apo

> The new law amends existing law in the Commonwealth that defines distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without the subject's consent —often called revenge porn —as a Class 1 misdemeanor. The new bill updated the law by adding a category of "falsely created videographic or still image" to the text.

This is a strange law:

> Any person who, with the intent to coerce, harass, or intimidate, maliciously disseminates or sells any videographic or still image created by any means whatsoever that depicts another person who is totally nude, or in a state of undress so as to expose the genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or female breast, where such person knows or has reason to know that he is not licensed or authorized to disseminate or sell such videographic or still image is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. For purposes of this subsection, "another person" includes a person whose image was used in creating, adapting, or modifying a videographic or still image with the intent to depict an actual person and who is recognizable as an actual person by the person's face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic.

https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/18.2-386.2

A kid makes a pencil drawing of the school principal in a compromising situation and posts it to Instagram.

Legal?

A very talented artist creates a realistic watercolor of the President in a compromising situation with Kim Jong-un and posts to Instagram.

Legal?

A kid uses software he downloaded to generate a realistic depiction of the school principal in a compromising situation and posts it to Instagram.

Legal?

It's a little surprising that this article approaches the issue from the perspective of the gizmo working, rather than ever-widening surveillance.

Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100% effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records, with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant database.

Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?

> These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

There's enough horror in American history, and depictions of them, to keep these committees busy for a long time. Washington, Jefferson, the confederacy, westward expansion, and slavery were not very controversial historical topics just 60 years ago.

Think about all of the events/figures likely to offend at least one vocal group maybe not now, but in the future:

- Andrew Jackson (purveyor of genocide)

- Theorore Roosevelt (bloodthirsty militarist)

- WWI (unjust war)

- Transcontinental railroad (genocide's superhighway)

- Texas war of independence (slavery)

- Moon landing (cold war publicity stunt)

- The Manhattan Project (America's WMD program)

- Albert Einstein and FDR (for kickstarting the world's nuclear nightmare)

- Lyndon Johnson (genocidal maniac)

- George W Bush (bloodthirsty militarist and torturer)

- Barack Obama (architect of America's robotic warfare system)

- Donald Trump (basically everything he ever did)

- The Republican Party (for supporting Donald Trump)

Some of these events/figures seem like a stretch. Maybe they are, but a lot can change in 60 years. The point is that we now have ample evidence for very vocal groups calling for, and getting action on, suppression of vast swaths of American history in the form of artwork and symbols.

> That's extremely misleading.

You're right - I should have said: "potentially a lot of water."

Sandstone (silicon oxides) seems unlikely given the reducing nature of the atmosphere. I'm no expert, but when liquid hydrocarbons rain down, there's not a lot of free oxygen on the surface at least. Ditto for basalt, which is about 40-50% silicon oxide. Still there could have been some process by which the interior sequestered most of the planet's oxygen, leaving what remained on the surface as water.

In contrast, liquid hydrocarbons seem plausible given the stuff rains down from the atmosphere and its density (methane ~0.5 g/mL, -162 C).

Titan's orbit provides some evidence consistent with a body that's more dense at the surface than at the core. One explanation is large amounts of subsurface liquid, but there are others:

https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-04/titan-could-h...

There's been some discussion about the apparent massive block of ice in Titan's surface, so the idea that Titan's putative subsurface ocean could contain water isn't too wild a speculation:

https://www.space.com/titan-saturn-moon-weird-ice-formation....

A subsurface ocean composed of water and liquid hydrocarbons would be consistent with everything I've been able to find so far.

> Scientists suspect that Titan might even have water—real, actual H2O—lurking beneath its surface.

Not just a little, but a lot of water:

> The density of Titan is consistent with a body that is about 60% rock and 40% water.

> ...

> Pre-Cassini models of impact trajectories and angles suggest that where the impactor strikes the water ice crust, a small amount of ejecta remains as liquid water within the crater. It may persist as liquid for centuries or longer, sufficient for "the synthesis of simple precursor molecules to the origin of life".[107]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)

That's a good study, but I'm not sure it disentangles income from education:

> Moreover, the “divorce gap” between college graduates and those with less education was larger in the NLSY79 cohort than it was for the 1950–1955 birth cohort. In the NLSY79 cohort, the divorce rate for first marriages is nearly 20 percentage points lower for those who have completed their bachelor’s degree compared with those who have completed high school, regardless of whether they have some college or not. The gap is even greater, approaching 30 percentage points, when comparing those with a college degree to those with less than a high school diploma. Just as with first marriages, college graduates were more likely to stay in a second marriage when compared with groups that have less education.

Couples that get married after degrees have waited longer to get married than couples that either drop out of high school or marry after high school. College grads tend to earn more.

So it seems any income difference must account for bachelor's degrees and the extra time before getting married that requires.

Seems plausible - got a reference?

> I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ranked one of the best places to live in the country.

I wonder to what extent the setting in which the author works selects for people who will feel isolated/regretful and therefore develop the kinds of problems s/he encounters.

> The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it.

The underlying assumption is that white and wealthy must not be worse off than the alternative.

But what if the environment itself creates problems that less affluent environments don't?

- Children can afford to move out of the house and so they do

- Couples can afford to get divorced, and so they do

- Individuals can afford to experiment with behaviors that lead to addiction, and so they do

- Families don't need their children economically, so they spend their time in the care of others or alone

There can be no regret without choice. The more money you have, the more real choices you get to make. And the more ways you can come to regret those choices.

> "This is absolutely terrifying," Katelyn Bowden, founder and CEO of revenge porn activism organization Badass, told Motherboard. "Now anyone could find themselves a victim of revenge porn, without ever having taken a nude photo. This tech should not be available to the public."

Or maybe the opposite?

The transition to ubiquitous deep fakes will be very jarring to those who haven't been paying attention. In time, the shock value (and indeed interest) should fade into obscurity.

Pop stars upset about appearing in one of these deep fakes should be much more horrified about another possibility: eventually their talents will no longer be needed at all because it will be possible to produce content free of human placeholders and much more effective at generating money.

> It all stems from a year-long lawsuit initiated by the estate of Dave Kleiman, a computer scientist who, according to the complaint, helped Wright “invent” Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The lawsuit claims that when Kleiman died in April 2013, Wright engaged in a scheme to deny Kleiman of 1.1 million bitcoin that the former business partners jointly owned.

This is comedy gold. A letter purportedly signed by Kleiman references a bizarre trust scheme involving a million bitcoin:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2644014/Tulip-Tru...

The judge's request is apparently based at least in part on this letter.

The letter references a "Key with ID C941FE6D," a PGP key Wright used to fabricate evidence of being Satoshi.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-...

As such, the letter seems fake as a $3 bill. Hilariously, the Kleiman family seems to consider it real. It's now being used to force Wright into proving he controls the corresponding private keys.

We've been here before back when Wright said he'd provide cryptographic proof of being Satoshi and furnished instead technobabble, mind games and deceit.

Instead of fleecing some technically illiterate folks out of cash, the consequences here for deceit are legal sanctions against Wright to varying degrees.

What goes around.

> In practice, it is much more complicated: while a limited set of “validators” — aka miners — share a history of transactions in (individual) blocks that are chained together (i.e. a blockchain), what Libra actually exposes is the current state of the ledger. In practice this means that adding new transactions can be much quicker and more efficient — more akin to adding a line to a spreadsheet than rebuilding the entire spreadsheet from scratch.

The author seems to be referring to the two different accounting models in crupyotcurrency: the coin model and the account model.

The coin (aka UTXO) model mimics physical cash. A transaction changes ownership of a digital token, leaving a chain of ownership in its wake. This is the model used by Bitcoin.

The account model credits and debits specific amounts from an account. This is the model used by Ethereum.

The author seems to imply that the speed of a network depends on which accounting model is being used.

It doesn't. In both cases, signatures must be validated, and this is the most costly computation. In neither case is the entire chain of transactions reloaded to verify a single payment. Instead, the most recent state is extended.

Transaction volume is largely a function of how open the network is and how trusted the parties are that write blocks. The more open the network to membership by arbitrary players, the slower it will be. The less trust in those writing blocks, the slower it will be.

Bitcoin users value censorship resistance and insist on validating their own blocks (or at least they should). The network is configured make this possible by, for example, setting a block size limit among other features.

Libra will need none of this. Validators will be implicitly trusted. What they say goes. A certain minimum hardware spec can be set and enforced, ensuring fast payment processing, at the expense of censorship resistance and openness.

> It is simply the original bitcoin protocol, ie. with all the stupid things that were added to "BTC" since 2009 removed.

Bitcoin SV clearly introduced many changes. But those changes are backward-incompatible for Bitcoin nodes, meaning that every one of them will reject an SV block.

It really doesn't matter what you think about the wisdom of what was added since 2009. All that matters is that Bitcoin nodes will ignore the blocks.

Experimentation is all well and good. But fringe groups breaking the protocol willy-nilly then claiming the result as Bitcoin is misleading at best.

That's what I was pointing out. It's a tactic used repeatedly by SV advocates including Wright. His involvement is relevant given the extraordinary nature of his claims and the deliberately misleading nature of his proof.

> No Segwit No RBF No block size limit No limits on scripts or data sizes

Scaling is so very easy when users are scarce.

Imagine how much more sane tuitions would be if these people had just done something else with their lives.

Unintended consequences of federal loan guarantees: education becomes more expensive, leaving young graduates who should be finding their financial footing trying to understand what happened to them.

Highly misleading. This runs on an alternative network called Bitcoin SV. It's most definitely not Bitcoin, but a fork of a fork of a fork.

Amusing really, because the "SV" stands for Satoshi's vision. The founder, Craig Wright has been bamboozling people for a long time with his nonsense.

It's so long ago that most have forgotten, but the real Satoshi weighed in on a pretty heated argument about whether the Bitcoin block chain should be used to store DNS records. Satoshi was against it due to scaling concerns.

The project went on to create its own network and blockchain called Namecoin.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289...

I would take this project in the same spirit. Someone created a block chain and network for mass data storage. At least that's the goal. The result is what you see, but it's not Bitcoin.

> You know, in the software world, in particular for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, [meaning] Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.

Perfectly in character for Gates to see the mistake as failure to enter the market with the copycat product rather than the product that creates an entirely new category.

I suppose the world needs people like this, but by golly there's no reason for them to get any more than acknowledgement for being one of many players.

If Microsoft had a history of doing things right consistently in the copycat position, that might be different. But as a generally mediocre player wielding a monopoly position to follow the technological lead of others Microsoft is really quite uninspiring.

> In its "unavoidable" final conclusion, the China Tribunal found forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, primarily sourcing body parts from detained Falun Gong practitioners, and possibly also an ethnic minority called the Uyghurs (although other groups are also targeted).

Oddly enough Falun Gong enjoyed approval from the Chinese Government in the early 90s:

> According to David Ownby, Professor of History and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the Université de Montréal, Li became an "instant star of the qigong movement",[119] and Falun Gong was embraced by the government as an effective means of lowering health care costs, promoting Chinese culture, and improving public morality. In December 1992, for instance, Li and several Falun Gong students participated in the Asian Health Expo in Beijing, where he reportedly "received the most praise [of any qigong school] at the fair, and achieved very good therapeutic results", according to the fair's organizer.[15] The event helped cement Li's popularity, and journalistic reports of Falun Gong's healing powers spread.[15][20] In 1993, a publication of the Ministry of Public Security praised Li for "promoting the traditional crime-fighting virtues of the Chinese people, in safeguarding social order and security, and in promoting rectitude in society."

That changed when the organization refused to become more closely aligned with the regime:

> In 1995, Chinese authorities began looking to Falun Gong to solidify its organizational structure and ties to the party-state.[53] Li was approached by the Chinese National Sports Committee, Ministry of Public Health, and China Qigong Science Research Association (CQRS) to jointly establish a Falun Gong association. Li declined the offer. The same year, the CQRS issued a new regulation mandating that all qigong denominations establish a Communist Party branch. Li again refused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

> That’s almost our public key, but not quite. We now encode (x, y) coordinates of our public point in hex ...

Bitcoin supports "compressed" public keys in which only the x-coordinate and the sign of the y- coordinate are present:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3059/what-is-a-c...

For some thought-provoking insights into the scale of the changes ancient American civilizations brought on the landscape, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann.

Maybe the most intriguing idea in the entire book is that the Americas were ten times more populated at the time of European contact than they ended up becoming in the 1500's (when most eye-witness accounts were written).

The "noble savages" we think of were remnants of a disease holocaust that wiped out 90% of the population. It's almost as if we're trying to understand European civilization by observing concentration camp survivors.

The recurring pattern: small group of Europeans makes contact with a native group. They report a land teeming with people and trade. A hundred years go by, and almost nobody is left. Those remaining live in small bands eeking out a subsistence living.

The culprit: smallpox and a host of other diseases that jumped species in Europe due to co-habitation with animals. The lack of such practices (or animal domestication in general) in the Americas meant that the disease transfer was destined to be one-way.

This dynamic may explain why there's only one genus of Homo left alive today. Whenever two groups contacted each other, one inevitably succumbs to the diseases carried by the other.

> The information includes names, addresses, birth dates, social insurance numbers, email addresses and information about transaction habits.

It's starting to look downright irresponsible to regard such information as private these days.

As such, it should be considered irresponsible to base any portion of a verification protocol on that information.

Too bad this piece doesn't link to the article containing hard evidence of numerous frauds:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-m...

Imagine how easy it would be to prove his claim of being Satoshi: a signed message using the private key from the genesis block or any of the first few dozen blocks.

After all, he did say he would provide cryptographic proof. Instead what he produced was technobabble designed to mislead the ill-informed.

So instead, this performance artist goes around suing people for pointing out the obvious truth.

For the technically minded, here's one summary of one of Wright's signature frauds:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone...

> Interest on the reserve assets will be used to cover the costs of the system, ensure low transaction fees, pay dividends to investors who provided capital to jumpstart the ecosystem (read “The Libra Association” here), and support further growth and adoption. The rules for allocating interest on the reserve will be set in advance and will be overseen by the Libra Association. Users of Libra do not receive a return from the reserve.

Forget about the cryptography and "blockchain" this system will use. The real innovation here is financial in nature. Only it's not really an innovation.

I doubt today's race to negative interest rates will be kind to Libra validators, who will be demanding a fat payout sooner or later for the loss of business on highly lucrative credit cards.

There's only one way to fund this beast: fractional reserve and ever more risky investments. The temptation will be enormous. The justifications true and well-intentioned. The outcome predictable to anyone who has paid attention.

Think Tether, but orders of magnitude larger.

> This was only made possible by enormous federal subsidies for returning soldiers and huge investments in public infrastructure by the federal government. ...

Today's government subsidies are creating artificial booms of their own. Credit, higher education, housing. The busts, like the one described in this article, should come as a surprise to nobody, but they will. Mixed in with that surprise may be an interest in finding a scapegoat - and a leader willing to deliver it.

The surprising thing here is that after all of those videos showing astounding robotic feats after all of these years, this is the first product release from the company.

From the article:

> Spot is currently being tested in a number of “proof-of-concept” environments, Boston Dynamics’ CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there’s no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year.

BD seems less like a standalone company and more like the R&D arm of a giant advertising monopoly. Cool gizmos but nothing that's going to find product-market-fit because that's not part of the plan. There's really no focus on a customer here at all.

This would seem to present an opportunity to a small, nimble competitor focused on a specific customer group.

> In two separate studies, researchers found the prototype consistently boosted memory 15% to 18%.

No mention of controls or error bars. Until then, this is all placebo effect.

> Consider refactoring before taking a step to code rewriting:

Refactoring is only an option for anything but a trivial code base if a suite of automated tests have already been written.

The article makes no mention of tests. I suspect the reason is that there were none. Refactoring would most likely have been impossible until an automated test suite had been written.

Many developers are confused about the purpose of an automated test suite. It's not to make your designs better. It's to allow you to refactor the spaghetti that will inevitably arise.

This event led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which granted the president sweeping military powers in southeast Asia. It amounted to a declaration of war on North Vietnam

It passed the senate with flying colors; only two votes against:

> The Senate conferred its approval by a vote of 88–2. Some members expressed misgivings about the measure, but in the end, Democratic Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska cast the only nay votes.[12] At the time, Senator Morse warned that "I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution

When the US starts wars, it's always with massive popular support - at least in the beginning.

It's easy to forget just what a boogeyman decades of propaganda had turned communism into by the 1960s. A similar thing has happened with "radical islam" today. There's currently a nascent movement to do the same thing to China.

When the next big war comes, expect it to be met with wild applause regardless of how asinine the justification is.

tl;dr: Sodium chloride was found using visible spectroscopy (literally, yellow patches), a technique that has been available for 20 years, but nobody thought to look:

> Meanwhile, JPL scientist Kevin Hand had used sample ocean salts, bombarded by radiation in a laboratory under Europa-like conditions, and found that several new and distinct features arose in sodium chloride after irradiation. He discovered that they changed colors to the point that they could be identified with an analysis of the visible spectrum. Sodium chloride, for example, turned a shade of yellow similar to that visible in a geologically young area of Europa known as "Tara Regio.

> ...

> "We've had the capacity to do this analysis with the Hubble Space Telescope for the past 20 years," Brown said. "It's just that nobody thought to look."

Sodium chloride is the major dissolved component of the Earth's ocean. The significance is that Europa's ocean may be much more similar to the Earth's ocean than previously thought.

Where there's similarity in environment, there's a chance for similarity in life that may be found there.

The article doesn't note the exact component(s) giving rise to the yellow color. It may be important that ocean salts, not pure sodium chloride itself, were irradiated by JPL. Ocean water contains many other dissolved minerals. Knowing the minimum component mixture necessary to produce the yellow color could say much more about the similarity between the oceans.

It's also not clear from the article what other materials might account for the 450 nanometer absorption.

Link to research paper:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/6/eaaw7123

The supplementary material Figure S2 contains some comparisons in the spectra of various samples:

> Here, we reproduce a selection of irradiated salt spectra that can be examined for the presence of a 450 nm absorption. With the exception of the NaCl brine taken from (23), all of the spectra shown were taken at room temperature. The bloedite spectrum (Na2Mg(SO4)2  4H2O) is from (29), the MgCl2 spectrum is from (35), and the remaining salt spectra are from (34). Of all of the spectra, only NaCl can explain the observed 450 nm absorption on Europa, and most have strong absorptions elsewhere that we do not observe in our HST data. All spectra are normalized to unity at 750 nm, and each spectrum is offset vertically by 0.4 units from the one below it.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2019/...

> Unlike some other "driverless" truck companies, Starsky isn't building a completely autonomous solution. Instead, it uses teleoperation to remotely drive the truck between freight depots and the freeway where a highway-only automated driving system takes over. ...

The video hints at "lane keeping." How much automation is involved?

However much it is, it's not hard to imagine a smooth transition between remote operation and autonomous driving over time. Each iteration would eliminate one more thing the driver needs to be concerned with until nothing is left.

> Instead of the sage life-saving advice I was sure she [Suze Orman] would offer on how to manage an amount of student debt the size of a home mortgage, she quickly brushed me aside with a breezily uttered, “student debt doesn’t count because it doesn’t affect your credit rating.” ...

Student debt can't be discharged except in very restrictive situations, so you could say this form of debt matters more.

https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancell...

The problem with fighting cancer is selectively destroying cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone. This article unfortunately says nothing about how this device does so (or even whether it does).

Without some handle on this aspect, side effects (some of which might show up much later) could be a major problem with this treatment.

No time to plow through the original paper - does anyone know?