“Fans” of the L.A. Lakers smashed store windows, lit police cars on fire, looted, and trashed a news van after the Lakers won the NBA Championship last night. I don’t even know what to say… what total morons.

Read these in order:

• Bungie acquired by Microsoft;
• Screed by the guy who ran The Mill, a former Bungie fan site;
• Bungie’s FAQ on the aquisition, in which they explain their motives. More importantly, though, they mention that they’ve been getting email full of all kinds of profanity and moaning… but they answer that well.

Wendell’s back! There are two big new projects, it seems: Linkin’ Log (which looks to be a “traditional”-type log), and Blog Party (which looks to be in the vein of WWWW). Both Neale and Wendell have now moved to the separate link log and meta log; was there some shift in the force that I didn’t sense?

Microsoft filed their arguments against moving the trial directly to the Supreme Court yesterday, and had two arguments lauded by law analysts on both sides of the fence:

• there’s absolutely no law that would allow the portion of the lawsuit filed againt Microsoft by the states to be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. The Expediting Act, which is the only law that governs this sort of thing, was written in 1974; the statue that allows states to bring federal antitrust lawsuits was written in 1976, and doesn’t give the states the same expediting ability. Thus, at absolute best, the DOJ could only appeal the federal part of the case directly to the Supreme Court.
• the changes in Microsoft’s business ordered by Jackson (e.g., splitting up) take effect in 90 days, yet the Supreme Court won’t begin consideration of the expediting motion until sometime after that 90 day window, which means that Microsoft has no legal recourse to appeal the sanctions. While many Microsoft haters love this idea, there’s a problem — the ability to appeal any lower court ruling is called due process of law, and is a fundamental property of our legal system. (Many analysts think that Jackson’s 90-day window is his largest mistake in this trial to date, for this very reason.)