The FBI should just pick up this book: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X

There's a chapter that discusses North Korea's program for dealing with POWs during the Korean War. It was astonishingly effective, and, at least the parts in the book, didn't seem to involve much torture.

Honestly, Slashdot has been one of my favorite websites ever since it was shown to me in high school. Within a year or two after I started reading Slashdot, it became *the* place to become "in the know" with what was going on in technology.

A big part of the direction that Slashdot has moved in has been a product of this. More and more people knew that Slashdot was a place to go to to get "in the know," but the pool of truly enthusiastic, sharp, science and engineering minded people became diluted with people who simply wanted to be associated with that. Everyone wanted to participate, and the signal to noise ratio went down. It's unfortunate, but the thing that initially attracted people here was largely due to your vision and your efforts. I don't believe that your departure is likely to improve the site. I know that I, at times, have been critical of the direction that Slashdot has gone in (and at times you have expressed frustrations with the site yourself, or at least, frustrations with what you should do with it), but this change in direction has largely been a product of the change in readership. It has been your vision that has managed to keep it sane.

What is truly unfortunate is that, looking around the Internet for a site that gives me the same enjoyment that Slashdot did in its heyday, I have come up empty-handed. It really does feel like there is nowhere online for the old-school geek anymore. Everyone wants to be part of that now. In fact, being a "hipster" now involves saying how geeky and quirky you are. It's pretty annoying seeing kids who can't even program move in on my turf like that.

Anyway, thanks for all of the effort that you've put into this site, and I honestly do hope that we meet at an Open Source convention of some sort someday. If we do, I'll buy you a beer.

There was a NOVA episode about this crash (an earlier commenter linked to it, but here it is again: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html).

I won't go into the findings of the NOVA team, but I will point out that your educated guess is completely wrong.

The airbus does have a considerably more advanced and automated autopilot system than Boeing provides. However, that only is engaged during "Normal Law" flight. When any of the sensors on the plane detect a fault, an alarm chimes, and the system informs the pilot that "Alternate Law" is engaged. In Alternate Law mode, the pilot is allowed to use the full control capabilities of the plane, not the restricted range that the sensors believe to be safe.

After alternate law engaged, the pilot can control the engines, and all control surfaces to whatever degree of capability he'd like. The plane in question definitely switched to Alt. Law mode; this fact was radio broadcast back to the Airbus HQ shortly before the plane disappeared. There's a high probability that the pilot was mislead by weather radar readings that said that he could shoot through a "hole" between two storm clouds, but which masked the fact that there was a third (much larger) storm further beyond. Once he was stuck in the middle of all those storms, it was game over.

The pilot and the passengers were not at the mercy of an autopilot that refused to allow corrective action; it is probable that bad data presented to the pilot did not allow him to correctly act.

I doubt this has to do with ITAR. I've worked on a DARPA-funded project which was covered by ITAR restrictions. I did not need to undergo a background check; I just needed to demonstrate American citizenship (read: show my passport to my boss).

Actually the new rules do address this. They are required to allow you to do self installs of cable cards now, so at least you won't have to set up a service appointment and have a clueless tech come out to do the install.

Now if you're a TW customer and lucky enough to be in an SDV area you'll also need a Tuning Adapter that will fail every 30 days until you have a couple of service calls for that, but I guess we'll need to wait another 5 years for the next FCC ruling to fix that...

You know, I just shouldn't have chimed in. I'm beginning to regret that I did.

Thank you for speaking down to me. Now, lets get to business.

I get it. I actually understand computational complexity very well. Had you read the follow-up post, which was posted well before your post, you would see that I added the caveat "if P!=NP", long before you had a chance to talk down to me.

I actually threw in the caveat in a follow-up post (since I wasn't very atomic about it) that this was if P!=NP. Nothing that I said affects class inclusions once that caveat is thrown in.