Day: March 25, 2003

Did the U.S. Hit Iraqi Television with an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb?

According to this CBS report, the United States dropped a bomb designed to take out Iraqi television by emitting an electromagnetic pulse to fry the broadcast equipment.

According to CBS,

The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft.

Iraqi TV did go off the air for several hours. It returned to broadcasting later with a weaker signal.

MSNBC is reporting, however, that Iraqi TV appears to be off the air again.

My HP PDA Thinks I’m An Idiot

There is nothing that annoys me when using a computer or PDA than this — when I am given the option to configure a setting but the device simply ignores my desires anyway. I wanted to scream when I finally realized this was why my new 1910 IPAQ was acting oddly.

Frankly, I thought for several days that I had a defective unit and was getting ready to call HP to see about exchanging it. The problem? The screen acted very oddly.

In the display settings I had set the machine so it always keeps the backlight on and always sets the display to the brightest possible setting. I’m not really concerned about battery life.

So a few days ago I noticed that I would turn it on, tap a few buttons, and all of a sudden the screen would get noticably darker. Cycling the power sometimes fixed the problem for awhile, but it would at some point darken again.

It was only tonight when the battery was under 20 percent that I realized that the device was simply ignoring my settings. When it gets below a certain battery level, it sets the device to a lower screen brightness regardless of what I want — which has to be the dumbest “feature” I can possibly think of. Aargh.

The Dixie Chicks Boycott

On the one hand, I really can’t imagine ditching my Dixie Chicks CDs just because I disagree with their position on the Persian Gulf War. In fact some people seem to be forgetting that this is one of the advantages of a free market — I generally don’t know nor care about the politics of the people who produce the things I buy. I suppose the Dixie Chick were a bunch of neo-Nazis or uber-Stalinists that might change my mind, but whether or not their embarassed that Bush is from Texas is really not important to me.

But it apparently is to some people which brings me to the topic at hand — the rank hypocrisy of some left-liberals when it comes to consumer boycotts. I think consumer boycotts are just fine. You want to all the radio station and ask them to not play the Dixie Chicks? Fine. Join a boycott against Michael Savage’s new show? Great — more power to you.

Unfortunately a lot of folks seem to think that when people they agree with initiate consumer boycotts, this is the First Amendment at work. But when people they disagree with initiate consumer boycotts, all of a sudden the very same activity is transformed into a terrifying effort to silence dissent.

I am really sick and tired of seeing people who cheered the boycott of Dr. Laura’s short-lived TV show or the current one against Michael Savage turn around and complain that the boycott of the Dixie Chicks is beyond the bounds of reasoned discourse.

Ludwig Von Mises’ Socialism

Hopefully they won’t run into the same problems that Glenn Fleischmann did, but Capitalism.Net has posted a 30 megabyte PDF of Ludwig Von Mises’ book, Socialism. Published in 1922, Socialism outlined what would turn out to be the fundamental problem faced by non-market economies — namely their inability to make rational economic decisions due to the lack of a functioning pricing system.

Mises’ conclusions about socialism are uncontroversial today, given that the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and other socialist economies have experienced exactly the sort of thing that Mises predicted would happen in the absence of a system of free market pricing. But in the 1920s, this was far from obvious and Mises never really received the recognition he deserved during his life time.