Thaank goodness for the Eternal August.

The very way the request is phrased assumes the guilt of the persons being investigated. When a trial starts with guilty until proven innocent, that IS what 'witch hunt' means. If the Republicans were asking for all relevant evidence, to see IF the IRS violated the first amendment, that would be different. In America, we don't ask for the Trtuth, that part of the Truth that proves what we want it to, and nothing but the part we like.

I came to this thread with one mod point left, and here you are, practically begging for it - so no, you can't have it, i'm gonna save it and come back to mod myself -1 off topic instead. And Steven Zoltan Brust is fantastic.

Security through Obscurity works, just as camoflage works for soldiers. And relying just on Security through Obscurity works just as well as camoflaging your soldiers and then sending them out without weapons, ammo, food, water or training into a hostile environment.

Why am I not surprised that the first post to this thread is from someone who doesn't know where babies come from?

Cause now everyone knows what Positrons are, Asimov's positronic brain sounds dated.

There's this principle, as part of the RICO act, that says creating a lot of shell corporations, where money moves around between companies in a very complicated way and it's very hard to track it, is one of the signs of an organized crime operation. Parts of the RICO law are written to deal with this specific method. For ciriminals to use this method, they have to build enough shell corps to make tracking the money very hard - a few won't do it, twenty or 50 or 119 is better. The Idea is that the more levels of shells there are, the more time the organization has to delay a criminal investigation, as the investigators have to keep going back to a judge and getting more warrents for new records. If they don't find anything the first few times, the judge is likely to stop giving them more warrents, plus there's more time to move money into places such as offshore accounts, or for the top dogs to skip the country if they must.
          There weren't a whole bunch of new PACs and such made by the Democrats in that election cycle, but because of the very nature of the Tea Party movement, we saw a lot of Tea party this and Tea Party that, over a hundred new non-profits for states, groups of states, and particular parts of the movement. In many cases, some of the Tea party organizers put their names on multiple applications in different positions, which is another sign of potential shell corporations. That's another possible red flag under RICO, seeing the same person's name for different positions in different corporations which are being formed in multiple states, as is seeing organizations incorporated in odd states (i.e.a company doing businesss only in Arkansas, but incorporating in Florida). (Delaware is somewhat of an exception to this, as their laws make it popular for many businesses to incorporate there, but I don't think there are any real advantages to incorporating in Delaware for non-profits).
          The IRS has also long had a position that even if something is technically legal to do as the law is written, it can still be illlegal if the primary purpose of doing it appears to be not to achieve whatever goal the law endorses, but to evade taxes. That means they could have approached this as a case where some of these new organizations might not qualify as their particular type of non-profit, AND might have made a profit AND had the intent to avoid paying the taxes that would entail. Technically, if somebody screws up and didn't stay within the non-profit rules, the IRS next looks to see if they made money, and if they did, for the third step the IRS gets to assume that the mistake in claiming non-profit status isn't an innocent mistake, but a deliberate way to evade taxes on that money. If you think about it, this makes a certain amount of sense - as the plaintiff at that point is often arguing that they accidentally made a profit without trying to, and they just coincidentally filed as a non-profit by innocent mistake. The press has tended to treat this as though the new non-profits could be set up wrong quite innocently, and have made a profit under law, but not done anything really wrong unless the IRS could prove some sort of intent, but the law normally assumes people don't make profits accidentally, and don't just happen to get the paperwork wrong coincidentally.

Minor correction guy, here. That's a proportionally higher chance, not a high chance. Since the best estimates for being gay put it at less than 10% of the population, a high chance of their uncles from the mother's sides being gay as well would mean, for example, for all those mothers that have a male sibling, there's at least a 25-50% chance those siblings are gay too. Since having a brother is so common, that means that if 10% of the populace is gay, somehow, there's also a general 2.5-5% of the overall populace that needs to be added to that. As a more specific example, if it's 'the future' and everybody who is gay feels absolutely no stigma about it, reports honestly, and we come up with a number such as 8%, we should add about 25-50% to it and report that the gay percentage of the population is really 10-12% or so, even if there's no other reason in such a case to think those uncles are not being counted already.
        That's not really something that makes sense in this example - we can't have a gene that is detectable by its effect on a major behavior and argue that being someone's maternal uncle stops that behavior but the gene is still present, for example, So let me give you an example where adjusting the incidence for what we know about genetics just might make better sense, for contrast.
        The genetics of schizophrenia have the highest corollation known for a genetic illness (not that being gay should necessarily be counted as a genetic illness, let's just stick with it being an effect with a genetiic component - but I think it's safe to identify schizophrenia as a generally undesired and dehabilitating condition.). If a person is schizophrenic, and has an identical twin, that twin has about a 50% chance of also developing schizophrenia. That's the top of the charts high chance corollation. Since many schizophrenics do go undiagnosed for substantial time, and many families attempt to hide the incidence of related cases in the family tree, or are in broad denial, it makes good sense to ask patients if they have an identical twin, warn them of the high potential for the disease, and to figure that the real niumbers of people at high risk or as yet undetected, should include a factor adjusting for the presence of occasional identical twins in the population. The link between male homosexuality and maternal uncles also bing gay is a lot less statistically significant than that, even though being somone's maternal uncle is a lot more common than being someone's identical twin.

international
  In this particular context, I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I think I'm pretty far from an obsessive collector (well maybe I do sometimes fall in that category and am just not seeing it), but it's not that relevant whether people are or not.
            I have some significant films and books that have been released in various censored editions. For example, I have the paperback Del Rey Gold Seal version of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which is both vetted by the author and has an afterword detailing some of the many bowderizings of that book (of all stories) and in what ways some other Bradbury stories were censored in various other editions. It's a rather nasty set of examples.
            I seem to recall there was a story covered here on Slashdot a few years ago about Blockbuster demanding changes to the copies of a gereat many videos they distributed from the theatre releases. In my classical music collection, I have a version of Copland's Lincoln Portrait that.was translated for a South American audience, and on the night It was first performed, the people leaving the auditorium went straight to the streets to conduct a revolution. It might be a good thing if the exact performance that served as a trigger was on physical media (and from some people's POV, it might be a very bad thing - quick, burn the tape!).
              It may be just "obsessive" fans who want to compare different releases of Star Trek TOS or Star Wars and argue over trivia, but when the changes involve more controversial works, THATS a real "pretty big reason to still prefer physical media". (And I'm not sure but what that applies to ST:TOS as well - that "First interracial kiss footage might still count as controversial in some circles - are their copies of what was actually broadcast in different southern US markets?). So, to your "you have some chance of actually keeping it", I'll add ", even if it makes the powers that be uncomfortable." Physical media let us see who is revising, amending, or deleting whose thoughts, and sometimes even make a pretty good guess why.

I don't seem to have "Rogue Bolo" in my sci-fi book collection, but the cover on Amazon looks familiar. I think I might have given it away one Halloween decades ago living in Princeton, NJ when I gave the option of getting books instead of candy to some trick-or-treaters (several teens there seemed to prefer the books).

Your point on a Bolo singularity makes me think about the Asimov universe, and how his robots there eventually interpreted the three laws in a way "The Zeroth Law" that gave them lots of independence, and that saw themselves as in a way more "human" than humans, and also caused them to start intervening in history behind the scenes. There is no set of laws or constitution that ultimately does not need some intelligent judge to interpret the meaning or spirit of the words in a present day context, and once some intelligent entity (including an AI) starts creatively interpreting "rules" including "metarules" about how rules can be changed, who knows where it will end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Inspired by your post, I've been looking through my Bolo books. I started rereading "Ploughshare" by Todd Johnson in "Bolos: Book 1: Honor of the Regiment" where "Das Afrika Corps" and other Mark XVI C Bolos act a bit odd due to a spilled milkshake by the "Director's son" in the "White Room" psychotronics lab and the use of "DK-41" cleaning fluid to fix that mess up. Another case of the unexpected...

I liked "Bolo Rising" novel which has a Bolo Mark XXXIII series HCT called Hector. That is an interesting novel of a Bolo regaining its operational capacity after being infiltrated and locked down by alien technology. There is another XXXIII in "Bolo Strike". But while those mega-Bolo stories are interesting in their own sort of over-the-top way (maybe your point about "the other guy"), I like the diversity in the short stories in "Honor of the Regiment" by a variety of authors covering the whole history of different Bolos of various capabilities and their unfolding increasing sentience and self-directedness. What does "Honor" or "Service" means over time and shading into a meta-level? For example, are whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, or Kiriakou honorable and engaged in service and fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution? Or are they traitors? Complex questions... Perhaps "Rogue Bolo" goes deeper into such issues? As a lesser example, "Bolo Brigade" explores the issue of a conflict between "rules of engagement" and a Bolo's desire to get its job done. Conflicts between priorities are not something that only humans will face...

It is not clear where the singularity of emerging AI and technologically-expanded-or-narrowed humans and so on will all lead in reality -- especially with Bolo vs. Beserker as an option. I forget the plot of "Bolo Strike" as I look at my Bolo books, but the blurb on the back says "as Bolo faces human-Bolo hybrid in a cataclysmic showdown". So there are other ways automated systems can cause change, either their own independence or by empowering some few independent humans. As I essentially say near the end of the 2000 post to the Unrev-II Engelbart Bootstrap mailing list, corporations are like vast machine intelligence at his point. And like the present day, what is the real difference to most people if the Earth is laid waste, the seas polluted, the mountains leveled, the oceans strip-mined, and most of the people kept down in their aspirations for a decent life by "aliens from outer space" or by some 1% of vampire-like human-machine-hybrid-organizational "aliens" who have become specialized in "extracting wealth" by privatizing gains and socializing costs (including the cost to the worker of unpleasant work environments)? Even without human-Bolo hybrids, there can be vast technological/bureaucratic enterprises that make use of humans as parts much the same as the "!*!*!" of "Bolo Rising" tried to do in their quest of "efficiency" -- "efficiency" to what end and to whose benefit? So much of sci-fi is a way that people can reflect of concerns of the day, but at a safer intellectual distance.

Anyway, reminds me I should try playing with my kid this old Metagame I have around somewhere and have not played in decades and was inspired by the Bolo series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Actually finding a new zero day exploit and figuring out how to exploit it, with maximum yield to chance of getting caught ratio, is very time consuming and involves a high level of luck, not just skill. David is shown as a bit more than just a script kiddie, but a lot of what he does in the movie has become simplifed to where script kiddees can easily get tools they don't understand to do the same things these days, so perhaps the movie doesn't feel the same from a modern perspective. It helps to remember that back in the era, seemingly simple things such as Wardialers weren't off the shelf items yet, and people who used them had to at least know a little about some Hayes AT commands and such beyond what was in the user manuals. David was hacking at a time when even getting advice about using social engineering meant going to a person who also had pure tech skills, and not from someone who only knew the social engineering side of it all. His use of social engineering to realize "Joshua" is a potentially likely backdoor in that particular case is actually the more skilled response, in that it takes a certain amount of analytical intelligence to look for something like it, but also more generalized intelligence to realize that doing it has a high chance of shortcutting trial and error methods that might take years in an era of 1200 baud modems, and that there was very little risk during the discovery phase. I would posit that the most skilled hackers working for the NSA, for example, are deliberately trained not to ignore biography shortcuts and such in favor of more seemingly LEET attacks. The people with nothing to prove most probably use social attacks, reverse engineering and insider information at the drop of a hat if it gets them results faster or safer.

I was just picturing jets spraying out heavy metals and nanochips and radioactive compounds, and then the HAARP broadcasts frying all those nanochips, and so on, and thinking "That's the stupidest conspiracy evah!"

Well, If someone can't admit there's a trend at all, they certainly can't admit it's accellerating, even at a very conservative rate that only leads to converting 11 cm. to 20 cm. in a hundred years. There's actually nothing likely about such a slow exponential growth. Positive feedback processes that tend to such low growth rates are usually inhibited by some transient factor, which eventually stops restraining them:
          Mandatory Car Analogy: For example, a company trying to ramp up production of new cars sees a low growth rate when they have to make a design change during the model year, but they learn to stop making design changes too often. If positive feedback loops are larger than such negatives, longer term predictions are always underpredictions, that is, they assume the existing feedbacks won't change much, but a better prediction would take into account we have reasons to think some things will change. In this analogy, human ability means that the process controllers will very likely learn to not make changes during a model year, because it slows desired increases in production. Fixing one such problem counts as applying positive feedback and if the car maker's production people keep learning more about how to make more cars faster, this counts as a positive feedback loop for as long as it lasts. Here, the positive feedback loop is still limited by total demand for cars - there's no point in being able to make more cars than you can sell.
            More direct example: For AGW, plant growth from increased CO2 is a negative feedback loop that tends to restrain CO2 buildup by sequestering it in living plants, but the increase in O2 levels that also goes with plant growth increases forest fire risk and damage, and puts a cap on how much forests can grow, so the negative feedback loop may be eventually overwhelmed by a positive feedback that in theory can dwarf its effects. The total area for plants to live, world wide, also puts a cap on the growth of the negative feedback process, as does the total available (for each) of free Nitrogen, Phosporus, and other materials needed for plant growth. Notice we should treat space available as an area and not a volume - plants grow only in the top 100 meters or so of the sea and on land surfaces, and get their energy by the surface area they present to the sun, and so people tend to mislead themselves if they think of the oceans as a volume that can absorb Carbon by this method instead, or that trees can just grow taller or denser without limits. When the ocean as a whole volume directly absorbs Carbon, that's called becoming seltzer water, which has its own limits, and wouldn't be goof for us if it did happen - it's hardly a fix for our problems.,
          From what I've seen, just about all the proposed positive and negative feedbacks on CO2 levels are such that the negative ones have relatively low caps, by which I mean they will either only work for a historically short time or just so long as the world remains below certain concentrations of CO2. The only negative loops anybody, seems to think are real*, that endure, are the mechanisms nature now uses, such as sequestering carbon in plant matter, or in calcium carbonate made by diatoms, and similar, and these all have limits, and to make things worse, are all being negatively impacted by human action. The new Cosmos video series, for example, shows just how much calcium carbonate sequestration would have to grow to keep up with human trends, and just how unlikely that is. At this point, you either need to have the opinion that the whole thing is a fake, or admit that 20 cm. is a very optimistic lowball estimate. Climatologists are probably trying to avoid appearing sensationalistic.

* To be fair, some people actually think God will just step in and work a miracle somehow, every time it's needed, which certainly counts as a negative feedback loop large and enduring enough to fix the problem. But if they aren't relying on that, what's their excuse?

Spruce Greenland, Hunter Greenland, Hooker's Greenland, Asparagusland (if it browns a bit as well), Army Greenland (once we're past Asparagus), Brunswick Greenland, #013220land...