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.

Dateline: Millions of light years (even faster parsecs than the Kessel run)

Lede: Scientists in the Dark; Does it Matter?

Today scientists announced that they can't see anything happening with stuff they can't see, but think is there, because otherwise the math is no good. After receiving directions to his laboratory on the phone, I went to see an authority on dark matter. During the interview, Dr. Seemore Lichspittle told this Any Paper, Any Time reporter that the thing about dark matter that one has to understand is that "it goes to eleven." When confronted with the observation that the sensing instruments only had scales from 0-10, he responded "Yes, yes, that's exactly it. The numbers... the numbers only work out in the dark. When the instruments are off. Matter of fact, it's all dark, really." At that point the interview was cut short as two lab assistants in white coats hustled Dr. Lichspittle into his own custom white lab jacket. Late for an important meeting, no doubt. As he left, nodding, he called back "it's really quite dark." Food for thought! Leaving Arkham, I was struck by the picturesque beauty of the stonework, and very appreciative of the tight security. We can rest easy, knowing that national treasures like Dr. Lichspittle work in such a safe enviroment.

Remember this isn't a criminal offense. Most warehouse workers are 'judgement proof', in that they don't have the assets to pay anything. The court isn't going to say 'you have to quit your job' because it has financial interest in NOT paying for their welfware because they can't work at what they're skilled at due to the non-compete.

Amazon would pay more than they could recover pretty much every day the court trial went on. Also, there might actually be enough push-back if they tried to change laws.

Personally, I'd like to see a law of 'sure, write up whatever non-competes you want. However, it means that the the employee is still your employee during the non-compete period. Which means you still have to pay them their salary and benefits'. Don't want them working for the competitor for 12 months? You gotta pay them to sit on their ass for 12 months.

Finally, it sounds like they stuck the non-compete into their boilerplate employment documents. It's not intentionally targeting warehouse people, though I suppose that with the increasing amounts of robotics in them, it might be deliberate, so said workers don't go describing how the robots work.

And this is why closed source combined with black-box development is so much safer than open source. Sigh.

I really don't mind -- actually, I think I'd be kind of of flattered -- if people were able to look at my code, go "hey, I can use that" and then proceed to use it. And in fact, I've written a fair bit of code I think would fall into that vein. I think I could write something book-length in the line of "cool coding stuff" and quite a few programmers would find it quite useful. I've been doing this since the early 70's. I write signal processing, and image processing (but I repeat myself, sorta) and AI code, with a strong background in embedded and special-purpose systems, a bunch more.

But because a lawyer might look at my code, and use it to screw me, and through me, my family and employees quite harshly?

Bang. Closed source. The opposite of furthering progress by virtue of passing along what I've learned. I give away some of my work product such as this, but you will never see my source code because of the legal environment.

As far as I'm concerned, if I wrote it without referring to "other" source code, then no one else has any claim on my work. I don't have any idea how to fix copyright and patent and still retain the supposed commercial motivation to create, but fact is, as it stands, it's completely fucktarded.

Pisses me off, it does. :/

I remember reading that the $20k 'hammer' was actually a set of tools, including a spade & pick, made of a special set of alloys(can't remember what) designed to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, and a few other nons for use in helping to clean up stockpiles of explosives that were destabilizing, getting more sensitive. Given the location and amounts, they couldn't just set them off in location.

The toilet seat was actually a whole toilet system, I can't remember if it was for a plane or submarine. Still not cheap, but something that had to be custom designed and produced for that vehicle, and they were including design costs.

You're only using the FIRST definition of 'break'. There are many more.

"To break something is to" also covers:
  to overcome or wear down the spirit, strength, or resistance of; to cause to yield, especially under pressure, torture, or the like:
  to disable or destroy by or as if by shattering or crushing:
to ruin financially; make bankrupt
  to impair or weaken the power, effect, or intensity of
to train to obedience; tame
  to become inoperative or to malfunction, as through wear or damage

I think my use of the word is particularly appropriate.

Fast; efficient; not bloated; not buggy; respectful of the user's privacy; hardened with regard to hacking if that's relevant; not encumbered by dependencies; adequately featured; well supported; well documented for the end user.

As far as I'm concerned, if you can't hit those 00001000 or 00001001 targets, you should be looking for different line of work.

Of course it is lovely if it's easily read code, well commented, well structured -- but if the former list is covered, I'll give the 00000011 latter a pass.

No, he's saying it should be illegal to keep things like mental instability and dangerous suicidal mindsets secret from the state when the state is what licenses you to be entrusted, day-in, day-out, with the lives of hundreds of people. If you've got mental problems, don't look for a job where that is by definition a disqualifier. It appears this German guy knew that, and was hiding his problems from his employer and the regulatory agencies that license his operation of giant passenger aircraft.

Yeah, thought so.

Adding weight to the airplane reduces its range and/or capacity for carrying paying passengers so it would be an ongoing cost.

Who says it has to add weight? Use modern materials for the partition; carbon fiber structures can be ultra tough and very light weight, for example. And probably not used in any near-current design as aircraft take a very long time from paperwork to production. A door in the fuselage weighs about the same as the fuselage; thicker in the middle, thinner at the edges. It might even reduce weight by creating more open space in the cockpit. You can argue that it would reduce passenger capacity, but inasmuch as US passenger aircraft are typically not fully loaded, it doesn't add cost in most cases either. No matter what, it wouldn't cost as much as the TSA does, between the actual money spent and the huge amount of people's time they subtract from pursuits that would actually benefit the economy. Not to mention the level of irritation and the follow-on effects on productivity and civility...

Always wondered why they didn't design the passenger seating to be removable and collapsible and just pull all the empty seats out as a pre-takeoff action after the aircraft is fully loaded. Be a heck of a weight savings. Plus they could probably leverage it to reduce the anti-passenger effect of the seat designs created by the one-armed, one-legged engineer that all the airlines seem to hire.