People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.
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.