It went to Grand Jury and was no-billed.

A lawyer that can't work out a resolution for the issue at hand in TFA without going to jury trial is a fucking moron.

$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."

There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.

Who'd you side with? Your paying customer or some shady business that does nothing for you except cause you work without compensation?

Know how to hack SBCs? Be reasonable. How many are simply going to toss a random answer in to win something?

If the NSA relies on that kind of junk for data collection, their information level is worse than I'd have expected. And I don't expect anything good from them.

Your jurisdiction, unlike the traffic of the internet, is limited to your own country. And the countries you control. Which is a lot, I give you that, but by no stretch whatsoever it's all.

Also: Money trumps laws. Twice so if corporations are involved. If $evil_bastard_country wants to throw money at whoever sells them $supersecret_technology, corporations will not obey your law, they will race against each other to find the loophole. Which usually ends in the tech involved being developed abroad by those suspicious foreigners and then sold to the $evil_bastard_country.

The net effect for the US of such a ban is a loss of jobs, loss of knowledge and most of all valuable IT security information in the hands of whatever foreign country was smart enough not to be as stupid as you are, putting shackles on your own ITSEC industry.

Yeah, it's "on the interne"... erh... wait, can I start over?

Given the potential universe of wacky cults, from Scientology to the Heaven's Gate to Aum Shinrikyo to Jim Jones' People's Temple, it might make sense to think about the risks associated with cults.

Especially if you factor in that Heavens Gate attracted a lot of people with IT smarts and Aum Shinrikyo tried to sarin gas the subway. Even if they don't become mass phenomenons there's some risk that bizarre millennial thought coupled with above average intelligence could lead to some bad outcomes.

Why not one of those hobby turbines used as a generator?

This one:

http://www.mhzusa.com/MHZ-JetC... ...has a gearbox for driving the driveshaft of a boat, but maybe it could be adapted to run a generator. The specs show 8kw of power output and I think this is the smallest one they sell. Some of the others have power output in excess of 10kw.

Given the vast weirdness of the government bureaucracy and its penchant for contingency plans for all kinds of events, I wonder if contingency plans for some branch of the government trying to take over based on paranoid contingency plans has ever happened.

In that case the correct answer would be "moar boosters!"

Not to mention that sometimes the people doing covers of some songs are actually better or at least more entertaining than the original group.

Ya know, I wonder why them terrorists don't do that themselves. Why don't they blow up some nasty corporations instead of, say, subways and running events? They really suck at PR, do you have any idea what goodwill they could harvest if they blew up some corporate HQs?

If movie quality was any reason for a rise or decline in copying, infringing would have hit rock bottom years ago.

ISPs send out threatening letters to those that they find copying. ISPs see a 70% drop in copying.

In other words, a third of the people who got the "you filthy pirate" letter simply ignored it.

Well, duh. When I control your computer, I control what anything running on it can see, including myself.

But you're invited to write the better mousetrap. I'd be delighted to test it.