Isn't it strange that "Redmond Justice" spent the last week of sweeps month boring audiences to tears with tedious economic debate (albeit punctuated with occasionally interesting heated arguments)? Isn't it even stranger that, now that sweeps month is over, "Redmond Justice" has taken a ratings-boosting mildly scatological turn? Okay, the timing may be off, but it's still a crowd-pleaser to hear the world's richest man debate the meaning of the phrase (and please pardon our French-- or, rather, the French of the engineer who emailed Bill Gates) "pissing on." A CNET article has all the vulgar details.

Basically, now that Sun's James Gosling is on the stand, the government's case against Microsoft has been refocused on the issue of whether or not the software company intended to kill Java illegally by making its own version incompatible with others, effectively wrecking the whole cross-platform promise of Java. The government prefaced Gosling's testimony by showing yet more video footage of Gates' pre-trial deposition. In that footage, Gates is questioned about some email he received from engineer Ben Slivka, in which Slivka states that "JDK 1.2 has JFC, which we're going to be pissing on at every opportunity." Most would interpret this "common vulgarism" to mean that Microsoft planned to "publicly disparage" that Java product, but when questioned, Bill Gates came up with a quote that is sure to live on throughout the ages: "I don't know if he's referring to pissing on JFC or pissing on JDK 1.2, nor do I know what he specifically means by 'pissing on.'" It's kind of long for a bumper sticker, but we bet it'd look great on a t-shirt.

As usual, the videotaped footage prompted laughter from the courtroom, which apparently got bad enough that a bailiff had to tell the court to simmer down. Heck, even Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray admitted that the footage was "occasionally amusing," though he maintains that it was "largely irrelevant to this case" and that it "undermined the government's claims." But the important thing is, everybody agrees that it's entertaining, and isn't that what it's all about?