I sense a great power here. Thousands of posts, hundreds of cookies and words full of wisdom. (bow) Thank you, master. Apologies for my worthless thread. And may the force be with you always.
No one said it was worthless, it's new here so there's something.
As for the post itself, the internals of computers do have the usb hubs/stacks locked down as hard as Chinese parts will allow them, but even the diodes and silicon they could throw at it have a breakdown voltage. Like in the post you link to you'll need to bypass them to actually fry anything.
As a person such as myself, the only limit here is the delivery, as in what is going to hold the power source. You could do a makeshift reverse joule thief, but it wont supply the voltage needed. The best bet, at leas on a budget is use capacitors, the ones found in disposable cameras. Maybe not a usb drive, but outfit the shell of an external hdd with a few 330V capacitors in series, rigged to blow with power and you got something grand.
Could be as simple as an npn running to a mosfet running to an opto or something that could handle it and built for suicide on opisite power rails, then maybe even you could fry the lipos dem blow up with some special handing lelz).
But then we digress into some handbooks meant for anarchistic reasons, even if we bring it into the 21st centry. No, we should stick with HackADay, seep it's wisdom and deviate only when needed.