The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[JadedWolf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8g-lugXGBQ

[BruceVC]

 

In the interest of full disclosure I have no issue with legal hunting as I eat meat and venison which comes from hunting. But firstly Palmer claims he didn't know as he mentioned but now the Zimbabwe authorities have arrested the two  trackers and are making a BIG deal about it, like really big. They are saying they want to implement some law to jail them for 10 years and are "appalled at the utter disregard this American has for the wildlife and sovereign wildlife of Zimbabwe" so this is going around some  media circles as an attack on the USA

 

But in South Africa we have been dealing with the extermination of our Rhino's for years ...and yet this is often seen as a " white issue " as it seems like " white people care more about rhino than indigent black people " .-snip-

 

But people do tend to care more about the animals than other people. I remember reading several articles on this and will see if I can dig up links if anyone cares.

 

I believe the order of precedence of ****s given is as follows 

1. Human babies

2. Animal babies

3. Adult animals

4. Adult humans

5. Gwyneth Paltrow

 

Also, I personally have no issues with hunting for food either but trophy hunting isn't something I can get behind

 

Yes please try to find them, I have pondered this question and believe that the reason it appears that people care more about animals is that animals are defenseless and are part of the ecosystem and in the case of rhinos there really are a finite number of them. Also we care about rhinos and we care about impoverished people so I see no conflict 

 

But I'm interested what is your objection to trophy hunting?

[kirottu]

Okay then...  ‘American’, ‘Freshman': 12 Words That the University of New Hampshire Has Deemed ‘Problematic’

Why wasn't "bossy" on that list? Clearly people-kin who made that list are misogynist ****lords.

[Ineth]

Okay then...  ‘American’, ‘Freshman': 12 Words That the University of New Hampshire Has Deemed ‘Problematic’

 

 

Since college campuses have become very concerned with “microaggressions” being committed on their campuses

 

...so they embrace micro-totalitarianism.

 

“is not a means to censor

 

No of course not, if it were formally enforced it would be illegal. (Yay SCOTUS.)

 

So lemme guess, it will be enforced through underhanded intimidation and social sanctions instead...

[Ineth]

U.S. officials can’t find the dentist who killed Cecil the lion

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to talk to Walter Palmer. But it can't find him.

Wait, how exactly does a Zimbabwean lion fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?

 

Smells of a government agency overreaching in order to jump onto a high-publicity case.

[ShadySands]

 

 

In the interest of full disclosure I have no issue with legal hunting as I eat meat and venison which comes from hunting. But firstly Palmer claims he didn't know as he mentioned but now the Zimbabwe authorities have arrested the two  trackers and are making a BIG deal about it, like really big. They are saying they want to implement some law to jail them for 10 years and are "appalled at the utter disregard this American has for the wildlife and sovereign wildlife of Zimbabwe" so this is going around some  media circles as an attack on the USA

 

But in South Africa we have been dealing with the extermination of our Rhino's for years ...and yet this is often seen as a " white issue " as it seems like " white people care more about rhino than indigent black people " .-snip-

 

But people do tend to care more about the animals than other people. I remember reading several articles on this and will see if I can dig up links if anyone cares.

 

I believe the order of precedence of ****s given is as follows 

1. Human babies

2. Animal babies

3. Adult animals

4. Adult humans

5. Gwyneth Paltrow

 

Also, I personally have no issues with hunting for food either but trophy hunting isn't something I can get behind

 

Yes please try to find them, I have pondered this question and believe that the reason it appears that people care more about animals is that animals are defenseless and are part of the ecosystem and in the case of rhinos there really are a finite number of them. Also we care about rhinos and we care about impoverished people so I see no conflict 

 

But I'm interested what is your objection to trophy hunting?

 

 

I'm wary of anyone who wants to kill something for sport. Food, yes. Population control, yes. Trophies, you lost me.

 

Anyway, links

 

 

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/people-care-pets-humans/

http://nypost.com/2014/02/15/do-we-care-more-about-suffering-of-animals-than-of-humans/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201311/what-do-people-care-more-about-animal-abuse-or-child-abuse

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/29/3685758/science-of-cecil-outrage/

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/10/22/backstory.animals/index.html?iref=newssearch

 

[ShadySands]

 

U.S. officials can’t find the dentist who killed Cecil the lion

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to talk to Walter Palmer. But it can't find him.

Wait, how exactly does a Zimbabwean lion fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?

 

Smells of a government agency overreaching in order to jump onto a high-publicity case.

 

 

"Palmer’s actions could have violated the U.S. Lacey Act, a conservation law meant to shield animals from harm. The act, tied to a United Nations treaty for the protection of animals, governs the actions of Americans who violate the laws of foreign governments."

[Ineth]

"Palmer’s actions could have violated the U.S. Lacey Act, a conservation law meant to shield animals from harm. The act, tied to a United Nations treaty for the protection of animals, governs the actions of Americans who violate the laws of foreign governments."

 

Interesting. If I read the Wikipedia entry correctly, that law was meant to regulate plant/animal trade across state boundaries, and has in practice been expanded to punish the trade and import of protected species parts from other countries - but not the killing itself, which is the business of that other country.

 

So I guess that agency wants to know if he took home a trophy...

 

 

PS (since this is the "random and interesting" thread): What is it with laws that were meant to regulate interstate commerce, being used as carte blanche to enforce all kinds stuff that has nothing to do with interstate commerce? I mean in this case it does sort of make sense; it reminded me of the 'Commerce Clause' justification for Obamacare though, which was just ludicrous.

Edited July 30, 2015 by Ineth

[BruceVC]

 

"Palmer’s actions could have violated the U.S. Lacey Act, a conservation law meant to shield animals from harm. The act, tied to a United Nations treaty for the protection of animals, governs the actions of Americans who violate the laws of foreign governments."

 

Interesting. If I read the Wikipedia entry correctly, that law was meant to regulate trade across state boundaries, and has in practice been expanded to punish the trade and import of protected species parts from other countries - but not the killing itself, which is the business of that other country.

 

So I guess that agency wants to know if he took home a trophy...

 

 

I also think the USA doesnt like getting this type of criticism..." rich white capitalist comes to Africa to kill our national resources "  but trust me the whole thing is completely exaggerated and really misplaced concern as it does nothing to address the real problem  

[Gfted1]

Yeah that is no surprise, I don't doubt that game rangers living in Zimbabwe are genuinely upset but all the rhetoric from the Zim government is just anti-Western diatribe, false anger and as you said probably   an attempt to get money from the USA

It made me smile that he specified "US Dollars". Homie don't want no TrillionyBilliony Zimbabwe dollars.

 

But now you have all the hardcore anti-hunting groups lambasting and vilifying this dentist ...yet where were they when there was the mass death of all the other Zim animals due to government policy?

Yeah, this kind of stuff irritates me. Theres no molehill that cant be made into a mountain. smh.

[BruceVC]

 

Yeah that is no surprise, I don't doubt that game rangers living in Zimbabwe are genuinely upset but all the rhetoric from the Zim government is just anti-Western diatribe, false anger and as you said probably   an attempt to get money from the USA

It made me smile that he specified "US Dollars". Homie don't want no TrillionyBilliony Zimbabwe dollars.

 

But now you have all the hardcore anti-hunting groups lambasting and vilifying this dentist ...yet where were they when there was the mass death of all the other Zim animals due to government policy?

Yeah, this kind of stuff irritates me. Theres no molehill that cant be made into a mountain. smh.

 

 

I will tell you something else since its relevant. You get people who say " hunting is cruel...how can you do it " but unless you are vegan I consider it utterly hypocritically to judge hunting

 

Have you ever been to an abattoir? Have you ever seen the fear and misery of animals as they are led to the slaughter or how battery chickens live ?

 

So if a person objects to hunting based on the cruelty aspect then you need to stop eating all meat. Also in South  Africa hunting is part of necessary culling...we need to hunt during the year to control the animal population. And if wealthy foreigners are prepared to pay good money to hunt this is even better 

[ShadySands]

I dunno if it's legit or not, I was just quoting the article

 

But in happier news - State Hate: Which State Is Your State's Enemy?

 

Poor Texas, both the most hated and the most hateful

[BruceVC]

I dunno if it's legit or not, I was just quoting the article

 

But in happier news - State Hate: Which State Is Your State's Enemy?

 

Poor Texas, both the most hated and the most hateful

 

Shame  the poor Texans ...why is that? I think Texans are hardcore and cool but they wouldn't survive without  the rest of the USA ..yes that means even you " liberal weed smoking people from Colorado " ...they need you, they just dont realize it  

 

I always find it interesting when I have met some Texans they seem to think Texas is not really part of the USA or it should go on its own. And coincidentally all the hunters I have met in South Africa have all been from Texas...but they were real men. They used longbows and knew how to track and survive in the wilderness..I admire that because I am a city person and know very little about the real wilderness 

[ShadySands]

Chechen Girls Troll ISIS With Fake Bride Scam

 

ISIS bride, meet Russian mail-order bride, meet classic Internet scam. A group of young Chechen women crafted a brilliant online money-making scheme, all in the name of ripping off ISIS recruiters—whom they essentially duped with the same tactics your grandparents fall for when they read their spam inbox.

 

The women were recently detained by local police for allegedly leading on ISIS recruiters for the cash and then bailing on their trips to Syria, according to Russian website Life News. The young women had apparently been contacted over the Internet by jihadis, and decided to play along. They were willing to go fight, the women reportedly said, if they were given travel funds. For ISIS recruiters, who often ply their online targets with money and gifts, it was a standard request.

 

But the women never showed up in Syria. They had scammed the utopia-promising jihadi scammers: After the wire transfers came through, the Chechens would block the jihadi they’d been communicating with and disappear—then they’d repeat the process. It’s unclear how long they managed the scheme, but the trio reportedly made around $3,300.

[Volourn]

"I think Texans are hardcore and cool but they wouldn't survive without  the rest of the USA ..yes that means even you " liberal weed smoking people from Colorado " ...they need you, they just dont realize it "

 

Why? Texas is bigger than many countries. It (and other states) would do just fine. Of course, they'd never be allowed to leave. The Northern states wouldn't hesitate to nuke it if need be.

 

 

On to the lion... the crying over it in the Western world is complete and utterly pathetic and disgusting.  And, I've seen plenty of racist comments directed towards any Afrikans who say they don't see it as a huge deal'.

 

One article quoted some villager saying' eh, it's a wild animal they are there to be hunted.' and then a bunch of commenters attacked him as savage,  claimed that attitude is why Afrika has aids issue. PATHETIC. That is SJWs for you.

 

And, L0L, @ scamming ISIS.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Volourn

[Darkpriest]

Some problems cannot be resolved by a gun fire in texas... https://ca.news.yahoo.com/texas-man-shoots-armadillo-gets-hit-face-bullet-214656503.html

[Malcador]

HitchBOT destroyed in Philly - http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hitchbot-destroyed-in-philadelphia-ending-u-s-tour-1.3177098

 

Canadians get another reason to jerk it over how Americans suck.

[Volourn]

Not this Kanadian. I approve of this evil robot being destroy. It was a Kanadian gov't plot. Kanadians hate Amerikans so if I were Amerikan I wouldn't trust a Kanadian as far as I could throw them.

[Woldan]

Armadillo wounds man. Kinda..

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33748027

[Gromnir]

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=76042

 

...

 

and it turns out that this is now INTERNATIONAL clown week.  

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Gfted1]

Why Won't Julian Assange Condemn Ecuador's Spying Software?

[Amentep]

^I  laughed at this bit (true or not): "The Ecuadorean government has treated Assange like he’s its first AirBnb customer and it’s desperate for a good review..."

Edited August 5, 2015 by Amentep

[Raithe]

It's all about getting the best view...

 

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

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNGiSQu9hkA

[Raithe]

Vice - A Love Letter to D&D

 

 

 

If you would read a man's Disposition, see him Game; you will then learn more of him in one hour, than in seven Years Conversation, and little Wagers will try him as soon as great Stakes, for then he is off his Guard."

-Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behaviour and Conversation in the World, Richard Lindgard

 

"Dungeons & Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd **** ever invented."

-Ice T

 

Playing Dungeons & Dragons after going through the polished and shoulder-padded world of the more normcore gateway drugs—Warcraft, Skyrim, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, whatever blockbuster thing with hit points and constitution scores that's keeping you from going outside—is like cracking open Revelation after a year of Sunday School. Unlike today's digitized RPGs, D&D was not designed to be accessible or even (to the chagrin of child psychologists) meaningful because, basically, it wasn't designed. Like all real art, the target audience for the first D&D rulebooks were the people who made them.

 

 

When D&D was thought up by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in 1974, the idea was there'd be a loose set of rules for how to pretend to kill people in the fake middle ages, and anything not in the official rules you could just make up. In theory, anything could happen. That kind of sandbox-style freedom made D&D its own unique thing to everyone who played it, niche-adapted enough to survive without being subsumed into any of the other visions of pop fantasy it would inspire over the coming decades. It's Game of Thrones but it's also Adventure Time—and everything in between. Aside from attempts to scrub away the unconscious racism and sexism of its 70s campus-nerd roots, the current game has survived with most of its genuine eccentricities intact—not in spite of how out of step they are with what people expect from a wizardgame in 2015, but because of it.

 

 

 

The Christians were right. D&D is still—even in a world with Grand Theft Auto, spice, ISIS, global warming, and Donald Trump—completely ****ed up. It is a game with talking floating eyes that want to disintegrate you, stats for the devil and the Buddha, a three-headed god that carries a panther-skin bag and throws a magic brick for 5-50 points of damage, magic teeth, the chance to play as a teleporting dog or a badger if you die, planets that aren't round, and psionic priest vampire manta rays.

 

 

But beyond all that, the reasons that D&D is still worth playing are the people you play it with. As opposed to online RPGs where players interact through screens or headphones, when you sit down for a game of Dungeons & Dragons you do it with your people. In the same room. With snacks. Without the rest of the bar watching. There's a story about three witches and a pack mule, which you all not only watched but invented, and then the witch threw a Dorito at you and drank your scotch.

 

You learn things about your friends during these times, too. Who are these people when the stakes are low and wagers are little and no one is cool? Poker night gives you permission to get into your friends' wallet; D&D night gives you permission to get into their heads. Sometimes it's no surprise: Patton Oswalt played a drunken dwarf, Marilyn Manson says he was a dark elf, VICE international atrocity expert Molly Crabapple played a thief—but would you have pegged our porn correspondent, Stoya, for a druid with a dog named George? It's important to know when there are hippies in your house.

 

The game is meant to reflect the people playing. D&D came out of the mimeographed, amateur-press wargame scene and reached the height of its popularity in the mid-80s, when zines had staples in them, Metallica didn't suck, and computers had not yet quite eaten the world—and it still carries a heavy debt to the handmade and the DIY. Every rule in the game has been crossed out and rewritten thousands of times by thousands of pencils in thousands of ways by thousands of Brads, Steves, and Marcys for tens of thousands of tables who wanted to do it this way instead of that way, and none of them needed to learn code to do it.

 

D&D gives you not only a reason to make real actual stuff, but a reason other people should care. At conventions you can see LED-lit mazes that make the Jackson Hobbit SFX team look like hacks, but the heart of the game is palace towers made from coffee cans and pig men painted with nail polish and crossing "winter wolf" off the wandering monster chart and writing in "warsnail." The nearest equivalent is the culture around the post-50s decadent-psychotic era of homemaking magazines when Woman's Day would show you how to make, like, shirred herring salad in the shape of an igloo on the rim of a lake of blue Jell-O. And for good reason: these distant scenes are both, at heart, about the ephemeral art of throwing parties. The eight-layer raisin-pineapple compote carousel and the foamcore Skull Fortress of the Hate Toad will both be gutted in 40 minutes, but right now it's fun and right now it's weird and that's a party. And when it's dead you spend a week planning the next one.

"Weird" was always key to D&D's continuing survival. On paper, the game should look and feel no different than any of the mechanized orc-killing toys you can get for your PC, Playstation, or XBox, or like the special effects blockbusters we're getting more and more now that Hollywood's figured out how to make armor and tentacles look right on a screen—but it doesn't. Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and other architects of the early RPG scene had read Tolkien and Howard's Conan books, but their fandom was crazy deep and genuinely literary, embracing the wisecracking and oddly adult sensibility of Fritz Leiber's medieval noir, the anti-mythic experimentalism of Clark Ashton Smith, and the amoral freakshow wordplay of Jack Vance—pulp fantasy's Nabokov, who inspired spell names like "Oitluke's Freezing Sphere" and "Leomund's Lamentable Belabourment."

 

•  
• 
  

 

D&D's weirdness is always the weirdness of people, put on the spot and making things up all by themselves. It's the kind of 3:00 AM weirdness that video game designers have to dial back in order to have a plot or snare a big enough audience to justify their budget. It's the kind of weirdness that can be exactly as interesting as the people playing it, and the later it gets the weirder the storyline becomes. It's a manifestation of the players' collective imagination, and it's a formula that—despite mind-blowing advances in graphics and gameplay innovation—can't be replicated on a screen.

 

 

[Raithe]

All that paranoia for reasons!
 
Slate - Windows 10 Privacy Problems : Here's how Bad They Are And How To Plug Them
 
 

Windows 10 is the operating system Microsoft needs. In other words, it’s not Windows 8, a Frankenstein’s monster of a tablet-plus-desktop OS that alienated everyone from PC manufacturers to corporate users. Instead, Windows 10 is an incremental improvement on Windows 7, one that is faster, slicker, and has some new bells and whistles, like virtual desktops and functional tablet support. One of Windows 10’s leaps, unfortunately, is straight into your personal data.
 
Apple and Google may have ignited the trend of collecting increasing amounts of their customers’ information, but with Windows 10, Microsoft has officially joined that race. By default, Windows 10 gives itself the right to pass loads of your data to Microsoft’s servers, use your bandwidth for Microsoft’s own purposes, and profile your Windows usage. Despite the accolades Microsoft has earned for finally doing its job, Windows 10 is currently a privacy morass in dire need of reform.
 
The problems start with Microsoft’s ominous privacy policy, which is now included in the Windows 10 end-user license agreement so that it applies to everything you do on a Windows PC, not just online. (Disclosure: I worked for Microsoft in the days of Windows XP.) It uses some scary broad strokes:

Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary.

Some have spun conspiracy theories out of that language. I’m more inclined to blame vagueness and sloppiness, not ill intent. With some public pressure, Microsoft is likely to specify how and why it will share your data. But even that won’t excuse Microsoft’s ham-fisted incursion into users’ data, nor how difficult it is restore the level of privacy back to what it was in Windows 7 and 8. Apple’s and Google’s privacy policies both have their own issues of collection and sharing, but Microsoft’s is far vaguer when it comes to what the company collects, how it will use it, and who it will share it with—partly because Microsoft’s one-size-fits-all privacy policy currently applies to all your data, whether it’s on your own machine or in the cloud. As Microsoft puts it:

Rather than residing as a static software program on your device, key components of Windows are cloud-based. … In order to provide this computing experience, we collect data about you, your device, and the way you use Windows.
 
In other words, Microsoft won’t treat your local data with any more privacy than it treats your data on its servers and may upload your local data to its servers arbitrarily—unless you stop Microsoft from doing so. Microsoft’s security story has been far from perfect; this move could make it far worse. For now, it’s not easy to restrict what Windows collects, but here’s how.
 

Don’t Use Express Settings During Setup

During installation, Microsoft will encourage you to accept its “express install” defaults. Without exceptions, these defaults will result in the maximum sharing of your information with Microsoft. Instead, select the “custom install” option, which will bring up a bunch of toggles. The first set of toggles, concerning personalization and location, looks like this:


 
These settings all send your personal data to Microsoft with little upside for you (unless you like customized advertising). I recommend turning them all off.

The second set of toggles is more cryptic but more important:
 

 
While the first two settings here, for SmartScreen and page prediction, simply send more of your activity to Microsoft, the next two are subtler. Automatic connection to open hotspots and to your contact’s networks means that your computer will connect to certain networks without your explicit consent. Unless you trust Microsoft’s judgment and all of your contacts, it’s best to disable those. Last, sending error and diagnostic information may seem harmless, but when something goes wrong, that “information” might include tons of sensitive stuff—if you were editing a spreadsheet of your romantic dalliances when your computer crashed, it’ll get uploaded. If you feel like helping out Microsoft, you can leave this enabled, but I turned it off.

Turn Off the Secret Settings

The install settings are only a subset of Windows 10’s privacy settings, which occupy more than a dozen different pages and dialogue boxes across the user interface, none of them in plain sight. Moreover, one of them reveals that Microsoft wasn’t being quite honest during setup. When you turned off “Send error and diagnostic information,” you really only turned it down from “Full” to “Enhanced.” To really reduce the amount of information sent to Microsoft, you need to go to the Start menu, select Settings, choose Privacy from the list of settings, and then go to the Feedback and Diagnostics section:
 

 
Choosing “Basic” will keep the amount of random data sent to Microsoft to a minimum.
 
That leaves, however, the other 12 Privacy sections. I recommend going through all of them, painful as that may be, and carefully assessing what you’re willing to share. In a pinch, however, there’s only one really important one that wasn’t already changed during install, which is under Account info:
 

 
This gives any app you install permission to see an arbitrary amount of your account info. Until Microsoft makes this considerably more fine-grained and transparent, as Apple and Google have done with their app stores, it’s a bad idea to leave it on.
Advertisement
 

Use a Local Account

Microsoft will encourage you to create a “Microsoft account” (formerly known as a Live ID) so that signing on to Windows is akin to signing into Microsoft’s online services. In this Microsoft is following Apple’s lead of associating your OS with a single account. This is the single biggest privacy compromise you can make. As long as you’re signed in, Microsoft could conceivably upload whatever data it wants to your server-side profile without you knowing. Without a Microsoft account, it’s harder (though hardly impossible) for Microsoft to lump your data together, and it disables other potentially problematic features like Wi-Fi Sense. Not using a Microsoft account will single-handedly protect you from many of Microsoft’s attempts to collapse the local-remote distinction in its privacy policies. Instead, use a local account, and use Gmail or Yahoo Mail or anything other than Microsoft.
 
Don’t Let Microsoft Steal Your Bandwidth

By default, Microsoft turns your computer into a peer-to-peer node to help it distribute Windows 10 updates, in order to save Microsoft server bandwidth costs. “Microsoft calls it Windows Update Delivery Optimization,” or WUDO. WUDO really should have been turned off by default, because it may slow you down and may even cost you additional money if you have a metered connection. Instead, it is also one of the hardest settings to turn off, requiring clicking through four obscure screens. I’ll walk you through it.

First, start up Settings and click on Update & security.
 
In the Windows Update screen of Update & security, select Advanced options.
 
In Advanced options, select Choose how updates are delivered. (You may also want to change the drop down to “Notify to schedule restart” so that Windows won’t spontaneously reboot your machine after installing updates.)
 
Finally—finally!—turn off peer-to-peer distribution of updates:
 
It’s almost as though Microsoft didn’t want you changing that setting. (Microsoft really wants your bandwidth.)
 

Don’t Use Edge or Cortana

Microsoft’s Siri-imitating Cortana personal assistant and its new Edge browser are designed to take advantage of as much personal information as possible to customize user experience, take annotations, and learn all about you. Until Microsoft clarifies its privacy policies, I recommend against using them. Stick with Firefox or Chrome as a browser, or even good old Internet Explorer.

This is not a complete list, but it hits the most important spots where Microsoft has made the defaults uncomfortably intrusive, nosy, or simply greedy. Microsoft needs to centralize these and other settings in a far more transparent and easy-to-understand box, clarify their implications, and pledge to users that it won’t upend their privacy settings in so egregious a way again. Until then, protect yourself.