Lobby Bar – August 12: The City of Free Bikes, Kids Driving Cars, and How to Crash Delta’s Servers

Lobby Bar – A Fabulous Footnote of FBT News and Views

Like father, like son. Jonathan Spira takes a seat behind the wheel of the 2017 Buick LaCrosse. As Spira notes, this is NOT your father’s Buick. Instead, it’s your child’s Buick, and comes with a booster seat, strap-on blocks for reaching the pedals, and a special safety mode that allows toddlers and young children to pilot the vehicle.

Swapping gears. Paul Riegler checks out Portland, Oregon, one of the country’s hippest cities. The bike share program is especially progressive: residents of Portland voted in favor of keeping all personal bicycles unlocked so they could be shared by all. Just don’t be surprised when your Bianchi is gone and replaced by a cheap Huffy from Walmart.

Guilty pleasure. The hacker who stole and resold United Airlines travel vouchers pleaded guilty to a pattern of unlawful activity. The judges decided that the punishment should fit the crime, and so the hacker’s private Netflix queue and Spotify playlists will be hacked and made public. We got a sneak peek and hoo boy are they super embarrassing.

Do Better. Remember that pop travel quiz you took at the end of the semester? We finally found an industrial-sized supply of red pens and graded them all. Unfortunately, the vast majority of students received a failing grade and will subsequently be required to write “I will study harder next time” on the board Bart Simpson style.

Making the switch. Delta canceled hundreds of flights this week when it experienced a six-hour IT outage. Apparently the outage started when a baggage handler clicked on the “upgrade to Windows 10” button accidentally, sucking all of the bandwidth from Delta’s servers and crashing systems worldwide. Possibly related to the event, the phrase “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” was heard over public address speakers systemwide. United announced that the upgrade is now complete and things should return to normal once they switch over to Macs.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)