Arabs Denounce West Bank Attack. Pales­tin­ian refugees burned tires and clashed with police in sev­eral cities Fri­day, protest­ing Israel’s assault on Pales­tin­ian leader Yasser Arafat, which Arab lead­ers denounced as a rejec­tion of their new col­lec­tive call for peace. [AP World News]

The ironic thing here is that burn­ing tires and clash­ing with police is unusu­ally civ­i­lized behav­ior for Pales­tini­ans. Who know, maybe if Arafat is killed they’ll be dri­ven to Ghandi-style peace­ful resistance?

PDA Hand­writ­ing Sys­tem Released. Con­nects sheet of paper to device [all­Net­De­vices Wire­less News]

The device is for Palm and Pock­etPC, and will cost $99. Of course, it would be sim­pler to just by New­ton Mes­sagePad 2100 for about $150, thus sav­ing lots of money over­all and wind­ing up with the best PDA on the market.

Bush signs cam­paign finance bill. US Pres­i­dent George W Bush has signed into law a bill that lim­its the
fund­ing of polit­i­cal cam­paigns. [BBC News: world]

The Incum­bent Pro­tec­tion Act would go into effect after the Novem­ber elec­tion, which will hope­fully give enough time for the Supreme Court to over­turn it before the next fol­low­ing election.

Pales­tini­ans Walk Out at Sum­mit. Angry Pales­tin­ian del­e­gates walked out of an Arab sum­mit ses­sion Wednes­day after Lebanon pre­vented Yasser Arafat from address­ing the con­fer­ence live via satel­lite link from his besieged head­quar­ters in the West Bank. [AP World News]

Here’s an expla­na­tion of why Lebanon blocked the speech. It’s almost funny, in a scary sort of way. I feel sorry for the diplo­mats who have to take those nut­cases seriously.

Lum­ber: A 29 Per­cent Tax. Amer­i­can soft­wood lum­ber pro­duc­ers are the lat­est sob story.

Hand­spring to raise stand-alone Treo price by $50 [PDABuzz.com]

This will make the price $600, which is ridicu­lously high. I have one of these for test­ing at work, and I’m not impressed. It replaces the Grafitti area of a nor­mal palm with a QWERTY key­board about the size of three postage stamps, and the phone aspect is noth­ing spe­cial. In addi­tion, I con­sider the idea of a com­bi­na­tion PDA/phone basi­cally flawed, because these are two dif­fer­ent func­tions which peo­ple will need to use at the same time.

If some­one wants a Palm device and a phone, they’d be bet­ter off buy­ing a reg­u­lar Palm model for around $150–200, and get­ting a cell phone for another $100.

Arabs set con­di­tions for Mid-East peace. Saudi Ara­bia unveils its peace plan for the Mid­dle East at an Arab
sum­mit, but Pales­tini­ans walk out after Yasser Arafat’s speech is
barred. [BBC News: world]

The arti­cle doesn’t men­tion any­thing about why Lebanon (where the sum­mit is being held) blocked the speech. I’m rather curi­ous as to the reason.

Gun con­trol laws have failed once more. For your infor­ma­tion, more than 1 mil­lion Ger­man and other Euro­pean chil­dren were killed in Hitler’s con­cen­tra­tion camps because their fam­i­lies had given up their firearms — and thus their abil­ity to defend them­selves against gov­ern­ment tyranny — by obey­ing vic­tim dis­ar­ma­ment (‘gun con­trol’) laws very much like the ones you’d like to see imposed here. …

When the tiny num­ber of chil­dren who die in gun acci­dents or due to the mis­be­hav­ior of mad­men in the free world begins to equal that num­ber — after sub­tract­ing the num­ber of chil­dren saved from such mad­men when law-abiding civil­ians show up to the res­cue with their firearms, as in the famous recent case in Pearl, Miss. — you be sure and let me know … where­upon I’ll advise you of how many chil­dren died thanks to the kind of ‘gun con­trol’ that fills your wet dreams, in Stalin’s USSR, in Mao’s Red China, and in Pol Pot’s Cam­bo­dia. [FirearmNews.com]

A good response to the igno­ra­muses who pro­mote gun con­trol “for the children.”

Quick­Time video on your PDA [PDABuzz.com]

Hope­fully this will sup­port Pock­etPC PDAs. They have the best hard­ware of any cur­rent PDA, but are stuck with Win­dows Media Player at present.

I’ve finally made some sig­nif­i­cant progress in my quest to use my stock options. After a great deal of bureau­cratic has­sle, includ­ing fill­out out forms and send­ing them via snail mail, I finally got an e-trade Option­sLink account set up. The process was very con­fus­ing and required a call to their help line (and a very rude sup­port per­son) because the nec­es­sary user ID and pass­word had not been sent. I think it’s safe to say that once I finally do get my options dis­posed of, I will never have any­thing to do with e-trade again.

The has­sle has been so extreme that if Syman­tec said to me, “we’ll pay you $1000 to give up your options,” I would prob­a­bly take it. I won­der if they make it this hard delib­er­ately. After all, it must cost the com­pany some­thing when peo­ple use their options, so if they can dis­cour­age peo­ple from using them by mak­ing it too much of a pain, they save money.