Warning... the following is going to be a very, very "bloggy" entry. Basically, this post has no thesis, because I'm not sure what I'd want to say.

First, today (Nov. 13) is my 24^th birthday. This doesn't directly relate to the rest of this post, but it might put an interesting spin on it.

This Monday, the good Doc posted a link to The Underground History of American Education: An Angry Look at Modern Schooling by John Taylor Gatto. I've only gotten to chapter two in the online book, but I've seen what he has to say before, in shorter form. You may want to read at least the first chapter for the rest of this to make sense.

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.

Slashdot had a story about this article. There is something in this article worth highlighting, though, which is the section called "No One's Perfect", which references something called Arrow's Theorum, which shows that no voting system can be perfect.

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. The Mercury News reports on a project to photograph the coast of California to look for illegal sea walls. It doesn't use computers to process the photos in any sort of automated fashion, but does take advantage of computer networks to allow the problem to be conveniently partitioned amoung any interested people, which counts as something difficult to do without computers, easy to do with. I even got the "environmental" aspect right. ;-)

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. If enough comment tool authors do this, and enough of the comment tool users are proactive in deleting the spam (which is easily imaginable), it may (emphasize may) deter the spammers from working too hard to deface the comment sections, since unlike email spam, the spammers desired result is that these spams stay there indefinately, so that people (or search engines!) can see them.

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. It shouldn't take that long, I just need the time to code it.

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. Advertising is at best a grease, and at worst, unnecessary in the final analysis. To a first approximation, anyhow; the true story is horribly complex and spam simply doesn't play a role.

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. There's no in-between.

I can tell you that this is true. And I can assure you that every well-educated computer scientist knows why it is true. But what I don't know how to do -- at least not yet -- is to give a simple, non-technical explanation for it. If anybody has a hint about how to do this, please, please let me know.