A Texan man in his 70s shoots and kills thieves at his neighbor's house. Is it legal?

The Castle Doctrine allows law-abiding citizens attacked in their own homes (their "castles") to respond with force, even deadly force, to protect themselves — though the law varies from state to state. Self-defense laws are back in the spotlight after two recent cases in which intruders were shot and killed by homeowners.

Castle Doctrine: In Defense of Self-Defense

Efficient management of RDF data is an important factor in realizing the Semantic Web vision. Performance and scalability issues are becoming increasingly pressing as Semantic Web technology is applied to real-world applications. In this paper, we examine the reasons why current data management solutions for RDF data scale poorly, and explore the fundamental scalability limitations of these approaches. We review the state of the art for improving performance for RDF databases and consider a recent suggestion, “property tables.” We then discuss practically and empirically why this solution has undesirable features. As an improvement, we propose an alternative solution: vertically partitioning the RDF data. We compare the performance of vertical partitioning with prior art on queries generated by a Web-based RDF browser over a large-scale (more than 50 million triples) catalog of library data. Our results show that a vertical partitioned schema achieves similar performance to the property table technique while being much simpler to design. Further, if a column-oriented DBMS (a database architected specially for the vertically partitioned case) is used instead of a row-oriented DBMS, another order of magnitude performance improvement is observed, with query times dropping from minutes to several seconds.

Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning

The Internet makes it easy for people to create separate communities and niches, and in a free society, much can be said on behalf of both. They can make life a lot more fun; they can reduce loneliness and spur creativity. They can even promote democratic self-government, because enclaves are indispensable for incubating new ideas and perspectives that can strengthen public debate. But it is important to understand that countless editions of the Daily Me can also produce serious problems of mutual suspicion, unjustified rage, and social fragmentation — and that these problems will result from the reliable logic of social interactions.

We've had this conversation here before.

The Polarization of Extremes

Be sure to flip through the subsections on the left.

We're bidding adieu to 2007 with a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year (give or take a few weeks; we compile this list by early December). To get a glimpse of what's been on our collective consciousness, we mined billions of search queries to discover what sorts of things rose to the top. We encourage you to check out our findings to see if you, too, reflect the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.

This is surprisingly lacking in rigor. They don't provide a scale for the vertical axis on their plots. Is it linear? Is the bottom zero? It would appear that Radiohead's free album was a bigger story than the iPhone. Or maybe people just went directly to Apple and didn't bother to search.

Who/what/how is interesting, and the plot comparing Hannah Montana to the Rolling Stones is amusing. I'm dubious of the parkour entry under Fitness.

Google Zeitgeist 2007

The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

The Tamarin virtual machine currently implements the ECMAScript 3rd edition language standard that is the basis for JavaScript, Adobe ActionScript, and Microsoft Jscript, plus some of the new language features proposed in the ECMAScript 4th edition specification. By working on an open source implementation of ES4 with the community, Adobe and Mozilla hope to accelerate the adoption of a standard language for creating engaging Web applications. We hope the Tamarin project accelerates the ability of developers to create and deliver richer, more interactive experiences that work across multiple platforms.

I was sure there had been some discussion here of ES4, but I can't find it. Guess not.

Tamarin Project

I've spent nearly ten years of my life building something that's too big.

I've done a lot of thinking about this — more than you would probably guess. It's occupied a large part of my technical thinking for the past four or five years, and has helped shaped everything I've written in that time, both in blogs and in code.

For the rest of this little rant, I'm going to assume that you're a young, intelligent, college age or even high school age student interested in becoming a better programmer, perhaps even a great programmer.

Code's Worst Enemy

What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally. People are much less prepared to defer to the acknowledged experts in various fields. At the same time, however, we are being swamped with data and information — a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there is a dilemma: Whom do we turn to?

The Intellectual in the Infosphere

What will life be like if people stop reading?

Twilight of the Books

Around the world, an elite band of trend-spotters spend their days providing businesses with glimpses of the future. So what do these 'futurologists' predict for 2008?

The shape of things to come

I imagined that a mathematician might show up in a distant city someday, perhaps in the irradiated marshlands of Belarus, only to realize that all the buildings around her are actually 3D illustrations of unsolved geometrical conjectures – only people are living inside them, raising kids and doing laundry. Eating bagels and writing blogs, surrounded by zeta landscapes in glass and brick variations on the Riemann Hypothesis.

That's not a corridor at all but a glimpse of elliptic curve cryptography – it's non-commutative geometry in concrete.

The city is built algebra.

The city of retroactive mathematics