Pretty sure when Orange Box was released, it included HL2 and HL2 Episode 1 in addition to HL2 Episode 2. Hard to remember because there were so many good games that came from that one purchase.

Bingo

This is how the worms win.

It should be noted that there is no evidence of any tampering of the voting machines in the 2024 election. The claim by researchers is that the voting machines in coffee county GA were accessed after the 2020 election by Trump supporters, and data from those machines in the 2020 election uploaded and distributed to pro-Trump groups.

There is no new information being raised in this letter to Harris and reiterates the same information from their 2022 and 2023 letters to the DOJ with the claim that it's possible that the software of these voting machines could have been reverse engineered, a potential exploit found, and then it could be physically possible to alter the vote. There is no evidence cited about irregularities in any Post-Election Audits of a sample of paper ballots which would warrant more scrutiny into the machines and require a full recount.

Obligatory Line Goes Up video, although not exclusively about Bitcoin.

I do admit that early in Bitcoin's life, around 2013, i was a interested in Bitcoin as an alternative to banking, but the volatility and speculation alienated me from the community. Anyone buying BTC now for $90k, you need to realize this turned into a pyramid scheme and you're not at the top of it. You may be able to find someone who's more of a sucker to take the Bitcoin off your hand and make a profit, but it's not sustainable, someone has to loose. Any gains you make are probably less than 10% what the person made by selling it to you.

If you do end up speculating on crypto, don't invest more than you can afford to loose, and assume you'll loose it all. It's very likely you'll either get hacked/scammed, loose your wallet, leave your wallet in an online exchange who runs off with your keys, etc. You're on your own if that happens. If you do end up making any profit, it'll be a blessing and you'll be way happier than if you thought this would be your key to get rich, and you end up loosing it all.

On one hand, we essentially have someone who accidentally missed an item during self checkout, and another person who ransacked the store, took everything they could, showed off what they stole, and had a standoff with police. Clearly both situations are not equal and saying that both should have the same consequences minimizes Trump's actions and blatant disregard of the judicial system and American people.

In Australia, which has Ranked Choice Voting, you number the candidates from 1 to the max candidates. For Senate races, you can vote for the party, letting the party decide the down ballot representatives. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work

I believe in this process, the ballots are human counted, but the country has less than the population of California, so it probably doesn't take too long. Scaling it up for the backwards US system would be harder, but not impossible to improve.

don’t let someone sign a petition for more than one candidate for a given race.

This would be so much overhead work and also defeat the purpose of Ranked Choice Voting. This basically moves the First Past the Post earlier in the process, which will exclude candidates

This is giving him way too much credit, thinking he's some mastermind who engineered this whole thing. He's very wealthy and addicted with twitter, and started amassing a lot of shares of the company. He didn't really care to own it, and instead tried seeing if he could sway Twitter to benefit him, namely by trying to ban the Elonjet account. That didn't work, so he used his classic 420 joke to say he's going to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, which was way above market rates. He had to be literally sued to purchase the company, after trying to get out of the deal.

Once he was forced to buy the company, it was the company that assumed the debts, not Elon, so it immediately was performing terribly, and Elon had to cut costs, firing employees, not paying rent and server costs, etc. Nothing was planned out ahead of time, the company is flying by the seat of its pants. And arguably the second most prominent user of the platform, the next President, has a competing platform and is directly invested in seeing that succeed, not Twitter/X.

If anything, both Elon and Trump are the modern epitome of failing upwards, exploiting the labor and systems in place to protect Americans, just so they can make more money for themselves. The fact they're celebrated as much as they are is disgusting.

If Joe doesn't pardon Hunter, there's no way Trump will. He's spent 6+ years saying the Biden family is crooked, he wouldn't want to show he's weak and reverse his original unsubstantiated stance. I assume Joe won't pardon Hunter, to set some sort of norm for Trump, which Trump will completely ignore and pardon his family at the first smell of corruption.

We must be truly desperate to look to the electoral college for help.

Still though, Dynamic DNS points to an external IP address, which you'd have your NAS exposed on a public port. This is the flaw in the design which allows remote execution of this exploit.

If you need remote access to the NAS, it should not be publicly exposed and should require a VPN to access. That way if there is an issue or misconfiguration, everyone on the internet can't exploit it easily.

If you’re using one of these models, it’s highly recommended that you replace your NAS system with one that’s still receiving patches from the manufacturer. If that isn’t possible right now, Netsecfish suggests restricting access to your NAS settings menu/interface to only trusted IP addresses. You could also isolate your NAS from the public internet to ensure that only authorized users can interact with it.

Emphasis mine, regardless of this incident, even with a brand new supported model, it shouldn't be exposed to the internet. Half the reason these security issues are such a big deal is because manufacturers wanted to make things simple and designed it to sit on the open internet, so they wouldn't have to deal with support requests. Now their customers are exposed because of poor recommendations and the lack of updates.

Perhaps I'm just in an echo chamber? John Oliver spent a full half hour of his show outlining it all and that has 10M views on YT and an estimated half a million who watched it live. ¹

And everyone just let him get away with that answer.

This is the most baffling thing, he can do every career suicide move and get away with it.

1 - https://ustvdb.com/networks/hbo/shows/last-week-tonight/

I hope we have mid-terms

is he paid residuals for theater and streaming sales? 🤮 if so, this would be a great reason to pirate it.

Sadly search interest for Project 2025 only peaked after the election. I assume of the people that heard about it, they either assumed Trump wouldn't be elected, and they therefore don't need to care about it, or think they'll be unaffected if Trump is elected. Now they're seeing the ideas outlined in there and probably freaking out.

Not really sure what more could be done to inform people of the dangers of Project 2025. Maybe repeating it ad nauseam caused people to tune it out or something?

There's always going to be a large majority of the population who is not informed about anything and just vote on vibes. Biden & Harris took a lot of the post-Covid economic heat that many countries are dealing with now, and isn't unique to the US or specific policies. That's causing bad vibes and rejection of incumbent leadership everywhere.

“There comes a time when the… the risk of doing nothing becomes the greatest risk of all.”

Once they decided to skip the primary and started getting contributions to a Biden/Harris campaign, it became virtually impossible to select anyone else once Biden dropped out. Only a Harris campaign could take over the money already raised for the campaign. Any other candidate would have to start fundraising a few months before the election starting from nothing, and would have been at a massive disadvantage.

voted my conscience by picking a third party instead of picking either unqualified candidates

Are you implying there was a qualified third party candidate? Is this an oxymoron?