Yay! Google has finally re-indexed my blog.

Yahoo! News – Airlines Fear Collapse Without More Help

The debt-ridden U.S. airline industry will be near ruin if the government does not help it reduce costs related to aviation security, the chief executive at the world’s biggest carrier warned Congress on Tuesday.

The airline industry, or at least the part occupied by the major carriers, suffers from unsound economics. The situation is only going to get worse for them in the short term as regional and discount carriers further undermine their crumbling business models. In the longer term, Air Taxi service is likely to erode the big carriers margins even more. Bailing out the industry now, in toto, would be a huge waste of money.

I’m not sure the best thing to do, but one possibility is to just let it ride until some of the weakest carriers fail or are forced to merge with healthier carriers.

Sure, travellers might be faced with more expensive tickets, but its better in the long run that the industry is sustainable.

Entertainment Tonight’s post-event covereage of the Emmys featured a 360 degree camera from Enroute technologies.

Appearantly this is a system of mirrors, cameras and digital signal processors that allow a 360degree view to be captured on video. On playback the view can be panned to look at any part of the frame. The Entertainment Tonight broadcast was not a great showcase for the technology.

1. Only one shot made real use of it (Martin Sheen throwing a piece of trash and a pan to it hitting a photographer. Other shots were basically static shots that gratuitiously adjusted the “camera” slightly.

2. The stupid phony motor noise as they pivioted the view was irritaing

3. It looked like crap. The picture was muddy & poorly focused, etc. The focus thing, I guess, can be excused, but it should have been crisper, and it should have scrolled smoothly since this wasn’t live.

All an all, not an impressive demo.

Scripting News

Google PR sends a message that they have a new News service. Maybe I’m slow this morning, or maybe I’m spoiled, but what’s the big deal. I thought they already had this. My personal aggregator is better, it shows me what I’m interested in, it’s not one size fits all. Help me figure this out. I’m sure there’s something innovative here, I just don’t see it.

0.They did already have this feature, it has been a public beta for a while, but it wasn’t featured on the front page and was undergoing revisions.
1. You just need a web browser to use it, not an install of Radio.
2. All the feeds are already there, you don’t have to find them and subscribe to them.
3. It groups stories on the same subject together.

*4. The search feature lets you are intersted in right NOW, not what you were interested in whenever you last updated your newsfeed subscriptions.*

The front page is nice, but judging from the way the product evolved during the beta, the news search feature is the main point, not the standard front page.

Scroll down to the bottom of the front page of news.google.com. Read the fine print. It says “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.” Think about that. Use the search functionality. Think what they can built on this foundation.

IBM, MS reject MySQL

“So far, I still see MySQL and some of the other open-source databases as really niche players,” said Sheryl Tullis, product manager for the SQL Server database at Microsoft.

Lets see, it isn’t as good as more established products, but it is good enough for a lot of tasks and it is a whole hell of alot cheaper. Sounds superficially like a typical disruptive technology.