Events

After dropping 12 of their last 15 games, the Cubs are now tied with the Brewers for 4th (last) place. There are 42 games left in the season; the Cubs have to win 10 of them to avoid a 100-loss season. It's not going well. At least they can't lose today—but they can drop into 5th place if Milwaukee beats the Reds tonight. This, by the way, is unlikely, since the Reds are doing just fine, and are tied for the National League Wild Card with St. Louis. I'm going to the Cubs-Cards game Sunday to watch the...

...but the Department of Justice suing to block the American-US Airways merger was sure stupid. Cranky Flyer gives them a Crazy Jackass award: It really does appear that DOJ has gone off the rails. The best way to sum up the argument is that airlines should all be punished for trying to be successful enterprises. The complaint is filled with talk about how capacity has shrunk and fares have risen. They think this merger will result in more of the same. But what they’ve failed to recognize is that the...

As expected, the Justice Department and several states' attorneys general have challenged the American-USAirways merger: The Justice Department says the deal would result in the creation of the world’s largest airline and that a combination of the two companies would reduce competition for commercial air travel in local markets and would result in passengers paying higher airfares and receiving less service. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the transaction between US Airways and American...

Paul Krugman points out this simple fiscal truth, along with polling data that makes my head hurt: A little while back I expressed a desire to see a poll of voters asking whether they knew about the plunging federal budget deficit. Just as a reminder, here’s what the CBO numbers for the recent past and projections for the near future look like: Well, Hal Varian of Google got in touch with me, and said,”We can do that!” So he put together a Google Consumer Survey; it’s still ongoing — results here — but...

Bruce Schneier thinks the NSA's plan to fire 90% of its sysadmins and replace them with automation has a flaw: Does anyone know a sysadmin anywhere who believes it's possible to automate 90% of his job? Or who thinks any such automation will actually improve security? [NSA Director Kieth Alexander is] stuck. Computerized systems require trusted people to administer them. And any agency with all that computing power is going to need thousands of sysadmins. Some of them are going to be whistleblowers....

Andrew Sullivan puts it best: "Every now and again, a writer needs to find a new way of expressing the notion that fundamentalism is not actually faith, but a neurosis built on misunderstandings and leading nowhere. And then you just read the AP:" A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday. Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to...

Yes, I know the weather's beautiful in Chicago this weekend, but sometimes you just have to run with things. So that's what I did the last day and a half. A few things collided in my head yesterday morning, and this afternoon my computing landscape looks completely different. First, for a couple of weeks I've led my company's efforts to consolidate and upgrade our tools. That means I've seen a few head-to-head comparisons between FogBugz, Atlassian tools, and a couple other products. Second, in the...

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first official night game at Wrigley Field. The night before, on 8/8/88, the Cubs turned on the lights—and got rained out: Cubs right-hander Rick Sutcliffe threw the first pitch. Phillies left fielder Phil Bradley hit the first home run. Cubs second baseman and future Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg stole the first base. Officially, of course, none of that happened. Heavy rain interrupted play after 3 1/2 innings and the game was called after a delay of two hours and 10...

I've started playing around with Orchard, an open-source content-management system, as a replacement for this blog's infrastructure (and as a replacement for other things, like inner-drive.com. It hasn't been all skittles and beer: Orchard has serious issues running on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, though it runs fine on Azure Web sites. It turns out, my employer is moving to Umbraco, a different open-source CMS. So it makes sense to try that out, too, as I'll have to support Umbraco at work...

The National Transportation Safety Board has released its final 2012 statistics: Part 121 commercial airline operations remained fatality-free, and general aviation accidents were virtually unchanged. In the general aviation segment, the number of total accidents was 1,470 in 2011 and 1,471 in 2012. Fatalities decreased slightly, from 448 to 432, and the accident rate per 100,000 flight hours declined from 6.84 to 6.78. On-demand Part 135 operations showed improvement, with decreases across all...