greg1647545532

Anyone gonna show up at the statehouse on Jan 6 to protest the Steal with the Proud Boys? I'm thinking about it.

Maybe because nobody died? Barring any actual news about co-conspirators involving terrorism, which I don't think anyone expects at this point, the story got as much coverage as "man kills himself in RV explosion" warrants, IMHO. Maybe what you're asking is, Why isn't Fox News filling hours of coverage every day with baseless speculation about how this fits into their ANTIFA/BLM/#STOPTHESTEAL conspiracies? Maybe that's the REAL CONSPIRACY. I hope we can get to the bottom of this. Fox News is BLM confirmed.

Well on the one hand, we have an evil cabal of ne'er-do-wells spanning 4 major corporations conspiring to the steal the election. On the other hand, we have internet sleuths who have managed to crack the whole thing wide open in less than 48 hours. As always with conspiracy theories, the conspirators are good, like unimaginably good, but the guys at home in their underwear are even better. And isn't that the real attraction of conspiracy theories?

Tried and convicted, right? Eta: doesn't even matter, just say that this isn't SOP so I know you're not insane.

Only attempted murder, not racy enough. (I know, I know, conspiracy to commit murder, not attempted murder.)

Forget war crimes, how about murder in general? Any presidential pardons for murder prior to Trump? And he's up to, what, 6 now? Last minute presidential pardons are SOP, sure. Trump's list of pardons is anything but SOP. He's pardoning his friends, cronies, and war criminals. His list looks like nothing I've seen in my life. SOP, sure. Pretend this is normal if you want. But alas, all I can do is throw this on the pile of ways Trump is abhorrent. I'm all out of outrage at this point.

Didn't click those links but have any previous presidents pardon convicted war criminals?

And like everything else he does, Trump does the best bullshit pardons. Nobody does bullshit pardons better than Trump. Bigly.

About this statement, even hand-counted paper ballots can be "hacked." The "problem" with US elections in general is that votes must be anonymous. This seemingly simple requirement makes election security almost impossible from a technical perspective, for this reason -- how can Joe Voter verify that his vote was counted correctly, while also making it impossible for anyone holding his ballot to figure out who cast it? This is a difficult problem from a technical perspective (public/private keys, sure, but then how do you create/distribute/secure those for a massive, chaotic population?), but it gets worse from here. Voter intimidation is a real thing throughout history -- imagine union bosses forcing their union members to vote for pro-union candidates (happened), or anti-union capitalists forcing their employees to vote for anti-union candidates (also happened). If Joe Voter can verify his vote after the fact somehow, then someone can force Joe Voter to verify his vote in their presence. Think about how we've addressed this fundamental problem using paper ballots. You show up to vote, and are handed a paper ballot with a unique ID after verifying that you're eligible to vote. You sign your name in the voter roll, and the unique ID for your ballot is logged as now being a valid ballot. These two pieces of information must be kept separate -- the unique ID for a ballot and to whom it was given -- so that nobody can trace a ballot back to an individual voter. From a security perspective, this still works -- since you signed your name on the voter roll, you or someone pretending to be you can't vote again. Since the ballot ID was logged as being a valid ballot, nobody can just print up new ballots and stuff the ballot box. However, from a voter verification perspective, this doesn't work -- and intentionally so, because of the voter intimidation reason. Once you drop your ballot in the box and leave the polling location, you can never, ever verify how your vote was counted. Ever. This means nobody else can verify who you voted for, but it also means you can never be sure that your ballot was not switched out. If this is a deal breaker for someone, then god help them, because that person can never trust any US election going back to the history of the country. There's an element of trust here, even with strictly paper ballots. Yes, your ballot can be hand counted again and again and again. Yes, it's impossible for paper ballots to be "hacked" easily and quickly at scale, because paper is cumbersome. But you trust that when you drop your ballot in the box, it's going to be secured by non-partisan or bi-partisan election officials, handled securely, and not modified. You can never, ever verify that this is done, so you just have to trust the system. Long story long, even with paper ballots, it's entirely possible for election shenanigans. Voting machines do not create the problem. In some regards they make it worse, and in some regards they can make it better (because recounts and data analysis). If you have 10,000 paper ballots in a room and you send in 10 vote counters to count them, you'll get 10 different results. Paper ballots will get misplaced and then found again, or they'll get lost and never found. It's impossible to ever remove all oddities and mistakes from an election. Therefore, simply pointing out mistakes when they happen is beyond meaningless in making any broad proclamations about the outcome of an election. Simply pointing out that hacking is possible with electronic voting machines is beyond meaningless in making any broad proclamations about the outcome of elections, because it's also possible for paper ballots to be unknowingly modified. So if you're not making any insinuations about the validity of the election, which I still kinda think you are, and you're truly just saying that "anything on the internet can be hacked," then the response is, OK, so what? It's a meaningless revelation. Anything printed on paper can be changed. So what? Are all elections pointless because paper can be changed, or voting machines can be hacked? Of course not. Absent any actual evidence of widespread issues or fraud, the default position should be to trust that election officials are doing their best to run a fair election, even if mistakes might happen because elections are run by humans, and even if the process can never be 100% secure.

Damn, impressive. Old F indeed :-P

You started your IT career in 1972?

Well, you linked to a news article that linked to a forensic analysis that made bold claims that election officials lied, the election results in Michigan were not legally allowed to be certified, and therefore Biden is not the president. If you agree that that's insane, and "all you're saying" is that electronic voting machines have been clouded in cybersecurity concerns for decades, then... fair enough. Not much of a discussion there.

Of course, the voting machines were shit in 2016 as well... Voting machines have always been shit. That's why most states still allow for manual recounts. It's easy enough to do a post mortem and figure out how shit they were, and to make sure that they weren't shitty enough to affect the outcome. Some machines are more shit than others, and some state policies are more shit than others, but mostly it's an academic exercise and not cause for concern in the short term. We definitely should be addressing the problem as a nation, but we only seem to care right after elections for a few weeks and then we find something shiny to look at. Pointing out that voting machines are shit in any given election year, even pointing out specific cases where they were shit in any given election year, does not lead to the logical conclusion that Trump won in 2020. That seems to be that hope of a lot of clingers-on. "If machine X had a problem on Tuesday, then how can we trust this election?" Well we have methods in place to allow us to trust the election despite machine X having a problem on Tuesday, and if you don't trust those methods then maybe Clinton won in 2016 and we should have a big ol' do-over.

Before when? Before 2 days ago when this was released? The report was released on the 13th, you've linked to a news article from the 14th. Other news sources picked it up around the same time. We must follow the laws of linear time in this country. I read through the report, I will grant that it is much better sourced than all of the bullshit in the Kraken. While I believe that Russell Ramsland is clearly working on a partisan basis, and has needlessly added partisan, non-expert-opinion proclamations (e.g., declaring that county officials lied, a conclusion he's not qualified to make and has no place in a technical report), he also appears to be somewhat qualified. Not an ideal witness, given his prior blunders and his shoddy report writing, but again, better than all of the affidavits Sydney Powell was able to gather. And he actually got his hands on the equipment per a judge's order, so he's not just talking out of his ass like so many have. That said, this 68% figure... it's from one county, on one specific day that the ballots were recounted (Dec 6th), and probably has a perfectly reasonable explanation. The remedy here is to hand-count the ballots, which a judge has thus ordered and will take place on Thursday. Trump won the county of 16000 voters by 4000 votes, so it's literally impossible for this to make a difference in Michigan. Voting machines suck, and I fully applaud any and all efforts to shine lights on their weaknesses. At the same time, there's still no evidence that widespread voting machine issues changed the outcome of the election. Would you say that's a fair analysis, Mace?

LOL. Your intuition's track record is shit, my man.

And a small dick. Want my number?

Yeah, sorry, I should have put that in yellow. I would like to do the ALCAN at some point in my Miata, the previous owner (guy in his 70s) told me he did that trip in it and I think it would be awesome to "recreate" it in his car. Motorcycles for me are just for putzing down do the local wine store. And by motorcycles, right now I just mean my Vespa.

I'm going to use it to ride the AL-Can highway. I figured a 200cc thumper is ideal because of the gas mileage.

A little bit bigger but essentially yeah, it's like a TW200 with classic styling.

Well I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, but I'm looking at a 2019 Suzuki VanVan 200. I think they're cute. But since it's not a $20,000 bike I don't think there's a lot of margin in them anyway, and from what you said it doesn't sound like dealerships would need to take a loss on them to get them out the door.

All right, thanks for throwing some cold water on my dreams Kerry.

It seems that a lot of motorcycles languish in dealer showrooms. I'm looking at a certain model that has a few 2019 examples still listed at MSRP. What do dealerships actually expect to get for a "new" bike that's been sitting around for a couple of years?

That's awful. I'm gonna go sign up for a Parler account so I can tell them how awful it is.

From here:

Good call, just bought some gift cards for crimmus.