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Topics - evensgrey

#1


They're unable to come up with anything more salacious to say than what the man's own lawyers and the mainstream media are saying.  (Certainly not all of the mainstream media, as some of them are obviously glad he can't implicate any more Democrats, but some of them are talking about just how incredibly convenient this is.)
#2
General Discussion / Feature or bug?
May 24, 2019, 11:47:22 AM
I guess this one REALLY depends on your point of view.

As many of you probably know, the newest version of Firefox, in addition to breaking a bunch of security and content control add-ons, also blocks autoplay of content on loaded pages.  As you would expect, this also applies to YouTube (which did at least have the courtesy that if you opened multiple YouTube video viewing pages, it didn't previously start the content until you brought up the page, now you actually have to click the button on the page to start playback, but this isn't the bug/feature).  The thing that seems to eb a feature to me, but YouTube might decide is a bug, is this:  If there's an ad-roll preceding the video, it appears that YouTube thinks this is running when it isn't.  It quickly proceeds to the end of the ad, including showing those static end-ad graphics and the timer in the lower left, and when the timer runs out, it goes to the second ad if there is one, which does the same, then goes to the video.

How long do you think it will take for YouTube to put paid to this?
#3
General Discussion / Huawei is suddenly everywhere
April 06, 2019, 04:08:24 PM
Has anyone else noticed that, about the time that several countries started to question the saneness of allowing an entity controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to supply infrastructure for cell phone networks (and the US has started criminal proceedings against company officers), Huawei is suddenly pushing their phones HARD on YouTube ads (which is especially interesting since YouTube is one of the many sites banned and blocked in China)?  I don't t hink I saw ANY of their ads on YouTube before this calender year, now they're EVERYWHERE!  They've been on YouTube for years (the oldest video on what appears to be their main channel is the "Huawei's IDEOS Smartphone Trailer" video, which is dated Aug 24, 2010), but until a few months ago I wasn't seeing any ads from them.

I particularly like this rather amusing ad (that you wouldn't get on TV in most countries, considering what isn't on screen from about 1:04 to 1:08).  A Chinese company can make a mighty entertaining ad when they don't have to care what the CCP thinks of it.

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#4
While watching this video from Tim Pool (yes, I'm two weeks behind in my YouTube videos, I've been busy, OK?)

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I realized Trumo and Hitler actually do have one significant action in common:  Both of them wrote books describing their methods long before they rose to political power.  The methods are mostly dissimilar, and the objectives almost entirely opposite
#5
I found an absolute goldmine of articles about her on the Australian Morning Mail.

First, there's this one about a really unfun investigation she's a possible target of:

http://morningmail.org/gets-worse-18c-user-cindy-prior/

There are accusations that her attorneys had access to non-public information that they shouldn't have, and the possibility that she or someone connected to her improperly accessed the student's records was the subject of an investigation.  That's a very bad thing for a former administrator to be on the sharp end of.

And yes, Cindy Prior did end uop the recipient of bankruptcy actions:

http://morningmail.org/requiem-old-crone/

Seems she hasn't paid the court-ordered compensation for the legal expenses of the students she targeted.

The trouble arising from this idiocy has spread:

http://morningmail.org/qut-students-sue-tricky-triggs/

The head of the commission that was handling the matter before it became a court case has been caught out deliberately misleading the public about what happened during her commission's investigation, so she's up for a libel suit by the students for claiming that the posts on Facebook were racially discriminatory.

An MP has gotten herself on the wrong end of a defamation suit as well:

http://morningmail.org/terri-butler-mp-sued-for-defamation-there-is-a-god/

Seems she couldn't not make the patently false claim that one of the accused students used a racial slur on a Facebook posting that was already proven to not be his.

This just never seems to stop providing one funny outcome after another, doesn't it?
#6
My YouTube subscriber feed seems to be mostly Tim Pool, TheQuartering, and Sargon of Akkad these days, and they seem to be mostly about the crazy nonsense coming from the dieing digital media companies and how the silicon valley tech firms are effectively conspiring against nonconformers.  And this is annoying because it's important enough that I need to watch them but I really don't want to have to.  Ah, the wonders of living through a media singularity...

Anyway, the interesting thing I've noticed is these videos are not just monetized, but HEAVILY monetized.  One of Sargon's videos at about 15 minutes had three different internal ads, and an opening and closing ad.  Ten minutes from Tim Pool had opening, closing, and internal ads as well.  This is pretty consistent:  YouTube has gone back to putting ads on 'controversial' creators.

Now, since I'm watching through a TOR connection, I'm getting a pretty random sample of ads (Ad Sense is clearly using the apparent IP to select ads, not the YouTube login info, since my login is specifically set that I'm in Canada, but I'm getting ads in and for various Easter European languages and places and services, like a Croatian tourism ad and various language localizations for Panzer Rush), but the ads are there.  They must be coming in because in those areas, none of the content on these channels is the least bit controversial.
#7
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000167-86a0-df8f-adff-affda6d90001

So, there's the December 6 ruling.  The court has ruled that the questions about whether Hillary attempted to evade FOIA requirements, and questions as to the legal adequacy of searches through emails the State Department had access to, and questions about the good or bad faith in earlier attempts to settle the FOIA case are all valid for further Discovery and review by the court as to the adequacy of the responses to Discovery.  The judge also noted that either the State Department officials involved were negligent and incompetent, or they may have colluded with Justice Department officials to stop the inquiry and deceive the court.  (We're looking at one pissed-off judge, here.  This is the second most angry I've ever seen a US Federal Judge, the most being the Dover case in 2006 where the judge openly accused two defense witnesses of perjury.)

Don't forget that not only could FOIA evasion constitute a felony, there are also potential charges under the Federal Records Act and the Espionage Act.   The last are the very charges Comey incorrectly declared Hillary Clinton absolved from because she didn't have the intent to violate the law, which is not a requirement for failing to properly and securely handle classified information under the Espionage Act, and neither is that anything was actually accessed by someone not authorized to do so.  All that is required is that the documents were handled in a manner that did not meet the security requirements of the classification level of the document.
#8
A video from Michigan attorney Steve Lehto

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describing the response of SCOTUS to oral arguments about a civil forfeiture case where a man's car was seized for him selling drugs worth ~1% of the value of the car.

The State Attorney General articulated the standard legal view at the moment, based on the last SCOTUS ruling on the matter (which is that they could, in principle, seize your car because you were speeding by 5 mph) and, apparently, the JUSTICES LAUGHED AT HIM.  They aren't framing this as a question of due process, but of excessive fines, so it won't make Civil Forfeiture go away no matter what they eventually rule, but it could force proportionality between the alleged offense and the forfeiture (which might at least eliminate forfeitures where there is no actual allegation of any specific crime).
#9
This time Fran Blanche needs some cash to help her move Fran Lab (which is both her business and the location where she shoots most of her YouTube videos) to a new location, as the developers who recently bought the building she's currently in are giving her the 'Brooklyn Shove'.

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And I'm again late to the party because her moving go Fund Me is already, after 2 days, at $17,390 of its $10,000 goal.

https://www.gofundme.com/franlab-needs-a-new-home

(For those not familiar with Fran's work, she is, among many other things, one of the greats in guitar effects pedals, and also a leading expert on the computer systems actually flown on Project Apollo, even having corrected some errors in previous official documentation.)
#10
It appears YouTube has instituted a new way of concealing videos.  This video by Sargon on his The Thinkery channel

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did not appear in subscriber feeds (I know it didn't appear in mine), and doesn't appear in the video list of the channel page either, and has no thumbnail, despite not being in any identifiable limited state.  I checked, and you can like/dislike, comment, and it even came up with an ad when I viewed it.

Sargon thinks this is a sort of shadowban feature like Twitter uses against people it just wants to suppress without admitting to it.  You might want to check your video lists to see if anything you've posted is missing in this way.
#11
I just got a robocall from a mayoral candidate in Kingston, Ontario, which is about 150 miles from where I live.  How far away have the rest of you gotten political robocalls from?
#12
General Discussion / OK, this is one funny prank
October 06, 2018, 05:25:35 PM
Not being a fa of this sort of art or a prank aficionado, I'd never heard of Banksy, but this is really funny:

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/banksy-painting-self-destructs-auction-trnd/index.html

I was checking CNN to see if the confirmation had gone through and saw this headline about a painting that self-destructed immediately after being sold for $1.4 million at auction at Sotheby's.  Apparently, Banksy is known for pulling stunts, in this case, building a remotely-activated shredder into the painting's frame and having it turned on right after the sale.
#13
Something amusing turned up in my spam folder today:

QuoteHow are you today.
The below payment has been awarded to you by the Nigeria
Government/World Bank to compensate you on the past experience had with
the
Nigeria scammers.
I write to inform you that we have already sent you 5,000.00
through
Western Union as we have been given the mandate to transfer your
full
compensation payment total sum of Five Hundred Thousand Euros
(EUR) 500,000.00 via Western Union by the Government.
I have on a good authority email you the MTCN and senders
details to enable you pick up the first 5,000.00,EUR and confirm receipt
to
us
so as to enable us wire the next EUR5,000.00 by tomorrow and subsequent
ones since we can only send EUR5,000.00 a day.

Please pick up this information and get to any western union in
your
country to pick up the 5,000.00 EUR and email the Western Union
outlets in charge of the payment so that they could send you another
payment
tomorrow.

I don't think I've seen this applied to the old Nigerian Letter Scam before.

There's more to the email, but what I'm not seeing is how they get money from me.  (The idea of using Western Union is amusing, to.  This would take over three months to complete if they were going to actually do it, and cost around $5000 to do.  To move money outside the Telex system.)
#14
Now there's these bits of kit:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/control

With free software (or $299 software allowing easy collaboration) and a starting pricepoint of about a thousand dollars for the simplest control panel, which looks like it should be quite adequate for HDTV-level projects.  Maybe not up to easy handling of full movie-quality work, but if you're getting the proper hardware kit for editing such movies, a $30k control panel is not likely to be seen as being outside the reasonable.
#15
OK, so I'm watching this video on trivia from Big Trouble in Little China,

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and suddenly this ad switches in...

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...that's 5 minutes longer than the video it was inserted into.  Why would anyone mistake that for something anyone is going to watch?
#16
This is a film made in 1969 by Oak Ridge National Laboratory about the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, one of the first experimental reactors for testing components of a full thorium reactor fuel cycle.

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#17
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Well, that's really something, isn't it?

Louis Rossmann has a video where he and an auto mechanic friend of his comment on this situation

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and his friend explains that removing the broken screws is actually a fairly straightforward (although somewhat tedious and exacting) task with the right tools and techniques, which Apple Stores clearly don't have, given what they did to the mount.
#18
General Discussion / Sargon needs some help
May 04, 2018, 04:54:35 PM
Sargon miscalculated a bit financially with all his recent travels (apparently his travel was paid for by someone else, but not all the sundries that go along with travel) and he's not got the money to continue defending the law suit.  Here's his gofundme for it:

https://www.gofundme.com/sargon-of-akkad-legal-fund

He's doing extremely well on this, he asked for £40,000 and has well over £50,000 in 9 hours as of this writing, so he should be fine for now, but some extra cushion in these things is never a bad thing.
#19
General Discussion / WTF
April 21, 2018, 06:30:31 PM
OK, I'm quite drunk and only half-way through this, but WTF AM I LISTENING TO?

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#20
OK, here's the transcript from his 20/20 interview:

http://abcnews.go.com/Site/transcript-james-comeys-interview-abc-news-chief-anchor/story?id=54488723

And I think he just managed to talk himself into a stay in Federal prison.  How?  He's claiming there's evidence, that he knew about while still FBI director, that Trump attempted to obstruct justice.  The reason this is a problem for COMEY (much more so than Trump, because nobody seems to really think what Trump did was obstruction except partisans like Comey) is that if he actually thinks he witnessed President Trump attempt to obstruct justice while he was FBI Director, and didn't report it to the Justice Department (which we already know he didn't) then he violated 18 U.S. Code § 4 - Misprision of felony.  (There's a fun one for you, knowing about the commission of a felony and not reporting it to appropriate authorities with all possible speed is, in itself, a felony under the usual definition of 'felony' used in US Federal law.)

(I also find it rather amusing there's a mention of his wife telling him to not be 'the torture guy,' probably in early 2004, when he later endorsed color of law cover for torture in 2005.)

(Incidentally, I think I found a provision the covers Hillary's private email server, 18 U.S. Code § 1924 - Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material at

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1924?qt-us_code_temp_noupdates=0#qt-us_code_temp_noupdates

It specifies an offense involving unauthorized removal of classified documents or materials to store them in an unauthorized place.  Since Hillary definitely lacked authority to remove the classification from materials classified by any Department other than State, and she intentionally stored them in her unauthorized private email server, it sure looks like she violated that one hundreds of times.)