Indeed, and in some countries (Europe mainly, I don't know much about the situation overseas) there's been several court cases where the guy declining the EULA and wanting a refund won against the retailer who denied it to them.

Refund ranged from the retail price of Windows Home edition to a flat amount (100$ or so) to 1/4th or 1/5th of the total price of the computer on which the software was installed. This refund was not limited to Windows per se but also included all the preinstalled software that the retailer paid.

The biggest pirates have been using rapidshare and other similar services for months if not years... and these services are not covered by Hadopi. Only true p2p networks are (Donkey and Torrent, mainly)

The regulators (FAA, JAA) specifiy very broadly what has to be done. after that it's up to the Aircraft designers to do the job, and there's constant communcation between authorities, aircraft design office and suppliers.

What I actually meant is that the backup power for flight controls is no longer hydraulic but electric and supplied by RAT. Electrical actuators are used instead., which simplifies the hydraulic system tremenduously since only two independant networks are required. So the RAT actually powers that flight controls elec backup. fly by wire (the command un control, not the actuators) is a given here and not at all concerned by this topic.
You DON'T have to have hydraulic to control modern planes. (A380 and after, B737-800 and after, although Boeing is known to be a little conservative (i.e. late) in that area.

No. (although you answer completely beside the point, we're talking about the safety of buzzword external means of recording)

On modern airplanes, the RAT (ram air turbine) is an electrical generator not hydraulic). It supplies DC emergency electrical network and a few flight control power.

It's not at all academic. The RAT helped save many aircrafts from crash.

(pneumatic is the air intake at engine level that supplies part of air conditionning and pressurization systems)

Except it's not the FAA or JAA's job to design & contract for those black boxes. It's Boeing and Airbus that have to do that. And yes, they do research a lot.

As you said, it's a matter of conservative tech more than cloudy Union protests.
Tech for DFDRs VDRs are supposed to still be working when almost everything else has failed. When engines, elec generators, hydrolics and pneumatics power have all failed, you don't have much left, and your sattelite uplink has very LOW priority among things that still need to be powered in emergency condition. Not to mention that uplink above the South Pole IS tricky.

Emergency conditions like that are supposed to happen somthing like 1 time every 10 or 100 million flight hours. What is the failure rate of sattelite uplinks ? of Sattelites ? what is the probablity of not beeing in sight of a sattelite ? what is the chance that the sattelite network you want to use won't be in use in 30 years when your plane finally needs it ?

Basically the recording systems have to be designed to that no matter the external conditions, it should work with the highest possible certainty. This pretty much rules out everything outside the aircraft

Why do you think GPS is still not the primary means of Navigation ? because it's UNSAFE. It's failure rate is not disclosed with enough certainty, it's reliance on government systems is unacceptable. (__foreign__ government, for 90% of the usefull world), the continuous maintenance of this network is not garanteed. It's exactly the same for Data Recorders. You just cannot trust the kind of technology enough for it to be the basis of your recording tools.

Airlines and governments are welcome to use any modern means of navigation, maintenance communication,... whatever, as __additionnal__ means of safety, but all this goes pretty much out of the window when serious problems arise aboard planes.

The summarry fails at more than basic science, it also fails at basic wine science. The year written on the label in very often **not** the year the grape actually grew but the year the wine was bottled. Wich can be anywhere between a few weeks to many years later. I'm a little worried nobody mentioned that before.

Most parts of middle east have had feodal structure for thousands of years. Yes, thousands. long before these religions were born. That means kings, chiefs, lords, ... yet, when they get conquered, they're told to build a democracy which they are not culturally prepared to. Then they're told that the most extremist aspect of their religion is a bad thing that must be erased (as much as I'd like to, I don't think we'll see someone telling a US extremist to forget about creationism).

That's the beauty of managing a country-centric website. You would like to believe it's pretty much international, untouched by national bias...

And maybe now westerners will see what their leaders say in Arab to the arab press, (blah blah blah ...)

English leader in english: They must surrender to our way of life and forget all about their culture ! CRUSAAAAADE !

English leader in Arab: please keep bombing our cities so that we can keep our people in control through fear. Oh and don't forget to set the price of oil high enough so that they stay too poor to be educated.

Arab press : "English leaders use double speech" (-- yeah, THEY make the effort to learn foreign languages).

tempête DU téton !

"pensez aux enfants" is actually far better.

I understand you can't translate it easily, but "Think about the children" is probably the best way to go about it. "pensez des enfants" doesn't mean anything by itself. "think of the children"

Just to clean up this mess for our american friends:

- People who vote left are always bragging about "democratic socialism". people who vote far left, or people who vote right donc like the word at all.

- People who vote right are either democrats (in the US meaning of the word) or the part of Republicans who understand the risk of voting for extremists.

- The "real" french republicans, (overzealous religious people, facists, death penalty advocates, racists...) vote for "Front National", a far right party that has declined somewhat for the last few years.

Once again: yes. but, I guess we'll just have to keep arguing for a couple of hours waiting for the website to make the announcement. Theeeeeen maybe the debate will be over.