An interesting read even though I have to admit I understand but half of it. What I didn't get is if there's a treatment path without medicine, something like the proper food, excercise regime, etc. -- because I find it hard to believe that the proper conditions cannot be created by the proper lifestyle.

"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.

Triple redundancy of the flight controls and 88 parameter FDR would easily refute that.

At least for U.S. commercial transport, there should be 2 each. Most likely one set in the nose and one set in the aft.

If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.

The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.

Because never in the history of the world has any such capability been abused.

And then do what about it? Collectively praying that FSM picks up the plane with his tentacles?

Technology is not a panacea. Add one thing to make flying more safe (locked cockpit doors), create another problem without which a catastrophy could have been prevented (locked cockpit door).

Something I learnt in my first leadership position: When someone has an idea, ask them about the downsides and potential issues. If they can't think of any, they haven't thought it through enough.

Follow the money. Who is asking for video cameras?

The last thing you would have seen would have been a smug face and a victory sign. Maybe not in this crash, but in the next. That, my friend, is headlines material. That's a breaking story right there. That picture is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, even if you print it on the most heavy paper you can find.

That's a meme, but also a lie. As IT people especially, we can take a big hint from IKEA in this regards. Their documentation is short, mostly visual, always step-by-step and gives the user exactly the information he needs, with none of the unimportant blabla that many blow up many other documentations from the necessary 3 pages to the actual 30.

If the instructions for Windows were made by IKEA, thousands of IT support people would be out of jobs because users could actually do simple tasks by themselves.

This.

When my girlfriend moved in, we needed some new furniture. The huge wardrobe took three weeks to be delivered, and then one more week to exchange an (important) part that was broken in transport.

We both dislike IKEA a lot, but we went there to buy some dressers. Half of what they have on offer is trash and the other half ugly, but we went home with two pieces of the one dresser that's not a shame to have in your bedroom. Because we didn't want to have her clothes in luggage and bags waiting for furniture to be delivered. It's not the 16th century anymore where people had to go into the forest to chop down trees every time they wanted to have a table.

if IBM can make a value proposition in China with PPC, they actually have a chance at getting some market share outside embedded.

yes i agree

from TFA summary: "because the government has been actively pushing homegrown solutions over foreign technology, "

China is serious about this.

They are wise to the level of embedded spyware and also the way companies will lock you into proprietary everything.

Also, it's a wise move from an IT perspective. Especially for something as huge as China, pushing "homegrown solutions" on that economy of scale is a major change and it will have a noticalbly positive effect.

"Like turning an Aircraft Carrier"...that's China's IT infrastructure...it's so huge, it takes a long time to turn, so your criteria for deciding to change course is different...also the consequences of when you do change course are orders of magnitude different

Correct. Rational evaluation will lead you to this result.

We're not rational, because our genes (who drive our evolution and thus our minds) don't give a fuck if we survive or not, only if they survive. To them, your kid is more valuable then you are.

This is total bullshit, and dangerous at that.

Firstly, a lot of software out there still has password length limits, sometimes silently discarding additional characters. You will still need ordinary passwords now and then.

Secondly, no normal human will type a five, six or more words passphrase every time they want to unlock their screen. They will do it for three days while they're hyped on how secure they are now, and then it'll become something they hate, and then they'll change it back to "123".

Thirdly, this is a bit more tricky, the real world security of almost every password scheme I've come across in 15 years of IT security experience is several orders of magnitude lower than the mathematical assumption. Because we consistently forget to take the human factor into account. Maybe some extreme nerds will actually follow this guideline, more normal people will discard words they can't remember for words they can, change things "a little" for convenience, and generally sabotage the whole system without even realizing it. It's the same as with passwords, all over again. Yes, on paper, a password has on the order of 10^16 possible combinations. But in reality, taking into account how people actually choose passwords (even ignoring the whole "password" and "123456" problem!) the actual diversity is more on the order of 10^9. Same here. You think using dice removes the human factor. omg do you underestimate humans!

This is right, but depends a lot on your threat scenario. For many applications where security really matters, both online and offline cracking are by far not the biggest risks.

In fact, they're ridiculous. I've given a couple presentations on password strength, and password meters are to password strength what the TSA is for air travel security - a better-than-nothing baseline approach that is mostly for show.

The problem is that we have nothing better to offer at this time, even though most security experts agree that passwords are a solution whose time is over.

Or maybe it would follow better moral reasoning. Ours is not perfect, it's just whatever evolution came up with that gave us the best species survival rates. That doesn't mean it's really the most ethical solution.
For example, in a post-feminist society, let's assume for arguments sake that gender discrimination has been overcome, wouldn't we also do away with "women and children first" - which is a suitable survival approach in a species fighting for survival in the african prairie, but hardly for the dominant species that already is overpopulated.