Posts by ronspencer314 7 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2016
Trump was way more of a wannabe Mussolini. A blazingly incompetent fascist dictator. The deep coordination between Trump and Murdoch's publishing empire also made the combination into a combination of Mussolini and Berlusconi. I'm not sure why the two are so in love with the worst of Italian leaders over the last century.
I ain't Spartacus,
At this point, many cars are pretty good at reading speed limit signs, and none of the cars I have used relied pm, or probably even bothered with, speed-limit databases. That said, speed limit signs can be deceiving, as some of them will have a bit "55mph" sign and small print saying that it applies only to trucks or vehicles hauling trailers, so cars can't take them too seriously until they can start reading the small print.
But, the cameras do work well for urban driving, and Teslas, at least since 2020, have been limiting such driving while using autopilot to 5mph or less over the detected speed limit.
So, the modern internet provides an incredibly convenient and easy way to perform denial of service attacks on discussions. You would think companies in the social media space would have come up with better responses to this kind of thing by now.
And back in the day, most Usenet groups were moderated. That would have stopped this kind of thing rather quickly with a lot less fuss. Algorithms are a long ways from being reasonable alternatives.
"Until and unless we observe some life Out There, the Drake Equation don't mean squat."
So, you can either start with an equation that organizes all the things that stand in the way of encountering a communicating civilization there might be, or you can just wait. What if you encounter exactly one other? What more have you learned, then?
It is certainly well understood that several of the terms in the equation are entirely unknown. But, so what? It is a useful exercise for thinking about these things that prevents thinking from going down other ratholes.
You don't need PRISM to filter one set of emails by whether they were sent to or from clintonemail.com and whether they are not in a list of emails you already know of from clintonemail.com.
That can be coded from scratch and tested in minutes, given nothing but a directory of email files, in a variety of computer languages. It's probably about five lines of PERL, or maybe 15 lines of python that you spent some time formatting to make it look nice.
Given the Weiner email batch, which is electronic and easily scanned, just generate the list of emails to and from clintonemail.com (by To:, Cc:, Bcc:, From: and Sent-From: headers). Then save the list of Message-Id: headers, and compare that list with the Message-Id: headers you already know of from the batch you have spent a year already looking at, and spit out the messages without a Message-Id: match. It is literally as easy as I am describing.
I would be surprised if the list it spits out was more than a few thousand. I wouldn't be surprised if the list was empty.
The idea that the FBI doesn't have any tools other than PRISM to do this is entirely laughable.
Yes, they would have had to wait until the court gave them the go-ahead. They had the go-ahead by last Monday. They should have been able to reach initial conclusions by late Monday afternoon.
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