I looked at this one, this typewriter wasn't the one that most of the military had. This is the rolls royce one.
I don't believe this typewriter came out till around 76-79
I just cancelled my on-line subscription!!!! Boy that felt good!
Even if the match had been perfect, all it would have done is show that Word can be used to duplicate a document typed on a Selectric.
The alleged relevance of this escapes me.
The question is whether a Selectric, or any other typewriter available in the early 70s, could type the alleged Killian memos. This has nothing to do with what Mr. Mendelson was attempting (and failed) to show.
> ... completely ignoring the fact that the typography
> in the memos was kerned.
Not kerned. Some glyphs are nested in a way that was not
possible with technology available to Killian, but
strictly speaking, they are not kerned. See:
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1214078/posts
These people remind me of the cat in Pet Semetary that just wouldn't stay dead.
This is true as far as it goes, but ignores a plethora of relevant issues (e.g. the likelihood of a typewritten document at a TANG base in 1971 having proportional fonts and reduced superscripts).
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No, he doesn't!
"...none of this demonstrates that the documents dated from the early 1970s are in fact genuine. It only demonstrates that the fact that the disputed documents can be reproduced in Microsoft Word is not convincing evidence that they are inauthentic. "
But it's still a very stupid article.
E. Mendelson, PC Magazine
Dear Sir,
For someone who works on the Internet, you are WAY behind the curve. Even people who are 24 hours behind know that the IBM Selectric doesn't do the proportional typesetting of today's better computer programs. The IBM Executive, which cost about the same as a new car, is the one that could do proportional spacing. But even that could not do either the kerning or the superscript as they appear in the forgeries.
As a US Supreme Court attorney for four decades, I assure you that any argument is lost before you begin if you cannot account for the observed, basic facts. Oh, you can win arguments in front of stupid audiences, for sure. But intelligent audiences will chew you up and spit you out. The Internet is an intelligent audience -- not as smart as your average Justice, mind you, but smart enough to take apart what you have posted.
You need to do your homework, then rethink, rewrite, and repost.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Cordially,
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "Time to Talk about the 2008 Election"
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Anyone see a pattern here?.
| Every death should be on the front page (2.70 / 40) Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them. |
| by kos on Thu Apr 1st, 2004 at 19:08:56 GMT |
Zuniga ("kos") has been known to raise money for the Kerry campaign. I wonder if the writer of the article took that into account?
Makes you wonder....
Just checked the masthead of my latest issue of PC Magazine.
"Forgery expert" Mendelson is listed as a contributing editor, but what interested me is the mission statement of this periodical, which is as follows:
"PC Magazine is the Independent Guide to Technology. Our mission is to test and review computer-and internet related products and services and report fairly and objectively on the results."
I am wondering if this guy went off on his own, publishing under the PC Magazine banner his comments comparing IBM typewriters and modern day word processing programs. This is something that seems outside the test and review mission of the magazine.
As a subscriber, I will give the magazine the benefit of the doubt for the time being because I don't believe the editors or publisher cleared Mr. Mendelson to do this.
Let's see if he even keeps his job after what appears to be a major mistake on his part, i.e., injecting his employer, a technical journal, into a Presidential campaign.
In any case, it appears his article is getting clobbered, so if I am wrong in my belief about how this came about, then PC Magazine will lose me as a subscriber.
This may be the most important thread in the history of this topic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1214078/posts
Burn 'em bump.
And I'm a subscriber!
Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value.Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width).
This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”.
OK guys. This explains a lot. FReepers have been arguing for days that the CBS documents are kerned. I have been biting my tongue because I saw what I thought were obvious instances where the CBS documents were not kerned. Yet FReepers and others wer able to point out instances where something more sophisticated than proportional spacing occurred.
Now hold on. This is a bumpy ride. The forged documents and the MSWord documents are "pseudo-kerned". This is an automatic feature of True-Type. Another thread has a former Apple programmer discussing the invention of True-Type. The ultimate point is that The forged documents are typeset using a letter spacing technology that was not invented until 1989. Not only was it not invented until 1989, but it is patented. No one but a True-Type licencee (read Microsoft) can produce the CBS documents.