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81
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of Fox News
Last post by ersi -
One upon a time Fox News went all-in on Trump. Then on 2020 they called the elections correctly and the warm relationship became endangered even after Fox News fired the elections reporters who had called the elections correctly. Fox News tried to save the relationship by spreading the elections lie more faithfully than William Barr, but it was to no avail. Fox News had to settle with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 m, fire their biggest magnet Tucker Carlson and Trump stopped appearing at Fox News.

Until two days ago or so, when Trump agreed with Fox News to arrange a "town hall", a televised meeting between a candidate and voters. Trump was in his normal mode:
- lying about elections
- lying about his lawsuits
- promising to become a dictator
- accusing media
- ridiculing and threatening his political opponents

And the Fox News hosts just giggled.

Evidently, Trump is like a drug. Even though relationship with him is extremely damaging and unhealthy, Fox News cannot help itself and desperately wants more. Until death do them part.
83
Browsers & Technology / Re: Software of Potential Interest
Last post by ersi -
Floorp is a Firefox fork implementing some notable features of Vivaldi browser, such as tab tiling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxRsikiu_E8

I think the name is actually passable. It has the minimum requirement for a project name: Be distinct, different from other projects. The name of Vivaldi browser does not pass this minimum requirement. Neither did Opera.

At this stage I personally am done browser-hopping, certainly when it comes to graphical browsers. Apart from interface configuration, what I want from a browser is
- Control over cookies (suppress all by default)
- Control over popups/popins (suppress all by default)
- Control over fonts and colours (the imposed styles and scripts should be completely unnecessary)

The modern web is bad and getting worse. In late 90's and 00's, popups proliferated. When popup blockers became common, popups were replaced by popins, which are a far more evil feature.

In good old times, control over cookies used to be in the browser, that is in the user's hands. Ever since the EU's completely unwarranted inane incompetent idiotic counterproductive cookie directive, there is no longer any control whatsoever over cookies. Instead we have cookie popups/popins which give the false impression to people that they are managing their cookie preferences, whereas in reality of course they are not. The cookie popups do not care what settings the user has set in the browser (in the only place where the settings have an actual under-the-hood effect), the popups pop up regardless, and also regardless what settings you set in the website popup earlier. Every time you visit a website, you get the popups no matter what your settings are or were.

None of the graphical browsers over the last ten years or so is able to control popups, despite some browsers having a setting for it. There is literally no single decent graphical browser currently in existence out of the box. Maybe Brave browser or the like can be made to suppress all popups with careful extra tinkering.

Text mode or terminal browsers handle both cookies and popups properly out of the box. They also handle fonts and colours properly out of the box and usually interface configuration is fine too. Unfortunately they do not handle webscript features, such as delayed loading, properly. For delayed loading and other heavily scripted features, graphical browsers are still necessary.

The user interface feature that I expect from graphical browsers is the ability to toggle off all toolbars and menus. Vivaldi used to have it for a while, but in recent updates they ruined it and they brought back an empty bar that you cannot get rid of. No reason for the bar and no way to get rid of it. I won't ask why.

On Linux I can still achieve the toolbar-less and menu-less effect in all apps by going fullscreen and then taking control over the fullscreen window by resizing it with the window manager as if it were any other window. Funny that Windows is called Windows, but has no window manager. Anyway, it should be possible to toggle off all toolbars and menus in all web browsers. Browsers are giving their users less and less, so give at least that.

84
DnD Central / Re: What's Your Favorite U.S. Supreme Court decision?
Last post by ersi -
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Human rights? Another symptom of your self-righteousness: You believe everyone in the world has the right to residence and citizenship anywhere they choose... Why? It's certainly not enlightenment. It's Soros-style agitprop.
How do you determine that residence and citizenship are inalienable? Hand-waving?
No. You just want to keep the argument going, and this red herring is just a means to that end. It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical!
Oh dear, you have not learned your fallacies properly. Your reading comprehension is F as usual.

My point was that DeSantis and Abbott are engaged in human trafficking. Human trafficking is a crime. Crimes should be prosecuted in a law-and-order country. Also, human rights reads straight in the Declaration of Independence of USA.

Your attempt to sidetrack from this by attributing the concept of human rights to Soros instead is a red herring. You are using logical fallacies to compensate for your lack of facts, but this is not going to work. Just keep on cheering crimes and criminals - when they are of your own party, you hyperpartisan hypocrite.
85
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2024 Presidential Elections
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
Quote from: ersi on
Americans with their stupid non-system where the president has the freedom to be a treasonous nepotist election-denying incompetent buffoon and run again without any repercussions to himself while all his law[y]ers and more eager supporters are being jailed left and right.
Can't even manage to put your frothing-at-the-mouth anger into sentence form! :) But look on the bright side: Michelle Obama might be "drafted" to run...
86
DnD Central / Re: What's Your Favorite U.S. Supreme Court decision?
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
Quote from: ersi on
The following are notes for myself. You are completely unqualified for this discussion, Oakdale.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL
First, the U.S. is not subject to the so-called World Court. So, your "serious charge" amounts to nothing more than impotent moralizing.
Second, immigrant status is not conferred by mere aspiration.
This is exactly my point, knowing that "conservatives" and "literalists" in USA do not acknowledge the concept of human rights, even though Declaration of Independence of USA takes it "to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." It's an enlightenment concept, not a World Court concept.

A country that is in denial of this concept is not an enlightened country. It is in plain evidence now that what Declaration of Independence proclaims does not obtain in the legal and moral sense of the inhabitants of the country at all.
Human rights? Another symptom of your self-righteousness: You believe everyone in the world has the right to residence and citizenship anywhere they choose... Why? It's certainly not enlightenment. It's Soros-style agitprop.
How do you determine that residence and citizenship are inalienable? Hand-waving?
No. You just want to keep the argument going, and this red herring is just a means to that end. It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical!
87
DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Last post by ersi -
A test question @jax

61% in Germany. 62% in Estonia. What explains the fact that the numbers are so low and so close to each other, compared to 83% in Lithuania and 90% in Finland?
88
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2024 Presidential Elections
Last post by ersi -
(It's too soon, because several keys are undecided yet, but) Biden is the more likely winner, according to Alan Lichtman who has correctly predicted every presidential election result since 1984 https://politicalpulse.net/us-politics/alan-lichtmans-prediction-for-2024/

Americans with their stupid non-system where the president has the freedom to be a treasonous nepotist election-denying incompetent buffoon and run again without any repercussions to himself while all his lawers and more eager supporters are being jailed left and right. And that this idiotic campaigning takes years in enormous cost of time, money and nerves. Oh Lord have mercy.

Good that this is over and done with now. Except if one of the main party candidates dies and the not the other....
90
DnD Central / Re: What's Your Favorite U.S. Supreme Court decision?
Last post by ersi -
The following are notes for myself. You are completely unqualified for this discussion, Oakdale.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
First, the U.S. is not subject to the so-called World Court. So, your "serious charge" amounts to nothing more than impotent moralizing.
Second, immigrant status is not conferred by mere aspiration.
This is exactly my point, knowing that "conservatives" and "literalists" in USA do not acknowledge the concept of human rights, even though Declaration of Independence of USA takes it "to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." It's an enlightenment concept, not a World Court concept.

A country that is in denial of this concept is not an enlightened country. It is in plain evidence now that what Declaration of Independence proclaims does not obtain in the legal and moral sense of the inhabitants of the country at all. The bussing of immigrants is a clear example that the moral turpitude is not limited to Oakdale rednecks in the country, but it is a general state of mind among the country's officials and jurists. As follows:

Quote from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html
The flights last month, carrying 48 migrants, attracted international attention and drew condemnation from Democrats as well as several legal challenges. Mr. DeSantis immediately claimed credit for what appeared to be a political maneuver — dumping dozens of asylum seekers on the doorstep of Northeastern Democrats who have resisted calls to clamp down on immigration.
The fact that DeSantis is using the budget of his own state to bus immigrants of another state (since his own state does not have such readily abusable immigrants) to a third state should be an inter-state/federal legal challenge in multiple ways, but this is not the most pertinent point. The most pertinent point is that "legal challenges" in this article refer to lawyers trying to figure out whether there is something legally challengeable in this activity.[1]

If lawyers are puzzled about human trafficking on the level of governors of states, then clearly USA is a sad third-world dump when it comes to the legal framework concerning human trafficking.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Third, if you're in the country legally (i.e., have been processed by Border Patrol and have a scheduled court hearing) and I offer you a bus or plane ticket to -say- New York, that is not "trafficking". That is largesse.
To reduce the concept of human trafficking as far as possible, its minimum key feature is the consent of the trafficked. Now, many people *want*, even desperately so, to get to a country that has been presented to them as a better country. They are lured by alleged opportunities. So people's want is not the kind of consent relevant to the concept. Trafficking comes in with a trafficker/smuggler who does the allegations of the work/living opportunities and then the opportunities don't obtain at the destination.

Say a pimp promising a different job to someone at a destination while the actual job ends up being prostitution — this is sex trafficking even when the pimp pays all the costs to the destination and provides accommodation at the destination.  This should be easy peasy to understand for a ten-year-old, if not a five-year-old. For an Oakdale pimping is a largesse because he cannot afford it, but legally pimping is sex trafficking. In case of the bussing of immigrants, the perpetrators provide nothing at the destination.

DeSantis and Abbott qualify as human traffickers. Human trafficking is a serious crime when regular people do it, but lawyers in USA are puzzled about it when governors do it, so once again so much for being a law-and-order country where people allegedly have rights. Immigrants deserve more adequate information about their destination country: USA is a below-average third world dump where non-citizens have zero constitutional rights and there is no recourse against state officials. African smugglers advertise the EU as the place where everyone who crosses the border receives an Adidas jumpsuit, iPhone and a fully equipped apartment. Sorry, dear immigrants, the traffickers are lying to you.
1 There's a class action lawsuit that has amounted to nothing much thus far.↵