Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

Under what theory of international law? This behavior is clearly bad and is the sort of thing a country has a right to be pissed off about, but there's no coherent, conventional theory that makes this an act of war. The situation is bad enough without exaggerating.

My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.

We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}

...laura

Yes it does- we have models of what that should look like.

If the apparent black holes in galactic centers are really wormholes then by the Copernican principle there exits should be about as evenly distributed as their entrances- we shouldn't expect some part of the universe to have a large number of exists.

Yes, we would know if we saw it. Essentially it would look very close to a white hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole. And we should expect that if wormhole entrances are common then by the Copernican principle we should see some exits near us. This is one of the major reasons to doubt this sort of thing. As to your question about other universes- GR is not really happy with wormholes going from universes to universes- no one has been able to get the math to work out in a reasonable fashion- there's a line between speculation that's decent science and complete science fiction, and right now wormholes fall into the first but wormholes that go to other universes fall strongly into the second. That could change in the future but right now that doesn't look at all remotely likely.

The main way we've detect Sag A* is its massive radiation profile. That's a completely distinct issue from the issue of mass. But even the mass thing is a problem saying maybe it is filled with some sort of pseudo-matter is even more speculative than speculating it might be wormhole. And even if that is the case, the gamma and x-rays would still fry anything that got near.

I'm pretty sure that the anonymous coward was referencing Star Trek V http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_V:_The_Final_Frontier where it turns out to be very much not God despite a certain fanatic's belief. This is where the famous line "What does God need with a starship?" comes from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYW_lPlekiQ.

Given the intense environment around Sag A*, even if it turns out to be a wormhole it will be utterly non-traversable. However, there are hypotheses that wormholes to be stabilized require using negative matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass. At least, that's the most plausible mechanism suggested- so this would be inadvertent evidence that negative matter exists, which would be a really big deal. There's also speculation that a cosmic string could do something similar- note that a cosmic string is topological defect in space time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string- these are not the strings from string theory although many forms of string theory would predict that such objects would exist. And of course, if wormholes exist in nature there's some small chance we can either make our own o find much smaller ones and put them to use. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dust and other debris between where we are and Sag A*, so even GRAVITY may have trouble getting enough resolution to figure this out.

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

...laura

My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!

I find the prequel movies unwatchable.

Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".

...laura

I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.

The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.

I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.

...laura

I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.

Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.

...laura

My current ADSL serves me well. I can stream all the usual video services (YouTube, Netflix, Acorn, etc.) in decent (near-HD) quality. The only time I could use more bandwidth is when I want to download something big, like an OS upgrade.

With that said, I'm sure if I had gigabit internet I'd find something to do with it. :-)

...laura