A little bird told me tonight that there are major rumors being spread by the Microsoft elite that there will be a major podcast related announcement by Microsoft and maybe even Bill Gates himself at Gnomedex.

Polizeros will be at Gnomedex with 150+ other bloggers who will report any such announcements real time on their blogs via the free WiFi in the conference hall. The buzz on Gnomedex is getting huge, just 300 participants, with Yahoo co-sponsoring, Google having a party, and now something big from Microsoft.

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After three weeks of mobilisations in defence of Bolivia’s gas reserves, the country’s political crisis continues to deepen. A June 2 attempt to quash the crisis by President Carlos Mesa, by calling elections for a new assembly, and for a referendum on autonomy for the country’s wealthier provinces, has done little more than enrage his opponents.

Demanding “nationalisation now”, a seemingly endless series of marches, strikes and blockades have saturated La Paz. In a city where few people normally smoke, people are everywhere drawing on cigarettes, applying the Bolivian antidote to tear gas.

Here’s a shocker

There is general consensus that the political model in Bolivia has failed; that two decades of market-led reforms have enriched a small elite but failed to deliver promised benefits to Bolivia’s mostly indigenous poor.

Well, that’s precisely what neo-liberalism and globalization do - enrich the tiny few, impoverish the rest. This is no accidental byproduct of the process.

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Straw sounds death knell for EU treaty

The Foreign Secretary was today announcing that Britain’s plans for a referendum to approve the EU constitution are to be put on hold

EU constitution: a French pig in a poke?

But at root was the voters’ resentment that those who ruled them didn’t listen to them. It was the eruption of the people power the rulers of Europe liked when it happened in places like the Ukraine. It wasn’t supposed to happen at home.

True to form, as soon as the voters gave the wrong answer, their rulers tried to discount them. Faced with the proof that he was out of touch with his own citizens, what did President Chirac do?

He replaced his prime minister with his crony Dominique de Villepin, who has never stood for elected office, is disliked in his own party and is about as people-friendly as Louis XIV on a bad day.

Elites from all political persuasions in Europe wanted the EU Constitution, a three hundred page behemoth filled with dense legalese, to pass. But the people read enough of it to see that it seriously limited the sovereignty of their nations, installed unelected rulers beholden to no one, and forced onerous regulations down everyone’s throats  - so they voted it down. The elites are still stunned.

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From Steve Patt, head of  Stevens Creek Software, a Palm software development company

Who needs podcasts when you can listen to PDAcasts? I just got a new Palm “LifeDrive”, which is their newest model which includes a 4 GB hard drive, as well as WiFi (and Bluetooth). Sitting in my office (i.e., near a strong WiFi connection from our in-house airport), I can download an entire hour show from Democracy Now, 27 MB, in 1 minute and 40 seconds, direct to the PDA, and then immediately listen to it from there (unlike an iPod, the LifeDrive also includes a speaker, and a fairly decent one too (of course it also has an earphone jack).

The LifeDrive comes with MP3 software included. Like iTunes on my desktop, but unlike an iPod, I can also just use the stylus to drag to a specific point in the show, so if I know there’s something I want to hear at 40 minutes into the show, I can do that (on an iPod, you can only listen straight to the entire show). The LifeDrive will also play movies, although at the moment I’ve only figured out how to play .asf files, not .mov files.

PDAcasts rule!

Excellent! Yes, one major flaw of mp3 players like the iPod and the iRiver is you can’t skip to a specific point in an mp3, you must start at the beginning.

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Schwarzenegger’s secret party line.

Big contributors to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) get “a secret telephone number that grants them access to his closest advisors and even the governor himself,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Twice a month, donors can become insiders’ insiders — invited to participate in conference calls featuring information about Schwarzenegger

Such a secret phone line of course is not used by 5-figure contributors to learn what Schwarzenegger is doing, rather it’s their conduit to him to insure their investments in him reap financial and political rewards. He’s hardly the only politician participating in such a corrupt system, but he sure was a pompous blowhard bleating about how he was opposed to special interests while he was running for governor. Now he’s given them a special phone line.

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