On the contrary, I think he's saying we should give up "foreign" foods like pizza and hamburgers and eat more tacos, sopes and tamales instead!~

You know you yanks looked incredibly brain washed from out the US of A.
A gun is a tool that allows quick any easy DEATH. Such tools should be highly regulated.

Well it does matter in the rest of the developed world that has socialised health care systems.

For example. Smoking in Australia, although not banned, is now incredibly invonvenient. The goverment banned all advertising; smoking in workplaces, all public enclosed spaces, outdoor eating places, street malls; jacked the price up to $20 a packet; hid the packets under counters; removed all branding from the packets themselves. Why? because the government (ie the tax payer, ie me) bears the burden of providing their health care. The same can be argued for huge serviving of HFCS drinks.

The trick is striking a balance between restricting an activity that reduces your lifespan and costs society $$ vs the individuals freedom.

Of course, the reality may be that there's evidence of further illegal activities that he hasn't admitted to in the encrypted files. That might make the case for self-incrimination.

But in making such an argument, wouldn't he then be admitting them, thus invalidating the case for self-incrimination? Sure, it's a catch-22 (and therefore should not be true), but the judicial system doesn't seem to care about that anymore...

I'm suprised it took this far down the comments for such a basic mistake to be corrected.
For clarity these are correct ways to refer to power produced.

20GWh was produced over a one hour period.
The solar output peaked at 20GW.

Energy is measured in joules which is watts x seconds.
Power is measured in Watts which is volts x amps.
(yes there are other definitions, but this is in context)

(Also, side-note, where the hell are the procedurally generated maps for the FPS genre? Why hasn't this happened yet?)

I have a suspicion that in that context, procedurally generated is a synonym for "boringly symmetrical," "unfair and exploitable," or both.

Some people might suggest that you could just make it bigger, but that's often not a feasible idea, even if it is lighter than the usual materials. For one example is why skyscrapers are not made of brick. It doesn't matter how wide your walls of brick would be, after a certain point, the weight of the bricks would crush the lower ones, and then the whole building collapses. The steel reinforced concrete we use can sustain much larger loads, and so is used for tall and heavy projects instead of bricks. Of course tethered satellite has to withstand much greater stresses, whether it's crushing down, pulling up, or swaying to the side. That's why super light but otherwise more conventional materials won't work.

Your own example disproves your argument: if the bricks in your skyscraper weighed much less (but had the same compression strength), then you could stack many more of them on top before the bottom brick would be crushed, allowing you to build a taller skyscraper.

Look, if you're so partisan that it blinds you to the blatant problems with this situation, then nothing I could say will convince you. I, however, can see that Republicans abusing their 501c3 status and Democrats corrupting the IRS to pursue a witch-hunt are both entirely possible. I don't know which of those happened -- cynically, I suspect both -- but I'm not going to pretend anybody is squeaky-clean just because they're on "my side!"

There is a saying: "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action." Even if each thing could plausibly be a mistake due to incompetence when considered individually, the combination suggests that somebody is acting in bad faith.

Unless you consider it gross incompetence to allow users to delete emails. Even the cat joke ones.

Disk space is cheap, and the Federal Records Act (etc.) says that stuff should be FOIA-able. So yes, I think that if somebody FOIAs the cat jokes then the IRS should be able to provide them!

Okay, fine. In that case, add a "...and the Federal Records Act (among other things) explicitly makes the kind of IT gross incompetence you mention illegal..." clause to my previous statement!

I do not like green eggs and ham!

Why is it that one of the few instances where the argument "we have sovereign immunity; go fuck yourself" is legitimate is one of the few instances where they don't use it?!

Personally I don't know of many IT staff that keep broken hard drives for 3 years.

Sure, that's reasonable... if that's the only issue and if you know you have functioning backups.

The problem is that it starts looking a lot less reasonable in the context that every other place the emails were stored was also "lost."

Conspiracy theory, much? Really?

When it's the user's hard drive and the contents of the mail server and the backups of the hard drive and the backups of the mail server and the user seems reluctant to tell the truth about what the emails actually say and there are allegations of misconduct involving said emails and (as far as we know) the IRS isn't also missing a whole bunch of non-related emails, only "coincidentally" the potentially-damaging ones... then maybe it really is a fucking conspiracy!

Oh yeah, once I got properly transferred to Comcast's cablecard activation line it was fine. The problem is that the first couple of people I talked to were too incompetent to even do that (i.e., one of them didn't know the difference between Comcast's cablecard activation line and TiVo's customer service).

This was about a year ago, by the way. Comcast had "forced" me to get cable by offering a lower price for internet + cable than for internet alone, and I figured that if I'm forced to get TV then I will damn well use it. Now, thankfully, I'm back on a relatively good Internet-only deal so the cablecard has been returned.