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LimeWire 1.6 is out if you’re into that sort of thing. The new version seems to have some screen repainting problems under Windows XP, but hopefully it will crash less often than it did. As we round up the Slobodan Milosevics of the world and haul them off to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes, it’s helpful to reflect on our own past misdeeds as a nation (I’m speaking to Americans here, my foreign friends). I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try current war criminals for their crimes against humanity, but I am saying that in the future, we ought to consider what we’ve had other people arrested for when planning our own foreign policy. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think that our current, media-saturated culture would prevent our government from blowing up millions of people in Southeast Asia and keeping Americans in the dark about it today. ...

Nothing gets my blood flowing like a sordid tale of corporate malfeasance, especially when the corporation gets their comeuppance in the end. Would you believe that Coca-Cola let the copyright lapse on their contour bottle, let it fall into the hands of an independent marketing consultant whose ideas they stole, and then fraudulently re-filed for the copyright later? According to GNN’s story Coca-Karma, that’s exactly what happened. When you factor in the billions of dollars at stake, the fact that the consultant was representing himself in court, and a corrupt federal judge, the story races into “the truth is stranger than fiction” territory … ...

The good news about Microsoft’s announcement that PC makers can now “remove” access to Internet Explorer from new PCs is that nobody is falling for it. Now that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on Web browsers and they’ve moved on to other things, like pervasively embedding hooks to Passport into the operating system, they have nothing to lose by making this concession. Besides, since there’s no other browser company out there interested in doing deals with PC makers to be the default browser on new PCs, nobody is going to turn off IE anyway. Duh. ...

Reliant Energy (one of the independent generators selling power in California) has issued a report explaining that they aren’t turning a higher profit in California now than they were before the energy crisis. Their report, Myths Debunked: The Real Story of Wholesale Power Costs in California (PDF) puts their higher revenue down to greater demand and higher cost for natural gas. Interestingly, the way the spot market for power works in California is that everyone sells their power at a rate set by the least efficient plants, which happen to be natural gas fired plants. So companies selling power that’s cheaper to produce (like nuclear or hydroelectric) are, in fact, making out like bandits. The gotcha here is that the hydroelectric and nuclear plants are owned for the most part by the California utilities, not the independents. ...

There are actually useful sites hosted by Geocities. Who knew? After talking about Windows XP here yesterday, I discovered that I had a Windows XP RC1 CD waiting for me at home last night that my editor mailed to me. I tried to install it, screwed up my hard drive somehow, went out and bought a new hard drive, and then successfully installed it. After turning off a few of the most annoying features that cropped up immediately, it’s pretty good. It’s certainly better than the abomination that is Windows 98, I don’t know whether it’s better than Windows 2000 yet or not. ...

Todd Gitlin savages Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger’s book, and the other people who reviewed Henry Kissinger’s book today at Salon. It does truly amaze me that people are so willing to give Kissinger a free pass for his horrific crimes against humanity in the United States’ dirty war against communism around the world. It doesn’t take more than a cursory examination of Kissinger’s record to discover that he makes Slobodan Milosevic, the war criminal du jour, look like a rank amateur. ...

Remember how Dubya promised that we’d see a different kind of Presidency, and the end of the so-called permanent campaign? Looks like he was lying. Not that this surprises me, or even that I think it’s wrong. I believe it’s a required feature of modern politics. I just find it a bit sad that people really believed him when he made that promise.

Today seems to be a slow news day. I will say that if you never have to learn the significance of the word polybutylene, you’re probably better off than I am. Here’s an interesting thread at Java Lobby: language constructs Java needs.

Mozilla trips up ZoneAlarm because it has a built in proxy server that it uses to connect to secure sites. A reader sent along that link to a thread in one of the public Mozilla newsgroups. Microsoft has always been a master of the “big lie” public relations technique. Their latest efforts have revolved around lying to the public about how open source software is bad for business, despite the fact that many businesses are built around open source software or rely on it for significant parts of their operations. Anyway, IBM, which is spending huge amounts of money in the open source software business, is doing its best to expose Microsoft’s lies for what they are. ...

I finally got around to installing Zone Alarm on my home PC last night, not because I’m particularly worried about security, but rather because I was curious about incoming and outgoing Internet traffic. Anyway, one curious thing I noticed is that Mozilla 0.9.2 wants to act as an Internet server as well as an Internet client. I have no idea what sort of server is built in, but Zone Alarm warned me about it when I started up Mozilla. Anyone have any clues? ...