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Every once in awhile, I delude myself into thinking that corporations are still establishing new lows when it comes to malfeasance. Last night, while reading Fast Food Nation , I learned that in order to hasten the adoption of the automobile, General Motors led a group of automotive-related companies in secretly taking over trolley systems around the United States and dismantling them (replacing them with buses). Of course, even this is minor league stuff compared to how monopolies around the turn of the century acted, but it’s a good example of the hostility of corporations toward their customers. ...

Here’s the proposed redesign for rc3.org. Simon Cozen’s posted a useful summary of Larry Wall’s annual The State of the Onion speech at the Open Source conference. This year, Larry actually talked about Perl, albeit in an unusual way. The Economist is banging the drum for drug legalization again. I admire the magazine for its persistence in arguing for sane drug policy.

A couple of readers sent along a link to a Washington Post story explaining that one of the things AOL got for their Amazon investment was a takeover provision. It’s unclear how insidious this is, though – several analysts quoted said that this is a common provision when a company makes a large investment in another. I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods this weekend. Needless to say, since then I’ve been surfing mythology sites like mad to get the backgrounds of the various gods mentioned in the book. I knew a lot of the big name gods, but Gaiman also incorporates a ton of more obscure gods that have equally fascinating backgrounds. I definitely recommend the book, and plan on reading it at least once more for sure. ...

Quick question: isn’t it the case that the only JVM that Microsoft currently ships with Windows is the one in Internet Explorer that enables you to run applets? As far as I know, you have to download the JRE (which allows you to run Java applications) yourself, or get it bundled with another software package, like Limewire or Opera. If you know the definitive answer to this, please send email. Adobe has asked that the federal government release Dmitry Sklyarov, the programmer who published an application that cracks Adobe e-books and was arrested for violating the DMCA. Unfortunately, it’s up to the federal government to drop the charges, not Adobe. Besides, the real problem (from my standpoint, not Dmitry’s) is that the DMCA exists in the first place. The fact that one can be taken to jail for selling software that enables someone to circumvent copy protection is moronic, as rc3.org readers already know. ...

Richard Mellon-Scaife’s personal outlet for conservative bile took Katharine Graham’s death as one last opportunity for a few low blows. Apparently they reached into their extremely shallow bag of tricks and decided that the Vince Foster gambit was appropriate, as they imply (none too subtly) that Graham shot her husband, who committed suicide in 1963. Clay Shirky beseeches OEMs to pre-install the JVM on their computers, since Microsoft is dropping the JVM from Windows XP. Contrast this move with Apple’s pervasively hooking Mac OS X in with the JVM, and providing a Java interface for their OS calls. Java, for good or ill, has achieved pretty massive popularity since it was introduced. It’s obvious that Microsoft’s refusal to embrace Java is nothing more than an anti-competitive move. (Sun is partly to blame here as well, since they’ve made it tough for Microsoft to embrace Java as well, and generally crowed about being at war with Microsoft for years now.) ...

I’m back from my trip and a few days of not reading the paper or watching the news. I’m only checking in to say that you wouldn’t think this kind of shit could happen in a first world country in the year 2001.

I’m going to be away for the computer until July 23, you’ll have to scrounge up your own news until then … One item before I go: Joel says software takes 10 years to complete.

Philip Morris commissioned a study that proved the economic upside of smoking in the Czech Republic. Any costs to the government from smoking are more than made up for by the fact that smokers die young and thus don’t use up their pensions or undergo years of expensive medical treatment. Encouraging smoking is, I suppose, the twenty-first century equivalent of dragging the old and infirm past the borders of the village at nightfall so that wild animals will eat them. ...

DNA Lounge (Jamie Zawinski’s labor of love) has officially reopened. Quoth Zawinksi: “As delayed and over-budget as this project was, it still shipped before Mozilla.” The battle between ElcomSoft and Adobe just turned extremely nasty -- Dmitry Sklyarov, a programmer for ElcomSoft, was arrested yesterday in Las Vegas by the FBI (he was there to give a talk on e-book security at Defcon) for violating the DMCA. This law must go. Salon has a story on David McOwen, the guy who was charged with a crime for running the Distributed.net client on some computers at DeKalb Technical College. I have a strong feeling that this is going to wind up being a huge black eye for the state government of Georgia. ...

Dan Gillmor is going to try to live without Microsoft so as to express his opposition to Microsoft’s business tactics. If I remember correctly, he’s not the first tech columnist to do so. Was it Dan Shafer or Jon Katz who went down this road awhile back? Maybe they both did. In any case, dumping Microsoft is, if nothing else, a veritable gold mine of material for the average tech columnist. I expect, “Where can I find a decent word processor?” and “Why can’t I connect to my ISP?” columns real soon now, because I assume he’ll try to use Linux. Dan should just grab an iBook and go on with life, he probably wouldn’t miss Microsoft at all. ...