What he suggests has a lot of merit. On the other hand, there are so many companies languishing under inappropriate technology whose problems would be solved if they weren't so boring. Applications that would be transformed if they only used an object database for example. Business logic that would actually be maintainable if they used a functional programming language. Unmaintainable COBOL that would benefit from an object approach. Yes, there are a lot of times you'll ship something faster by being boring. But whether you'll get the best quality? Not so sure.

COBOL, Fortran etc work, but not well for large projects. You can't work around it when you have a million lines of unmaintainable code.

How about yes, but only viewable if there is a crash landing and fatality.

Another good idea!

That's actually not a bad idea. Could be good also if both pilots get sick or something, the hostesses could radio the ground for codes.

On the other hand, you need time to thwart an attack once they have the cockpit. If you put the plane into an instant 90 degree dive, you can't overcome that. Once a bad guy has the cockpit, and wants to crash you, its game over.

Clearly, what the passengers are "realising" is not what is protecting the cockpit. Rather it is the armoured door. I'm sure even without armoured doors nobody could now hijack a plane with merely box cutters, but they might still be able to with better weapons. I tend to think the armoured doors are still a good idea, but they might want to refine the protocols of who can open it and when.

Russia has no pressing need to steal a plane. Actually, very few, if any states do. If you control a country, getting a plane isn't a big problem.

The chances of 2 suicidal pilots on the one plane would be infinity to 1.

Yes but I reckon a lot of people who might consider doing this are actually cowards at heart. Anybody sitting there, even an air hostess would be a deterrent.

I suppose they "could" do it, in the same way that I "could" build and manufacture my own Intel computer chip. There isn't any big secret preventing it, but it's nevertheless takes a lot of infrastructure and facilities and smart minds to bring it all together.

"Killing the enemy is not murder."

Debatable.

Hey, at least we don't send people to guantanamo bay with no trial, and execute people later found innocent, spy as much on the populace as the NSA. Australia has plenty of stupidity like illustrated here, but the US shouldn't throw stones inside its glass house.

I'm outraged by this law, sure.

But I'm doubly outraged that I had to read on slashdot that this just passed the senate and there has been ZERO coverage of this in the mainstream media. Shame on you Fairfax, News Ltd and ABC. You went to sleep and betrayed us.

I don't know what your definition of "dirty" is, but there are going to be scenarios where you need your data cleaned.