Month: February 2002

According to the insider trades data on Yahoo, CEO John Thompson made $2 million from stock options at the end of January. It seems he had options for 70,000 shares at $6.50! It must be nice to be able to give yourself as many options at whatever price you want. As a lowly employee, my options (which are far less numerous) have had a negative value almost the while time I’ve worked for Symantec.

iTunes plug-in bridges Newton gap [MacCentral]

More coverage of the Newton’s MP3 support and iTunes plugin. I tried this out last night, and found that the pluging worked perfectly. The playback stuttered a few times, which suggests I need to use a lower bitrate setting. Linear Flash isn’t the fastest storage around.

Progressive Policy Institute – Modernizing the State Identification System [Privacy Digest]

The socialist position on national ID. They’re in favor, of course.

Campaign Finance Reform: Wrong Target. Walter Williams at Capitalism Magazine –

Campaign Finance Reform: Wrong Target – Bill or Rights enforcement
solves another problem. [mind]
bq. I say: Forget about campaign finance reform. If Congress did only what
it’s constitutionally authorized to do, influence-peddling would be a
non-issue because Congress wouldn’t have the power to grant favors. It
might also help if we had a law that read: Whatever Congress does for
one American it must do for all Americans. If Congress pays one
American not to raise pigs, every American not raising pigs should
also receive payments.
[End the War on Freedom]

DMCA Protection at U.S. Border. U.S. Customs agents have halted shipments from an Asian video game retailer because of concerns over copyright infractions. By Brad King. [Wired News]

bq. Customs agents are using the UPS computer system to track packages from origination points, UPS spokesman Dan McMackin said.

Here’s an advertising opportunity for FedEx. They could adopt the slogan, “We don’t collaborate with fascists.”

It appears all of my weblog archive pages have spontaneously disappeared. This happened once before, but the previous fix didn’t work this time. All the files exist on my local hard drive, they just aren’t being upstreamed.

Inquiry after Afghan mob kills minister. An investigation is launched after a crowd of pilgrims enraged by
flight delays at Kabul airport beats the Afghan aviation minister to
death. [BBC News: world]

This is too bad, it sounds like the minister hadn’t actually done anything to deserve it. On the other hand–if we sent the head of the FAA to Kabul, maybe that mob could be persuaded to give a repeat performance?

A Japanese Lesson. As the history of the Great Depression is one long regret of political follies and blunders that aggravated the suffering, so is the story of the Japanese recession from the 1990s to the present. The Japanese government tried to spend its way out of the recession, but instead merely prolonged it and created a mountain of debt. It probably improved the Japanese infrastructure but simultaneously propped up a badly misguided economy; sustained insolvent banks and insurance companies, always preventing the needed readjustment and thereby prolonging and aggravating the recession; and, last but not least, consumed the people’s savings of a decade.

It turns out the Radio Python support doesn’t work on the Mac OS. I can see the sample script, but when I click “Run” the Python Interpreter gives me an error message:

This is not a script. It is probably an auxiliary Python file such as an application template or a preference file.

Canadian Warship Seizes Drug Vessel. A Canadian warship patrolling the Arabian Sea seized a wooden vessel carrying hashish and joined a U.S. ship blasting it with explosive shells and heavy machine guns until it sank, the Canadian commander said Thursday. [AP World News]

This is pretty disgusting. The US and Canadians commit a blatant act of piracy, and then have the gall to brag about it to the press. I hope all those people in the Arab world who hate Americans will take note that the Canadians were the main pirates in this attack.