Here's a slightly irreverent if not accurate analogy for why the State should stay out of making laws governing a woman's choice to have an abortion:

...unprecedented numbers of Americans are getting irresponsibly fat. Lyposuction is an easy way out. But the only responsible thing for an obese person to do is to make a lifestyle change. So the state outlaws lyposuction. And the conservative pro-diet-and-exercise crowd scorns obese activists by saying "You should have controlled your own urges to stuff your fat faces with donuts! You made your bed, now you lie in it!" This scenario is absurd, because clearly the poor self-control of the obese is no one else's business. There are fat people and there are unwanted pregnancies. Both conditions arise from powerful biological urges. To say "you should control yourself" is ignorant, condescending, and (most importantly) not your concern [Corpse Divine].

More fundamental to the problem of pro-choice vs. pro-life is the criteria that should be used to determine when a belief on morality should be translated into a law. It isn't an easy question, but it seems to me that laws should only be made to protect a group or individual from the actions of another group or individual. Laws should not be made to limit the actions of an individual if their actions don't infringe on the rights of another. Using this criteria, the only thing that needs to be decided is the point at which the rights of the unborn need to be considered. At conception? First, second or third trimester? Birth? There is no constraint imposed upon us by nature, so it comes down to arbitrary ideological differences, usually religious in origin. The best decision by the government in this case is to attempt to define a point when the majority of people would agree that the unborn has rights and to keep its laws out of the grey areas. Let individuals govern themselves according to their own conscience where the grey areas are concerned. 10:46:50 AM      

Kasparov won his first match against Deep Junior, but remains cautious about the outcome of the series [Yahoo! News]. 10:29:49 AM      

Last year, I read about some research that demonstrated how common compression algorithms, such as gzip, could be used to categorize a block of text based on the language it is written in [Language Trees and Zipping]. The idea is that a higher degree of compression will be achieved when a block of text is compressed along with sample text in the same language versus sample text in a different language. In other words, take some text in an undetermined language, compress it individually with blocks of text in known languages, then measure the amount of compression achieved in each case. The matching that achieves the highest compression rate will be the one in which the unknown text and known text are in the same language, say English-English.

This same process has been used, although in a much less formal context, to identify spam [Kuro5hin]. The idea is that if you compress the body of an email message against a block of spam messages, then against a block of non-spam messages, the one that compressors further is likely to identify the category of the message being tested. What I find most interesting about this process is how simple it is. Compression tools have been used for years with the most mundane of applications, and seemingly out of nowhere we find that these compression algorithms are almost intelligent. 10:14:44 AM      

In case you live under a rock and Synthetic Morpheme is your only source of news, a worm rocked the Internet over the weekend targeting Microsoft SQL Server machines. It resulted in a massive slowdown of the Net at various places due to the huge amounts of traffic it generated [DaveNet][ArsTechnica]. Since I was playing XBox all weekend instead of using the Internet, I wasn't personally affected, but a lot of my friends were. 9:49:04 AM