The airbus does not have a stick shaker, as there is no kind of force feedback on the side stick (aside from it being locked in the neutral position when the autopilot is on). The only indication of a stall in alternate law (when the fly by wire is degraded, which was the case for AF447) is a "STALL STALL STALL" aural message and the indication on the Primary Flight Display that the speed is in the barber's pole section of the speed tape. The part about the warning being inhibited below 60kts is correct.

Lots of long haul airliners have a separate bunk, however they are only useable for flights with more than two crew members, as at least two pilots have to be in the flight deck at any time. Most flights under 8 hours only have two pilots, in which case the only option is for the pilots to take turns to rest in their seat if they are too exhausted.

WHOOSH!

Seriously can somebody mod the GP Funny?

This outage prompted me to look for an easy way to backup my mail. I use the webmail interface, and don't necessarily want to put some time into configuring a mail client that I would not use for backup purposes only.

A google search returned Gmail Backup, apparently designed for the sole purpose of backing up Gmail. I have to wait until I'm home tonight to test it, but I was wondering if by chance some slashdotters would have tested it already. The app seems promissing, but I want to make sure that it's indeed working, as I don't want to find out the backup is crap the day Gmail collapses.

I used to agree with the slashdot crowd that glossy==bad, until I had to use a glossy screen on my work laptop.

The glossy screens give you a better contrast, at the cost of pretty bad reflections on the darker areas of your screen. While I agree that the reflection may be a huge problem for the professionals working with anything related to images, I think that glossy screens are a better fit for the professionals that mostly deal with text and numbers. The characters are usually black on white, so the increased contrast gives you increased legibility. The glare is a non-issue, since the background is white.