The NTSB did not mention any mechanical problems with the airplane or the engines and did not list engine failure as a possibility. The NTSB said only that the probable cause was “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane while maneuvering resulting in an inadvertent stall/spin.”

Teledyne Continental (TCM) was the manufacturer of the Baron’s engines way back in the 1970s or whenever this plane was produced (the NTSB doesn’t say). An engineer might say “it is impressive that those engines spun flawlessly for thirty years, not quitting until this pilot flew them right into the ground.” A jury saw this accident differently, ordering TCM to pay $4 million to the survivors of the pilot. The total market for these kinds of engines in new airplanes is about 2500 per year, of which Teledyne makes roughly half. So this judgment represents a cost of about $4,000 per engine sold every year to airplane manufacturers.

Wow. NTSB reports are not admissible in court. It sounds like, considering that $4m is enough to put the manufacturer out, there was no solution for the maker... go broke doing everything you can in defense, or go broke with the judgement. The plaintiff was in a pretty safe situation -- no one who lives was on the plane and no one would (to the survivors' face) say it was wrong to sue.

As the blog notes, with this kind of legal environment, US aerospace seems way too risky to be worth it.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Airplane engine manufacturer loses $4 million judgment

Enron worked out very badly for investors and average employees, but it was a great place to be a senior manager, some of whom are now among the wealthiest Americans (e.g., Lou Pi walked away with $250 million and become the second largest landowner in Colorado).

Have public company Boards learned any lesson from Enron? A March 31, 2008 article [sadly not online] about Stan O’Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, suggests not.

The Board at Merrill Lynch Enronized their company by promising to pay Stan O’Neal roughly $50 million per year if he made some numbers look good.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » 2008 » April » 21

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

Bessemer Venture Partners

Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

The original was pretty great.

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org

Which makes me wonder... could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of their servers to scale?

Jim Roepcke's weblog: have browser, will travel

The Olympic torch made a strange and lonely procession through central Delhi on Thursday, with the event so comprehensively overshadowed by fears of the anti-Chinese protests that had marred its appearances in other cities that no members of the public were allowed close enough to witness it.

The 70-odd Indian athletes and celebrities who carried the torch down Delhi's widest avenue were outnumbered by thousands of watchful members of India's security forces, who managed to stamp out any pomp and excitement, transforming the occasion instead into a tense security operation rather than a celebration.

Because this kind of required response makes China look better than either dealing with the protests, or just cancelling the torch.

Torch passes quietly through empty Delhi streets - IHT

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

How to write 200,000 books, with a computer's help - International Herald Tribune

And to think: All it took was two World Series titles.

When the Boston Red Sox had Bill Buckner throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park Tuesday, it was more than a nostalgic nod. It was an act of sporting absolution, a way for fans to finally forgive the former first baseman for his epochal flubbed grounder in the 1986 World Series.

OK, Red Sox fan reeducation:
1. We can win the World Series.
2. And not just by a crazy comeback against the Yankees
3. Actually, our payroll resembles the Yankees now
4. And people other than Yankees fans no longer like the Red Sox or its fans
5. Bill Buckner is allowed in the state of Massachusetts again.

ESPN Page 2 - Hruby: A time to forgive

One by one, a machine operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York City subway cars off a barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.

“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,”

Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars - New York Times

When you place your order the cashier marks a coffee cup with your order and places it into the queue. The queue is quite literally a queue of coffee cups lined up on top of the espresso machine. This queue decouples cashier and barista and allows the cashier to keep taking orders even if the barista is backed up for a moment. It allows them to deploy multiple baristas in a Competing Consumer scenario if the store gets busy.

I have intentions to write a similar article about ice cream shop models... soon.

Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns