Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

50 Killed in New York Plane Crash

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At least 50 were killed late last night and several injured in the fiery Buffalo, New York, crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air. The flight, which was headed from Newark, New Jersey, to Buffalo, was on approach approx. 10 miles from its destination airport when contact was lost. Preliminary information indicates that the Q400 Bombardier aircraft, a twin-engined turbo-prop, entered a steep dive and impacted a residential home, killing all 49 aboard and at least one on the ground.

Other aircraft in the area reported icing conditions, and ice buildup on the wings can cause a catastrophic loss of lift, but it is too early to determine if the weather was a contributing cause of this crash. Much stronger anti-ice procedures were put in place after the 1982 crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into Washington, DC’s 14th St. Bridge and the Potomac River shortly after takeoff.

This is the first crash of a commercial airliner resulting in fatalities since 2006, ending a remarkably safe period in commercial air travel.

The Axis of Evil Animals

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People who have known me for a long time know that I have long considered two kinds of animals to be evil. Of course, in reality, no animal is really ‘evil’ since they are simply slaves to their instincts, but we tend to assign human qualities to them anyway.

The two I have long considered evil are deer and squirrels. I came to this conclusion based on the fact that these two animals are hit by cars more often than any others, generally because they zig-zag around like absolute morons when cars approach instead just, say, getting out of the way. Since this is fairly consistent, I figure they’ve got to be involved in some kind of personal injury insurance scam.

I’ve neglected, however, to include geese. So, as of today, consider geese the third in my newly-established Axis of Evil Animals, joining deer and squirrels.

Geese have now been formally implicated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River in New York. Aside from that, they’re also just terrible, mean-spirited creatures. Ever spent any time with a goose? They’re evil, and they hiss like angry cats for no reason.

Haiku: Almost Alpha

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In the software world, a product goes through (basically) three testing phases before release.

First, in the ‘alpha’ phase, nobody is pretending that the product is totally stable or ready for mission-critical use. It is more of a ‘proof of concept’ where the product can be demonstrated and it has potential, but it’s nowhere near ready for prime time. In commercial software, regular users never get to see ‘alpha’ releases. In the open-source world, daring users usually can.

Second, in the ‘beta’ phase, the software is (or at least should-be) showing real promise. It’s mostly functional, though it might still have some bugs, and it’s ‘feature-complete’. These days, some products—like Google’s GMail email software—remain in ‘beta’ phase forever. Often commercial software makers like Microsoft will make betas of their products available to early adopters who are willing to take the risk.

The third and final phase before release is the ‘release candidate’ phase. In this phase, the product is done and—if no ‘showstopper’ bugs are discovered—the release candidate will become the final product.

One of my favorite open source software projects, the Haiku Operating System, hasn’t even reached the ‘alpha’ phase yet. The developers, for whatever reason, feel that the operating system as it stands today is still in a relatively early development phase. This is a shame, as every time I fire up a new Haiku virtual machine it’s more stable, more capable, and runs longer without crashes—to the point that a daring user with relatively limited needs can use Haiku full-time if they really want to. Its stability is certainly better than anything in the Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME line, and lots of us used those every day for many years.

Personally, I think it’s time to declare Haiku an alpha product; in fact I’d  even say it’s approaching beta quality. The Haiku team has a number of bugs marked as ‘blockers’ for an alpha release, but alphas aren’t supposed to be bug-free (or even stable) so—in my humble-outsider’s opinion—let’s throw the switch and generate some buzz!

If you want to know more about where Haiku stands today, check out Thom Holwerda’s excellent review on OSNews.com.

Who Are We Stimulating?

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How does $800,000,000,000.00 sound to you? It’s a lot of money. Writing it in the standard shorthand way—800 billion dollars—doesn’t quite do it justice. It really needs that long string of zeros to hit itself home. That’s how much President Barack Obama (D) and the Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate think our government should spend on ‘stimulating’ the economy, at least for now. When you add this to President George W. Bush’s (R) $700,000,000,000.00 stimulus from last year, we’re talking at least $1,500,000,000,000.00—or $1.5 trillion—of unnecessary federal debt for poorly-defined and likely-ineffective efforts to ‘fix’ a natural downturn in our economic cycle. You, your children, and your grandchildren will inherit this debt and pay for it one way or another.

Our leaders are now walking us down the Great Depression road that was paved by President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) ‘New Deal’ in the 1930s. I put much blame on President Bush and those Republicans—including Senator John McCain (R-AZ)—who went along with the 700 billion dollar boondoggle last year and set this monster in motion, being justifiably trounced in the November elections as a result. It is little consolation that many Republicans have come to their senses now . . . after having ceded the White House and both houses of Congress to strong Democratic majorities.

The 700 billion dollars Bush bailout from last year was an unprecedented government intervention into the free market, characterized by major government ‘investment’ (read: partial nationalization) in the financial industry. Worse, it quickly spread into other industries (like the automotive ‘big three’) without any Congressional authorization or Constitutional basis. The one, small redeeming quality was that at least the money, sooner or later, ended up in businesses. To stimulate an economy, you need to stimulate business and commerce.

The new 800 billion dollars ‘New[er] Deal’ program being considered now is more of an exact duplicate of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, which many economists believe lengthened and deepened the Great Depression rather than fixing it. Its hallmarks are not investments in business and commerce, but investments in new, broadened government programs and authorities. This will not have any major positive impact on our economy and, worse, will grant ever-more power to an already over-powered federal bureaucracy.

I weep for the republic.

Tired and Sick, But Catching Up

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Yeah, I know, I’m slacking on postings and have been doing a poor job of responding to emails, answering phones, and so on. Sorry about that. I finally got much of my to-do list conquered by Thursday evening, right around the same time I started to feel a bit off. I woke up Friday with a pretty bad cold, complete with congestion, sore throat, and general badness. I’ve been consuming plenty of vitamin C and drinking plenty of fluids and getting plenty of sleep (with the help of Nyquil D), so hopefully it’ll pass soon.

I still have quite a few to-dos to finish, and I’m still working on them, but things have basically settled back to a normal level of chaos. I’m going to try and get back into a habit of regular posting, but please be patient with me ;-).

You would think that with the immense technological power we have as a society—billions of computers that all are interconnected to one another—they’d have figured out some way to kill a common cold.

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Posted in: Life

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.