Submit to ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law! Munich, Germany, 25-27 Mar 2025. Full paper submission deadline: 30 Sept 2024 (soon!) Also works in progress & lightning talks options (later deadlines) Full call for papers computersciencelaw.org/2025/cfp/

Inbox: House E&C announces markup of KOSA and COPPA 2.0, the two child safety/privacy bills that easily cleared the Senate, but *not* APRA, the broader data privacy bill that was abruptly yanked in June

In his dissertation, my graduate student showed that political endorsements by scientific publications: (1) don't convince anyone about politics; (2) make people less likely to believe scientists when it comes to vaccines, health advisories, etc. nature.com/articles/s4156…

Chernobyl caused 40 deaths directly, but indirectly it caused 1 million times that. Fear prevented 400 additional nuclear power plants from being built, and each would have saved ~800,000 years of additional life by reducing pollution from oil & coal

From a law of war standpoint, Israel's pager bombs represent one of the most precisely targeted strikes in the history of warfare. I can't think of a single widespread strike on an armed force that's embedded in a civilian population that's been more precise. It's remarkable.

This is self-recommending.

You don't need to learn this lesson again, conditional on having learned it once.

Through a series of unexpected events, I ended up at the argument at the DC Circuit in Thaler v. Perlmutter today. I expect the court to affirm the District Court based on what I saw but that's always risky to guess at. A few other thoughts...

Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated. A new essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes & me. Why the UK's ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is not just a problem. It is *the* problem. And how fixing it is the defining task of our generation. ukfoundations.co

BREAKING: BLOCKBUSTER MICROSOFT DATACENTER DEAL RESURRECTING THREE MILE ISLAND NUCLEAR PLANT Microsoft and nuclear plant owner Constellation have agreed to a massive, unprecedented deal to restart the closed Three Mile Island by 2028 to power its datacenters, per the New York

Wow.

Happy to see my article, "Administrative Virtues," published today in ALR. In it, I explore how deontological and utilitarian thought has shaped existing administrative law, and how virtue ethics offers a third way of looking at things. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Rarely mentioned in the debate around price discrimination is that colleges are the largest utilizer of the practice. They set a very high list price and then discount not only on ability to pay but also perceived competition for the student. Schools will often negotiate on the

If you're angrier at the IDF for destroying weapons unlawfully stored in civilian buildings than you are at Hezbollah for unlawfully storing them there, then you're getting the moral and legal calculus exactly backwards.

Please share this far and wide. As far and wide as you can. NIST Password Guidelines for 2024 are in the process of being updated. This is a HUGE pet-peeve of mine (when vendors in particular are still operating like its 2017 and keep changing passwords every 60 days, STOP DOING

Fact check: true.

Is antitrust doing more harm than good? Richard Langlois explores this question in his new working paper. Read here why antitrust may have hurt innovation, how IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft were targeted, and the real forces behind technological breakthroughs networklawreview.org/langlois-memes…

Further evidence that, in very many circumstances, economics is a real science. This outcome is so predictable.

Why are students afraid to speak their minds? U Michigan's report on freedom of expression asked students about campus climate. A short 🧵: "During meetings, professors and other faculty have made comments that vilify other conservatives and portray them as ignorant."

The half-life of code is an interesting predictor of project quality. Linux, has one of the longest code half-life’s at 6.6 years. WordPress, less than 2. Every software change induces some risk. Repos with numerous "change bursts" have the highest incidence of defects.