In November 1993 the owner of a local computer store (and a friend of mine) asked me whether it would be possible to sell computer parts over the Internet. In December 1993 that site went live and was among the first retailers on the Internet (Bottomline Computers...Discount computer parts that protect your company's bottom line!) The system was only semi-automated, as the server simply wrote the transaction to a text file, encrypted it, and emailed the encrypted file to the owner for manual processing, but that was a state-of-the-art bleeding edge concept at the time.

The site flopped and was shut down less than a year later. Back in early 1994 most people still equated online shopping with catalog shopping, with visions of dodgy JC Whitney parts and cheap knockoffs dancing in their heads. It was still an untrusted concept.

I never even thought about patenting e-commerce. I could have been rich! (of course, I seem to recall looking at a few other sites doing similar things as part of the development process, so I'm 99% sure we weren't actually the first).

It occurred to me that demonstrating the NEED for SOPA might be the point of this entire exercise. Megaupload unquestionably aided piracy, but it was also a legitimate business that had millions of legitimate users. The owner and operators of the site may be able to convince a judge or jury that the primary purpose of the site was NOT piracy, but was simply incidental to the operation of that type of service. If they can convince the judges in their home countries of that, they won't be extradited. If they can convince U.S. juries of that, they won't be convicted. In order to prosecute these guys, the U.S. will have to prove that piracy was the primary reason for the sites existence, and that could be tough to do. They still have a pretty decent shot at walking away from this.

And if they get off, you can bet the halls of Congress will echo with, "See, we DO NEED SOPA! Our laws are obviously inadequate if we can't even shut down a pirate site like Megaupload!"

That may the plan, after all.

The position of the U.S. government is that these are foreign nationals operating a criminal enterprise within the United States. From a legal standpoint, it's no different than issuing warrants for foreign drug kingpins who ship drugs to the United States. They're not prosecuting foreigners for their actions overseas, but they are charging foreigners for the actions they are initiating within the borders of the United States itself.

Osama bin Laden never set foot in the U.S. either. We still had arrest warrants out for him, even before 9/11, for acts of terrorism he initiated on U.S. soil (the '93 WTC attack) and on foreign U.S. locations (embassies, Khobar, etc). While we're talking about two vastly different types of crime, the legal principle behind the charges is the same. If you direct criminal actions within the United States from a foreign location, you become subject to U.S. law because you are committing activities within the country.

By placing a datacenter within the borders of the United States, MegaUpload's management placed itself within the jurisdiction of U.S. law for any actions occurring within that datacenter. This isn't a purely U.S. thing either...pretty much every country on the planet recognizes this same legal principle. When you choose to operate a business within a nation, you are also making a choice to subject yourself to that nations laws.

There's only one way around this that I know of, and that's to insulate via foreign subsidiaries. Many multinational corps use subsidiaries to avoid this exact problem. In Megaupload's case, I don't see how they could have fit that into their business model.

If there's one lesson to take away from all of this, it's simply that you should check a nations laws before opening up a business there. If something is legal in your home country, and illegal in the country next door, it's probably a BAD IDEA to start opening offices in the neighboring country. MegaUpload was stupid to open a datacenter in the United States, the MPAA/RIAA's home turf.

As a longtime software developer and all around computer power user, I find my tablet to be fairly useless. It has a lousy onscreen keyboard, runs limited applications, and can't really be used to do MANY of the really cool things that I've spent the past 20 years doing on computers.

My wife, on the other hand, is a technophobe schoolteacher, and is rarely seperated from it nowadays. It gives her a simple way to do her pointless social and entertainment things...Facebook, email, Youtube, etc...without having to deal with all of that "computery" stuff. If you ask her, she'll tell you that it's the greatest bit of technology ever invented.

But the real eye opener came from my kids, including my about-to-go-to-college daughter who is incredibly computer literate and who I taught the fundamentals of BASIC coding when she was only four years old. To her, and my 14 year old son, it's just another computing device. There are some things that are better on computers, and some things that are better on tablets (who wants to watch a streaming movie on a laptop with a keyboard in the way?) To them, the entire discussion is silly, as both devices have their own purposes. The kids simply move back and forth between them without a second thought.

We are contrained by the limits of our own prejudices and experiences.

GIGabyte? Heh, one of my DNS servers still has an ancient Conner 850MB drive that has been happily spinning away for at least 15 years. Other than replacing a power supply and a couple fans, it (and the ancient Pentium Pro server it's connected to) have been the most durable computers I've ever owned! Of course, since it only acting as a backup DNS server and runs an equally ancient Slackware build (3.9!), it doesn't actually do all that much work. At this point, it's mostly just an experiment to see how long it can actually run before releasing its magic smoke.

They're also good at keeping small veggie gardens warm. I live in a part of California that freezes 10-15 days a year, and not all at once. I have a four 50sf raised bed veggie gardens behind my house, and if they're properly tented, I can grow year round (tomatoes, melons, lettuce, zucchini, beans, radish, asparagus, and a half dozen others.) I toss a 60 watt tough duty bulb in a waterproof droplight casing into each of the gardens to keep them warm when the temps drop below freezing, and keep a small 25 watt bulb burning in the gardens when we get sustained temps under 40. A single 60 watt bulb is more than sufficient to keep the garden above freezing, and to keep the plants alive. A single 25 watt bulb generates enough heat to raise the internal temp by 15-20 degrees.

You can't do that with a CFL and dedicated heaters would burn a LOT more power. They would also be very unsafe...a bulb in a water-resistant housing can be used outdoors in the rain...find a space heater that can do the same thing without creating an electrocution risk.

I work in a university environment and have been programming for...a while...so when my son's Boy Scout troop approached me about teaching programming to some interested boys, I did a ton of research and came up with Alice.

If the goal is to teach programming concepts and logic, then it doesn't get much better than Alice. The course materials are already written, the language is easy to use, it's supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's completely free.

The greatest thing about Alice is that it's an entirely visual environment, and it gives immediate visual feedback to the students which is PERFECT for younger learners. Instead of scaring students off by throwing them straight into code-hell by forcing them to learn the syntax of Language X just to print "Hello World" to the screen, Alice allows students to learn the concepts of programming in an entirely mouse-driven environment...and they get to watch video animations generated by their software within minutes of starting. That sort of simplicity and feedback keeps younger learners interested and hooks kids who might otherwise see it all as "greek".

The only complaint I had from the group was that I had only three computers to teach eight boys...they were literally shoving each other out of the way to get a chance to program. That's probably the best endorsement anyone could give it.

Some people might complain that Language X or Language Y is better, but the reality is that you're teaching kids, and that any language they are taught today will be abandoned or heavily revised long before any of them are ready to jump into the field. As a teacher, you're better off teaching them in an environment where they can focus on concepts, and NOT syntax.

Go to Alice.Org>About>What is Alice and watch the video at the bottom. It shows the language in action, shows the feedback, and demonstrates the concepts it promotes.