No, that we may as well do it carefully and try to learn from it first. We're going to get an Ebola victim anyway, and the more we know about it the better.

You know what was so nice about Borland's Turbo Pascal when it came out? It was being able to write, compile, and run programs without restarting applications.

Consider my first C compiler for my home computer. I had to bring up an editor and write the code. Then I got out of the editor and ran the compiler and then the linker, and then I had an executable. Then I got Turbo Pascal, and I could work on programs without invoking multiple applications and switching disks. Yay! I'm a lot less impressed with IDEs when I can have multiple xterms and, for example, just keep vim up all the time.

We're currently using Visual Studio and Subversion. I'm not claiming that Visual Studio is better than vim/g++/gdb/make/gprof/etc., but it works well enough. My main complaint is how slowly C++11 features get into Visual C++.

Look, a live human body with ebola is going to enter the US sometime or other. The incubation period can be weeks, which is plenty of time to fly to some nice East Coast megapolis.

I think it highly likely that an Ebola victim is coming in on an airplane sometime. If we fly one in now, very carefully, we are likely to be better prepared for the guy who boards the plane to New York in the time after infection and before symptoms start, and who starts feeling flu-like after a few days here, and then starts leaking blood.

Look, MegaMultinational, Inc. can be ordered to do things by a US court. This may include making a request of MegaMultinational BmbH, who may reject it as illegal. If they have direct access to data, though, they can be compelled to hand it over.

Huh? Iranian courts have no jurisdiction over people not in Iran who are not Iranian citizens. If they do have jurisdiction over somebody, they can legally compel them to hand over information they have access to. As a US citizen currently in the US, I can ignore all Iranian legal directives until they get a US court to cooperate, so if I have control over a server I'm not going to give the Iranian government access. And, yes, it may be unwise to keep direct access, while in Iran, to some information in the US.

BTW, it's perfectly legal to be a Christian in Iran, although I suspect there's some social stigma, and maybe legal restrictions, attached. I believe the crime is converting from Islam to another religion, which I consider to be in gross violation of human rights.

So why is Microsoft US allowed to access the data? If you want to keep your data in the EU, keep both the servers and the direct access in the EU. Certainly Microsoft can have a European subsidiary run its own cloud.

The US government has no jurisdiction over non-US citizens who are not in the US. If somebody in the US has free access to the data, then a US court can require them to hand it over. If this is illegal according to the jurisdiction where the data is actually stored, then it's up to the people in that jurisdiction to limit access to the data. If it's illegal in Ireland to allow certain data to be disseminated, and I can access it from here in the US, then I can legally disseminate that data. The business in Ireland may be breaking the law in allowing me access, but I'm staying legal over here.

True, the EU has strong privacy laws, which is fine. So, what is a server located in the EU doing automatically accepting data requests from US entities? If I have legitimate access to a server in the EU that holds data that I could not legally access or publish in the EU, and I'm in the US, I can do all sorts of things with the data that would be illegal in the EU. While sitting here, I'm not in EU jurisdiction, and I'm subject to US law only.

If an EU business is allowing somebody in the US free access to confidential data, then it seems to me the EU business is violating the law, not me in the US. Since I'm under US jurisdiction, a US court could order me to get the data, since I've got access. If I had to submit a request that would be granted or not based on EU law, the US court could order me to make the request, but obviously has no jurisdiction over the EU business.

The key piece of information about the data is not where it is physically stored, but where people with immediate access to it are. In this case, Microsoft US has such access. Whether this is legal in Ireland is a matter between Microsoft Ireland, the Eire government, and the EU.

I don't think it's legal for EU companies to export some data to the US anyway. Microsoft Liechtenstein might have to maintain its own servers in the EU that are not under the control of Microsoft US. If Microsoft US doesn't have control, Microsoft US can't be compelled to produce it. Of course, a EU court might require Microsoft Liechtenstein to hand over data.

Basically, every cloud service is controlled from somewhere on the planet that is under some country's jurisdiction, and that country can issue legal orders to get that data. This isn't just a US thing.

Huh? While you're in the US you do not have direct control over your Amsterdam bedroom. Microsoft US does have direct access to the emails. (Or it did, at least, and the courts aren't going to look kindly on a party that deliberately hides evidence.)

Essentially, yes, and Microsoft has a choice of complying or not doing business in that country. As a matter of practice, no country is going to do that. In this case, the US courts want specific email that Microsoft has chosen to store in Ireland for reasons of its own. This is not a general fishing expedition into Microsoft Ireland. This would be entirely unremarkable if the email was stored in the US, and the only reason it's interesting is that Microsoft is trying out a new excuse to avoid handing the email over. As the judge pointed out, this would make any sort of discovery or subpoena or search warrant useless against a multinational company.

In Harrison's "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers", the 747 was using a cheese-based drive for interplanetary and interstellar travel. None of this VASIMR nonsense.

Moreover, Fleischmann and Pons were getting energy out of what they were doing, so they did have experimental results. Some other people were confirming it as fusion, and were later exposed as people who had no clue how to use a neutron detector. Since then, I've been dubious about results like this (didn't stop me from trying to figure out how to put FTL neutrinos into Special Relativity, though).