While everyone can agree that this story is a bit silly all around, I can't believe this comment got modded +5. Am I to believe that the real reason this is silly is because people need a PC to play WoW or Starcraft? Or because people like to upgrade their hardware with new CPUs and graphics cards? The fact that the commenter doesn't even know what it is like to buy a pre-built PC should make us pretty skeptical that his/her experience can be generalized to the entire population...

Also, we better not opine about what it is like to write college theses if we can't spell thesis correctly.

And it would have been a lot harder to pull off if it hadn't been... http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906

Boeing's use of hydraulics instead of fly-by-wire technology has nothing to do with American individualism. And Airbus's use of electronics isn't due to Europeans' greater trust in computers. It's because Airbus's only popular designs are newer than most of Boeing's. Newer technology really is better here, sorry. Remember that American jet that landed safely in the Hudson river recently? It was a lot easier to pull that one off due to its flight controls.

Here's an entertaining and actually informative take on that incident: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906

Feel free to get off any Airbus jet you don't trust, but as someone learning to fly pretty old planes, I'll ride the new ones, thanks.

Yeah, basically. It's noteworthy that twitter is useful for this kind of thing. This was not some sort of foregone conclusion. When you first heard that people were twittering about all the inane stuff they do every 5 minutes, would you have thought it would also be useful for this? It would be noteworthy if 10 other hard-to-control tools sprang up, too, which they probably will in time. The more communication tools people can use to carry out tactics against governments that try to cut off access to those tools, the better. I bet there are some other students in some other country struggling for democracy who think this is pretty noteworthy indeed, and will try to organize this way now.

Never mind that congregating in the galley area could be illegal on flights to/from the US, depending if the galley is near the front of the plane. (Forgive me if few planes are structured this way, but I just looked up a few seating charts and it seemed that several common Boeing models were)