Thank you. I've only been to Belfast so far, which was great fun, and I hope to spend more time in both Irelands.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

If you're seriously interested in disk encryption, it's pretty clear that there is no viable platform other than Linux, and maybe BSD. Any other platform will be riddled with NSA backdoors, and you'll have no way to check. So I don't understand why cross-platform compatibility is even desirable, much less necessary.

I think we were talking about the threat of a taxi driver killing a passenger, not the other way around.

Taxis take your credit card after the ride is over. A serial killer has plenty of time to do bad stuff to you before your card is used. Uber knows who you are from the moment you hail the cab.

The Wikipedia article contains zero mention of any controversy surrounding whether or not Dolly is a real clone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Where is your evidence that Dolly is not a real clone? If Wikipedia doesn't mention the allegation, it's not even a conspiracy theory.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

If you think a bit further... An operating system could load an executable at a different address every time it is used, without recompilation!

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. )