Adobe has thousands of customers, most of whom can't tell you anything about the file formats or underlying mechanisms of the tools they use, and almost none of whom are Birthers. Tom Harrison is one of many thousands of ordinary users of a popular and widely available computer program. It doesn't make him a "computer expert."
On the other hand, training and experience in computer science, including studying and teaching at the school responsible for that product, followed by decades of industry experience, give me and others the insight to point out where your pseudo-experts are making a mistake. So far you have no answer for that explanation other than to demand that we aren't "really" experts, even though the expertise is being demonstrated to your face.
No "woo," just the widely-available but technically challenging facts. You were handed the official Adobe description of the PDF system on a silver platter and asked to reconcile it with Birther assumptions for how PDF imaging should work. You have failed to do so, and you have ignored the summaries of it provided by others.
An expert knowledge of the Portable Document Format is required to evaluate claims pertaining to suspicion over a PDF file's composition. None of your so-called experts has been able to demonstrate such knowledge. Nor have you been able to address our criticism of their findings by any means other than begging everyone to believe that it's nonsense.
Naked denial of the refutation is not an effective rejoinder.
None needed. The Magic Scanner theory is the Birther straw man. I have instead provided several explanations and descriptions now of how PDF optimization typically works. You have willfully ignored it, hence you may not insist that I must believe in magic scanners. I refuse to wear the argument you keep trying to pin on me. When you're ready to discuss the argument I actually made, let us know.
No, he couldn't even get that right. It took me a while to duplicate what he was doing, until I figured out that he was toggling the clipping mask within the object and not the object itself.
In any case I answered this question at length. Kindly stop simply repeating your non-expert's claim as if it hadn't been debunked. What we see in the PDF is the expected behavior for an optimized PDF, and I have explained at length why. Your Oregon farmer with the made-up credentials and the home car-repair and web-design business has, like all the other Birther pseudo-experts, made the classic common-sense amateur's mistake of assuming the PDF rendering engine works like the more common z-buffer compositing algorithm. Nope, it doesn't.
No, you said:
You play this dishonest game every time one of your pseudo-experts is debunked and deposed. When you first presented his claims, we pointed out that they were technically naive and were just being used by a tabloid to lend an air of authority to their sensationalist claims. "No, no, no," you said. (paraphrasing) "He's an expert and his judgment has to be respected." Now you want again to back away from the expert-witness claim and say that the "evidence" speaks for itself.
No. The evidence you wished at first to present was Tom Harrison's allegedly expert judgment that the only way that PDF could have arisen from a scan is if the scanner somehow had x-ray vision. But the judgment to that effect was based solely upon Harrison's lack of imagination to consider other explanations that a real expert could instantly list. The claim, "I can't imagine how else this could have arisen, therefore fraud" is valid only if the witness's imagination is sufficiently informed.
So now you've tried to move the goalposts. Now you want to say that the evidence is instead the "anomalies" in the PDF that you say are somehow self-evident, require no judgment to interpret, and cannot be refuted. The earlier evidence comprising allegedly expert judgment is simply a recitation of layman's ignorance. Your change of argument suggests you understand this but you do not acknowledge it.
The observations and facts, upon which Harrison's former judgment was made and which you now say are the uncontestable evidence of forgery, have their explanation not in Photoshop layers, as Zebest has claimed, or "x-ray scanners" as Harrison has claimed, but instead in the ordinary and expected behavior of optimized PDFs. You have this explained to you multiple times by me and others, but you deny any obligation to consider it. You have been handed the official Adobe reference manual for the PDF language, but you refuse to read it.
You may trot out as many layman as you wish to attest to "common sense" interpretations that deny the published facts, but it will not convince anyone. You may deny to your heart's content that no expertise is required to understand what goes on in the Portable Document Format, but everyone else can see it being shown otherwise.
No, just yet another guy you've trotted out who patently doesn't know what he's talking about.
To sum up:
You have no legal basis for an accusation of fraud.
You have no factual basis for an accusation of fraud.
What is it that you think you have, that someone who isn't already a Birther would consider compelling evidence?
