BC POLITICS
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

 Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!
Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.
This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."
I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.
Obviously back in 2000 and 2004 the voting machines where going to basically be windows xp boxes running some custom software (well, not in 2000)

What are they today? Linux on arm? God, are they android?
Maybe they've gone for the one true atm operating system.
OS/2!
I took a picture of a Diebold atm the other day, and it was running windows 10.
(possibly on arm, though.)
Personally I think we should run all our voting machines on a well understood, well characterized chip, which we've had nearly half a century to get familiar with.

The 6502!
It powered everything from the Atari 2600 to the NES to the Apple II to the Commodore 64.
A very versatile chip, and it's still manufactured today.
It also limits the ability of state-actors to execute complex attacks on it, because it's so simple.
Has the management engine been hacked with hidden invisible code?
Is there complicated glitch injection lurking in dark silicon?
Has the microcode been updated to calculate some things incorrectly?
No! It's a 6502! The chip is built on 8 um tech and the die looks like this and we know what every single bit of it does.
It'd be interesting to run voting machines like how the Vegas gaming commission runs slot machines.
At any point, inspectors can walk up to a machine and yank chips out to verify they're running the code they're supposed to.
Random spot checks of voting machines, with someone like John McMaster on hand to decap them and image the dies, to confirm they're the chips they claim to be.
Look, democracy can't work without sulfuric acid and electron microscopes
Anyway, if anyone has a voting machine they need to get rid of, let me know.
Georgia probably has a bunch they won't need by the end of the week.
The economics of voting machine companies must be really weird.
You basically have a product that no one needs, except every two years or so they need a couple million of them.
Do you even have stock during those lean years? Or do you just have them made in the run up to an election, then retrofit them all into ATMs and vending machines afterwards?
Do you redesign your system for every election? You've got plenty of time to iterate and improve... Or maybe you just hire all your programmers and engineers on short term contracts which end a week after the election
You've got 20 thousand employees, March to November on even years, and the rest of time you've got a dozen marketing people, a couple executives, and someone to make coffee for them.
Anyway I'm gonna go home and write my own voting software. It'll be open source and target the Apple II.
Of course, being an Apple II, you can only vote for Carter or Reagan.
Anyway, don't blame me, I voted for the doom slayer.
Vice President: Rick Astley
Party: MS-DOS
Campaign slogan: "You are huge! That means you have huge guts!"
Fun fact: the "swamp rabbit" that attacked Jimmy Carter, and possibly cost him the 1980 election?

That was Daisy, Doomguy's pet rabbit.
it turns out I don't need a voting machine, someone already did what I'd do (thanks to @alanc for alerting me to this)

https://t.co/kj4Y58Iebl

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foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
FUN
foone
foone
@Foone
So I was in the shower this morning, and started wondering:
Do you think the people implicated in Jeffrey Epstein's book had a general "Dead men tell no tales" slush fund?
Or did they have to separately organize his assignation?

I'm just imagining that on August 10th there's a big traffic jam of hired killers all running into each other like


some guy's sneaking out of a vent when a guard walks in, sees him, and goes "HALT!" and the vent guy goes "SHIT!", then notices the guard's ill-fitting suit. "Wait, ...Steve? Is that you?"

"Alex! I haven't seen you since the Reno heist! What are you doing here?"
"Same thing as you, looks like."

"I'll be damned. Well, I've already knocked out the guard, you want to let me finish this?"
"Yeah, go ahead. I'll get paid either way."
CULTURE
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foone
foone
@Foone
I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT


I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.


on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
Bad news:, everyone: I got my next keyboard


The front folds down


Honestly I've seen much worse keyboards


It's got buttons on top


The back is molded but has no functionality except the battery compartment
FUN
foone
foone
@Foone
1. in the beginning, browsers didn't have download statusbars
2. firefox got a browser statusbar extension. it was configurable and worked well
3. chrome cloned it without options and it didn't work as well

4. firefox realized chrome was faster and more secure at everything and therefore dropped extensions
5. now firefox doesn't have a download statusbar either

6. someone reimplements download statusbars in firefox's new web-extensions format. it's terrible because of the inherent limitations of the significantly less flexible and powerful extension format

7. CHROME WINS! (with its terrible download statusbar implementation which can't be fixed by users, because No Options and No Skins and No Extensions)

this is where we are now
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Werise
Werise
@We_Have_Risen
Happy New Years y’all...

I was going to take a little nap until morning but that can wait 😅

So much has bothered me but nothing more than how everything has been manufactured, everything...

We are literally living in an illusion...
POLITICS
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Alexandria Ocasio-Cort...
@Ocasio2018
All the challenges to Leader Pelosi are coming from her right, in an apparent effort to make the party even more conservative and bent toward corporate interests.

Hard pass. So long as Leader Pelosi remains the most progressive candidate for Speaker, she can count on my support.


I agree that our party should, and must, evolve our leadership.

But changed leadership should reflect an actual, evolved mission; namely, an increased commitment to the middle + working class electorate that put us here.

Otherwise it’s a just new figure with the same problems.

I hope that we can move swiftly to conclude this discussion about party positions, so that we can spend more time discussing party priorities: voting rights, healthcare, wages, climate change, housing, cannabis legalization, good jobs, etc.
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gwen frisbie-fulton
gwen frisbie-fulton
@gwen_fulton
Today in #GRAHAMNC I went to a permitted March to the Polls lead by Rev Drumwright and others. Starting at a Black AME church, Rev Drumwright started the march by asking folks what our intentions were. TO VOTE the crowd chanted. Its the last day of Early Voting in #NC.


We then marched, escorted by police, about half a mile towards the center of Graham, chanting and singing. We moved slowly, because of the many elderly folks and families with small children. Graham is a small town in #AlamanceCounty.


Alamance County is known as "No Chance Alamance" because of rampant inequality and a judicial system generally known to be hostile to Black and Brown folks, and poor white folks. We believe that we can change that at the polls this year.

As the march approached the center of Graham where a large Confederate statue is, we kneeled in rememberance of George Floyd. His neice and nephew were in the crowd.


Moments after we were done kneeling a police officer started to yell that we had to be off the street. Folks were confused because we had been escorted there and had a permit. I moved my child up onto the sidewalk. They started pepper spraying us. My child couldn't run because
POLITICS
Jean-Michel Connard
Jean-Michel Connard
@torriangray
so my eldest brother, who is a moron, has been playing soldier with his moron friends in the deserts of texas for the last year preparing for the collapse of civilization if biden won (lol). they were burying food and ammo stashes out in the desert, running drills, crazy stuff

this included getting a cb license so he could be their lifeline to other groups of white idiots when the cell towers all went offline. wouldn't want to violate federal law while communicating with your resistance groups after the fall of the federal government i guess.

anyways, you would assume given that they've been prepping for the end of the world for at least a year they're well situated to ride out the rolling blackouts right?

wellll

their plan for cooking and heating during an extended power outage was natural gas, but like a lot of homes their gas service is out. the food in their freezer and fridge is already toast due to the power outrages, so they're down to canned stuff, but there's a catch.

they can get into the pull top cans just fine, but the ones that require an opener? their only can opener is electric. so a good 3/4 of his canned food store is inaccessible to him unless he goes after it with a knife, which i sincerely hope he does.
POLITICS , PREPPERS
Jugal / \u091c\u0941\u0917\u0932
Jugal / जुगल...
@jugalrp
IMP 🚨 INVESTIGATION

India's lockdown was called world's largest, strictest etc. @ BBC, we wanted to know how the govt planned it.

So, what're we looking at?

Govt docs that reveal every department/agency who was consulted by PM Modi before imposing #lockdown.

#Thread


How did we access the docs? Well, for months my colleague Arjun Parmar and I filed RTI applications with the relevant govt depts - State & Centre. Hundreds in fact. We then filed appeals, then filed second appeals..phew!

Background - this day last year, India had less than 600 cases and nine deaths. Some European & Latin American nations (with way higher numbers) had imposed lockdowns.

China, with thousands of deaths and cases by March 2020, never imposed a national lockdown.

One more thing - India started monitoring and preparing it's response to coronavirus from January 8, 2020. It was repeatedly mentioned that none other than PM was personally leading the effort.

Let's start with what we've got now.

India's lockdown was imposed by an @ndmaindia order. Who heads NDMA? Prime Minister.

So we asked NDMA - who all were consulted before lockdown? Also, how many NDMA meetings did the PM attend? Their response.

NIL to both. Yes, NIL.
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Thread.

Recently, Harsimrat Kaur @HarsimratBadal_ claimed in parliament that Guru Tegh Bahadur protected the religion of Hindus despite of being a Non-Hindu. And Hindus owe a huge favor to others.

In this thread, I will show that Guru Tegh Bahadur was every inch a Hindu!

Let us begin with some contemporary sources.

Guru Tegh Bahadur visited the holy Triveni at Prayaga in 1662 CE.

This visit is documented in contemporary Bhat Vahi records.

Unlike those unpublished "bhat vahis", this one was published by Sikh historian Madanjit Kaur (1978)


This Bhat Vahi was signed by Guru Tegh Bahadur.

The content of the letter is particularly striking.

Guru Tegh Bahadur calls himself a devotee of Naina Devi.

Note. A devotee of Naina Devi. He does not mention Akal Purakh or Waheguru.


In the record, Guru Tegh Bahadur identifies himself as Sodhi Khatri by Varna and Kaushish by gotra.

This is exactly how the followers of orthodox Hinduism identify themselves to this date!


Further, Guru Tegh Bahadur appoints a brahmin purohit named Bhoj Raj.

He orders Sodhis of his line and all his Sikh followers to obey the aforementioned Brahmin Purohit.

This practice of appointing purohits is just what is referred to by some people as "Brahmanical Hinduism"
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Guruvayur Sri Krishna & Coconut with Horns.
#Krishnaleela
#Bhakthi
🕉
We’ve all grown up listening to stories of Shri Krishna. This one is a famous story of Shri Krishna in Guruvayur Temple, also called Dakshina Dwaraka.


There lived a villager who planted coconut saplings and had promised that he would offer the 'first coconut' from each of his coconut trees to "Guruvayurappan". When the trees started to yield coconuts, he collected the first coconut from all the trees in a sack 👇


and set forth to Guruvayur.

On the way he was stopped by a robber who asked all the items in the sack. The villager told the robber that the coconuts in the sack belonged to Guruvayurappan and so he was unable to hand it over.
@SriramKannan77 @Jayalko1


The robber with anger asked the villager "Is Guruvaurappan's coconut any different? Does it have horns ?".
Saying so the robber pulled the sack forcefully out of the villager's hand, and coconuts came out..👇


To their astonishment each and every coconut in the sack had horns! Even today, the coconut with horns are displayed in the temple for devotees to see.

Below Picture is not original, as we cannot take photos inside temple.
Hare Krishna
Guruvayurappa
🕉🕉🕉🕉🕉
Shubham
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One thing that goes unremarked about Wikipedia: the vast majority of the content was written over 12 years ago—which means (given turnover) that the editors dominant today were not directly involved in that creation.

Put another way, the editors who built the dominant nodes in this network...


...have little overlap with the ones who made this much more recent managerial flowchart.


Internet time runs at hundred-fold speed—the difference between the people who painted what's in the Uffizi, and the people in charge of keeping those paintings from deteriorating. Very different tasks, and (one presumes) very personalities as well. @PaulSkallas?
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Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

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Joanna Cherry:"Alex Salmond secured a concession that nothing in Scotland Act would preclude the people of Scotland from subsequently choosing an independent future. This is recorded in Hansard during second reading of Referendums (Scotland & Wales) Bill, May 21, 1997."

Donald Dewar said: “I should be the last to challenge the sovereignty of the people, or deny them the right to opt for any solution to the constitutional question they wished. For example, if they want to go for independence, I see no reason why they should not do so." JC

"In same debate Alex Salmond went on to emphasise that “… the Claim of Right referred to sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine a form of Govt best suited to their needs. It did not suggest sovereignty resides with English Members of Parliament." Joanna Cherry

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