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Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

reuters.com

321–330 of 400 posts

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#321
post #73

Why are all the articles about Beto about how cool and antiestablishment he is? Just absolutely nothing about what he really intends to do, how he intends to do it, and most importantly, how do we reconcile his conservative voting record with this contrary image he presents?

He ran a very publicized Senate race. And all his policies and intentions are well documented.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#322
post #44
post #29

He's nice and all, but can we go back to electing Presidents who have had lots of executive and political experience ?

What, was being an elected congressman not enough?

3 terms in the House and some local council work is not “lots of political experience”, at least by the standards of historical Presidents.

Whether the software/services for he founded in 1998 and ran until...sometime before March 2017 is lots of executive experience is debatable, but it's certainly not particularly large scale executive experience for a Presidential candidate.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#323
post #315
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though some Presidents have served as house representatives in their past, none of them made the Presidency without doing something else in between their house service and winning the presidency. https://history.house.gov/People/Other-Office/Member-Preside...

Still satisfies the stated refrain of "having political experience", but an interesting historical factoid nonetheless.

> Still satisfies the stated refrain of "having political experience”

The request was for candidates with “lots of political and executive experience”, not merely some political experience.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#324
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If /ˈbɛ.toʊ oʊ.rɔːrk/ was R he would be buried on "TacoLand" alone.

What's with the strange serialization? Does that mean something I'm not aware of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#326
post #186
post #46

He named his BBS "TacoLand". He should definitely play up this angle...maybe campaign on a taco cart on every corner. I know people who will vote for him for that alone. This piece is a disaster. It's an excerpt from a soon to be released book, it's light on facts about O'Rourke and is at least equally about Cult of the Dead Cow, it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the gui…

I think "TacoLand" has a meaning that could be awkward. The food can be a metaphor for genitalia or for the attached humans. For example a tacofest, much like a sausagefest, is a gathering in which one sex is greatly overrepresented compared to the other. Meat goes in a taco. So, one can guess what was featured on his BBS.

You can look up his textfiles if you want to see what was on the BBS.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#327
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ~80/90s hackers aren't really the same thing as most post 00 hackers. Yeah, no hackers from the 80s and 90s ever had any bad intents. /sarcasm

The meaning of the word has changed somewhat; it was mostly about curiosity and exploration in the 80s/90s. Less of the economy was reliant on computers so there wasn't much crime to commit beyond mere unauthorized access. Heck, "2600: The Hacker Quarterly" could be found on the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble back then.

2600 was on the B&N newsracks for many many years. I think most people passed over it as a nerdy nerd thing.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#328
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can't exactly ban chemistry textbooks, can it? Anyway, for this type of censorship to be effective to prevent dissemination of knowledge, it would need to happen before distribution, and prior restraint is generally considered unconstitutional in the US, except in matters of national security. National security could likely include planned troop movements and nuclear weapons manufacturing procedures (a…

There's a pretty big difference between a chemistry textbook on the one hand, and a step by step layman's guide on how to make a bomb, avoid detection and so on on the other. And then of course beyond that you can go into progressively more dangerous weapons. Would a guide to building IED's with shaped explosives fall under the protections, for instance? I was just watching a documentary yesterday about Iran taught t…

The Chemistry textbook is more dangerous, because it isn't full of errors and bullshit like the Anarchists Cookbook.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#329
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly; this is why we frequently get such lousy candidates winning in the primaries, who then go to the general election for everyone to vote on.

I tend to credit the two party system for there being a general lack of good candidates who make it into the general election with only two having more than a remote chance of winning.

Duverger's Law only applies to the general election, where each main party only fields one candidate. It doesn't work for primaries, where the party has lots of candidates running. There's nothing really stopping the parties from selecting better candidates in their primaries, since the parties have control over who they select anyway (they're not actually bound by the results of the election, and can rig it if they want, such as with "superdelegates").

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single sentence in an otherwise glamorizing and embellishing article does not a anti-Beto piece make. That sentence doesn't even read as not pro-Beto to me, either. It's more of a neutral "this guy is really cool, but is he cool enough?" rhetorical.

"wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street" doesn't sound particularly pro-Beto to me?

It seems beto-safe to me. Of all the details in this story, this child death fiction no doubt required a strategic approach. It's the weirdest of the bunch and the sort of thing that an opponent would love.

In this case, it seems the best way to play it was to just cut to the chase. Summarize it as brutally as Trump could and just be the first to say it. Get it out there so that an opponent can't ride it's energy.

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