February, 2002

  1. Jonas Savimbi Killed

    Jonas Savimbi was killed on Feb. 22 by soldiers of the Angolan army. Savimbi waged guerilla warfare against governments in Angola for 36 years and became an ally of the United States during the 1980s when Ronald Reagan received Savimbi in the White House. Whatever else he was, Savimbi was skilled at public relations. At…

  2. Screensaver Narrows Possible Anthrax Drugs, Enrages Some Users

    New Scientist reports that researchers at Oxford University used one of those distributed computing screensavers to analyze 3.5 billion potential anthrax-fighting compounds and reduce that to a mere 300,000 potential compounds which will now be analyzed using a supercomputer. This sort of analysis would normally require several years. Oddly enough, some people who ran the…

  3. Farm Subsidies, Tariffs and Lifesavers

    TechCentralStation.Com’s Ryan H. Sanger takes down George W. Bush for his recent statements linking farm subsidies, of all things, to the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Sanger reports that at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting in Denver, Bush told the cattlemen that, “It’s in our national security interests that we be able to feed ourselves .…

  4. Google’s AdWords Select Rocks My World

    A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my…

  5. Let Tyson Fight Already

    The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already. The NOW e-mail complained that…

  6. The Beginning of the End for PayPal

    MSNBC reports that less than a week after its IPO, PayPal has been hit with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of people who claim that the company wrongfully denied them access to their money. PayPal is an interesting experiment, but in the long term I think it is doomed. Quite a few people…