Greg Maxwell's comments about Anunymint should be condemned in the strongest way possible. It is absolutely ridiculous to explicitly say (as Maxwell has said) that it is acceptable to ban people because you do not like them, or because many people do not like them.

The comments made by Maxwell only give credibility to those claiming censorship on bitcointalk and r/bitcoin (Greg Maxwell is a moderator of both). The same is true for the absence of a strong condemnation of Maxwell's statement.

Further, it is difficult to take his post seriously when Greg's actions/behavior at Wikipedia have been described as "vandalism" by his peers at Wikipedia. Some have claimed that Greg continues to have a positive professional relationship with the admins at Wikipedia, however I have not seen evidence of this, nor have I seen anyone to claim to have affirmative direct knowledge of this. 

The sale of fake IDs and stolen credit cards is illegal in most of the civilized world, so this is already against forum rules.

Further, both of your examples have real victims, and the harm is not that someone's feelings are hurt. There will be people and/or entities that will ultimately suffer real financial losses as a result of stolen credit cards and/or fake IDs.

There are not any *actual* victims of people selling forum accounts. None of the flawed arguments against account sales even make this claim. In fact these arguments fail to account for *real* market incentives not to do the very same things that those against account sales claim sales cause.

It is ridiculous to claim any kind of authority to regulate what people can and cannot do. Especially when you are in absolutely no way elected, and in no way accountable for your decisions. People who regulate others' actions who are neither elected nor accountable are generally described as "dictators".

It is not necessarily a function of being desperate, it is a function of market economics. People in happy marriages pawn off their wedding rings all the time to meet current financial needs, and pawn shops lend out amounts in line with what they can sell them for at a profit if/when the loan goes into default (although someone pawing off their wedding ring is probably in a desperate situation, so maybe this is a bad example). Other examples of people taking out loans similar to "account loans" would include people taking title loans against their car, and home equity loan against their homes. They also pawn valuable property that is not as sacred as a wedding ring.


This shows the importance of not accepting collateral at a value the lender is not confident he can sell quickly for the amount lent, plus interest, plus the value of his time selling the collateral. A smart lender will be familiar enough of the market of whatever he is accepting as collateral to know how much he can sell whatever he is accepting as collateral, and lending out sufficiently less than a quick liquidation value so the borrower has sufficient incentives to repay his loan. In other words, the lender should only lend out so much based on the collateral he is receiving so he will profit if the borrower defaults on the loan.

Ironically, the reported goals of the 2016 Russian meddling was to sow discord in US politics, which those on the Left are gladly furthering, probably to the point that their behavior is resulting in much greater discord than Russia could have even hoped for.

I would not be surprised to Mueller (and his team) leak additional information and/or indict additional people just before the midterms, although many on the right are already calling Mueller's actions as political. For example, RealClearPolitics has called out the fact that the recent indictments left out hacking attempts by the Russians on Republicans, and Andrew McCarthy of NationalReview, called out the indictments as "nakedly politicized law enforcement", as those indicted should not be presumed innocent, and will never see the inside of a US courtroom.

Also of interest, Rod Rosenstein is in the process of getting impeached, although Identity Politics, and the number of Democrats in the Senate will prevent him from being found guilty in Congress. I personally think a contempt of congress charge would be more appropriate that is enforced by the House, rather than an impeachment.   

Sarcasm?

Very few people are so corrupt that they will leave negative ratings against people that speak out against them for made up reasons. Your level of corruption is the exception rather than the rule.

See won’t get tagged because he isn’t weak enough to be unable to defend his actions. He would win a debate of the issue on its merits.

A scandal? I don't think it was a secret that Trump was/is a womanizer, and CNN was publishing tapes that were more than a decade old of Trump calling into Howard Sterns radio show. What was being published was much worse politically than Trump having an extramarital affair with a (ugly) porn star. 

Further, there were multiple (likely politically motivated) allegations of non-consensual sexual activity on the part of Trump around that time, and a single additional consensual relationship would likely have swayed few, if any voters one way or another. 

I am not sure if you are aware, but water will expand roughly 8% when frozen. This is another way of saying that the area water takes up will decrease by roughly 8% when it melts (when it is no longer frozen).

I have not (and will not) reviewed that study, however it is one study, and there are other ways to evaluate what data is relevant and draw conclusions. Unfortunately, anyone who even questions the conclusion of global warming is shouted down, so there is little to no debate within the scientific community on the matter.

Are you an alt of pugman? If not, then why are you bumping his thread?

I would disagree with this logic. 

If someone needs $100 today, and is expecting to receive $120 in two weeks, but no lender is willing to lend more than $20 based on their word, this person will either be unable to meet their $100 need, or will need to give the lender a valuable asset to hold (aka collateral) while the loan is outstanding. This person can either post/browse from an alternate account while the loan is outstanding, or take a two week break from posting until the loan is repaid.

From what I can tell, most of who likely were conspiring against Trump are no longer in the DOJ, with the exception of Rod Rosenstein, and possibly a small number of FBI agents.

There are obviously those helping the Mueller investigation that essentially took over where James Comey left off when he was fired. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult politically to get rid of this group at this point. Indictments have been handed down at politically inconvenient times by Mueller, and I would not be especially surprised to see more not long before the midterms, although this may backfire, as Trump and some congressional Republicans have somewhat delegitimized his investigation, and any indictments would likely be seen as being political.

Based on their behavior in Peter Strzok's public congressional testimony, I suspect some congressional Democrats are a part of the Clinton, Obama, DoJ conspiracy, and they may have played a part in getting Sessions to recuse himself, which ultimately lead to Mueller's appointment.

I think the window to nip the Trump Collusion with Russia investigation in the bud has closed, and this probably needed to happen well before Comey was fired. Part of Trump's problem is that Russia has a long history of meddling in elections (as does the US), so an investigation into Russian election meddling is not exactly frivolous, although based on 18 months of evidence, an investigation into the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia to meddle appears to be frivolous. Based on available evidence, it does not seem that Russia was particularly effective in their meddling, as their disinformation campaign did not appear to have reached many people, and other activities likely got people to attend rallies no more frequently than they otherwise would have.   

Having read the entire dump, it seems that the information is mostly repetitive, and you will have read nearly all information in the original FISA application. The second renewal does have an additional footnote about how Steele was fired as a source from the FBI, and that Page wrote a letter to the FBI alleging voter suppression by Hilary Clinton, asking them to investigate.

A couple of interesting things:
- It appears the fact that Christopher Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, who was hired by the Clinton campaign was originally classified as "top secret/no foreign nationals" -- I wonder why this would be. What could it be about this information that would cause "exceptionally grave damage to National Security" if disclosed?

- The basis for the FISA application appears to have been (1)that Page lived in Russia, (2) that Page gave a speech in Russia, (3) Steele's dossier, (4) partisan news articles that we now know Steele was the basis for, and (5) speculation within the US new media. This means that Page was spied on, and likely has his phone calls listed to based on this information.

- The exact statute citation for the FISA application was redacted.

Well theymos has said multiple times the forum is not in need of money. If this is the case, I don't see why theymos would not subscribe to some kind of plagiarism service.

Further, there are hundreds of thousands active users, and over time, it will become more and more difficult to detect this on any kind of manual basis.....I am not entirely sure how the OP was able to find these examples, but I suspect it would be difficult for someone to read a post and make a determination if said post was "spun" from another post.

I think Anunymint has agreed to not break the 'multi-posting' rule, along with other rules. He also says he believes the specific reason for his ban was that he was posting the same post in multiple threads, which he also has agreed to do, and in practice has actually stopped this practice, as in my interactions with him, he would "url reference" previous points he has made instead of actually copying the point again. For example:

I still don't understand why the forum doesn't use a service like turnitin that complies writings and gives each writing a plagiarism score, and those that score too high can be automatically flagged for review by a moderator.

My initial reaction of the two reports in the OP was that the spammer read and agreed with and/or had a similar opinion of the person whose post he was copying. However after reading actuallytwolamas' post, I would no longer believe this.

If these posts are in fact being plagiarized, I would have no doubt that a bot is creating these posts.

The anti-plagiarism rules are good in theory, however they fail to address the root cause of the plagiarism. Having anti-plagiarism rules has resulted in moderators simply playing 'wack-a-mole' with spammers who have far greater resources available than the mod team. What needs to happen is we need to remove the underlying incentives to create plagiarized posts.

This is in no small part because those who believe in global warming refuse to debate those who want more information. Anyone who does not blindly support the global warming theory is shouted down, and in the case of Exxon recently, called a criminal.

The fact is that temperature measurements from more than 50 or so years ago is horribly imprecise, and the change over the last two generations is little more than a statistical anomaly.

Further, the global warming theory fails to account for the ice age, and the subsequent thawing. The world is subject to a cycle of temperature changes. Modern technology may or may not be accelerating this cycle, however history has shown us that both humans and the world will survive.

The FISA warrant application for Carter Page has been declassified and released by the FBI.

This is the FISA application (via subsequent wiretaps) that were allegedly used to spy on the Trump Campaign in the 2016 US Presidential election. Many have alleged the actual underlying purpose of the FISA application was to spy on the Trump Campaign, and/or was otherwise politically motivated.

One of the early interesting tidbits in the application is a comment that Russia has interfered with US elections (and the elections of other countries) for decades that span multiple generations. To my knowledge, the media and political elates have made very close to zero hubbub about this interference until the 2016 election, and they are now acting as if Russia is about to take over our country with their interference.     

The declassified documents are over 400 pages, and are heavily redacted. I have not yet had the opportunity to review anything close to a substantial portion of what was released yet.

Post in this thread anything interesting you find.

What do you think?

Link to released documents - https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/95-carter-page-fisa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf

I understand that the sample might be generally accurate for that general period of time, but I am interested in seeing how this changes over time.

You can access and post from multiple Twitter accounts via tweetdeck, and can login to multiple Twitter accounts fairly quickly via the Twitter website but can only be logged into one at a time.

I suspect most of the bounty spammers use some kind of bot to tweet and create other social media posts.

That is probably because the forum kept getting hacked and was the subject of ddos attacks.

Cloudflare along with theymos’ Other countermeasures seems to have mostly stopped this. As bad as CF is for privacy, I suspect it does quite well against hacking attempts for a number of reasons.

Edit: a letter