It’s a noble cause, but a flawed strategy. Victory is unlikely, but even if achieved it will be quickly squelched by legislation redefining personhood as belonging only to human beings.

That’s one of the problems universal marriage proponents have had: some courts have said gay couples have a right to marry, but many legislatures, including most notably the U.S. Congress via the Defense of Marriage Act, have simply legislated a definition of marriage that explicitly excludes those deemed unworthy of the right.

Luckily, DOMA was ruled unconstitutional this year (I’m ashamed to say I apparently failed to blog about the June 2013 decision…). But it was the culmination of a long battle for the plaintiff and an even longer one for opponents of the ludicrous insult to the constitution that was DOMA.

In short, it’ll be a long time before the law purports to give a damn about how depressed a chimp in a trailer park feels. And that’s a damn shame.

Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at The Washington Post:

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

Incidental indeed.

The quarter-billion-dollar news company Pierre Omidyar is founding will be fascinating: a digital-first journalism outfit with old media money behind it.

It’s an odd flip of the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post play, which involved a digital-first entrepreneur putting the same money as Omidyar, $250M, behind an old media organization.

If I had more free time, there would be a good article in there somewhere about what exactly it means to see that kind of money converging on the old/new media dichotomy from opposite directions.

But I don’t, so there won’t. For now, at least.

Stephen Wolfram, putting modesty aside as he often and justifiably does, to discuss his most ambitious project to date:

The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful. Anything that WolframAlpha knows your app knows.

This can be the beginning of a vastly more accessible world of bespoke, personal programming, or it could be very, very bad.

No.

Very sad news. I’ve used Winamp for its entire life, all 15 years.

Everyone on the Internet should have to read these.

Great news for fair use doctrine, and a big win for word geeks.

Judge Denny Chin said much in his ruling granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, but this part stuck out to me:

Google Books permits humanities scholars to analyze massive amounts of data — the literary record created by a collection of tens of millions of books. Researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.

The decision is up on Scribd. I shall geek out further about it after I have a chance to read it through.

The link is aimed at software developers but it’s applicable to anyone looking for a new job. I am at my current employer as much because it answered my questions satisfactorily as because I answered its questions satisfactorily.