Justice should be blind. Thank you for your service.

Funny, I always figured it would be Wonkette which got Gawker dragged into court. Shows what I know. Anyway, IANAL, but Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr are, and have some useful analysis on Gawker/Gizmodo's exposure.

All too well, all too well. I had a home-built gateway/firewall running Slackware which I kept under my desk. As far as Charter was concerned *that* was the computer connected to the Internet. What a joke.

Lots of colleges and universities are switching over to Google. The reasons are pretty straightforward: Google offers more storage space than most higher ed IT departments could reasonably afford and the move relieves them of the need to administer an email server. See this article for an overview. Even Hope, in Taco's home town, switched over a couple years back and I know they've been pretty happy with it.

According to Eugene Volokh, the law was actually passed in 1951, is something of a dead letter, and they're currently trying to repeal it. Sorry to spoil all the hand-wringing.

Perhaps someone with better knowledge of the case could comment on the substance of the judge's order, which concerns the apparently incorrect testimony given by the defendant. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you can recover fees when your own client makes material misrepresentations. I'm surprised that the RIAA's own request for sanctions was denied under the circumstances.

The summary, however, oversimplifies things. In the opinion, the Court notes that the sergeant signed an acceptable use policy in 2000, and was informed at a general meeting in 2002 that pagers (and their messages) were considered email as far as the policy was concerned. The city had a policy/practice (not entirely clear how official) that employees who went over the 25,000 character limit would pay the overage. The lieutenant who acted as the bill collector apparently told members of the force that if they paid the overages there would be no questions asked. In 2003, the chief asked for an evaluation of whether these repeated overages were work-related, apparently (and a jury agreed) to determine whether the 25,000 character limit was still reasonable or whether it needed to be increased. The primary point of contention, I think, is over whether the provider violated the Stored Communications Act by turning over the transcripts to the city in the first place. There's an interesting write-up over at Volokh from Orin Kerr, whose work on the SCA is cited in the Court's opinion.

In other words, if this law passes, a bunch of lawyers and constitutional law professors are going to make some serious money ;).

Whereas I'd ask where you live that you somehow have cable but not DSL + dish.

Well, no. If you look at the text of the law itself (USSC 47 533 (f)) (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_sec_47_00000533----000-.html), the FCC was given the power to "ensure that no cable operator or group of cable operators can unfairly impede, either because of the size of any individual operator or because of joint actions by a group of operators of sufficient size, the flow of video programming from the video programmer to the consumer", among other provisions. The court's position is that the 30% rule, which the FCC first adopted in 1993, no longer complies with the meaning of the Act because the marketplace has changed. The court cites, among other things, the growth of both dish services and the entrance of telephone companies into the television market. The court was also dubious of the methodology the FCC used to devise and defend the 30% rule. These are valid questions for a court to consider and completely within its remit.

Full text of the case, Comcast Corporation v. FCC, available here: http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200908/08-1114-1203454.pdf. The case was heard by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Douglas Ginsburg wrote the opinion, joined by Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Randolph.

Which means more parking, more infrastructure, etc. If you think about a typical service station, it works vaguely on a first-in first-out principle, except that some vehicles need more time to gas up, or sometimes you're staring at someone's nose because his tank is on the opposite side. Generally this isn't an issue because people get in and out within a few minutes of each other. If this is no longer the case the traffic flow in a service station will have to guarantee a route for each vehicle (or, as you say, morph into a fast food joint). On the other hand, assuming a cruising range of 200 miles at 60 miles per hour, you're pulling over every two and a half hours (when you're at a quarter charge). That's a lot of cheeseburgers ;).

I live in the Midwest. 200 miles won't get me from Chicago to Detroit without re-charging. My 2002 Ford Focus has a cruising range of, conservatively, 320-350 miles, based on a 13 gallon tank and 27-30 mpg highway. That's not even close to parity. My other concern, and it involves all electric vehicles, is this: even at 10 minutes for a full charge, that's longer than it takes to refill my gas tank. This means a correspondingly low throughput at gas stations or the new equivalent. Has anyone addressed this looming logistical problem?

I'd say you're describing intercity rail, except for #6 and possibly #7.

The standards at college newspapers are not always as stringent as those at major market newspapers. Thinking about the one at my alma mater, it did not employ an ombudsman, rarely fact-checked articles and didn't use tape recorders at interviews. I can think of three situations during my four years where it libeled a student or member of the administration. However, being a small paper with limited circulation and footprint, not much was done about it. Ditto, that matter, for an alternative weekly which accused a fairly prominent administrator of improper sexual conduct using anonymous sources (pretty weaselly actually--"rumours going around etc..."). A quick google-check shows that the Internet is perfectly unaware of any such accusations. What happens if that issue ever gets indexed online? He already got quietly forced out of his job.