Month: March 2002

Longitude clock comes alive. John Harrison’s H4, the famous timekeeper that solved the longitude
problem, is running again this week for the first time in over a
decade. [BBC News: sci/tech]

bq. Harrison radically re-thought his design and produced H4, a timekeeper that resembled a large pocket watch. It was a revelation. In six weeks, it was out by just five seconds; an accuracy three times better than that required to win the

Capitalism vs Statism. There’s an interesting article about how the US is practicing statism rather than capitalism. I thought it was a rather balanced treatment on the whole. It astutely points out that most “Free Trade” organizations are actually promoting “big corporation” trade in the first place. [kuro5hin.org]

The article is written for some sort of punk rock fan website, so it’s a bit odd at times. Still, the author is right–the US economic system has slowly been perverted into a bizarre combination of socialism and national socialism.

For those who aren’t aware, the economic philosophy of the national socialists (better known as Nazis) is to allow private ownership of property, but allow the government to dictate how that property is used. The Endangered Species Act is an example of the national socialist philosophy in action.

I was able to add an entity pop-up menu to nHTML. It turned not to be that hard, although there is a graphical glitch that I couldn’t figure out. I sent the modified source code to Adam Tow, the original author. He said that he would put the modified version up on his site for download. I don’t know how many people use nHTML besides me, but I hope someone gets some use out of it.

Chinese Explorers ‘Discovered America’? [Slashdot]

The theory being advanced is that the Chinese voyages of exploration in the early 15th century reached America, among many other places. I’ve read as much as I could find about those voyages, which isn’t much. The ships used were much larger than the largest wooden ships ever build by Europeans, and there’s no doubt they could have reached America, or circumnavigated the globe. The question is, did they really?

The Chinese government deliberately destroyed as many records as they could about the voyages and suppressed the technology used to build the ships (thus ensuring China’s place as a third-world country), so it’s hard to say for sure what they really did. The best source of information I know of is When China Ruled the Seas. Not too expensive, and very readable.

PGP deep-freezed – NAI shrugs. Andrew Orlowski at The Register –

PGP deep-freezed – NAI shrugs – Network Associates hasn’t found a
buyer for Pretty Good Privacy and is no longer selling
licenses. No problem. You want the freeware from

PGPi anyway, though I don’t know if anyone is keeping it working
in newer OS versions. [grabbe]
bq.
John Ashcroft has been drumming the beat recently, reminding the tech
industry that a “lucrative surveillance state” (in our Tom’s words)
can be built from the ashes of the September 11 attacks. This
obviously doesn’t extend to personal privacy software. Are we the only
people who find the neglect of PGP somewhat fishy?
[End the War on Freedom]

I don’t think there’s any conspiracy here. NAI was neglecting PGP long before September 11th–remember that Phil Zimmerman left over a year ago. It’s more a case of NAI management’s total incompetence, which affects all areas of their business. I bought the Mac version of PGP from them in 1998 or 1999, and it was incredibly difficult. I spent about a week searching their web page for some sign of how to buy it. Their tech support was notoriously worthless as well.

Arrivederci, Svizerra. Michael Gilson De Lemos at LewRockwell.com –

Arrivederci, Svizerra – Mr. De Lemos lived in Switzerland between
the ages of 12 and 14. He talks of all the things he liked about it,
in the past tense, as they will soon be now that Switzerland has
joined the commU.N.ists. [lew] [End the War on Freedom]

Interesting article about life in another free country (which has given up that freedom). It reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about life in the US before I was born.

Bloodiest day of Mid-East clashes. The death toll in fighting between Palestinians and Israelis reaches
the highest level in a single day since the current uprising began. [BBC News: world]

The US and UN are still making concerned noises about a truce. They’re wasting their time–boths sides have to want a truce, and the Palestinians don’t. If the Israelis try to declare a truce, they will only allow the PLO to regroup and plan new terrorist acts.

Fox Explains Why SSSCA Is Bad [Slashdot]

The article, published by Fox News, is certainly interesting. It also explains how the Republicans could use the Democrats’ betrayal of their principles against them. This gives too much credit to both parties, though–to the Democrats, for suggesting that they have principles, and to the Republicans, for suggesting that they are smart enough to take advantage of the situation.

Nat Hentoff: “The press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI’s harvesting lists of what ‘suspect’ Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers.”  [Scripting News]

There are ways to deal with this. The most obvious is to simply pay cash and refuse to give personal information to the bookstore. Also, bookstores and libraries could stop keeping records (or destroy them when the book is returned).

Powell condemns ‘war on Palestinians’. US Secretary of State Colin Powell criticises Israel as at least 12
Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers are killed in fresh violence. [BBC News: world]

bq. “If you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed – I don’t know that leads us anywhere,” Mr Powell told the congressional hearing.

Surely former General Powell knows better than this. The Palestinians declared war quite a long time ago, and have been conducting a strategy of almost exclusively comitting war crimes. The Israelis, even under Sharon, have been going out of their way to avoid fighting a war in return. The problem is, many Palestinians want to die and take Israelis with them. The best solution is to help them die as quickly as possible and without letting them hurt anyone else.