The New York Times' "Bits" blog has a post today arguing in favor of digital voting.

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Now that the 2016 campaign has officially started, I thought it would be a good time to take another look at campaign finance reform. This is a very frustrating subject for me, as I'm sure it is for many; every scheme I've seen so far, from what I can tell, is just an attempt by some special interest groups to give an advantage to their method of buying politicians over other methods of buying politicians. But I have a proposal to cut through all the posturing and get to the root of the problem:

The only entities who can make political contributions are those who can vote. In other words, only individual voters.

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I recently came across a blog post proposing a rather novel solution to what it calls "the shortage of technology talent in the United States".

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As reported by the Volokh conspiracy, the Pacific Legal Foundation is now asking a Federal court to rule that Obamacare violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution.

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(Note: there is a good discussion of this post and the Knuth-McIlroy exchange on Hacker News.)

The other day I came across a blog post about an interesting exchange between two world-class programmers, Donald Knuth and Doug McIlroy. I talked about McIlroy in my last nerd interlude. To briefly summarize what happened (the article goes into more detail and is worth reading, at least if you're into this sort of thing), Knuth was asked by a computer magazine to write a program that illustrated "literate programming", a technique that Knuth had spent much time developing, and McIlroy was asked to critique what Knuth did.

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Today's great news story is that the US Supreme Court has upheld the "individual mandate" portion of the Affordable Care Act. I won't bother linking to any particular stories since it's everywhere by now. I also won't comment here on whether or not the individual mandate (or indeed the act itself) is a good idea; that would be a much longer post than I want to write right now. Instead, I want to look at the Court's opinion from the viewpoint I have posted about before, that the Court has turned what Chief Justice Marshall called the power "to say what the law is" into something very different from what Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison was arguing for.

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In my last post I mentioned that global warming would get its own post sometime soon; it appears that now is the time.

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Along with a lot of other people, I watched Discovery fly over Washington, DC on its way to Dulles Airport. A good sequence of pictures is here. I lamented a while back that today's NASA seems to have fallen far from the NASA of the Apollo missions, but obviously there's not much to be done about that except to move on (see below for more on that), and anyway, that's not Discovery's fault. The Shuttle deserves a good retirement, and will get one; I plan to go see it in its new home.

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Eric Raymond has published an Open Letter to Chris Dodd in response to Dodd's recent speech. Any comments from me would be superfluous (and if you've read my previous posts on this subject you'll know where I'm coming from anyway); just read Eric's post. It's worth it.

Many sites on the Internet (including this blog) were "blacked out" yesterday as part of a protest against SOPA/PIPA. Opposition to these bills has been mounting for some time, and a few days ago it appeared that SOPA, at least, had been shelved by the House, but it turned out that it had only been delayed until February. (Even if does eventually get "shelved", the cynical read on that, which would be mine, will be that Congress is simply taking it off the radar, knowing how short the public's attention span is, and will try to slip it in later as an amendment to some other bill that is expected to pass without much scrutiny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.)

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