Month: February 2002

Long-running Scandal in the Libertarian Party. A long-running scandal in the Libertarian Party is met with the typical response seen in other political parties. It’s not at all surprising that any group of people, much less a politically-oriented one, should find itself embroiled in some degree of scandal. The whole event tells us much about politics, power, and the LP itself. [kuro5hin.org]

The is a helpful explanation of what was going on with the national Libertarian Party. I’ve seen lots of angry writing from L. Neil Smith about how they are a bunch of crooks, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone explain how they’re crooks.

I found a nice explanation of what a hawala is on the Libertarian Samizdata site.

I was reading the manual for Compaq’s iPaq (out of curiousity, I don’t own one) when I noticed something surprising. In the section on charging batteries, there was a warning that if the battery ran out all data would be lost.

I had thought that PocketPC devices used Flash RAM, so that the memory contents would be safe if power ran out. That seems like an obvious feature for a platform that claims to be superior to the Palm OS. Also, the iPaq’s battery is apparently built in, so there’s no way to use ordinary AA or AAA batteries if the user won’t be near a power source.

Is this flaw common to all PocketPC devices, or just the iPaq? The PocketPC OS is presented as being suitable for stand-alone devices, but how can thdt be if the suffer from the same memory loss as the Palm devices?

Matsushita 1900 mAh NiMH. Matsushita (Panasonic) has today announced new 1900 mAh AA NiMH rechargeable batteries. Up until this point the maximum capacity of NiMH AA available was around 1800 mAh. Interestingly the batteries are… [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

I wonder how long my MessagePad 2100 would run on these batteries. Maybe I should buy some and find out!

News.Com: Plotting the revival of Ricochet. Our approach is, “Let’s build a public-private partnership.” We have to rent space on top of light poles to put our antennas on. Most of those poles are either owned by cities or utilities. So we have to lease the space from them. We’re trying to get a better lease rate (than what Metricom was paying). [Tomalak’s Realm]

I’ll certainly sign up if it comes back in LA. I hope this time they concentrate on major cities where people will use the service, though. Metricom held back on making the service available until they had it installed in many cities all over the country, and then it tried to support all those cities at once. It’s no wonder they failed!

What they should have done in the first place was expand a city at a time. The Ricochet network was active (although at the lower speed) in Los Angeles for some time before the “official” date–Metricom should have started signing people up here first. Then, when they had enough customers, they could go to one more city, like New York, and so on.

Nasa outlines space tourist criteria. US space agency, Nasa, releases a list of criteria future space
tourists will have to meet to be allowed onto the ISS. [BBC News: sci/tech]

Since NASA has no intention of allowing tourists themselves, this is really just a set of demands they’re attempting to impose on other people who might. Specifically, it’s directed at Russia, since the Russian space program is the only one to show an interest in capitalism so far. How’s that for irony?

Plea to close Sangatte rejected. A French court rejects a fresh attempt by the Channel Tunnel operators
to shut down the Sangatte refugee camp for security reasons. [BBC News: world]

bq. Tens of thousands of migrants cross Europe every year, many of them heading for Britain where they hope to find work on the black market.

This is a fairly obvious statement about conditions in Britain compared to the rest of Europe. I wonder if this situation will go away as the EU gradually drags Britain down to the level of the rest of Europe?