I understand that people are worried and connect the 737 Max with this model (737-500). The two are not related and these aircraft have flown for a long time. The way I see the data is that they lost control due to something catastrophic (loss of hydraulics, flight surfaces) and this is a guess. Also sabotage should not be ruled out. Interestingly enough, the 737-500 has a relative of the MCAS, the STS (Speed Trim System), which does operate mainly in low-speed high-thrust situations on the stabilizer (takeoff, go around scenarios). I cannot see how the STS would have caused this because its operation is not normally related to the phase of flight just before the loss of control. The aircraft looked like it was trimmed properly and then suddenly went out of control. Like the (earlier) versions of the MCAS, the STS does operate on single sensors/single computer and the pilots know about it and can cut it off by switches.

I am very sorry for the loss of life, this is tragic!

...because we do provide secure (as encrypted in the transport, network and the storage layer) . Spanish judges. You have to love them how people that know the law know few things about technology.

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 6128 with 128k of RAM. My personal laptop today has 8 Gig of RAM, 65536 times as much as the CPC6128.

No, I am sorry to say that your assumptions are not true. I have started working on the Internet in 1998, and I worked on core TCP/IP protocols and Ethernet device drivers, which is what drives today most of the corporate networks.

1)Your assumption that one has to petition corporations and governments and eventually suck it up is totally wrong. It's not only Tor. If you want to safeguard your own communications, you could setup an SSH tunnel between two BSD/Linux hosts and as long as you (or somebody you trust) can control these hosts, governments will have hard time to break you in the middle (I hope you do not start with the theories that encryption algorithms are tapped. They are not, and you are free to choose, and you have the source code to prove that). No corporation can stop you from doing that to establish who you wish to talk to, when and how. They might make it difficult, but not impossible and certainly within the feasibility of a capable IT person(s).

2)On the other hand, the assumption that the guy who sits on NSA/GCHQ has the will to listen to your personal communications one morning is also wrong. If you are an intelligence analyst, you are looking for needles in a haystack and you have specific problems to solve. Yes, there is data mining. Yes, there are ways to tap into your personal communications. Yes, you could be a bystander and accidentally tapped into in an attempt to locate someone, but this is less probable than you being the victim of a phishing/zero day exploit of some bad arse that wants your machine for a botnet, or is after your bank account, etc. 3)If you have something to hide (aka you are someone's enemy), the problem is not the technology, but the position you bring yourself into. Have the most advanced protection, they will get you, not by means of technology, but also by other means. If you have nothing to hide and you are just concerned that they might listen to you, take your measures. As I said in 1), technologies do exist to ensure that you keep whatever you wish to keep amongst few people (family, partners).

Personally, I have nothing to hide. If NSA/GCHQ want to listen to how I talk to my partners (sometimes swearing into IT problems) or what I ate in the evening, or when I need to go to the toilet, or what I order for pizza, they are welcome. Because, first I do not have a troubling position and secondly, when I talk to my family for something serious, I won't do it via the phone or facebook or twitter. I will do it in person.

So, I wish that people would spare all that crap about NSA/GCHQ listening to them. This is paranoia in the same way that you expect from Snowden and Assange to tell you that Governments around the world are playing dirty. Do you really need them to figure out that they do this? Do you really think that the big news networks are really concerned with your privacy, or rather with the advert they are going to air just before they give the latest on snowden's Moscow hotel/airport status?

Enough with this s***! Sorry, I would rather be cynical and pragmatic rather than conformant and naive.

Why don't you write him and ask for an answer. You will probably get it. After that, you will never be alone in your phone/internet conversations :-) .

Nahhh! If they had the tech to get 100% of the lines tapped AND listen to it, the US cash flow would be different. It's good to develop good DPI, lots of nice HPC tech is generated with the idea as the basis.

Oh dear. In Europe, we are so advanced that we do not need people like Snowden to be heroes (the process of deciding to work for NSA directly or through contracting, thinking that you never go against people's privacy and one day you discover that is not the case and you go and leak info, wow!) and leak the info. Ministers do it instead! :-)

The only painful thing you have to do is to decide how to increase threading in your code.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/luarm/ and for more info have a look at my PhD thesis:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/MagklarasPhDThesisv3.pdf
Just to get a few ideas. The paper that describes LUARM can be found here:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/papers/LUARM-WDFIAfinal.pdf
Some of the things in LUARM have been modified since the paper was written but the idea is the same.
GM

Use LUARM as one of the counter measures: http://sourceforge.net/projects/luarm/

Yes, once more, all those COBOL programmers there must have an income. Who are you Mr. State to decide that you can just upgrade everything.

You should also mention the multi Petabyte paradigm of life scientists and the Next Generation Sequencing applications. This is just another frontier in data intensive computing paradigms.

I use it to SSH to my systems and I browse the web using Lynx. Bandwidth efficient and secure. Even the default Maemo from Nokia is more secure than most of the Android derivatives. I am not going to use an Android phone if I SSH to my servers anytime. Never failed me security-wise and I think it never will.
GM

There is nothing wrong with doing business in the middle east. What is wrong is to rely so much on the Middle East. This creates contention and undesirable situations, especially for Middle East folk. The very fact that most of them export their resources to oil feed the rest of the world, when very little money returns to them is indicative of most of the geopolitical problems that rose, are rising and will rise in the area.

Oil is not the only example. Manufacturing and outsourcing is another. If only 20% of the Asian manufacturers of integrated circuit/assembly lines decided to close tomorrow for whatever reason, the implications for the US and the rest of the electronic consumer's world would be at least worrying and at most catastrophic for the market.

I believe this is a general trend of globalization, which is mainly driven by us, because we want the cheapest and then someone has to produce that cheapest product by pushing outsourcing to the point where we rely on few places. Personally, if I knew that a product is REALLY only made in the US/UK/Europe etc, I would buy it, even if it was more expensive. Not because I dislike Asia or whatever distant part of the world, but because I want with my behavior to enforce resilience, the very opposite of absolute reliance.
Do you really think that the world has resilience today in terms of energy?

I would agree with you but... I don't. The oil monopoly is supported by some large car driving populations. For most of this folk, it is really a big thing to get on the bike and/or use fuel efficient cars or rationalize the use of the car. This is why the US started considering fuel efficient cars only recently. If you compare the average GM/Ford/whatever gas guzzler they used to chunk out of their production lines (which was cheap for the average Joe to buy) to the average European car there was no comparison. Extrapolate this behavior to the growing middle class of India and China and you get the idea. Power is given to monopolies by people, it does not come by itself. In the absence of realizing the consequences, the majority of the people will use the more readily available and cheapest solution. And that I am afraid is petrol :-( . Not necessarily because they do not have the extra money to pay for an alternative. But because they are sold to the idea of horse power, acceleration, when the most they do on their motorway is 30-40 miles an hour just before the rush hour! :-)