How do you define brazen? How about lobbying Congress to cut the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice when you’re in the middle of an anti-trust suit? This is the perfect story for me: it makes Microsoft looks bad, it’s on a technology related topic, and it discusses how influence is bought and sold in Congress.

Priceline is suing Microsoft for patent infringement. This is the logical follow-on to Priceline’s having filed for a patent for a business model, which seemed pretty idiotic to me in the first place. It’s hard for me to take Microsoft’s side in anything, but I hope that this sends Priceline’s market cap down into the gutter where it belongs.

The U. S. Senate failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty yesterday, voting down an arms control treaty for the first time since they rejected the Treaty of Versailles (which, of course, led to World War II). The sad thing is that the Republicans in the Senate rejected the treaty not out of conscience, but out of spite toward President Clinton. Way to go, idiots.

Looks like Apple isn’t going to be able to ship the PowerMac G4/500 in the near future. Apple says Motorola can’t build the 500 mhz chip, Motorola says that they’re working hard to increase volume and that there are no bugs in the chip. Somebody is lying. Long-time Mac fans will immediately be reminded of the debacle involving the PowerMac 9600/350.

Nokia is going to build set-top boxes for Europe based on Linux and Mozilla. I wonder if they’ll be contributing source code to both projects?

The Y2K bug has reared its ugly head in Maine. The state government has issued titles for “horseless carriages” to year 2000 model cars.

Declan McCullagh has written an article for Wired News that frames the debate within the IETF over whether hooks to facilitate wiretapping should be included in newer Internet protocols. This problem touches on nearly all of the issues confronting the IETF today. For better or for worse, the Internet has become too important to be designed and planned by a few geeks who were put in charge because they did all the work.

O’Reilly and Associates is going to release The Cathedral and the Bazaar in a hardcover edition this fall. Will the words of Eric S. Raymond appear in red? (Yes, I know that he wrote the whole thing … it’s a joke.)

It seems Symbian and Palm are ganging up on Windows CE.

I almost never link to sports stuff, because even though it’s incredibly interesting to me, I doubt most of my regular readers share my fascination. However, this column on why streaks don’t exist is fantastic. If you’re a geek, you’ll love the fact that math triumphs over the intuition of almost every sports fan you know. Basically, the article explains what most of us know already: the fact that if you flip a coin and it comes up heads 10 times in a row, the next time you flip it, it will just as likely come up tails as heads.