When will the IRS start issuing jack boots to all agents?

Why not jackboots? ATF and Secret Service are also part of Treasury.

ATF has been the classic "jackbooted thugs" for most of their existence - ever since they got spun out of Internal Revenue in . They're "the revenuers" that enforced alcohol taxes with machine guns even before they and the FBI burned down a church camp in Waco over a $200 tax bill and shot a man's son and wife on Ruby Ridge over a $500 claim, inspiring the original NRA "Jackbooted Thugs" ad.

Secret Service has a history of incarcerating people and holding them incommunicado if they think they might be possibly be a threat to a high government official. (I knew one '60s radical who BECAME a '60s radical, a nice Jewish girl who, when still underage, was playing spy/counterspy with a friend in Grosse Point using their new toy CB walkie-talkies, totally unaware that JFK was passing through the Detroit area on his way to speak at a university graduation ceremony 50 miles away. Scooped off the street, thrown in a cell overnight, no mention of why, no phone call, no notice to parents, ...) They also harassed someone who, during the Vietnam protests, wrote "Piss on JFK" on a postcard. Reason given: "If enough people pissed on him it would kill him."

Why should the IRS be left without appropriate footwear?

I was expecting the CDC to pull this stunt, but the IRS?

They're just getting a head start on Obamacare - which they will be administering.

Ten million people's medical records? They now have a mandate to have EVERYBODY's.

In the vacuum tube era they'd get stacked up to tens of thousands of volts, and they went even higher for particle accelerators (which are a big fancy vacuum tube when you get right down to it).

There's no inherent limit to how many capacitors you can put in series.

Yes, the "balancing tricks" do cause a LOT of leakage. Series caps are more for storage times measured in seconds or fractions thereof than weeks.

The second experiment added some Linux laptops that ping-flooded to generate lots of network activity. The second experiment showed a clear increase in plant "damage" /lack of development.

Were the laptops located so that their fans wouldn't be blowing hot air past the seeds, heating them and sucking the moisture out of them?

... once you've built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies.

You can watch it go immediately insane from sensory deprivation.

Modeling the brain is not enough. You have to model enough of its supporting systems and environment to keep it functioning.

... a laptop that isn't connected to the internet, which is erased every time it is powered on ...

I hope it's erased every time it's powered OFF, as well. (That way nobody can seize it while it's off and sniff the disk.)

Note the "as well". You still want to erase it on the way back up, just in case the power failed before the shutting-down erase is complete.

The issue I have is the discrepancy in amounts. $7500 is targeted to make it just cheaper than dealing with a lawyer. The $150k is statutory damages designed to deal with commercial infringement.

To quote Wikipedia:

Lawmakers will provide for statutory damages for acts in which it is difficult to determine a precise value of the loss suffered by the victim. This could be because calculation of a value is impractical, such as in intellectual property cases where the volume of the infringement cannot be ascertained.

In the United States, statutory damages [for copyright infringement] are set at a minimum of $750 per work, to a maximum of $30,000.

It seems to me that suits on torrent-distributed "pirate copies" need to make a distinction between seeders and others in the network.

A torrent is a tree distribution. When it's working as intended:

  - The person who seeded the torrent committed a deliberate action that made the work available to everybody in the network who eventually made a copy.

  - The others in the network, on the average, only hosted the down load of one copy. For every person (including the seeder) who hosts the download of one copy, there is one person who didn't host any actual downloads at all, for every person who hosted two downloads there are two who didn't host any, and so on. Sure the early players host a few more downloads - but the late players download none and the average is still one per participant. (That's what makes torrents useful despite the slow upload speeds of most home internet connections.)

Granted it's hard to tell how many downloads any given network participant actually hosted. But if he had not chosen to join the network and download a copy for himself (with software that also made downloads available), the remaining participants would have still gotten their copies. The number of infringing copies made would be reduced by only one. (On the other hand, if a seeder had not seeded, there would be no infringing copies.)

So it seems to me that, by the internal logic of the "statutory damages" law, it could certainly be argued that the seeder enabled some unknown large number of copies, and thus appropriate to apply the high-end damages on the seede. But to apply that to the other participants in the tree - who averaged one copy (effectively: their own) apiece - would be coming to the well repeatedly. The right penalty for the other participants would be the statutory minimum - or even less, because you can show that, with an average enabling of one copy, they don't fit the "unknowable but large number" model that the "statutory damages" legislation contemplates.

Of course there's also the issue of the torrent NOT working as intended: It's possible to configure a client in a "leach" mode, where it only downloads, and this means non-leaching participants host an extra download for each "leach", who doesn't host his "average of one".

But the default configuration is non-leach. How many participants change that (or are otherwise unable to host)? If it's half, the average for the remainder is still only two hosted downloads. If it's 75% they're hosting four. With a statutory minimum penalty of $750 and a $10/copy work you'd have to have 87% leaches to cross break-even. (Aren't there studies of the leach ratio? This is a civil trial under a "preponderance" standard so IMHO such studies should be admissible.) Meanwhile, for every two non-leaches there'd be 13 who could truthfully claim "I didn't host ANY downloads. I shouldn't even be in court."

IANAL. But I'd love to see how a judge would handle a claim that seeders might be due the maximum penalty but every other participant either the minimum or perhaps three times the retail price.

THANK you for that correction.

I got the story from the voiceover on a video made from what was apparently Rosenquist's film. Don't know if I misheard/misremenbered it or if it included the misattribution of the film to Johnston (or Blackburn).

The question wasn't why the grandfather poster couldn't kill misbehaving mandatory apps on his iPhone.

He was wondering why the poster couldn't kill a misbehaving iPhone support app on his Microsoft Desktop, only restarting it when he actually needed to use it.

"The aim was to recreate, in true-to-life detail, what happens when a volcanic eruption punches through Earth's crust."
Hugh, it seems to me the aim an excuse to play with explosives.

Especially since it DOESN'T model eruptions - especially the explosive kind.

One of the major martyrs to science is the geologist who died in the most recent explosive eruption of Mount Saint Hellens. It was known that some mountains explode, and that this was the usual mode for this volcano. But it was a big mystery HOW they exploded.

He was too close to escape when the action started. But he had a (film) camera with him. So he took a series of photos as the mountain went off, then wrapped his camera in his backpack and jacket before the devastation got to him. His camera was recovered, the film developed, and running the series of stills as a movie made the mechanism utterly clear. It was an "Of COURSE!" moment.

In this case there is a LOT of gas pressure under the mountain. This pressure, not just the buoyancy of the lava, is much of what is pushing the mountain up. Meanwhile, the weight of the mountain is what is holding the gas down, at enormous pressure.

Eventually the mountain is pushed up enough that a rock avalanche starts on one side. This releases some of the pressure, which lets the gas push the mountain up further, making it shrug much more of the side off in an enormous rock slide. One side of the mountain slides away. This leaves the gas pressure held down only by the remaining rock, which is insufficient for the task. Before the rock slide is more than about a quarter of the way down the gas is blasting the remaining rock into fine dust and launching it into the stratosphere -(as well as sideways, so goodbye neighborhood). Essentially the whole mountain goes away, leaving a crater where rebuilding the mountain for the next cycle begins.

Let's see you model THAT with explosives! (Hint: If you're throwing rocks you didn't use enough explosives.)

Lesser eruptions have a number of models, depending on things like the composition of the lava (including how much gas is bubbling out of it, like soda fizz once the lava makes it to near atmospheric pressures). Explosives don't do those justice, either.

How long before we farm transfusions from a donor critter or lab grown spleen vat.

Never.

It's a protein. Just splice the appropriate sequence into a plasmid, inject it into an e-coli bacterium (of an "enfeebled" strain to keep it from going feral)), and grow its offspring by the vatload, producing purified product by the gallon.

This procedure is one of the earliest commercialized pieces of genetic engieering.

Cisco IronPort. We use it and rely on it heavily for secure emails regarding pii for our pension fund.

Then I can't (won't) read any email you send me.

To read Cisco IronPort mail you must install software from Cisco.

To install the software from Cisco you must sign an EULA - which makes a BIG POINT of being a binding contract.

The EULA has anti-reverse-engineering terms that, were I to sign them, would (IMHO) make me unemployable in the computer security field.

Therefore I will not install the software.

Therefore I cannot decrypt "secure" email you send me.

Therefore I will not do business with your company.

Do you REALLY want to FORCE your clients to CONTRACT WITH A THIRD PARTY and SIGN AWAY THEIR RIGHTS in order to exchange important email with you?

These days, no ID = no vote.

Not in my state. They cannot legally ask for ID at a polling place (not that it'd do any good if they did as you don't even need to be in the country legally to get a DL in New Mexico).

And you have a lot of election fraud, don't you.

This is one of the reasons the Electoral College, rather than national popular vote, to elect the President is a good idea. It limits the fraction of the vote margin that cheaters in one state can achieve.

It also limits the scope of recounts. Remember the mess a couple years back in Florida? Imagine if they had to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY in a close election...

The social security database in use for many years already has names, dates of birth, etc.

Worse: The medicare I.D. is the social security number followed by one letter as a "check digit".

That means every medical provider (Including places like Costco if you get a flu shot there) have your name, address, birth date, and SS# in their database and the hands of the clerks. A genealogy site profvides the mother's maiden name and identity theft is a snap. Talk about a target-rich (and predator-rich) environment.

Oldsters are observed to have a substantially higher rate of identity theft. Researchers noticing that, of course, have blamed the oldsters for allegedly being less competent at guarding their identities.

Getting Medicare to assign you qa non-SS$ I.D. is not an option. Turning down Medicare coverage is an option only for the very rich: Private insurance deducts the amount Medicare WOULD have paid from their benefits for anyone eligible for Medicare, whether they have registered for Medicare or not.

Whitehouse online petition, anyone?

ITAR also says that exporting blueprints and technical data related to an item requires an export permit in the same way that exporting the item does.

And this puts the ITAR rules in direct conflict with the First Amendment. Guess which wins: The Constitution, or a law?

This government action has just brought the conflict into scope for litigation and created a person with the necessary standing to bring the suit.

He's a law student, too.

(Also a self-proclaimed "anarchist libertarian, which I think is a slap at some of the recent anti-libertarian mouth-foaming among the Lamestream Media).

There are several well-funded (mainly by millions of gunnies' individual contributions) organizations whose charter includes supporting such suits. They've had considerable success lately - such as DC v. Heller (confirming 2nd Amendment protects an individual right) and McDonald v. Chicago ("incorporating" it, i.e. applying it to the states and their subdivisions.)

I think the government just opened themselves up to another 2nd Amendment suit. B-)