Evidently GM is not happy about loosing ground to Toyota in the race to be the #1 car manufacturer in the world. The tactics employed by GM are funny though. Instead focusing on better cars or improving customer service they are rigging the vote of an online, non-scientific, reader's poll for Newsweek. Surely the time devoted to this little Rovian endeavor can't have been better spent improving product.

District Judge Doug Herndon ruled Tuesday that the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act is indeed constitutional and can be enforced. Herndon reiterated his previous finding that the criminal provisions were unconstitutional but that the civil penalties under the law are constitutional. While the case was pending many southern Nevada businesses flaunted the voter's call for clean air. As of today the Southern Nevada Health District has a complaint form online to report businesses that are not complying with the law.Nationwide smoking bans have been a boon to tavern owners as customers who formerly chose to stay away return for drinks and food while existing customers who are smokers go outside and smoke.

Recently Nevada's smoking ban took effect. The ban makes many bars face the choice of continuing to serve food while asking their smokers to smoke outside or taking the revenue hit of not serving food any longer. There are, reportedly, a number of business owners who haven't taken a look at the research from other venues suggesting that the smoking ban will lead to an increase in same-store sales. Instead the chicken-little crowd is lining up to rip out every vestige of restaurants from their establishment. A couple of creative local bars have suggested they will pay customers' costs for ordering delivery.As with many business obstacles this is really an opportunity. A bar wanting to keep smoking in the bar (though why is another question entirely) can wall-off the kitchen. The kitchen already has an entrance to the rear of the building. Setup a delivery business of comfort and bar fare out the back door and instead of watching revenue decline there will be the opportunity to have competing neighborhood bars pay your delivery fee for their customers. It seems that this minority of business owners is more interested in playing the  wounded business owner card instead of figuring out a solution.

Google's Apps for Domains has been in beta for a while now. The service is a nice way to combine several great Google services with one's own domain. Personalized start pages, calendars and email are a few of the services available. Nevertheless, Google also makes some silly choices. For example in signing up for a new domain name today the following email arrived:

Thanks for your interest in Google Apps for Your Domain. Unfortunately, we are not able to invite your domain example.com into the beta at this time, because you have reached the maximum number of domains per administrator. If we increase this limit, we'll let you know by email.

Now I wonder how they imagine this actually works. Do they imagine that people who are astute enough to reach the "domain limit" will balk at having more than one Google account to sign up additional domains with? That domain administrators reaching this limit do not have more than one Google account already would come as a bit of a surprise.