United States district court judge Liam O'Grady said he didn't know if "we are ever going to have a trial in this matter" after being told Dotcom's file-sharing company had never been formally served with criminal papers by the US.

Dotcom's US-based lawyer, Ira Rothken, said it was the defence's understanding that it was not legally possible for Megaupload to be served with papers accusing it of criminal acts.

"My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States."

The cause of death remains unknown, but a close friend of Ham's said last night he believed Ham, who had been on a methadone program, had begun using heroin again ''heavily'' and abusing alcohol after the Kookaburra trial.

Larrikin Music Publishing, which owns the copyright for Kookaburra, sued Hay, his fellow songwriter Ron Strykert and EMI Music Publishing, seeking back-dated royalties and a share of future profits.

While we've seen some successes in Germany, it appears that the party has now become the third most popular party in the country, surpassing the Greens.

Its success in Europe is already driving other parties to pay much more attention to the issues that have attracted so much attention for The Pirate Party: internet freedom, free speech, civil liberties, copyright law, patent law, privacy and much more.

Poet Michael Tolkien, the eldest grandson of the The Hobbit author, will write two novels based on stories his grandfather read to him as a child.

Gerald Dickens, the great-great grandson of Charles, will narrate the audiobook versions.

Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, "I don't know."

The Java programming language is in the public domain and free, but some aspects of Java require a specific license from Oracle. The complexities, such as different licensing schemes and their applications, will make it difficult for the jury to get a black-and-white view of this central issue.

After the legal harassment continued even on Saturday night, when BREIN sent an email at 20:15 demanding extra measures under threat of draconian penalties, the Pirates are anxious to finally get their day in court. The penalties imposed by the court are 4 times higher than those ordered upon the large commercial ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo, demonstrating that the ideas of a (yet) small political party are deemed more dangerous than for-profit companies.

“It is time that the industry attack dogs understand that you can’t trample on people’s freedoms for your own monetary gain,” Pirate Party board member blauwbaard says.

Costing only £16, the tiny computer has been designed to inspire anyone, especially children, to get started with computer programming.

Delivery of the first batch of production machines has been delayed twice - once because the wrong component was soldered on to circuit boards and a second time thanks to confusion about electromagnetic testing.

The Pi is built around the Arm chip that is used in the vast majority of mobile phones. It runs one version of the Linux operating system and uses SD cards as its storage medium.

CISPA would set up a mechanism for the government's security services to share information on new threats with private companies and utilities. In return, those companies can share data on their users with the government if requested, and the bill ensures they are bulletproof from legal fallout if people complain.

There's also an impressive list of technology companies lining up to support CISPA, including Microsoft, Intel, EMC, Oracle and Facebook.

"HR 3523 would impose no new obligations on us to share data with anyone – and ensures that if we do share data about specific cyber threats, we are able to continue to safeguard our users’ private information, just as we do today,' said Facebook's Joel Kaplan

The US government has filed papers objecting to Schapiro’s law firm working on Megaupload’s defense, citing conflicts of interest involving Google, YouTube, Disney, Fox and other movie, TV show and software companies.

The government’s complaints pose a real problem for Megaupload. Will it ever be possible for Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants to recruit a high-quality copyright specialist law firm that hasn’t ever represented any of the potential witnesses in the case? It seems unlikely.

“[I]f the Government is to have its way in this case, the only lawyers before the Court will be those representing the Government. If the Government is to have its way, the only evidence available to the Court would be that cherry-picked by the Government, for the Government, from the universe of relevant servers slated to be wiped. If the Government is to have its way, in sum, Megaupload will never get its day in Court and the case will effectively be over before it has even begun.”

MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase.

Oracle has continued development of MySQL, but stirred discontent in the MySQL community when the company shifted the development model away from a fully open-source approach to an "open core," with new enterprise features offered under a commercial license only.