And while that may be true, the reason so many Democrats are rabid Libertarian-haters is that no matter how many other issues they may agree about, Libertarians simply do not support the big-government model Democrats insist upon. It's a fundamental philosophical difference.

Democrats, by and large, are unwilling to look past this difference, and see the things they DO agree on. Which is too bad, because it leads to the typical Leftist Libertarian-bashing that we see so much: conflating them with anarchists, etc.

Even though according to independent polls he won every debate in which the news media and other organizations allowed him to participate.

When a few events like this happened last year to Home Depot and a few others, I saw a couple of those letters with offers of free credit monitoring, etc.

IANAL, but I am pretty sure these are just attempts to stave off lawsuits. There is nothing binding about the "offers", and they don't preclude you from suing them for liability if you are an actual victim of identity theft.

I think what this will actually take, are some people willing to step up and kick off some big suits. It is those kinds of damages that will make them finally pay attention.

Having said that, "punitive" damages by government are supposed to be big enough to get corporations to end the sloppiness and take their their liability seriously. So yes, I think you can lay a lot of blame on government's cavalier attitude toward this sort of thing.

I hardly think that's really the point. Being a "strategic material" -- and it very definitely is -- there is a real issue with selling shares of US uranium production on the open market to the Russians.

While we aren't exactly in a "cold war" anymore, our relations in many ways are less than friendly, and the Russian deal with others who are even less friendly to the U.S. So doing that is just plain stupid.

It's like selling ammunition to a third party who you just know is going to then turn around and sell it to your enemies.

What OP doesn't say (and probably doesn't know) is how that IP address is assigned. As likely as not, it's assigned by the software he is using on his laptop, via DHCP by his host software; that would explain why they ALL have the same IP address. (Certainly that could be in the pump firmware, too, but we have zero evidence of that, so it could just as likely be the other.)

If the pumps actually get their address via DHCP, the software could be hacked to assign a different IP to each pump, and then using a simple ethernet hub or switch, run the firmware update in multiple threads, one thread per pump.

I don't know that's the case, but I have been given no reason to believe it is not.

OP should find out how the IP address is being assigned. He could probably do that simply by trying to telnet into the pump, or using one of the many bits of network analysis tools available.

This.

Hope it gets defeated in the Senate, and they just let Sec. 215 expire. Call or write your Congresscritters in the Senate and tell them to vote down this deceitful POS. Sunset 215!

But that doesn't automatically make it okay.

The ruling SCOTUS made in the "Betamax decision" had solid reasoning behind it. It is precisely that "temporariness" that people have legitimate reasons for wanting to bypass.

What I observe with the majority of people: they are fully capable of being free-thinking individuals, but the main way they use this capability is to follow the crowd.

With herd animals that are prey creatures (i.e. cattle, sheep) this makes sense in terms of survival. There is safety in numbers. Stray from the herd, and you get targeted by ever-present predators.

With humans, who are at the top of the food chain and generally have no natural predators, it's just a form of cowardice. I'm not sure the DNA of fruit flies is going to provide a satisfying explanation here, at least not one that can be extrapolated to include people, fascinating though it may be.

In my honest opinion, there is something very, very wrong with you.

Your habit of misrepresenting comments taken out of context is very likely to get you nailed to a very rough wall one of these days, if you keep it up. It's not as though I haven't warned you. And I'm not even saying I would be the one to do it. If you do this to other people too, it would probably not be reasonable to expect them to be as tolerant as I have.

Again you try to put words in my mouth. That's a fundamentally dishonest thing to do.

I commented about Revkin's own comment. No more. There was no argument AT ALL, there was no "stumping". You're fabricating.

You just get more hilarious by the year.

I repeat: you might want to examine your own conscience. Because you never know when you might be called on to defend it.

I, on the other hand, am an open book. I have been consistently amused that you have never learned to read it.

As a general principle, I don't lie. I make jokes now and then, and that sort of thing, but I am probable far LESS of a liar than about 99 out of 100 people you'll meet.

I have no problem at all with conscience. But I strongly suggest you start examining yours. Because at some point you may have to defend it.

Why should I "admit" anything? I don't owe you anything.

However, if this is the claim you make, then I am happy that you are reinforcing my case that you have been abusively "cyberstalking" me for years. You claim to be following even my deleted tweets. How interesting.

In fact, I now have two good pieces of evidence in less than 24.

I repeat what I said before, more that once: you aren't as smart as you think you are.

All you have to do to protect yourself is to stop being an asshole. I've told you before. You have refused to listen.

Of course not. But that's not what I was doing, so the rest of your comment is moot.

Abuse of a system that was intended to be used differently in capitalist America is no different from abuse of a system that was intended to be used differently in formerly "communist" Russia, or China. The economic system has no bearing on it whatever: it's still just abuse of the system.

People have abused laws in all socioeconomic systems and they almost invariably do it for their own interests. You don't get to blame something that happens in ALL socioeconomic systems on "capitalism".