And the main reason flight 1549 landed perfectly in the Hudson river was due to the A320's fly-by-wire system, which allowed the pilot to maintain aircraft nose up and as low a speed as possible for landing without stalling. He had to maintain a fine line between gliding in slow enough to avoid injuries and not stalling, and without the onboard computer this would have been a difficult maneuver for a human pilot to accomplish with his workload.

The likely reason the co-pilot hid his depression was due to the stigma that mental illness carries. If companies end up instituting a policy that people with signs of mental illness be immediately fired, it will end up stigmatizing them further. Instead of trying to seek treatment for their problems, pilots with depression will just hide their issues. Particularly if you get rid of doctor-patient confidentiality, as it would mean a pilot seeking treatment would be reported by the very person supposed to be helping them and might lose their jobs.

As an life-long anglo-Quebec resident, I feel I have to respond this unfair characterization of our province that you and many others outside of here have:

Most of us anglo-Quebecers are actually at ease with the fact that French is the dominant language and we need to adapt ourselves to it. I just consider a matter of common courtesy and politeness to make an effort to communicate with your neighbour. Sure, we will whine about the ridiculousness of the language police at times, but not many people argue with the principle of the language laws in trying to build a common society

We had a democratic debate on the matter, and showing that despite your characterization the overwhelming majority of Quebeckers, 75% of them, voted against the party that proposed to ban religious symbols. Showing that we're more tolerant than most of the US, we're legislators in Indiana made discrimination against minorities legal, or in Europe, where bans against religious headgear are part of the law in France. Quebec, on the other hand, has had an openly gay head of government, has a permissive attitude towards weed where it is openly smoked alongside cops in our parks (come to Montreal's park Mont Royal on a Sunday if you don't believe me), and brothels (aka massage parlors) openly advertise their storefronts downtown.

And then you finish your rant with a bigoted racist attack against la belle province. If you really want to find bigotry, look in the mirror.

How much do these cost compared to FEMA trailers? As maligned as the FEMA trailers are, I suspect the reason they are widely used in disasters is because they are cheap and can therefore be deployed in large quantities. Sure you could do something of higher quality, but if it raises their unit cost it will significantly affect the ability to widely deploy enough shelter in an affected area. Having a low cost solution that can be deployed in large numbers may be more important than quality in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

Except that rich people usually have drivers, and so whether you instill points or day fines they'll be mostly unaffected. At most, their driver may lose their license, in which case they'll just hire another one.

Rich people drive only as a form of entertainment and pleasure, and they can always take out their supercars to private racing tracks where a driving license is not a requirement.

The concept itself is deeply flawed. If you were a crewmember, would you entrust your safety to fellow crewmembers whose primary qualification is that they are willing to die (i.e. exhibit suicidal tendencies) ? There is a reason NASA carries out extensive psychological testing among its applicants. If you're going to entrust a multi-year multi-multi-billion dollar mission in the hands of a select group of people, you want those people to have strong survival insticts that will push them to do everything possible to overcome adversity to come out alive. You do not want people who are willing to give up on life.

It depends on the situation....

When I have an issue to discuss, I prefer to start off with email. Email allows me to give a more detailed description of the problem than other methods, and being assymetrical gives time for the other side to review and consider the issue carefully before responding.

I then like to follow that up with a phone call and/or instant messaging to ensure the other side received my message, and understands the issue. Communication at this stage is to ensure the other person is engaged in my issue.

Only after all I'm sure the other person is engaged, and has had time to review the issue at hand, do I hold a face-to-face meeting. Face-to-face can be very effective, but I need to ensure the person is up to speed on the issue first, otherwise face-to-face will be a waste of both of our times.

And in any case, dealing with a lot of coworkers who are off-site, face-to-face has been increasingly substituted by online meetings and teleconferences.

Slander laws exist in almost every country, including the United States. And what the contractor said went beyond a simple rant - he implored other contractors not to work with the firm in question (thereby causing commercial harm to the company) and used racist language in his diatribe. If I went on a similar rant against an American company that resulted in a substantial loss of revenue for that company because of my allegations, I would very likely also be sued. The difference is that US courts have a higher standard to meet in a defamation suit, but given the loss of revenue and the racist diatribe even under US standards this contractor would be in hot water.

You're misconstruing the argument in the article. They're not saying that we should try to whitewash people who have done bad things, and a person's bad reputation may often be well deserved. They're warning against falling into the trap of, once someone happens into bad circumstances, of creating a narrative for that person that tries to assign their circumstances as a predestined result of fate. The most insidious example I see of this is when someone contracts a serious disease such as cancer. Often the first questions asked by medical staff are regarding their lifestyle choices, which builds into the narrative that they're sick because of the way they lived.

During the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, for example, the first questions asked to those diagnosed were often whether they lived a promiscuous lifestyle, took drugs, or engaged in gay sex. All activities which were frowned upon, and fed into the dominant societal narrative at the time that the people who were contracting AIDS were losers who contracted the disease because of their loser lifestyle. I'd argue in that case the loser edit was applied to a whole category of people, and held back progress in addressing a serious health issue.

If he can get a guarantee that the trial will be an public and open trial, and not done through a closed and secret military court, I think it can actually be a brilliant tactic. An open trial would force the government to air its eavesdropping activities out in the open. It could perhaps bring some judicial accountability by forcing them to defend the constitutionality of their activities.

However, that's all a big if, and I'm doubtful the government would agree to have Snowden tried in public court outside of a military court.

Isn't the process used laser metal sintering? There's no need to use trendy buzzwords ("3-d printing") that give the false impression that this is a new technique that a hobbyist could do in his basement, when really this is just a variation of a well established industrial process, that requires large industrial tooling.

So OpenStreetMaps is only now adding a basic mapping feature that's been available in other sites for over 10 years now, and somehow we're supposed to get excited about it? To me this is only highlighting how far behind a lot of the open source software is compared to commercially available applications.