In case this is intended to be particularly critical of the French, they do indeed have 4 ballistic missile submarines and 6 attack submarines in their navy, all of which routinely spend more than 30 days underwater at a time.

They _still_ don't use Twitter, Skype, etc (even though it has been technologically possible for over a decade) whereas for some reason that is of particular interest to him. Maybe he wants to set a record for deepest depths a human has traveled into the depths of his own narcissism? I am interested to see how his Facebook wall holds up.

In case there was any doubt: here is your ongoing proof that Fox is "fair and balanced" (/sarcasm). The headline reads: "FBI: Chicago officially America's murder capital" but did the FBI report contain anything suggesting the term "Murder Capital" was appropriate? Let's see... nope. OK, maybe the report particularly damns Chicago's poor attempts to reduce gun violence? Hmm, nope it doesn't say anything specific about Chicago at all. Where is the fine print at? Oh, ok, there it is! Chicago is, per capita, safer than almost all the other large cities in the US (NYC and LA as notable exceptions). So, in case you were wondering, the "Murder Capital" race is a toss up between Detroit (54 murders per 100k), and New Orleans (53 murders per 100k).

Where do you stand on rounded corners?

You will die exactly once (barring a zombie apocalypse, in the event of which I am going to disavow any credit for this post) so why reinvent the wheel if it's only going to get one turn anyway? Hire a reputable family lawyer, set up a will detailing your important documents (and whatever else you are giving away), name an executor, choose a safe place (in meatspace) for the documents to live in the meantime, and then enjoy your retirement.

As many others have pointed out, there is no obligation for the IRS to retain email records for longer than 6 months. So what you call incompetence is really your own inability to understand the requirements. No one told anyone else to "keep these emails sacred, back them up in 3 places, never let more than 2 of the backups get within 100mi of each other, etc" so no, there is not any appropriate punishment here unless you can demonstrate that the emails would have been retained (perhaps by some ultra-vigilant employee) but were not, as a result of a higher up specifically ordering their destruction.

No need to be baffled. You are seeing his statement backward. He is not saying this case is excusable because it happened before, he is asking why this case is being treated with such fervor while the previous one wasn't. After all, this thread is metanews about the reaction to the scandal, not any reflection on the actual happenings at the IRS/Treasury.

OK, here you go: The hard drive containing her emails "crashed" (it was unusable and could not be recovered by the IRS IT staff) and as a result, it was recycled/destroyed and replaced with a new one. The actual source was a Politico story which, besides conjecture, contained only this brief line of concrete information:

So, unless there is some compelling reason to think that the drive was corrupted purposefully, or the recovery was disingenuous, then all you have here is SOP for any IT department (fix what's broke). Yet the only thing we see on Foxnews.com is a story painted to look exactly like the uncovering of a conspiracy (see all the other rants about impeachment for an example of how severely people are overreacting to this.)

Anything else I can help with?

Nevermind that you have to go seriously out of your way to find a TV that even has a cablecard slot in it... TV makers are racing to cram more Apps in, ethernet and wifi ports, USB, and all that, but ignore cablecard completely. First world problems...

Speaking of which, I think that means cable boxes are carbon neutral, since they are apparently powered by four giant nuclear reactors. So, I can finally stop buying carbon credits for my cable box carbon footprint! Hooray.

Because a C&D is somehow damaging to the "IkeaHackers.net" brand beyond the obviously untenable position regarding their name? If IkeaHackers is serious about operating in good faith they will choose a similar but un-infringing name and go on with their lives. The wrong way would be a C&D followed the next day by a court order and the day after by a subpoena and lawsuit.

I believe (but am not an expert) that the mining pool concept is what accounts for this. The pool (one main server assigning jobs) runs on a nice fat, multi-homed system with plenty of bandwidth in every direction. Then, the ASIC-based miners sign on to the pool and do the crunching for it. This has the effect of both allowing the pool to maintain constant operations, and to hide the ASIC miners from public view.

Custom made ASICs are so much more powerful than GP CPUs that no, I doubt all the rentable cloud capacity currently in existence (if you could manage to muster it) would compare to the mining capacity in use via ASICs.

Postulate 3 (split the pool up) raises a very interesting question: if the operators are anonymous, can the pool ever be split in such a way that we are sure the same group doesn't control both pools? With clandestine collaboration, two pools totalling over 50% of the total could perform the same treachery that a single pool would. Since we don't know who controls it, how do we know who *doesn't* control it, or does it matter?

The less you spend per core (by having them less concentrated) the more you will spend on interconnecting them in a way befitting a supercomputer (i.e. massive parallelism). A pile of machines totaling 600 cores on a gigabit switch is of very little use compared to a few mega-core machines on a better, smaller network. And you don't want to know how much all the fabric would cost to properly integrate all of those 8 core systems.