I don't know man, I haven't had any disease trepanning or a good blood letting couldn't deal with, well there was this one time where I had to drink a gallon or mercury to get over a...ahem..personal disease.

Not completely true, yes Marinol was developed because growing weed was illegal, but it was not just pure extracted THC, it was "synthetic THC". As I understood it, the Marinol drug was developed because a lot of people did not want to smoke weed, they wanted a simple and easy to swallow pill.

Copper isn't a heavy metal, it's absolutely poisonous, but not a heavy metal.

Three or four liters of rubbing alcohol delivered through epidural injection should do the trick, although you might want to hook up a continuous drip through a central line to make absolutely sure.

I could cite Kasparsky Labs if you'd rather.

Yes, and the Apollo program was just fireworks with an unlimited budget.

I realize you, and many others, have a lot of axes to grind with the NSA, but they are an organization of skilled people who actually know what they are doing.
If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.

And saying that you cannot put any of your work on a resume is just a boldfaced lie, yes it is true you cannot write on your resume: "I developed the HDD firmware hack that EQUATIONDRUG used" or "I was heavily involved in wiretapping of Burmese embassies in the period from (x) to (y)", but there is nothing stopping you from putting in "I worked extensively with hardware programming and device security" or "I worked extensively with telecommunications infrastructure and security in the South East Asia area".
You cannot say that they don't do product development, yes it is true they probably wont ever make any software you can find on the Android or Apple App stores, but that is not the same as saying that they don't do development, it is just that a lot of the software that the NSA (or more likely, NSA subcontractors) develop are developed for a very limited and specialized audience, anything that does come out of NSA development projects is likely to be quite specialized and obscure.

That said - there is a not insignificant chance that a lot of the advancement in speech-to-text and other speech-recognition projects we have seen over the last years, has code in it that was developed by people who started out doing work on those subjects for the NSA (ECHELON supposed relied heavily on the ability to recognize keywords in recordings), likewise it is also quite likely that a lot of people who worked with and for the NSA are now out in the civilian sector designing datacenters and supercomputers.
It is easy to see the NSA as this big, evil organization that does only one thing: spy on people. And while that is certainly one of their main objectives, you have to remember they are also a large IT business and as such have a large IT infrastructure, and because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there.
Add to this that there is a large section of the NSA that isn't really an intelligence agency at all, they're a Security and Compliance agency that makes sure that DoD, Military and Diplomatic networks meet whatever security standards the NSA specify.

Unless you are giving testimony in connection to a crime unrelated to you (ie. you witnessed something and are specifically not charged with anything) you should NEVER talk to a cop. The whole "Everything you say, can and WILL"-thing isn't said just to scare you.

The whole "Reading you your rights"-thing, only really applies in cases where you are being charged and questioned.

And strictly speaking, even if you technically have the right to deny the police the right to search your person or vehicle, all that will happen if you do that is that the police will interpret that as evidence of guilt and arrest you, at which point searching you or your vehicle becomes a security requirement - it represents an unacceptable risk to bring you into custody without searching you because you might be concealing weapons, the same applies to your vehicle.

Remember, the police can arrest you for any reason and hold you for up to 24 hours without charging you with anything.

Yes The Equation Group really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.

It is if you are transferring that data over a HF link, I mean ostensibly once you are over the pacific or the Atlantic you could switch to communicating over satellite, but in all likelihood, most aviation radio for OTH transmissions are probably HF signals, not sure you have ever tried transferring data over a HF link, but let me put it this way: 9600 bps is considered HIGH speed.

I'm all for equal opportunity and right-to-work and all that, but, I really would prefer that the people in control of the thing that lifts me up to 10.000 feet and travels at 500mph is fully certified as "not even a little crazy"

So, don't be a work 24 hour hours a day, seven days a week.

What's to stop their employer from doing this now? I mean, doesn't the cockpit audio recorder already record their conversations?

They might not work like that when the condition causing them is Epilepsy, which I agree isn't really a thing that just randomly happens.
That said, there still could be some kind of neurological condition behind this, I am not a doctor so I am not going to argue the specific diagnosis, I'm sure your wife is right.

The thing that makes me think there was something physically wrong (be it drugs or pathology), is the fact he is reported as "breathing normally" during the whole thing, even if he was a terrorist or suicidal, he would still have the fight or flight reaction, and there is no way rapidly approaching a cliff wall and knowing you are going to die and kill 200 (or however many) people in the process would not trigger the fight or fight response, and one of the main symptoms of a big adrenaline surge is an increase in breathing and heart rate.

You would not always notice that you are becoming light headed, yes, the CO poisoning case he might have had time to radio down.

But, what about a sudden stroke or an absent seizure?

That said, in all likelihood autopilot would have been on already, the co-pilot (as I understand it) just told it to begin a decent.