The House Judiciary Committee today held an important hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act with a hugely stacked deck of witnesses—Google's lawyer was the only one of the six to object to the bill in a meaningful way. And it wasn't hard to see why. This wasn't a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with "the pirates."

How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" (courtesy of the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida).

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The icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa may contain a body of water the size of the Great Lakes sitting just 1.8 miles below the surface. If confirmed, the findings could heat up the prospects of finding alien life on the chilly moon.

Deep underneath its frozen exterior, Europa is known to house a vast ocean, with two to three times the volume of Earth's oceans. And researchers have previously speculated that small amounts of water might exist near the moon's surface in pores or cracks.

"Now we've found evidence that there are giant liquid lakes perched inside the ice shell," said planetary scientist Britney Schmidt from the University of Texas at Austin and lead author on the paper, which appears in Nature on Nov.

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Quantum mechanics is a powerful theory that explains much of the world at the level of atoms and molecules. Its predictive and explanatory powers are only matched by relativity and evolution. There are, however, gaps. These gaps are not the sort that you can see in everyday experiments—for instance, if you shine the right color of light on an atom, an electron might be excited from one state to another, and quantum mechanics predicts this perfectly. But there are some questions it doesn't handle so easily. How long does it take the electron to enter an excited state?

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A 26-year old Romanian hacker has been arrested for damaging computer systems at NASA, according to a release from the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT). Robert Butyka is charged with breaking into an unspecified number of servers at NASA starting in December of 2010.

NASA has become something of a reputation-building target for Romanian hackers. In an unrelated security breach in May of this year, another Romanian hacker claimed to have stolen classified satellite data from servers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. That hacker, who calls himself TinKode, posted screen shots from an FTP server related to NASA's SERVIR Earth observation program, which provides data to relief agencies and other humanitarian organizations. And in 2008, another Romanian, Victor Faur, was convicted in Romania of hacking NASA and US Navy sites in 2005 and 2006.

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I was impressed by the graphics and attention to detail when I played Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on the PC, and the first few hours I spent with the game flew by. Soon, however, the game's terrible menus and user interface began to sour the experience, and I found myself tempted to put the game back on the shelf for a month or so until these issues can be fixed.

This might be a contender for game of the year, but it's also a clunky mess once you begin to level up your character, manage your inventory, or use your map. The good news for PC players is that a full suite of modding tools is on the way, and the community will take care of all the balls that were dropped by the original development teams. And boy oh boy, so many balls were dropped.

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Last month, an "iPhone Micro USB Adapter" popped up on Apple's British online store. Since then, the little plug has made its way across Europe—but not beyond its borders—and it's not hard to connect the dots between this adapter and the earlier European agreement to make all smartphones use the same Micro USB port for charging. So far, it doesn't look like Apple is going to stop including a power adapter with its iPhones in Europe, but even at Apple's prices (8 in the UK, 9 elsewhere) the Micro USB plug could be a somewhat cheaper alternative to buying a an additional charger or cable for those who already own one or more third-party chargers.

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Fresh off a decision to keep its PC business, HP is joining the Ultrabook crowd with the new HP Folio. It's not the thinnest Ultrabook, but HP is claiming to offer the longest Ultrabook battery life at up to 9 hours, and also makes the ambitious claim of having built the "first business Ultrabook."

We could argue that the whole point of Ultrabooks is to create a business-friendly option for people lusting after ultra-slim laptops. While the MacBook Air is the most popular device in the category, Windows is by and large preferred over Macs in business settings, and any Ultrabook can presumably be outfitted with the Professional version of Windows 7. But HP says it is adding an extra security feature designed for mobile professionals: A "TPM [Trusted Platform Module] Embedded Security Chip that protects data in e-mail as well as information on the hard drive for security-conscious users." There is also an optional USB 2.

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French mobile development company Applidium has reverse engineered the protocol that the iPhone 4S uses to communicate with Siri’s servers. Applidium’s developers have published a brief technical explanation of the protocol and some sample code that demonstrates how to use the service to tap into Siri's hosted speech-to-text conversion capabilities.

Their research shows that much of the heavy lifting for Siri's speech recognition is done on the server side—which suggests that it’s theoretically possible to build Siri speech recognition clients for other devices. When a user speaks to Siri on a 4S, the phone records the audio and compresses it with the Speex codec, an open audio format that is optimal for voice. The recording is transmitted to Apple’s servers as part of a specialized HTTP request. The servers send back a zlib-compressed binary plist that contains the response data.

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We usually defer to the experts when it comes to posting about video game sales, but right now retail shelves are choked with excellent games. You either have a monstrous gaming budget and no tough decisions to make, or you're being forced to make some very hard choices. Amazon has your back, and has begun to offer some of the best games of the season in a buy one, get one half-off sale.

Take a look at some of the titles available through this promotion:

The deal is limited to one bundle per customer, and this is for a limited time, so I'd jump on it if you still haven't bought some of these games. This isn't just the busy part of the year for gaming releases: 2011 has seen a better-than-average selection of games released in the past few weeks.

Let us know what you pick up!

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A major new survey of American attitudes to online copyright infringement has found that 70 percent of all 18 to 29-year-olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. But almost no Americans are hardcore grog-swillers, and two-thirds of those who do acquire copyrighted material without permission also acquire content legally.

The new research comes courtesy of a forthcoming report called Copy Culture in the US and Germany, and it was done by some of the same researchers who worked on the groundbreaking Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report earlier this year. Data comes from a Princeton Survey Research Associates telephone poll of 2,303 American adults during the month of August; a Google grant funded some of the research.

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