In fact, the vast majority of the nation’s 19,000 airports do not have control towers. At those smaller airports, typically used for general aviation, pilots are responsible for logging into a specific frequency to broadcast their position and their intention to land. Airports that have scheduled commercial traffic, however, are required to have a tower that is staffed.

(I also take issue with the general media hysteria over the idea that "uncontrolled" airports are a dangerous, risky free-for-all. There are right-of-way rules that apply to air traffic at all times, regardless of whether a disembodied voice in your headphones is telling a pilot what to do or not, and pilots are always responsible to see and avoid other aircraft when able to see outside the airplane.)

Some experts questioned whether adding a second controller for the midnight shift, when most airports restrict or shut down for traffic, would help at all.

“I am not sure the answer is to have multiple heartbeats at a time of the day when nothing is happening,” said Robert W. Mann Jr., an aviation industry expert in Port Washington, N.Y. “You might have well have a dog in the tower along with the controller. The dog could bite the controller if he fell asleep.”

I generally agree with Mr. Mann -- the answer is probably not to require two people working a graveyard shift. However, I disagree with his suggestion. The answer isn't technological or other ways to ensure a lone controller stays awake; the answer is not to assign graveyard shifts on four consecutive nights in the first place to someone in a safety-critical position who also has multiple other responsibilities. (The controller in this incident was, apparently, a supervisor, and it's my understanding that controllers' shifts can vary quite a bit. We pilots deal with issues like this, too, and I don't believe highly variable schedules are safe for pilots, either.) If that means hiring more controllers, so be it. Spending a few million dollars per year on aviation safety seems worth the tradeoff when you consider that even the least-expensive airline accident could easily cost in the hundreds of millions.

It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

Memo to Sarah Palin: If you're going to quote Reagan in a press release decrying "the left" "blaming" you for Jared Loughner's massacre, you should probably be willing to accept personal responsibility for using over-the-top rhetoric and imagery in campaign literature and admit that you shouldn't have done that when you were called out for it EIGHT MONTHS AGO.

We don't let people off scot-free who hire hitmen merely because they didn't pull the trigger themselves. Inciting violence is wrong, too, and apparently you don't realize this, or simply aren't willing to admit that people might have interpreted it that way.

Also, stop being childish by prohibiting NPR from embedding the video. You're clearly unfit to be anything more than a modern celebutard.

Custom UI makes sense when you have a problem that the standard controls and conventions don’t solve, but too often there doesn’t seem to be any design benefit from the deviations.

Exactly. This is why Gruber is wrong -- as is Apple's iTunes, to name just one particularly egregious example -- and Read the Fucking HIG and Tim Morgan are so right.

The solution for absentee voters determined by The Powers That Be, apparently, was as follows:

If you voted for Jones, don't like Hopewell, and wish to vote for Schuitmaker, you must request a new absentee ballot.

If you voted for Jones, and you don't care if your vote in that race is discarded, you don't have to do anything.

If you voted for Schuitmaker, you don't have to do anything, because even though your ballot has the name of a dead guy on it, your vote was for a living candidate and still counts.

Clear as mud, right?

It gets worse. Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

I'm a staunch Republican who wants to ensure a Schuitmaker victory. I encourage everyone who already voted absentee ballots in favour of Schuitmaker to pretend they voted for Jones and request a new absentee ballot...which they then use to vote for Schuitmaker again.

As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no safeguards in place to stop this from happening.

What they should have done was to discard every single ballot that has Robert Jones as a candidate. Yes, this would require all absentee voters who already had ballots to get new ballots, but it would ensure that no one can sway the election in favour of the Republican candidate by voting twice. (It would also have the side benefit of not revealing the political affiliation of anyone who comes in to request a replacement ballot, as the township clerk's office made it very clear that if I voted for Tonya Schuitmaker, I did not need to be requesting a replacement ballot. So much for secrecy!)

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the Free and United Champions of Keeping E-mail Respectable and Safe. We now return to your irregular and unscheduled blogging.

Of course, this is only a hop, skip, and jump away from the lady who set her husband's go-kart on fire after they watched a Jennifer Lopez movie, so maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised.

(Hat tip to Dave Barry for both links.)

That means no pennants baring sports team logos, no Jolly Rogers, no rainbow banners celebrating gay pride and no historic flags showing a coiled rattlesnake bearing its fangs.

Indeed, I'm sure that were rattlesnakes capable of written language, they'd have written themselves a constitution granting the right to bear fangs, especially since fangs are an inherent trait of their species and all, but I do believe the copyeditor over at the old Grey Lady somehow managed to interchange "baring" (uncovering or showing, often in a display of aggression) and "bearing" (bringing or carrying) in this sentence.

(The article has since been fixed.)

Heck, limit it to within the lateral limits of the goal mouth if you want. But it's pretty clear to all involved that what Suarez did was a (legal, under the current rules) deal with the devil that cost Ghana the match. If that goal is awarded, Gyan doesn't miss a penalty, and Uruguay is forced to score in the last few seconds of the game. Suarez himself said the red card and automatic one-match suspension were "worth it", and no one would argue otherwise -- without that handball, the match for which Suarez would earn his suspension would be some meaningless international six months down the road with Uruguay out of the World Cup.

Life isn't fair, but sport is man's attempt to construct a framework of fair competition. Awarding only a penalty as compensation after a defender has illegally prevented a certain goal is, well, unfair. Memo to FIFA: fix it.

Couldn't send message; server says "552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. f6sm13922652anb.16".

The same attachment sends just fine if you change the extension from .zip to .txt.

The ultimate solution? There isn't one. Gmail, for whatever reason, does not like this file, which was created by Control-clicking a folder of a few JPEG images (all with the ".jpg" extension) in Finder and choosing "Compress". Hey, Google, a folder full of JPEGs created on a Mac is not a security risk.

[Southers] will not give me a straight answer [as to whether he would allow TSA employees to have collective bargaining rights]. This is all about politics and not security.

This is the same Jim DeMint who has been blocking the nomination of Errol Southers as head of the TSA because, as Joe Sharkey so eloquently put it, "DeMint, a former market researcher, has surveyed the situation and identified the real terrorist threat to America: Unions."

Now who's about politics, Jim?

“If the American government really wants to advance relations with Cuba, I recommend they leave behind the conditions of internal governance that they are trying to impose on us and that only Cubans can decide,” Ra??l Castro said in his assembly speech.

So, Ra??l, how about letting Cubans actually, you know, decide? No population in the history of the world has ever voted to uphold a Communist or totalitarian government in free and untainted elections, and it strikes me as unlikely that it'll happen this time. (As far as I can remember; readers are free to point out obscure exceptions in the comments.)

Notably absent from the list is Indiana, the state with the least shoreline along the Great Lakes. Of course, Indiana has already demonstrated it doesn't give a crap about Lake Michigan anyway, when it issued a permit to BP/Amoco to dramatically increase its pollution output from the Whiting refinery south of Chicago.

So the two states with the shortest coastlines on the Great Lakes get to destroy them for the rest of us? Yeah, screw you, Illinois, and that Hoosier horse you rode in on.

Just to reiterate, though: if the bomb gets on the plane, we've already lost. Once it's there, no procedure anyone can ever invent is going to stop someone from succeeding in bringing down an airplane.