Actually, no, your description of what happened was completely wrong. Airbus side sticks have a "priority" button, there is no "fighting each other" - if a pilot wants to take over command then all he has to do is press the priority button and he has command authority.

What happened to AF447 had little to do with how the Airbus controls are set out - after all, the exact same thing (pilots stalling the aircraft because they were unsure as to what was happening) has happened on both the 767 and the DC-9, which both have linked control columns.

What really happened to AF447 is that the pilots lost their situational awareness, they didn't carry out the right procedures in the case of an airspeed mismatch, they didn't recognise that they were approaching a stall, and then they disregarded further airspeed warnings after the airspeed issue was resolved - by reacting badly to the initial fault, they stalled the aircraft and didn't realise until far too late.

The right hand seated pilot kept his stick hard back, which is against all of his training - he shouldn't have been trying to raise the nose that much at all, and yet he kept the stick hard back for minutes at a time. It wasn't until the senior pilot, being summoned from the cabin where he was resting, queried the action being taken that the pilot flying stopped his action, but by then they were seconds away from hitting the water.

There is no issue with the Airbus flight controls, despite what many anti-Airbus people say - as I said above, the same issue has happened on non-Airbus aircraft.

Also a side note - at abso-fucking-lutly no time should two pilots be "fighting for control over each other". Should never happen. The designated pilot flying should be the only one on the controls, the designated pilot-non-flying should be doing the instrumentation and only ever have his hands on the controls at the explicit request of the pilot flying. Your "description" of what happened would be a huge failure of training and crew relationships.

Huh? The Epub format was released in 2007, while the Mobi format was released in 2000, and the Mobipocket company was purchased by Amazon in 2005.

Hell, I was reading purchased eBooks in PDB format back in 2002, from ereader.com.

And still required the proprietary database to be updated before the files would be available to play - you couldn't just dump the files on the disk and have them work.

It took 2 years of searching before the black boxes from Air France flight AF447 were found, and during that period there was a massive amount of speculation and doubt about what happened, leading to total uncertainty about how to prevent another crash. Airbus took a beating as everyone assumed it was an aircraft fault which led to the crash.

When they found the black boxes, the real problem turned out to not be a systems fault (although there was a momentary loss of air speed data due to icing, it didn't cause the crash) but a crew training problem so spending the time and money to find and recover them after 2 years has lead to small systems changes but significant pilot training changes.

So while everyone assumes that MH370 crashed due to the pilot committing suicide, there is always that element of doubt because we really don't know what transpired until we have evidence - so what happens if that assumed 0.001% chance of this particular crash being caused by something else, something mechanical or systems related, comes real and it causes another crash?

Right, I can buy audiobooks from many different sources, so Amazon is hardly dominating the market, and also are you saying a company is never, ever, ever allowed to vary anything?

Amazon has as much monopoly position in eBooks as Apple has in smartphone apps - they have their own ecosystems but thats it. I can buy eBooks elsewhere, and publishers can even create their own apps and distribute their own products without Amazons involvement at all. EBooks is possibly the easiest market to break into.

The fact that you see nothing wrong with Apples requirements says loads - so its ok to set prices across your ecosystem and everyone else ecosystems (which is what Apple was doing) but setting prices on just your own ecosystem is completely wrong...?

Lets not forget that Yeltsin came to power off the back of a semi-failed military coup against Gorbachev.

In this case, I'd rather have Amazon than Apple - I can read my Amazon Kindle books on the Kindle, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Windows Phone and a whole host of other places, while I can read my Apple iBooks on ... an iOS device.

And you forget that authors and publishers also had to take whatever Apple was willing to give them - don't even start to kid yourself that Apple is the altruistic good guy in this, they required publishers and authors to not sell their ebooks cheaper anywhere else when they were sold through iBooks. Thats bad enough in my book.

Releasing all the "summer blockbusters" at the same time is an even worse business model...

Roaming is something the carrier can allow on your current sim, what you really mean is "what about using another carriers sim at any time, ostensibly for use overseas"...

The problem is that this isn't the US piercing the EU rules, its the US judicial system saying the EU rules do not apply to it, which is entirely correct.

This is the US judicial system putting US companies between a rock and a hard place - the company has to comply with EU laws or face penalties, while also complying with a US court order or face penalties.

This is, however, actually how it should be - EU rules do not apply to the US judicial system, they only apply to those entities operating within the EU, and the US judicial system should not care about other countries or jurisdictions laws it is not bound by.

That doesn't mean its not a difficult situation, but it does mean its an interesting case to watch.

There's nothing stopping Jewish or Christian candidates standing for other seats, which is exactly the same as Congress. The only difference is that there will be at least one Jewish or Christian member (among all the other reserved seats) in any Iranian Parliamentary session due to the reserved seat, unlike Congress which does not reserve any seat for minorities.

So its far from tokenism.

Since thats exactly what a large number of Palestinians did when the Gaza-Israeli border crossings were open (find work in Israel and go shopping in Israel), I see no reason why the tunnels into Israel are not also for the same purpose - food is freely available across the border in Israel, its getting it back across the border which is the issue.

The Gaza-Egypt border is managed by Egypt under an agreement initiated in 1979 and then amended by Israel in 2005 - the opening and closing of the borders is, under those agreements, managed by Israel even if they are policed by Egyptian officers.

So even though its a Gaza-Egypt border, its still controlled by Israel.

Its only since the uprising in Egypt that Egypt has unilaterally closed the Gaza-Egyptian border, and for this they should be in the international spotlight, but even then the Egyptian closing of the border and prior blockade is not comparable to the Israeli blockade which extends to Gaza ports and international trade into Gaza which does not cross Israeli territory.

If security fixes take up significant amount of additional space, then something's being done wrong. Very very wrong.