I had this happen once and I had a hell of a time trying to find a way around their bullshit. I finally just emailed them and asked for a real tracking number not a link and they actually obliged.

Kinda… Slightly more helpful, but almost as vague. I’m advising against opting for solutions that are technically correct but would be more difficult for the average person to get right most of the time.

The OP’s CAPTCHA as a case in point, it’s frustrating for them because they’re ostensibly asked to enter the characters that they see but there are several and the length of the string of characters is not known and some characters are hard to read and depending on how you interpret it you could be being asked to enter all these characters or you could look at them and say there’s a background set and a foreground set in which case, which one is the correct one? That’s at least 3 different ways to do it and that’s assuming that what appears to us a representation of depth is indeed intended to be the basis of separation for 2 sets of characters and not some other arbitrary categorisation or no categorisation. Sounds complicated and ambiguous. Except, it’s much harder to read the background set, and the idea that there would even be some other way of categorising, if it occurs to anyone at all would be impossible to work out since if it’s there, it’s not discernible. The easiest way is to just read the letters that aren’t partially covered up and also smaller than the more obvious, easier to read, not occluded characters and disregard the ones behind it. What’s easiest to do also most of the time turns out to have been the hidden instruction for what you were meant to do.

There’s no explicit instruction to do this, it’s wishy washy and hard to abstract for different CAPTCHAs which is why this advice doesn’t look a whole lot better than “just guess right” but in a way that’s kind of part of why they still have some effectiveness, they’re unspoken rules that humans Intuit. Where some of us, like me before kinda “getting it”, go wrong, is in overthinking and over analysing it. “but what if they mean this? I mean technically it could…” If you’re thinking like that, odds are you’re barking up the wrong tree and the solution is way less sophisticated.

As others have pointed out, it’s probably the foreground characters. They’re easier to read and less ambiguous from occlusion by other characters.

In general I find you can resolve technical ambiguities or possible loopholes to instructions in these things by asking yourself “what would most people do, especially if not really thinking about it much?” That’s particularly helpful for situations where you have to select all the tiles with x object in them. Often you’ll see that technically there’s a little bit of the object in squares other than the most obvious ones that everyone would have selected and you ask yourself “does that count? Technically a little bit of it’s in this square” but if you just pretend you didn’t notice that and only go for the most dead obvious squares you end up passing. Once I realised this the number of times I failed CAPTCHAs significantly reduced. For some reason the only ones that continued to be a problem were the click a checkbox ones that seemingly analyse your mouse movement because somehow I apparently move like a robot.

Other than in some very niche and select circumstances that I honestly can’t really think of, nobody is going to think it’s cool. However if you like it and want to do it then that’s really more important than if others will think it’s cool. However, I should add some caveats to that.

In some environments, if you’re young than school especially, can be very cruel and very conformist. In those sorts of environments, being “weird” can seriously make you miserable because you’ll be ostracised and while being authentic and true to yourself is important you’ll need to decide how important this specifically is to you, because if it’s not that important then in a context like school I’d say don’t risk it.

However if you want to try it out sometimes around friends who already like you then why not? Just try to keep an eye on people’s reactions and see if they start to get tired of it or roll their eyes or visibly cringe, that’s a sign you’re doing it too much and it’s getting irritating. Definitely don’t change your entire speech pattern to whatever you decide equates to “old timey”, all the time in every conversation with everyone, it won’t land well.

The article mentions that. They supposedly released 2 versions, one “enhanced” to help make the relevant parts of the image easier to see, which certainly matches the description of “modified” and the other, the same footage but described as “raw” and. It enhanced in the same way with implication being that it wasn’t “modified”.

There are a lot of plausible a d likely explanations for the Adobe metadata schema information that is in the file that don’t involve deceptively manipulating footage to hide something that was in that footage before public presentation, then again, given the circumstances and supposed rationale behind publicly presenting this footage, failing to release the footage in a way that wouldn’t have metadata modified from the camera original source files is not a good look and then failing to answer questions about makes it look even worse. This is is especially true when, although there is no answer they could give that would actually totally convince everyone, there are as I said many plausible explanations they could have offered and yet they were just silent.

Ironically, as is so often the case with anything like this, depending on the interpretive lens you’re using this issue with the metadata helps confirm either assertion, that there was cover up and Epstein was murdered, or that there was no such cover up and he really did kill himself. Obviously, the fact that it’s modified lends credence to the idea they’re hiding something because one might expect that if they weren’t it’d be easy to just supply the footage with metadata more reflective of a surveillance system than Adobe software. However one could also say that, modifying metadata in a way that is undetectable should actually be relatively easy and the fact that that couldn’t be bothered to do that, or didn’t know how, or never thought of metadata being present in the first place suggests it’s not untoward so much as technically unsophisticated and sloppy - too sloppy for competent conspiracists. On the other hand, they could also be sloppy AND conspiracists who just did an awful job, nothing about that seems altogether unlikely either since the entire thing unnamed forced conspired to have people believe is very suspicious to begin with so not exactly an expertly conceived plan, more improvisational and done in a hurry which would kind of track with them botching later actions to take the heat off.

Got him! Send in the seals.

It’s likely heavily reinforced by your voting system but 2 party systems aren’t unique to that system, even in theoretically better voting systems you frequently end up with very similar results. Australia as a case in point. That said if current electoral trends continue we could be seeing the end of that here and at least our system theoretically allows that to happen.

There’s stuff on there I didn’t download… Hundreds of gigs. Eek.

Surprised it hasn’t been superseded meaningfully? Or surprised people are still using it instead of another better tech?

That’s really not fair or helpful to the poor kid. It may be nonsense but it’s very real and has a very real impact on his life. Those little monsters truly will go out of their way to make him miserable and sad as it may be keeping a low profile and reducing the number of things they can pick on can be a way not to be targeted. The idea that of telling him he “should be better than that” is just adding to the burden he’s already carrying of being forced to coexist with those little sociopaths. Is it somehow his fault?

I’ve been using this guy’s one for years. It’s called stretch video

https://gist.github.com/arpruss/74abc1bc95ae08e543b9b74f15a23b07

It’s not often I have to use it but if you ever watch something online where the uploader has messed up the aspect ratio you can just fix it just like that, no need to download and reencode or anything I love it.

No shade on you man, you were young, just wondering if any who isn’t being scammed ever chooses to use that service or of it’s basically dedicated entirely to facilitating scams.

Ah I see my confusion now

His “water fuel cell” was later examined by three expert witnesses in court who found that there “was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis.”

I initially took it to mean they’d examined the fuel cell in the vehicle but the way that’s written it’s not necessarily the case so it was probably a separate demo prototype to the buggy.

Yeh, I can send money from bank to bank internationally already. The banks use the SWIFT system.

Haha I never knew there was a real person attached to that myth. I was hearing about that as a big conspiracy theory from teachers when I was kid all the way here in Australia.

That’s interesting he did produce an actual machine that could move though. I was reading the Wikipedia about him and they don’t go in to that exactly. They point out that his design and vehicle were just using conventional electrolysis and thus couldn’t work as claimed, but it still moved. What was the catch then? It uses a battery to do the electrolysis, does it just use up all the battery to inefficienly split out the hydrogen using more energy than gained from the hydrogen in the process? Making it a really weird electric car?

Is Western Union used for anything other than scams? What’s it for legitimately? Can’t you just send money via your bank?

You’re unsurprisingly getting a lot of replies along these lines, taking issue with this strange and unfounded blanket statement about an entire country and you’re replying back to them with similar riffs on the theme that those commenters are being disingenuous and masking a kind of widely known understanding that the reason people visit there is for the sex industry.

I have to say I think you might have gotten the wrong idea there. There’s a kernel of truth to it in that yes, it is known to be a place where sex tourism occurs so you could say it was famous for it, but I also don’t think that that’s like, their thing. Other commenters have tried to persuade you of this by pointing out compelling reasons one might go there other than for sex tourism but you seem unwilling to believe them because of this idea you’ve latched on to that they’re being deliberately naive. I think it might help just to point out that, at least amongst Australians, this is a very mainstream holiday destination, like it’s not a place where anyone would raise their eyebrows to hear you were going there. You could happily discuss this at any workplace and say you’re going to Thailand for a holiday and you’d probably get a lot people saying how much they love the place and asking which part you’re going to. I’d be surprised to learn if somehow all or even most of these people, sometimes families with children, had all gone there for a shag and also that this practice was so widely known that it was somehow a reasonable, immediate assumption to make about why they’d chosen Thailand and yet they also decided to broadcast this intention to everyone they know.

While I don’t know the stats, I would guess that a lot of the world’s sex tourism probably occurs there, so I imagine that’s where you got the idea that that’s THE reason to go there but it’s also just a place where a lot of tourism generally happens.

What turned out to be the problem application?

I was unbothered by it as well, at least intestinally, the physical pain of something hot enough was certainly something I could experience and dislike at the extreme end but my stomach and bowels would have been fine. That it until about the past 5 years or so when my stomach suddenly decided it couldn’t handle all kind of things that were never a problem before and now I totally get what people were talking about. It’s pretty sad, I miss being able to reliably tolerate highly spicy food.

The easy answer is no, that is not an overreaction to the problem as you’ve assessed it. You didn’t want to drive to begin with, because of doubts about your capacity to drive, then when you did drive you encountered a dangerous situation and now you don’t to do it again, that’s just rational.

The tricky part is deciding if you’re going to persevere anyway. Though not wanting to drive again is rational and probably good for everyone else on the roads, you are also most likely not uniquely incompetent even if you’re self critical and doubting. This might be where the idea that you are overreacting comes from, the tension behind this rational response and the simultaneous idea that perhaps you’re being too self critical. Ironically, I think both are true.

For better or for worse we’re living in a world where you can continue to do this and on balance of probabilities, you will get used to driving and get more capable with it, but there’ll be a period while you reach that stage where you and everyone else on the road will be at risk of harm. That’s not a great situation and something that in other contexts for other activities might not be tolerated, but it also might be a necessary one. It might perhaps put your mind at ease (or the opposite depending on how you interpret this), to realise that the road is full of drivers that might not be “good” drivers because they’re, nervous, have bad multitasking, are drunk or on drugs, are tired, aren’t concentrating, are underconfident, are overconfident, angry right this second, inexperienced, over experienced to the point of becoming inattentive and all manner of factors that should objectively mean people just shouldn’t drive but nevertheless we do and in the time and circumstances that we find ourselves in you wouldn’t be against the moral zeitgeist on this to decide that driving is necessary or beneficial enough for you that you’re going to become just one more such driver less than optimal driver in the roads. Hopefully after a while you’ll get past the fear and inexperience and that will make you a driver of at least average competence.

This isn’t to say I think you should do that. One less car on the road, especially driven by someone who by their own judgement thinks they aren’t a good driver and also doesn’t want to drive would, in the grand scheme of things be good, but I acknowledge it would be hypocrisy of me to suggest that you should exclude yourself on this basis when very few of the rest of us would.