Monthly Archives: December 2009

Tech quote of the day

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What’s Apple doing? Why did Apple do this deal with these stumblebums in the first place? And, surely, such flagrantly vile service is enough to call it quits on any deal. So what gives over there at Apple? Why aren’t they suing AT&T and making the iPhone an open network device? Steve Jobs is famously unsympathetic to human weakness and heartache, but AT&T is beyond normal sadism. I suppose, the great iPhone accomplishment, the test of its virtuosity, is that so many people believe they need to have one even if that means dealing with AT&T.

But enough. Come on. Please, God.

–  Michael Wolf, pleading for a change on the iPhone’s US carrier (via Fake Steve Jobs)

Airborne terror (updated)

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It seems to me that the complaints about the failure to stop the most recent terrorist attempt on Christmas are valid. Valid in the sense that a sufficient warning had been provided to the US government to trigger at least a careful search of the terrorist prior to allowing him to board a plane.

On the other hand, I think that there is no way to stop all would-be terrorist, aside from requiring passengers to travel nude following full-body cat scans.  Anytime you bring people together in a closed space there is a risk of criminal behavior. Nate Silver has provided a calculation of the true risk of being a victim of airborne terror:

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

Am I wrong to ask how many more billions of dollars we are willing to spend to reduce this extremely small risk? Are we getting our money’s worth from the huge amounts spent on the TSA? Certainly there are a great number of risks that are far larger than this that could use the funding for risk mitigation.

Update: And today, Holman Jenkins, Jr., writes an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal noting that airport security is actually very good.

Silly are the outrage and accusations simply because Mr. Abdulmutallab was on a list (along with 550,000 others about whom suspicions have been raised) without keeping him off a flight. Critics really seem to be saying that, politically, security personnel can’t maintain any lists that are bigger or different from the no-fly list—which is ridiculous.

Let’s be realistic—efficient counterterrorism requires the setting of priorities. There has to be more than one list. Yet the reaction to Farouk Abdulmutallab may soon mean there will be one list and eventually everybody will be on it and nobody will be able to fly.

AT&T stops iPhone sales in NYC (updated)

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The Consumerist is reporting that AT&T has ceased selling iPhones on their website to NYC residents. When contacted by The Consumerist, AT&T spokesperson “Daphne” said:

Yes, this is correct the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone. You don’t have enough towers to handle the phone.

Oh my. Is this an admission that AT&T’s data network is not up to the task of supporting iPhones? Who knows, but AT&T quickly changed their story. They now claim they are doing this because of “fraudulent activity” in the NYC area.

Fake Steve Jobs’ take:

New York. The biggest city in the United States, a place where I’m told many business and finance and media type people are living, cannot have the iPhone anymore? Does it say that somewhere in AT&T’s ads? Somehow I must have missed the little asterisk after the “We’ve got the fastest 3G network” phrase — the asterisk that takes you to a little disclaimer that says, “Except your phone won’t work for shit in the largest city in the United States.”

Update: Apparently the rash of fraudsters has been quelled. New Yorkers can now buy iPhone online again.

Holiday quote of the day

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I’m starting to get the sense that 2009 wants to finish me off before it dies of old age. A calendrical unit yelling “I’m taking you with me, you bastard!” from its vanishing final paper bunker marked December, every spent day a room deleted from the structure until 2009 is finally huddled in one small box marked 31 and screaming obscenities in stark terror.

- Warren Ellis, writer, from his blog (via Quotation of the Day mailing list)

RIMM: three strikes

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After reporting stellar financial performance in the most recent quarter, RIMM now has some news that is not so good. It suffered an email collapse on its Blackberry service throughout the Americas. This is possible because of the centralized nature of RIMM’s push email technology. It creates what is essentially a single point of failure risk to the system as a whole.  It appears the outage lasted 8 hours.

Even worse for RIMM, this outage is the third in a month.

The issue represents the third such failure within weeks and comes just as RIM is counting on continued strong sales to buffer itself against competition from the iPhone, which may come close to or match BlackBerry sales based on some analyst estimates.

Three hours on the tarmac

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This is the longest that will be allowed for domestic flights under new regulations issued today by the Transportation Department. The hell of waiting on the tarmac for many hours on a plane will now be limited to three hours. Too me, that is too long, but this is the first regulatory limitation yet enacted. President Obama does something right. Otherwise, we have the equivalent of kidnapping to hold passengers significantly longer. The only bad news in the announcement is that the new rules will only go into effect 120 days from now.

Conservative of the year: Dick Cheney (updated)

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Did anyone at Human Events notice what year it is? Salon thinks not.

For most people, the year ending now is 2009. That’s apparently not true at the right-wing magazine Human Events; reading it Monday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration is still in office.

Update: And Wonkette adds its own take.