Reply With QuoteThese are purportedly personal memos.Exceptions to the hearsay rule:
Whatever the odds, TD, it won't be good enough for Nbadanallah or DeSPURate.
I found that site, (even posted it here), the guy is thorough and, I'm glad you exhibited the hubris I lacked in contacting him.
These are purportedly personal memos.Exceptions to the hearsay rule:
And to me it doesn't look like a match with word:
Ha. You have no answer.
They would fall under the business exception. Theres nothing on them that says personal.These are purportedly personal memos.
Again, CBS' own expert has said that the do ents have been scanned, copied, and/or faxed multiple times.
That's not certain.
What did I not have an answer to?
You have provided no proof to your assertion that the do ents came from the Pentagon. Now provide me a quote or a link.
As you said to me: It's been done. Why are you not aware of this?
Prof at Rice has his doubts...
www.cs.rice.edu/Database/cork.shtml
... in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were not equipped to produce do ents like the Killian do ents. In Fall 1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at Stanford. I soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which had the most powerful time-sharing system (a PDP-10) on campus. In either 1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer called a "Xerox Graphics Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were given to the MIT Computer Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science Department. The programming staff at the Stanford AI Laboratory was thrilled with the gift because it was the first opportunity that computer science research community had to develop software to support printer quality type-setting. The three Computer Science Departments cooperated in developing the word processing programs to support the XGP. I wrote my first published research paper and my doctoral disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It would take another decade before comparable word processing systems were available to most computer science researchers on minicomputers running Unix. It would take nearly another decade before they were widely used on personal computers.
The typed text in the "Killian memos" is kerned (check out letter combinations like "fo" and "fe"), but the (IBM) Composer text is clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex task beyond the capacity of any mechanical typewriter--even one as expensive and elaborate as the IBM Selectric Composer.
CBS is running a story right now about the docs maybe you ought to watch it.
we can throw experts at eachother all night:
Boston.comAfter CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered do ents that referred to a 1973 effort to ''sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the do ents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time.
But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the do ents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.
(SNIP)
Bouffard, the Ohio do ent specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush do ents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
Where is the link proving that the Pentagon is the source of those four memos that Rather based his report on?
That's ok kiddo some of us aren't unemployed and sitting on our asses at home.
Why do you insist on making this personal. Just makes you look like an ass.
Well, DeSPURate, you've been looking like a silly ass, on this topic, since yesterday...I guess you needed the company.
Ah yes, Bouffard.
www.indcjournal.com/archives/000859.php
September 11, 2004
HOT UPDATE: Dr. Bouffard Speaks About Boston Globe!
INDC EXCLUSIVE!! MUST CREDIT INDC!!
I just interviewed Dr. Bouffard again, and he's angry that the Globe has misrepresented him. He's been getting hate mail and nasty phone calls since last night's story was posted, and he wants me to correct the record. He did not change his mind, and he and his colleagues are becoming more certain that these do ents are forgeries.
Instead of providing my analysis of our conversation, I'm largely going to transcribe his unaltered quotes (please note that he's a rather colorful, engaging older gentleman):
(I'm dynamically updating as I transcribe quotes, so keep refreshing)
"What the (Boston Globe) did now sort of pisses me off, because now I have people calling me and e-mailing me, and calling me names, saying that I changed my mind. I did not change my mind at all!"
"I would appreciate it if you could do whatever it takes to clear this up, through your internet site, or whatever."
"All I'd done is say, 'Hey I want to look into it.' Please correct that damn impression!"
"What I said to them was, I got new information about possible Selectric fonts and (Air Force) do ents that indicated a Selectric machine could have been available, and I needed to do more analysis and consider it."
"But the more information we get and the more my colleagues look at this, we're more convinced that there are significant differences between the type of the (IBM) Composer that was available and the questionable do ent."
"The (new Selectric) typefaces sent to me invalidated the theory about the foot on the four (originally reported to INDC), but after looking at this more, there are still many more things that say this is bogus."
"... there are so many things that are not right; 's crossings,' 'downstrokes' ..."
"More things were looked into; more things about IBM options. Even if you bought special (superscripting) keys, it's not right. There are all kinds of things that say that this is not a typewriter."
"Any form of kerning may be critical (he hasn't rendered a definitive verdict if there is a form of kerning yet). If there is any type of kerning, it obviously isn't a typewriter or it's definitely a typeset do ent."
On the Globe and others:
"You talk to someone on the phone and it comes out different than you said!"
On the source of the 1969 Air Force Supply Memo:
Dr. Bouffard received an e-mail from the address of Roy Huber, a noted retired forensic analyst in Ottawa, but a response indicated that it was Lynn Huber.
"I presumed that it was a relative of Roy. The do ent said that there are fonts from the IBM that don't have the foot on the '4.'"
The e-mail also contained an attachment to possible Selectric fonts that indicated that the "4" had a foot, and the Air Force memo that indicated that the military purchase of such a machine was a possibility.
But since having had more time to analyze the fonts of the Selectric:
"We've looked into more and more IBM options and ... there are all kinds of things that say this isn't a typewriter."
UPDATE: These are all the transcribable quotes that Dr. Bouffard gave me at this time. More as the story develops.
I provide his words, you decide ... but I have come to the definitive conclusion that the Boston Globe misrepresented their main source's testimony to stunningly misleading effect.
Whether or not the docs are even forgeries or not is almost secondary in the media narrative at this point. The fact is, Dr. Bouffard was used as the main source to write the following headline in the Boston Globe:
Authenticity backed on Bush do ents
Square that headline with the quotes from their source that are listed above.
UPDATE: NOTE TO COMMENTERS - Feel free to parse the details of whether the do ent is fake or not, if that's your passion, but I think that many of you that bother are missing the real point here. At this point, with this angle, the veracity of the do ent is almost secondary to the Boston Globe's willingness to mislead you into believing that the case is closed.
UPDATE: Also, to be perfectly clear - Dr. Bouffard is not indicating yet that the the docs are definitely fake, he's just clueing me in on a preponderance of indications that it may be likely. Expert analysis is still underway.
Just want to make sure that I don't present a mischaracterization that is the opposite of the Globe's presentation.
UPDATE: By the way, if anyone would like to contact the ombudsman for the Globe ...
Christine Chinlund
[email protected]
617-929-3020 / 3022
Is misrepresentation by the Globe a pattern?
UPDATE: By the way, read my previous analysis of the Boston Globe story, written before I re-interviewed Dr. Bouffard for this post. Was my analysis correct?
Looks like I struck a nerve.
Suffice it to say, I think most readers would feel you are sporting the Donkey's head around these parts today.
Oh well, so much for the claim that the Pentagon was the source for those do ents.
Seriously whatever. You haven't proven that these are fakes. You just choose to accept them as such because they undermine your beliefs. I don't really give a **** if they are real or not. Either way Bush went AWOL, didn't show up for a medical exam at the same time they started doing random drug searches, and didn't attempt to get into a unit in Boston where he was supposed to finish out his credits.
CBS is standing by the do ents, The white house is refusing to answer any direct question about them. What have they got to hide about it? My best guess is that some of these docs may be fake (the two that look like word docs) But the WH can't comment on it, because they know real ones out there exist saying the exact same thing. And they can't say for sure whether or not these are fake, because they don't know.
I do a disservice to the democratic party by continuing to argue with you because it really draws away from the other important questions, and its just falling for the republican trap. These do ents have been well tarred whether fairly or not. It just draws away from the perpoderence of evidence that Bush went missing in Alabama, that he was overqualified to tranfer to a non drilling unit.
And Newcomer's analysis is based on a bit more than that.
As the man said:
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a do ent that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this do ent could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).
Why should he be believed? Well,
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS do ents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic do ent production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the do ents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the do ents within a few minutes. At time I a writing this, CBS is stonewalling. They were hoaxed, pure and simple. CBS failed to exercise anything even approximately like due diligence. I am not sure what sort of "expert" they called in to authenticate the do ent, but anything I say about his qualifications to judge digital typography is likely to be considered libelous (no matter how true they are) and I would not say them in print in a public forum.
I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Do ent Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography.
Awwww, the littleis mad because his bull was exposed.
Why is the white house refusing to answer simple questions about them? Seriosuly they flat out refused to take a stand about this issue?
You should see me angry I am moderately amused actually. Your continuing to gloat over a proving something which you haven't done.
Again, where is the proof that those do ents came from the Pentagon?
Amusing? Yes, you have been quite that today.
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