Moderated Obama birth certificate CT / SSN CT / Birther discussion

Status
Not open for further replies.
Robert Prey said:
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Same goes for this guy. Look familiar?


[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=808&pictureid=5920[/qimg]
Click to expand...

Your arguments are unconvincing for the reasons I've given. You can either address those reasons or you can try a different argument. Whining because no one believes you is childish.
 
Guess what? I got up this morning in anticipation that it would be another day during which Barack Obama would be President of the United States of America. And I was not disappointed! Barack Obama, duly elected by the citizens of the land, certified by the Electoral College, and inaugurated on the steps of the nation's capitol by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Isn't it grand?

Our president, yours and mine.

President Barack Obama.

President Obama.

How I enjoy saying that.
 
Last edited:
Robert Prey said:
Except for Sheriff Joe's 1200 replication tests.
Click to expand...

And would you like to explain to everyone why they're inadmissible in court? Would you like to propound a legal theory for why the prosecution must replicate exculpatory evidence in order for it to be valid? Now you can see why Arpaio holds press conferences instead of trials.

Anyone can fail a thousand times at something if he's. It particularly motivated to succeed.

How many tries did it take his team to (without looking) exactly reproduce the PDF object groups using Adobe creative products? Oh that's right: he never did those tests. He never tried to mount an evidentiary case for forgery after his first massive failure.
 
JayUtah said:
How many tries did it take his team to (without looking) exactly reproduce the PDF object groups using Adobe creative products? Oh that's right: he never did those tests. He never tried to mount an evidentiary case for forgery after his first massive failure.
Click to expand...

That's the relevant question: Which process leads to exactly that kind of document structure? It must be reproducible. If it is just what is alleged by Arpaio et al they should be easily able to come up with a very similar document.

Another thing that occurred to me is this: There pdf Robert linked has two different optimisation procedures. One proprietary Adobe one and a second shared by different softwares.
The question for me is: Does the second one have just one implementation of the algorithm or are there multiple out there? Do they consistently produce the same result no matter which software I use or does that change the internal structure of the pdf file?
The next question I have: Are those the only two optimisation algorithms out there? For example my HP printer allows me to save scans as PDF documents, including some optimization stuff that is supposed to make the PDF smaller. What's used by such systems?
 
There's a rather more fundamental point that invalidates all this discussion of data structures, which is this: The State of Hawaii has certified that the information in the PDF matches that on the original paper copy of the birth certificate. Therefore, it doesn't matter how the PDF was produced. It could have been drawn up on an etch-a-sketch, photographed, traced on greaseproof paper off the photograph, cut up into separate fragments, the separate fragments separately scanned and the whole lot re-assembled digitally, and it wouldn't matter; it's a certified copy of the birth certificate, and this is true regardless of the process by which it was created. All this nonsense about PDF layers is completely irrelevant.

Dave
 
Moss said:
What's used by such systems?
Click to expand...
Your answer is "allsorts". The only way of reliably producing the identical PDF that I have seen work reliably, is to reproduce exactly the same the same scan on exactly the same computer, using exactly the same settings.

I could, for example, write a program in, say, VB which organises my image files.
20 other programmers could do the same, but no two solutions would be identical.

In the same way, PDF is simply a page description language. How many ways could you describe a page? And would your description be identical to someone elses? That's as simple as I can make it without getting into technicalities.
 
Dave Rogers said:
There's a rather more fundamental point that invalidates all this discussion of data structures, which is this: The State of Hawaii has certified that the information in the PDF matches that on the original paper copy of the birth certificate. Therefore, it doesn't matter how the PDF was produced. It could have been drawn up on an etch-a-sketch, photographed, traced on greaseproof paper off the photograph, cut up into separate fragments, the separate fragments separately scanned and the whole lot re-assembled digitally, and it wouldn't matter; it's a certified copy of the birth certificate, and this is true regardless of the process by which it was created. All this nonsense about PDF layers is completely irrelevant.

Dave
Click to expand...

No. An altered BC must be indicated or it is a fraud.
 
Robert Prey said:
No. An altered BC must be indicated or it is a fraud.
Click to expand...

The information was certified true.

If you photocopy a document, and adjust settings so it is readable that counts as fraud?

Careful you dont wear out the bottom of that barrel with your scraping...
 
Robert Prey said:
No. An altered BC must be indicated or it is a fraud.
Click to expand...

Baloney. The act of creating a digital image is itself an alteration. If the information on the copy has been certified officially to match the information on the original, then the copy is a certified copy whatever the process by which it was copied.

Dave
 
Robert Prey said:
No. An altered BC must be indicated or it is a fraud.
Click to expand...


Robert, you realize that NO ONE has their original BC right? Every BC issued by every state, province, territory, nationstate, etc on this planet is a COPY of the Original, which is maintained by the appropriate government body.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Baloney. The act of creating a digital image is itself an alteration.
Click to expand...

The act of creating an analogue by means of xerography or photography is also itself an alteration of the original, which is why these copies are expressly certified so as to have official value. The certification says that the information contained in the copy is true and correct, regardless of any express or implied flaws in the copy.

If the information on the copy has been certified officially to match the information on the original, then the copy is a certified copy whatever the process by which it was copied.
Click to expand...

Correct. The case against the PDF was over long ago. Hawaii's certification dismissed any legal standing for a challenge against Obama on those grounds. However, Birthers aren't really motivated by protecting the Constitution or investigating a legitimate claim of electoral fraud. They are a small group of partisan politickers who seek to attract attention by accusing the sitting administration of something nefarious -- it doesn't really matter what. They don't even succeed very often at hiding their hatred. Mara Zebest, the "expert" who first questioned the PDF's authenticity, then went on to try to show other Photoshop-related fraud in the Obama administration. Of course she has no clue what she's talking about, but that doesn't seem to matter to the Birthers.
 
abaddon said:
The only way of reliably producing the identical PDF that I have seen work reliably, is to reproduce exactly the same the same scan on exactly the same computer, using exactly the same settings.
Click to expand...

Agreed. This is why I asked Robert early on to describe all the parameters and settings that affected what a PDF contains. I asked twice and he never answered. The answer is "practically infinite," meaning a large enough number to preclude exhaustive investigation. This is not, however, why Arpaio's toy investigation is legally inadmissible. It is, however, why it's useless for any practical evidentiary use.

Not even the same paper on the same scanner and computer using the same settings would be guaranteed to produce the same PDF. Small factors such as the fine alignment of the paper on the scanner bed have an observable effect. Why? Because, for example, PDF optimizers can attempt to correct what they recognize as alignment errors. Thus they replace objects in the original PDF with new objects that are transformations (i.e., scaling, nudging, or rotation) of previous elements. If, for example, the document was more perfectly aligned on the scanner bed, the optimizer might not recognize it as something that needs adjustment. Therefore the optimized PDF won't have those adjustments.

This is something we see all the time in the field of computing for science and engineering, as we collect and measure data from the real world. The care with which we obtain that data affects the behavior of downstream algorithms, often to a nonlinear extent.

Yes, Robert will just try to handwave these facts away as "more techno-babble from Jay," but of course what he's really saying by that is, "I don't understand a single word Jay said, and I can't refute it." And that's why experts, not Robert, make the important decisions and acquire credibility.

I could, for example, write a program in, say, VB which organises my image files. 20 other programmers could do the same, but no two solutions would be identical.
Click to expand...

I.e., what happens several times a semester in any computer science curriculum. As a former teacher of college engineering and computer science courses, I can attest that if you get two solutions that behave suitably alike, that's evidence the students may have collaborated and you should look more closely for evidence of outright cheating. The natural condition is for solutions to differ markedly.

That's as simple as I can make it without getting into technicalities.
Click to expand...

Feel free to get into the technicalities with me. I love it, because it's part of my profession, and Robert can't figure those arguments and so gets visibly flustered.

The notion of PDF, PS, and other page description languages as languages is vital. I mention one of the subjects I taught was computer graphics, which is intensely fun -- especially if you're teaching at the university that produced the people who went on to found Evans and Sutherland, Pixar, and Adobe. And one of the assignments was indeed to hand-write programs in Postscript and PDF.

I remember one student wrote a program, in Postscript, to generate fractals as output. It was a very tiny program, as far as PS files go, and just for bleeps and giggles I ran it on our department printer -- took three hours to run and produced gorgeous device-resolution output. Now an equivalent PS file (in terms of visual output) could have been written simply as an embedded bitmap. Or in any number of ways, programmatically. The field is literally wide open, when you have a Turing-complete programming language to work in.

The Birthers loved technicalities when they thought the technicalities were on their side. It was fun to listen to them foam about "layers" and "bit masks" as if they suddenly knew what these things were. Nowadays it's hard to get a Birther to talk about them. Why? Because the world saw them shoot themselves in the foot. "PDFs from scanned documents ever only contain the one layer!" they said. And after quickly realizing that that was a most inexpert position from which to argue, they've been backpedaling ever since and hoping the technical argument would go away.
 
JayUtah said:
The notion of PDF, PS, and other page description languages as languages is vital. I mention one of the subjects I taught was computer graphics, which is intensely fun -- especially if you're teaching at the university that produced the people who went on to found Evans and Sutherland, Pixar, and Adobe. And one of the assignments was indeed to hand-write programs in Postscript and PDF.

I remember one student wrote a program, in Postscript, to generate fractals as output. It was a very tiny program, as far as PS files go, and just for bleeps and giggles I ran it on our department printer -- took three hours to run and produced gorgeous device-resolution output. Now an equivalent PS file (in terms of visual output) could have been written simply as an embedded bitmap. Or in any number of ways, programmatically. The field is literally wide open, when you have a Turing-complete programming language to work in.
Click to expand...

Back in the day, the Postscript printers could be substantially more powerful than the workstations the cash-strapped computer department would provide for the students. More than a few classmates (not myself, although I *did* learn the language) built their computing scripts in PS and ran them on the printer rather than wait for the server to have enough resources to run it. Later, we got a dedicated "computation server", which worked fine until someone decided to test it by generating a 4000x4000 matrix ... and computing its inverse. The admin was not amused.
 
Robert Prey said:
Of course, someone has stepped up to say it was just a mistake.

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=808&pictureid=6527[/qimg]
Click to expand...

I love conspiracy theorists. Any mistake is evidence of a conspiracy. Anything they can interpret as part of the conspiracy is evidence of a conspiracy. Anything they can't intepret as part of the conspiracy is just more cleverly part of the conspiracy, and therefore evidence of a conspiracy.
 
davefoc said:
But, if he had the capability to implement this hoax which would certainly be the most amazing hoax in the history of the world
Click to expand...

Most conspiracy theories are about grim hoaxes, mass murder, etc. But aside from its obvious racist roots, there's no reason to be alarmed if this theory IS true. I mean, let's say for a moment that Robert is right, and Obama was born in Kenya. Ok, so what ? So, the constitution doesn't allow for a non-native to become president (which I disagree with). So he's not legally president but... even so, it's not really that catastrophic, is it ?

Which is why they add more layers to the conspiracy to make it more sinister. Otherwise no one would really care anyway.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom