Gosh, today was a busy day. Lots of stuff happening in the world. Enough, in fact, that it's worth an actual blog post (*gasp*) rather than just Reader notes to run down them.
Supreme Court decisions - 3 of them today, two of note. First, the "millionaire's amendment" to campaign finance got struck down, so the limit for campaign contributions doesn't increase against self-funders. Campaign finance law will continue to be a mess; film at 11. Also, the DC gun law was struck down, in what was generally a good decision in my opinion. I think it's pretty clear that the federal government can't make such a law prohibiting handgun ownership based on historical precedent and common-sense reading of the 2nd amendment.
ICANN releases domain names - We will now have virtually any string be a potential FQDN (fully qualified domain name), which will wreak havoc on many things. There are two parts; the first is allowing non-ASCII characters, which should be fine, except for standard i18n concerns; the second is allowing anybody who will pay $50-100k to get a TLD, which might be any arbitrary string (excluding trademarks), so http://mail./ might be a valid domain. (The ending . is to prevent browsers from, naturally, doing all sorts of things with the string that would make sense, and ensuring they treat it as a FQDN)
Microsoft to buy Powerset? - At $100 million (or even more) for what is essentially vaporware that can search Wikipedia only moderately worse than Microsoft's existing search engine, I think it's fair to say that Microsoft is trying to make Yahoo! jealous by buying a bunch of other search engine companies.
Oil at $140 - No link, but it seems to be going up and up ... at some point, both supply and demand will become inelastic, and substitutes will increase; but there's no saying where that point will be.
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