Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Holiday Update

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Yes, I am slacking on entries again. My excuse is a good one though: I’ve been spending time with family, since it was Christmas and all. Merry belated Christmas to everybody, and Happy Early New Year!

We had a great Christmas and extended weekend with my and Melissa’s parents and siblings. It was great to have everybody together and do all those fun, traditional, Christmassy things. I also managed to squeeze in some errands and other things that needed to be done. It was a good, low-key, enjoyable holiday this year. Very low-stress for once.

Anyway, many thanks to everybody for the great gifts and, more importantly, thanks to God for sending us his son, Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate this Christmas season.

Senate Passes Health Care Bill

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The U.S. Senate has passed a highly divisive health care reform bill by a strict party-line vote. Democrats mustered the bare-minimum 60 votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster. The Senate bill is very different from the version of health care reform passed by the House of Representatives in November, especially in that it does not include the so-called ‘public option.’ The two bills will now proceed to a conference committee to reconcile their differences.

Presuming that the two drastically-different Senate and House bills can be reconciled, they will then return to each house of Congress for another vote. Assuming final passage in Congress, the final bill will then proceed to the president for his signature and become law.

Health care reform has been among the foremost policy efforts undertaken by President Barack Obama (D) since he took office. It has proven to be a very contentious and controversial issue, both in the government and among the general public. According to most recent polls, a plurality of Americans oppose the Democratic health care plans working their way through Congress. Many recent polls show public opposition well over 50 percent.

RIM’s Flaw: Single Point of Failure

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I became a Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry user a little bit over a year ago now, and overall I remain as happy with my BlackBerry ‘Bold’ 9000 as I was when I wrote my positive review of the device. It’s a good phone, and it has treated me well—far better than the AT&T 8525 (HTC TyTN HERM100) that preceded it. The hardware has held-up through heavy use with only minimal damage, and the software remains solid and crashes only on very rare occasion.

But while I have very few complaints about the phone itself, one of my biggest qualms about the BlackBerry universe before getting one remains my biggest problem today. I hate having to rely on a middle-man to pass emails from my server(s) to my phone. Phones from Apple, Palm, HTC, Motorola, and others all manage to communicate directly with mail servers, but RIM insists on passing all BlackBerry email traffic through their North American data center in Canada. The RIM servers stand between my phone and my email, polling for messages on the servers and pushing them out to my phone.

Usually this works okay—in day-to-day use, what does it matter what route your email takes to get to your phone? My objection is that it adds another potential point of failure to the system. With any other smartphone, if your wireless carrier provides a working data connection and your email servers are up your email will work. With a BlackBerry, you need both of those plus a working RIM data center. This adds an extra, unnecessary place where the system can break down.

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Airlines Can’t Hold You Hostage (For More than 3 Hours)

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We’ve all heard the horror stories about plane-loads of passengers being trapped in an airliner on the tarmac for hours on end. Maybe the weather turned bad, or maybe there’s a mechanical problem on the plane. They pushed back from the gate and just parked there, then sat . . . and sat . . . and sat. Those of us who fly even on rare occasion have experienced 1- or 2-hour waits, and the unlucky few have had to sit in planes for 5, 6, 8, or 10 hours.

This has always been absolutely, unequivocally wrong. You don’t trap people in an airplane. If the plane is broken or if it can’t embark, let people off. Your average human being can figure this out, but it is apparently beyond the capabilities of the average modern airline executive.

Thankfully the Department of Transportation has stepped in to put some simple, common sense restrictions on how airlines treat their passengers: You can’t keep them on the sitting in a parked plane longer than 3 hours, and you have to keep the toilets working while they’re trapped on the plane. Oh, how terrible. The airlines will go bankrupt trying to abide by these stringent new regulations.

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“Don’t Bring a Gun to a Snow-Ball Fight”

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The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, DC, doesn’t have the best reputation as a law enforcement agency to begin with, but an incident during this last weekend’s blizzard really takes the cake. A ‘veteran’ detective with over 25 years of experience, when faced with a crowd of people wielding snow-balls, pulled out his handgun in an apparent effort to deter this wild crowd of . . . snow-ball throwers.

Look, the snow-ball throwers were in the wrong—some of their snow-balls were hitting passing cars, which is potentially dangerous, and they didn’t exactly behave in a respectful way toward the detective. I don’t fault the detective at all for stopping his car, confronting them, or calling for backup. Fine. An overreaction, but an understandable one. But pulling your gun? In what universe do hand-lobbed balls of snow (and this wasn’t even wet, packable snow) constitute a threat worthy of brandishing a firearm?

As you might expect, the detective has been placed on desk duty pending an investigation. Check out the video below, including the enjoyable chant that I stole as this entry’s title.

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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.