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Posted by CaptainJistuce

If the US was trying to take out Venezuela, we would've DONE IT by now. The country's problems are genuinely self-inflicted, and fairly well-documented as such.
Also, the CIA probably wanted the aluminum equipment intact and usable.

Their dictator-in-chief is an inept, ham-fisted, and violent buffoon and his clumsy attempts to manipulate the mood of the people are doing more damage to his position than the CIA ever could.

According to the Venezuelan government, the blackout was an act of sabotage masterminded by the opposition leader, which is standard practice for Maduro. Every time anything goes wrong, it is the opposition's fiendish plan to destroy the country and sell it to the capitalist pigdogs. And every time something goes right for the opposition, Maduro makes sure something goes wrong in the country.

Would Venezuelans support foreign military intervention?

My research in Venezuela suggests otherwise.

All credible polling in Venezuela says that most Venezuelans desperately want Maduro out. But that does not necessarily mean they are open to desperate measures.

In November 2018, I worked with Datanálisis, one of Venezuela’s most respected polling companies, to add several questions about about military intervention and potential negotiations to its nationwide tracking poll.

When asked whether they would support “a foreign military intervention to remove President Maduro from his position,” only 35 percent said yes — hardly the warm welcome predicted by advocates. More than half — 54 percent — would reject such an operation.

Severely short of troops to spare, the British and French requested that President Wilson provide American soldiers for the campaign. In July 1918, against the advice of the United States Department of War, Wilson agreed to the limited participation of 5,000 United States Army troops in the campaign. This force, which became known as the "American North Russia Expeditionary Force"[15] (a.k.a. the Polar Bear Expedition) were sent to Arkhangelsk while another 8,000 soldiers, organised as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia,[16] were shipped to Vladivostok from the Philippines and from Camp Fremont in California.

After coming to power, the RCC government took control of all petroleum companies operating in the country and initiated a process of directing funds toward providing education, health care and housing for all. Despite the reforms not being entirely effective, public education in the country became free and primary education compulsory for both sexes. Medical care became available to the public at no cost, but providing housing for all was a task that the government was not able to complete.[6] Under Gaddafi, per capita income in the country rose to more than US$11,000, the fifth-highest in Africa.[7] The increase in prosperity was accompanied by a controversial foreign policy and increased political repression at home.[5][8]

Muammar Gaddafi, the deposed leader of Libya, was captured and killed on 20 October 2011 during the Battle of Sirte. Gaddafi was found hiding in a culvert west of Sirte and captured by National Transitional Council forces. He was killed shortly afterwards. The NTC initially claimed he died from injuries sustained in a firefight when loyalist forces attempted to free him, although a graphic video of his last moments show rebel fighters beating him and one of them sodomizing him with a bayonet[2] before he was shot several times as he pleaded for his life.[3]

The interim Libyan authorities decided to keep Gaddafi's body "for a few days", NTC oil minister Ali Tarhouni said, "to make sure that everybody knows he is dead."[30] The body was moved to an industrial freezer where members of the public were permitted to view it [31] until 24 October.[32] Video shows Gaddafi's body on display in the center of an emptied public freezer in Misrata.[33] Some people traveled hundreds of kilometres to see proof that Gaddafi was dead; one said, "God made the pharaoh as an example to the others. If he had been a good man, we would have buried him. But he chose this destiny for himself."[34] One reporter observed gunshot residue on the wounds, consistent with shots at close range.[19]

Posted by BearOso
Except in this case there's no organized militarized rebellion. There's no rebel fighters, the opposition is pacifist. The US is only denouncing Maduro and attempting to provide supplies for the general population. There's no incentive to invade except humanitarianism. Since you're hinting toward this angle: the oil supplies aren't needed and aren't sufficient. Mismanagement and stupidity, not especially tyranny, are ruining the country.

Posted by wertigon

Uh yeah, could you provide a more updated map showing everything post-WWII?

Because I promise you, I could give you a similar map for the UK, though most of those influences would be pre-WWI. After WWI, british economy tanked and they had severe trouble keeping the empire together. In WWII, the empire collapsed completely, which is why Australia and India now are their own countries (among many other things).

Does that mean we should crucify the UK for everything that happened over a century ago?

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government expanded the geographic scope of its actions to foster regime change, as the country struggled with the Soviet Union for global leadership and influence within the context of the Cold War. Significant operations included the U.S. and UK-orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, the anti-communist purge in Indonesia, and support for the Argentinian Dirty War, in addition to the U.S.'s traditional area of operations, Central America and the Caribbean. In addition, the U.S. has interfered in the national elections of many countries, including in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s to keep its preferred center-right Liberal Democratic Party in power using secret funds, in the Philippines to orchestrate the campaign of Ramon Magsaysay for president in 1953, and in Lebanon to help Christian parties in the 1957 elections using secret cash infusions.[3] The U.S. has executed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000.[4]

Posted by tomman
I do get your point, but that's the same excuse that everybody and his dog is using to do nothing ("we must stay aside" - that's not like the '80s USA which was willing to get rid of commie pigs far less dangerous than Maduro - the current one only worries about TERRIRISM™ and doesn't give a fuck about what happens to us because we aren't a threat to anybody but ourselves, and all we got from the international community is token acts which really don't help us at all), which clearly is a unsustainable position in the short run. As I've just said: the next blackout likely will be permanent and most of us will not survive the ensuing chaos.

Posted by tomman

While we get that we are likely to repeat the same errors if we get rid of Maduro (and trust me: it will happen because 90% of the Venezuelans are complete and absolute morons; the other 10% are waiting its turn to take advantage of the situation to satisfy their own personal agendas), we STILL may have hope of actually getting back into the rails. Venezuela isn't exactly an Arab hellhole full of hateful people willing to kill between themselves (YET!), but if we let this shit continue without an effective and HARD solution, we might as well become one, and if that happens, well... all bets are off. America only has room for one Cuba, not two.

Remember: we are also becoming the next drug cartel haven too. Mexican mafias don't really like the competition...

Posted by tomman

If Venezuelans are dumb enough to let another commie asshole to fuck us hard in the ass, well, it's time to send the nukes. There are too many countries in the world, noone will miss a tiny piece of desolated land in their next Geography quiz.

I've lost all hopes at this point. I don't even want to talk at my family anymore (it's split between "I don't care about you anymore", "Maduro will leave the power in the next 3 days, BE POSITIVE!!!" and a lone communistoid that still defends the ill-fated actions of the regime). I've developed a state of anxiety that I never expected to have in my life. I don't even have a outlet to express my frustrations anymore (much less with my faulty DSL which will never -and I repeat, NEVER- get repaired)... except for this messageboard, and even I understand that out of all places, this is not the best place for it.

OH FUCK, POLITICS REALLY PISS ME OFF!!! Politics destroyed my career, disbanded my family and friends, nuked my incomes, are leaving me to starve to death while I fight with this brokenass laptop that didn't even wanted to turn on after 4 days of being without power, and definitely have pretty much ruined my life, my hopes and dreams, and my expectations for the future.

No matter the outcome of all this, I'll never have respect for anyone engaging into a politics career anymore in my life.

• When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards.

Posted by Screwtape
Old news, but Stay classy, Pale Moon. (why Pale Moon does not have an OpenBSD port)

Posted by Screwtape

Really? The guy who starts off the very first post with "You will..."? Not even "Hello, I'm a fan of the Pale Moon browser, and I noticed you're doing this particular thing that the project leaders hate" or "Thanks for helping to get Pale Moon working on your platform, but we've got some problems with the way you're going about it"?

Regardless of the legal or technical merits of his position, that's not the way to get people to want to help you.

Posted by Screwtape

That's definitely a problem - there's always more jerks in the world, and it can be very difficult to give the next person the benefit of the doubt when the last five people you interacted with were assholes, just ask anyone who's worked retail.

That's really part of the job, though. Some people have the emotional maturity and support network to handle that kind of work, and other people don't, in the same way that some people have the upper-body strength and fitness levels required to haul loads of bricks around all day, and other people don't. If you have those things, you can do the job well, but if you don't have them you're going to do the job poorly, or do OK for a little while and then burn out. If you can't do the job, there's no shame in finding a more appropriate way to contribute.

Posted by Screwtape

All that to say, if the Pale Moon developers and their proxies can't send legal requests in a polite manner, they should find somebody who can do that on their behalf, for their own good, and the good of the project. Heck, if they'd just called their lawyers instead of creating that GitHub issue, the resulting cease-and-desist letter would probably have been more pleasant to read.

Posted by Screwtape

There's also the people who take browsers like Firefox and sell "subscriptions", where for an monthly fee they'll send you a copy of the Firefox installer and tell you they've scanned it for viruses. There's even people who will build Firefox with an insecure configuration, or with nefarious CA certificates bundled, or with spyware, and pass it off as the real deal.

Sure, you and I probably wouldn't fall for such tricks, but with a product as widely used as a web-browser it's good to have some level of protection; protection that trademark law was invented to provide.

Posted by Screwtape

It's not just browsers, either; I remember hearing about a bunch of punks who would take every VBA-M release, hex-edit the binary to replace the original attributions with their own names, then upload it to their own website with changelogs like "improved HDMA timing accuracy" and "higher-fidelity colour reproduction for mode-3 graphics", and ridicule the original VBA-M team for being unable to provide such improvements themselves.

It's enough to make a man want to invent a device to punch people in the face over the internet.

Posted by Screwtape

I'll grant that TPB probably provided more practical freedom than the FSF in the time they were around, but where are they now?

Posted by Screwtape

TPB was an attack on the excesses of copyright law from the outside, the FSF is an attack from within. TPB had much success with little effort, but the System brought its resources to bear, the System squashed TPB, and the System will be immune to such attacks in the future (why download MP3s when you have Spotify? Why download movies when you have Netflix? Why download an office suite when you have Office365.com?). The System cannot attack the FSF, because the FSF is made of the same stuff, so it would just be attacking itself.

Posted by Screwtape

Honestly, if anyone wants to make any kind of techno-social change, investing the money in India or Africa or somewhere like that is probably a far smarter move than doing something in the USA or Europe, calcified as they are in their existing systems. If you really have a better idea, you have a better shot at getting it adopted in a culture that's not already heavily invested in an alternative. For example, the ideas behind Kaizen were invented by Americans, who couldn't get them adopted in America because American industry was in love with Ford-style mass production. It wasn't until those ideas came to Japan post-WWII that they were successful, because Japan's industry was largely destroyed during the war and they were ready to try something new.

Posted by Screwtape
Sophie Wilson - The Future of Microprocessors - in this talk from 2016, one of the designers of the original ARM1 CPU discusses how CPUs got ten thousand times faster over the course of her lifetime, and why they aren't going to get much faster than they are now. Among other things, she discusses Moore's Law, Amdahl's Law, and has a cool "power density" chart that plots Intel CPUs from the 80386 to the Core i7 against "hot plate", "nuclear reactor" and "rocket nozzle".

Spoiler: Intel hit "hot plate" shortly after the Pentium Pro, but they chickened out before the P4 could reach "nuclear reactor".

Posted by tomman
Before my DSL dies (again), here is it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YAtq4knigW74p8dA1PBZhCx_JBG9TXlrvi-ylQKatuM/edit?usp=sharing

Yes, that's a Google Docs link. Turns out that it's far easier to force YOU -the reader- to download Google's shitpile of Javascripts rather than dealing with Excel's proprietary HTML junk or LibreOffice HTML export artifacts - by default it produces nothing resembling a spreadsheet; if you install Writer2XHTML, the results are far better but the resulting HTML requires A LOT of cleanup due to redundant CSS junk that it's a PITA to deal with on such a document. Plus, clown computing is useful for once (also, yay backups~)

Posted by tomman

But... for some stuff, things are not so easy. Dubbed anime is a good example, particularly for languages not named "US English". Sure, for most licensed titles you can simply buy the DVD/BD and rip those as many times as you want (for out of print titles you may have to resort to eBay and its legion of scalpers and crazy collector nutjobs), but in some markets we aren't that lucky to get releases on physical media of any kind. I have a 1TB HDD dedicated solely for my Latin American Spanish collection - most of it is irreplaceable because of many reasons ("Sony killed Animax LA" being the #1, while "FBI seized Megaupload" and "people in Latam hates torrents" being #2 and #3, respectively), and recently when I emptied an spare HDD with old backups, I decided it would be a good idea to repurpose it to backup the (in some cases already failing) collection of DVD-Rs with years of downloads. ~250 discs managed to fill the HDD, leaving little spare to spare.

Posted by tomman

1) Preserving loose audio tracks is of dubious utility - they're not meant to be consumed as a standalone product! I know, I was there, I still have .FLACs of every audio I managed to rip from Animax. Noone wants them, except those making their own encodes/remuxes.

Posted by tomman

2) Uploading the ISOs to the Archive is actually a great idea, to be fair (why didn't I thought into that!). If my DSL ever gets fixed, I may look about their offerings and how they would deal with those. The goal of my collection is not a private stash where stuff would be lost forever if all of my HDDs were to suddenly die the very same day, but to share and spread the word about those weird and wonderful Touhou fan animations and concerts. If their rule is "anything goes", why not? They preserve absolute turds like the SCD32X library, and those Touhou DVDs are more worthy of preservation than that. Plus, anything that can be done in spite of Chinese file hoarders is always welcome~

Posted by tomman
1) Russia does everything wrong, from politics to piracy. I do watch my dubs. Having to remux them prior to watching kills the enthusiasm, thus why noone does that. I'm not one of those Troo UNIX® Way™ nerds that love really convoluted non-solutions, so don't bother. Once again, HDD space is not a problem if you consider that outside US English, the percentage of dubbed anime licenses is rather small. Dragon Ball dubs are not going to be lost anytime soon, while archiving, say, Di Gi Charat Nyo! LA Spanish dub (complete with average quality MPEG-4 video encodes) only requires 3 DVDs, and for a modern multi-TB HDD that's peanuts.

2) Rutracker is cool (it has saved my ass in at least a few occasions), but not for Touhou stuff. They do have some stuff (mainly music and maybe the games), but nothing regarding the videos (once again I know because that's one of the places where I look for new material from time to time).

Regarding the copyright part, most circles don't give a damn (considering that they're doing derivative works from another copyright which belongs to a dude that basically has a "anything goes" rule regarding said works), although I've seen some stingy ones in the music arrange area that are trigger happy with those DMCA takedowns. On the video scene? Not so much - most circles are fine as long as you don't go and upload their latest Comiket releases right away (case in point: Manpuku Jinja -of Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~The Memories of Phantasm~ fame- is fine with reuploads, but only if you respect their "first dibs" right on YT/NND uploads, and that's just one example from personal experience)

Posted by creaothceann

If the streams are separated into several files, people may only download the files they're interested in, making it harder to ensure the torrent's completeness. Sooner or later the unpopular files are no longer backed by the swarm.

Posted by https://twitter.com/Telstra_news/status/1107526963583844353

We've started temporarily blocking a number of sites that are hosting footage of Friday’s terrorist attack in Christchurch. We understand this may inconvenience some legitimate users of these sites, but these are extreme circumstances and we feel this is the right thing to do.

Posted by creaothceann
F-Zero rendered in 4k

Posted by Kawa
Of course it looks flat lol. Such is the nature of the effect 😸

Posted by Screwtape

- Sometimes, I'm pretty confident I got it wrong. For example, there's two "new WIP" posts in the v037 thread, then a post that mentions changes that might have landed in wip 4 or 5, so three WIPs are missing but I have no idea which ones.

Posted by https://board.zsnes.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=182489#p182489

~\bsnes_v037_wip06>upx -9 bs1.exe
                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
                          Copyright (C) 1996 - 2008
UPX 3.03w       Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Apr 27th 2008

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
   1063936 ->    348160   32.72%    win32/pe     bs1.exe

Packed 1 file.

~\bsnes_v037_wip06>upx --brute bs2.exe
                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
                          Copyright (C) 1996 - 2008
UPX 3.03w       Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Apr 27th 2008

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
   1063936 ->    306688   28.83%    win32/pe     bs2.exe

Packed 1 file.

Posted by https://ameliorated.info/
Windows 10 AME (Ameliorated) - What Is This Project?

Windows 10 AME aims at delivering a stable, non-intrusive yet fully functional build of Windows 10 to anyone, who requires the Windows operating system natively. Spyware systems, which are abundant in Windows 10 by default, have not been disabled using group policy, registry entries or various other workarounds – they have been entirely removed and deleted from the system, on an executable-level. This includes Windows Update, and any related services intended to re-patch the system via what is essentially a universal backdoor. Core applications, such as the included Edge web-browser, Windows Media Player, Cortana, as well as any appx applications, have also been successfully eliminated. The total size of removed files is about 2 GB.

Great effort has been invested in maintaining the subsequent system’s stability, bug-free operation and user experience, as many of these removed services conflict with core Windows 10 features.