Oh he is not a good author by any stretch. The sci-fi equivalent of eating sugar - technically reading, has that fun sci-fi bits, but nothing of real value underneath.

C.S. Friedman is a highly undervalued SciFi/Fantasy writer IMO, I think she played in a lot of the same themes as Hubbard but with way better writing and much more interesting stories.

Hubbard was good at churn and rock solid as a swindler, and Mission Earth IMO was just him throwing his last "screw you"s to the people he conned.

A stupid but moderately entertaining read, with insane alien sex scenes, mostly from the perspective of a (I swear I’m not joking) small dicked trickster alien who keeps screwing up his own plans. I think its Hubbard’s self insert.

I wouldn’t bother with it though.

Yeah, definitely subjective, but to me the early days of the web were before HTML 2 - so up to 1995.

And yeah, so many tables for a long time… Mostly because it was a bit messy to work with and had limitations, not to mention browser support requirements and a pretty fast moving sets of specs…

It was fun though.

Ohhh… No, not battlefield earth.

Mission Earth. 10 book series.

divs were added in the late 90’s… that is not what I’d call early internet

The sheer number of different religions and the general talk about any religion, as well as the laughter at the idea of a god other than power, would have me disagree on that.

But that’s the fun thing about books - everyone gets their own interpretation of the message!

There are parts of it where he explicitly has the aliens talking about how stupid humans are for following dumbass religions, and how easily religious leaders - of any religion - can be bribed with power, money, and sex.

Its definitely not in support of any religion

Eh, maybe early on. Scientology was founded in the 50s, the Mission Earth series that made fun of religion and the people who followed it blindly was in the 80s just before he died, so I don’t think he bought into his own bs. I think that was him saying “You schmucks will still follow this crap after I die”.

I don’t believe in the slightest he though he created a novel approach to psychology.

He has other books he’s written where, plain as day, he points out the absurdity of religion and people following it. He put out a sci-fi book as a self help book because he thought it was funny and would make more money. He then made it a religion because he knew people were easily manipulated.

I am basing this on other things i’ve read from him, such as the Mission Earth series. I don’t believe in the slightest that he believed in any of it, from the junk science on up.

Was that the file transfer allowed for remote code execution one? That’d be the one that sticks out to me. 3 or 4 years ago iirc?

Edit: CVE-2021-27649 is the one that came to mind, not sure if that’s the one you’re referring to.

Exif-eraser, open source and available on F-Droid, Google Play, etc.

I’m in hard agreement with you, EuroTrip Yoda (had to).

My in-laws definitely voted Harris, my dad passed 4 years ago (Vietnam vet - not a trump fan), and my mom went down an idiotic rabbit hole. I haven’t talked to my mom in weeks, and I’m sure she knows why.

She also doesn’t know that we are planning to leave the country. I can’t stay in a place that will reduce my daughter to a second class citizen without bodily autonomy. Yet that’s what the nitwit I called “Mom” voted for.

Exif data can contain everything from the make/model of device used to take a picture, to a gps location of where the picture was taken.

Removing that information depends on what you’re using to do it, but can be done with an exif editing tool in pretty much any OS I’m aware of.

Edit: Autocorrect is a pita.

You keep pointing out the design flaw, but I think we are aware that its a flawed design.

So a shit design, yeah, that’s what we’re talking about.

That’s my hope for my kids right now.

Still working out where to go, and of course the (lengthy) process of getting there, as well as an obvious step further than simply sending my kids off to college elsewhere…

But “Not the US” is the answer to far too many questions right now.

With modifications making it not as good, to be clear.

that will hurt poor people the most.

As is tradition.

The comment from Maven is, as you found, accurate.

The answer is all of it.

But the electoral college is dumb and pointless

And its also how a president is elected in the United States, or 2016 would have gone a bit differently.

have an extremely high demand job.

I’m banking on this actually. My specialties are, and my wife’s is as well. So I’m reaching out to companies I know with a presence to see what my options are where I’d like to go, and decide from there. I doubt we will be the only ones though, so we’ll see what that ends up looking like.

The only up side is I’m in a very niche specialty with broad experience, have contacts on both sides of the work I do.

I think I’m in a better position than most, and I still think its going to be an uphill battle.