Or maybe they just meant that an early version of this spine provided a marginal wedging advantage, which allowed the current "power-up" version of the spine to evolve.

By the way, the only other 777 crash in history was another failed landing short of the runway. In that case it was British Airways.

Perhaps knee-jerk rants on culture are worthless and the whole story actually does matter, hmm?

I don't care if you're a racist or not. My comment above was in response to someone else.

I'm sorry you took offense to a comment that was not directed to you.

Gladwell based his theory at least in part on Korean Air flight 805.

The NTSB recognized hierarchy as a contributing factor in the crash of that flight. However, in doing so, the NTSB cited a study of US pilots to illustrate problems with such hierarchies and how they can contribute to crashes. Hence, hierarchy problems in the cockpit do not seem limited to Asia. This is further evidenced by the fact that the KLM flight crew in the Tenerife disaster was Dutch.

I'm not sure why you're bringing Confucianism and Korean culture into it. You seem to want to make generalizations. If Gladwell had any statistical training at all, I imagine that one takeaway from his writing would be: Do not generalize from rare events.

"The crash in Guam was squarly attributed to a heirarchy problem."

It was one factor of many. The NTSB report cited a study of US pilots to back up the hierarchy theory, so by culture I presume you mean cockpit culture.

Yeah, screw forensic science and rational deduction, let's just jump to conclusions because the pilots are foreigners. That's incredibly lazy and will not help prevent future crashes. I mean, how could the whole story possibly matter? The NTSB should just wrap up the investigation now and file your post as their report.

You're engaging in pure speculation.

We don't yet have the whole story about what happened in the flight 214 cockpit. An airline cockpit is not at all like a traveling soccer club. It's likely that pilots undergo a lot of training, etc, do I really need to explain this?

When a US-based airline loses a plane, do we all start speculating about a culture of cowboy pilots and a give-me-freedom-or-give-me-death attitude?

I agree that excessive cockpit deference may have contributed. Emphasis on the "may" and "contributed". Even if the captain were a totally cool dude who digs second-guessing, anyone can have a bad day when they act out of character and perhaps snap at someone expressing concern.

I supposed my main point was that the "authoritative captain" became a large part of the narrative, when in reality it may have merely contributed to the other, hard-science factors that are without doubt known to be definitive contributors.

But hard-science doesn't make a good story. An Ahab-like captain who accelerates into doom does.

My East Asian experience was similar. The opportunity to save face can be postponed, preferably after everyone is prevented from death.

Same happened after the Tenerife crash, with people characterizing one of the crashing captains as an unchallengeable authority and trying to blame the crash on that. And yeah, not true it turns out. Whoda thunk it!?

So, what, would you rather MIT's electrical engineers study the art of persuading lazy sys admins to keep things updated? You've like gone to a bbq and complain about the lack of veg options.

Hey, you're not supposed to point that out lest you bother someone for taking offense.

The amount of privilege in some of these comments is mind boggling. How can people go through life without a clue about how lucky they are?

To be perfectly honest the comment did not bother me enough to warrant all this attention. However, the comment is indicative of a baseline level of misogyny on /. as well as in tech in general. We only have to look at most of the AC posts above and below this one.

We don't call a female coder a "programess" (and the ones I know sure as hell wouldn't put up with that).

Can you think of any good reason to embed gender into job descriptor? If you need to indicate gender, use "he" or "she". Mapping gender to job descriptor is pointless and archaic.

Yet you took the time to complain about my complaining. How about you be part of the solution and stfu?

Oh yeah? What's the difference? You should shine the light on this gem of a thought and let everyone see what kind of person you really are.