Well, we're about to elect Hillary Clinton. She's not stupid. She thinks everyone else is stupid, and she's got enough supporters who don't care whether or why she's being feloniously coy about things like her email use (her lawyer just this evening explained that Clinton has destroyed all of her email that wasn't printed out to lamely respond to demands for her records from her tenure at State).

When she's president, don't ask why we elected a stupid person. As why we stupidly elected her. We'll have eight years to think it through. Yay.

What ARE you talking about? The problem you describe is the state being required to be more thorough in investigating matters like the case in question (the lady with the car, Twitter, etc). The solution to that isn't lowering the threshold by which we describe airlines pilots as too unstable to do that particularly stressful, demanding, and highly responsible (for other people's lives) work.

1/3 of people aren't airline pilots.

And more to the point, 1/3 of people don't take out their depression on a hundred or so other families by slaughtering a plane load of people.

Everybody goes through "rough patches," but very few of them kill themselves over it, let alone decide to kill a hundred other people just to add some more drama to it. The whole point here is that you can't have someone in a position of responsibility like that, and have them be one of those much more fragile people who become suicidal/murderous over a "rough patch."

If it takes something bad happening in their life to make it clear they can't keep a level head and maintain their professionalism, then they are not in the right line of work.

"Many people" are not commercial airline pilots.

You should not assume that women are more pro-woman. Many female managers will tell you they have a lot more problems with female subordinates than with males. This is especially true if there is a significant age difference: if a talented young woman is put in charge of a team that includes older women, you will often have a lot of friction.

Well, she is a lawyer, so that is stating the obvious.

That the thing about dark matter... it has a perfectly reasonable explanation (WIMPs). It's not that weird of a "thing".

Dark energy on the other hand, that's just WEIRD ;) It doesn't act like any "energy" as we know it, even though everything is clearly moving into a higher energy state. A question I've had for a while... if space itself is being inflated (or any sort of mathematically equivalent scenario) - everything inflating in all directions at all scales - wouldn't there be some sort of weak radiation signal from electrons expanding into a higher energy state due to dark energy and then collapsing back down? But I have trouble picturing how to reconcile an absolute, varying distance at the atomic scale with quantization of energy states, positions, etc...

R. Pirsig wrote a paper on the philosophical and mental challenges in defining "quality". I suggest reading it.

That's a stupendous way to end software development overnight. Yes, Apple had a bug. All software has bugs. They clearly intended for a different outcome and surely never expected Google to actively attack it.

Of the two, Apple made a mistake but acted with good intentions (at least on the surface, but there's no point going full tinfoil because then there's no point having a conversation about it). Google acted maliciously, and if someone's going to be held accountable for this then it should be them.

In before "lol fanboy": I would say exactly the opposite if, say, iCloud.com exploited a bug (not a feature: a bug) in Chrome to do the same thing. In this specific case, Apple seems to have acted honorably and Google unhonorably.

Not in any legal sense. Just because you imagine it to be a threat because of rabid foam-at-the-mouth manufactured outrage, doesn't mean it really is. If a clause in a contract is unenforceable, it is not illegal to put it in the contract, it just can't be enforced. Amazon has made NO effort to enforce this clause against any warehouse workers, so there is no actionable tort against them.

There are real problems in the world to get outraged about. You should refocus on something less ridiculous.

No. Because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, there can never be a complete vacuum. Even if there was, you couldn't measure it without destroying it.
 

Indeed. I don't think that any of this is new. The reason dark matter was hypothesized in the first place was because of the behavior of colliding galaxies, such as the Bullet Cluster. The missing mass couldn't be stars, because it didn't emit light, it couldn't be gas or dust, because it didn't experience drag, so it must be either WIMPS or MACHOs. Further observations ruled out the MACHOs. So what is new about this observation?

Isn't this what one would expect if dark matter is WIMPs?

Sure there is: add this to the CPDLC standard and make all of the hardware modifications needed to support it:

----
Message type: Revert flight plan and lock
Message arguments: TIME: the time of the flight plan to use
Message description: Revert to the flight plan that was active at TIME that had been approved by both ground control and the pilot; engage autopilot; and disable all pilot / copilot access to all systems. If there is no approved flight plan then the flight plan is to return to the nearest suitable airport in the most direct route possible.
----

Additional modifications: Make sure that the pilot can never disable datalink communications with ground by any means that ground wouldn't have time to respond to.

Result: Nobody is ever "remote controlling" the plane from the ground. A murderous / terrorist ground controller can't crash the plane, only make it autopilot itself on a previously approved or otherwise reasonable flight plan. A pilot behaving suspiciously can't crash the plane, as ground control will just engage the autopilot and lock them out. To abuse the system both ground and the pilot would have to agree on a suicidal flight plan.