The problem is, having the APU further down the list is done for a reason, and Sullenberger essentially rolled the dice by doing what he did.

Plus starting the APU can take a considerable drain on the existing power budget, which can cause knock on effects. Again, its another one of those decisions to be weighed up at the time.

Ahh, Wikipedia articles. One minor step up from UTTER AND COMPLETE BULLSHIT.

Try reading the accident reports on both of your chosen examples - they differ wildly from the Wikipedia articles conclusions.

In the case of AF296, the aircraft performed exactly as it should have - if the aircraft had allowed the commanded elevator action, the aircraft would have stalled and come down before the tree line. The issue with AF296 is that the pilot was being a fucking twat, had descended to below the height of local obstacles, and dropped the engines back to idle - the engines responded to the commanded thrust increase within the engine manufacturers specs, which is to say that it takes several seconds to spool up from idle to the setting the pilot input. By which time the aircraft was in the trees.

The pilot should not have been flying at that altitude with the engines at idle, they should have been at a high thrust level and he should have been controlling his speed using spoilers, flaps and other aerodynamic devices - if he had done that, he would have had instant power available when he needed it. The bloke was a twat.

If the same manoeuvre had been attempted in a Boeing 737, with the same vectors and the same thrust inputs, the aircraft would still be in the trees.

The theory that Airbus messed with the FDR and CVR is also rubbish, and has been proven in the past to be rubbish - there was a period of "missing data", but that was caused by the tape being folded over, and when folded back again to how it was the data all matches up. A lot of the rumours about data tampering came about from a grainy photo taken of the crash scene, which showed the FDR with a completely different stripe on it than there was in the official photo of the recovered FDR - hence it not being the same FDR. But the original negatives of this photo have never been released for confirmation, and other photos of the same scene show the correct stripe on the FDR.

Remember that the pilot involved in AF296 spent time in prison and has lost every court case he brought against Air France, Airbus, the French aviation regulatory body and everyone else - he is also the main proponent of tampering theories etc by Airbus.

Take it from me - don't assume that Wikipedia articles are unbiased and fair. If you follow the aviation articles long enough, you see some very "interesting" edits and roll backs going on - entire sections backed up by aviation regulatory board citations go "missing", and negative hearsay gets put in its place. These edits only really seem to affect the Airbus pages...

You are talking about billions of sites across the globe - and sites would be dependent on weather, local conditions, change of use etc etc etc. What if on that fateful day, one of the Hudson's ferries happening to be in the way but there wasn't enough power available to allow the use of the forward radar? What if the field pre-chosen had suddenly turned into a camp site? Or had a combine harvester and a fuel bowser parked in the middle of it. What if the Hudson was iced over?

As for the APU, the issue is that it simply was way down on the checklist - and a lot of things on that checklist can't be done in parallel etc Just because a computer has a speed advantage, doesn't mean it can use it. It was a concious decision from the PIC to fire up the APU out of checklist order. You don't find concious decisions coming from computers.

I thought there was a big outcry recently that one mining pool managed to get above 50% of the total computational effort, and therefore was in a position to control bitcoin due to the intricacies of the system?

What sensor suite would that be? Even military systems find it inordinately difficult to discriminate between ground targets amongst ground clutter, and thats with human guidance.

Currently an aircraft cannot find and airport and land without external input, be it GPS, ILS or other such systems - and thats to a well defined landing point. A computer would have to identify a safe location to ditch, make decisions based on available data and extrapolated data, and then actually perform the ditching.

Another point to make about the Hudson ditching was that it was only successful because the pilot specifically skipped a load of stuff in the checklist and told the co-pilot to fire up the APU, because he knew there wasn't going to be enough electrical power from the engines and RAT to give him full command authority - he would lose things like flaps and spoilers, meaning his options would be much more limited. If he hadn't done that, chances are he wouldn't have made it even to the Hudson.

The stall warning was cut off because the readings being fed to it made no sense (they dropped below absolute minimums - the reasoning being that the pilots having sat through 5 minutes of warnings and not changing their approach to flying the aircraft, it won't suddenly fix itself as the horizontal speed drops to zero) - it wasnt cut off because of any automation systems, it was cut off because the readings didnt make any sense.

But it takes more than an avid Boeing fan to actually read the AF447 report.

The decision tree to get to the idea of putting the aircraft down onto anything other than a runway with a CAT I, II or III landing system is beyond automation. Without ILS, the computers on board the aircraft had no idea what the ground infront of them looks like, other than "its there".

You assume a level of technical capability and desire that typically exists only in TV or film.

Even when the IRA switched to mobile phones as their method of detonation, they never added a deadmans switch - hell, they never used more than one detonation method in most of their bombs, meaning that when the timer circuit failed the bomb had no chance of going off, resulting in more than a few finds over the years. And this was a heavily financed, technically competent group - hell, they were firing delayed action mortars onto Heathrow airports runways from remote controlled cars!

The first set of London Underground bombers used themselves as the timer circuit, but they went to the effort of actually having switches etc - the second set, the set that failed, again used themselves as timer circuits, but this time they had nothing but bare wires and a battery each. They also cocked up the explosive mix thankfully, so it never went off.

Mobile phone detonators have become a big thing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but even then you don't see a secondary system - they just add technical complexity, and in turn that adds more ways to prematurely detonate, which the bomb makers want to avoid at all cost.

Or because not everyone has to share the same opinion, so its obvious people are not going to necessarily share the opinion that network neutrality is a great thing? Shocking I know, but there you have it.

A hell of a lot of one time pad encrypted messages have been broken due to pad misuse in the past - take a look at the Venona Project, where the Soviets reused pads for different communication types, and thus western analysts were able to break a non-trivial amount of them.

All UK ISPs are subject to UK law however, and they will get the job of enforcing this through blocking non-conforming websites.

In the UK, modifications such as you suggest still need to meet the vehicle roadworthiness test for the car to gain its MOT certificate - can't hit the road without one of those, so the work is definitely regulated.

So he just handed a fuckton of information over to unvetted people?

How is that not the same as releasing it? Its still Snowdens responsibility. But I can see from my down modding above that certain twats dont want it pointed out that their messiah has flaws, and isn't the perfect little shit they profess him to be.

As for Argentina having a claim, sorry but there is no such thing as a claim based on geographical vicinity, and imperialism doesn't come into it as Argentina was created through imperialism in the first place, And the British claim predates the creation of Argentina anyhow.

Pointing out that justified intelligence actions are being damaged is a side show? What world do you live in? Snowden can justify releasing information about immoral intelligence gathering, but what about when the intelligence gathering is legitimate and within the purpose and intent of the agencies involved?

Releasing details about legal intelligence operations is throwing the baby out with the bath water and puts Snowden in a very different light - he justifies his actions by saying he wants to raise awareness of illegal actions by the various government agencies, and yet he has also released details of actions which don't fall into that category.

Hardly a "side show" when it calls into question his justification, now is it?

Snowden isn't exactly all white as snow either - look at the shit that just came out from Snowdens bag of goodies about the UK spying on Argentina between 2006 and 2011.

Argentina invaded UK sovereign territory in 1982, got the shit kicked out of them by the British armed forces and thrown out of that territory, but has been very vocal and belligerent about it ever since. There has been successive escalations from Argentina ever since, including blocking medical flights, forcing South American companies to stop trading with the Falklands and other acts. Oh, and the repeated claims of ownership over the islands themselves. Just last week they again tried to claim jurisdiction over the Falklands by threatening to prosecute any oil company that drills for oil in Falkland Island waters.

So, Snowden, in what world is spying on such a nation in such circumstances not justified? Why would you release details on justified intelligence gathering operations?