Nearly all political elections in the United States are plurality votes, in which each voter selects a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Yet voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices.... Unlike these procedures [described in the elided section], the plurality system looks only at a voter's top choice. By ignoring how voters might rank the other candidates, it opens the floodgates to unsettling, paradoxical results.

It's pretty pointless for me to go on about how I feel about the Microsoft ruling. But I feel obligated to nonetheless at least register as One More Coder who thinks this is complete bullshit, so that my silence is not interpreted as assent. I'll leave writing the actual opinions to two people who have already done a better job then I could hope to do anytime soon. One, James Grimmelmann on LawMeme, and two, John Robb with both of his points regarding the case.

In my Human Justice for Human Beings essay, I used as an example of automated law enforcement the idea that somebody could today take satellite imagery, and write a program that would attempt to detect when people do things to wetlands that they are not supposed to do, such as fill them in, or dredge them out, or drain them, etc. Well, I still don't know if that's happening, but something similar enough to it is happening that I feel justified in claiming that the example is now firmly grounded in reality.

Mark expands on a couple of comments I made with regards to the recent beginning of people spamming comments sections of websites. Apparently the weblog community recently passed some sort of critical mass that makes it worth spamming. Mark, if you read this, I think for now the only "Lojack" solution that will be feasible in the short-to-medium term is the one I proposed in my second comment, which is to let the web site owner easily review all recently posted comment and easily delete offending ones, in combination with a generalized rate-constraining scheme to ensure the user never has to filter through 3000 messages at a time.

As per Phil's observation people are starting to spam weblog comments, I've disabled the comments here. I think maybe a sum total of 10 comments have been posted anyhow, none of them terribly importent. It's not worth the exposure.

I am planning on creating the RU Freenet syndication tool sometime this week. One of the things I learned was that Freenet was soon going to .5, so I decided to wait until after that, since just between my last Freenet exploration post and today there have been 4 seperate releases of Freenet. I wanted to wait for a bit more stability then that. I put all the pieces I want to use together, and now it's just a matter of assembling them.

I just received an email from a spammer with the usual self-inflated claims of importence of spam, including the canard about "banning spam" being a major factor in the current depression of the economy. Talk about betraying a misunderstanding of how the economy works... along with the implicit claim that sales will somehow suffer if advertising is blocked. Newflash: Advertising does not cause sales. "Supply" that can satisfy "Demand" causes sales.

Lately there has been much discussion about the bandwidth troubles associated with serving out RSS files to lots of readers, especially when there are no changes in the file for long stretches. There have been several suggested simple changes that can alleviate the situation, but the field is still open on a final long term solution to the problem. This post explores one radical long-term solution. As such it is a technical post, so you may want to skip it.

The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer writes Edward Felten. I get the impression I would know exactly why if I could put the correct pieces together, but I can't lay hands on them right now. Has anyone written well about this on the Internet? [markpasc.blog] From the piece: If you're designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do.

So there's an extraordinary (and extraordinarily interesting) range of reporting about the argument before the Court. As I was on the front line, let me add a bit more. My hope in doing this is to put this in a bit of context, and to highlight at least what we should be looking for. (EV predicts a 6-3 victory, which is significant, because he and I have a bet, and he took the other side.