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...

(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.

given Japan's industrial might and know-how, it wouldn't take very long for Japan to re-militarize. All it takes is one charismatic mad-man.....

...or a loss of confidence in the US's ability or willingness to provide protection.

The problem is your modern TV does not have enough horsepower to keep up with the cable card. Sure a TV *could* have that horsepower but when a consumer is presented with a $300 tv that plugs into their $10/mo cable box vs a $900 tv that allows you to forego the cable box you can bet consumers will pick the former option becuase it's less money upfront.

So what you're saying is that all these "smart TVs" that do have enough horsepower must support CableCard, right? Except they don't, so you're wrong.

With that said, doing a search for cablecard on various shopping sites brings up a plethora of devices under $200.

[Citation Needed]. I know of exactly two, the TiVo and the HDHomeRun. I own a HDHomeRun, and it was a bitch to set up because even Comcast customer support had never heard of it (at one point, they told me to call TiVo!).

No, they hate it because it's a massive pain in the ass to deal with.

The cable industry designed the CableCard standard themselves, so that's their own goddamn fault!

Yes, all of us programmers are smart enough to realize you could just trigger the auto-wake a minute or two early, but they don't do that... and that's not the fault of your cable company it's the fault of Motorola, ARRIS, Pace, and the other makers of the actual equipment. Their code is clunky and shit, and to top it off someone asswipe company probably has a software patent on 'waking up the box prior to the recording start time to minimize power consumption'. Yes, really.

Bullshit.

It is the cable company's fault precisely because the cable company, not the user, is choosing which cable boxes to buy and the cable company (unlike the user) doesn't give a shit about user experience. If cable boxes / DVRs were sold retail instead of rented there would be competition and the manufacturers would be forced to get their shit together!

Sure, I'll buy that. Obviously, that means there are tons of TVs that support "tru2way" CableCards these days, since it's been a standard for 6 years now.

Oh, wait...!