Smart TV spyware is why I just use Linux on an old laptop and a dumb monitor. That way I at least some control over the level of spyware and adds.

You're only free to commit crime at will if you've got 100 bitcoin to give the president in exchange for your pardon, or if he's hoping you'll do something else for him.

Not all of the 1200 who died on October 7 were killed by Hamas. Many of them were actually killed by the IDF under the Hannibal directive. Basically the Hannibal directive says that it's better for an Israeli to die under IDF fire than the government be forced to negotiate their release. It's not clear how many died due to IDF fire, but one location apparently had about 75 vehicles destroyed by the IDF returning to Gaza -- most of them probably with would-be hostages.

It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

I would continue that statement

"... if you just give up and let everyone go. We can find a solution together! Ideally one that doesn't end with me and the rest of my pack pulverizing those puny strands of calcium that keeps your bag of human meat functional!"

or maybe this will be the reason we start giving the robots guns (eventually somebody is going to think it is a good idea.

I was more expecting it to be used in a bank robber, tbh..

So, Microsoft now has both the financial resources and the power need that could justify a serious research/development project to produce a production Thorium reactor. -- The original problem that the DOE had with Thorium reactors was that they were almost useless for producing nuclear weapons (an important 'side effect' of Nuclear power back in the '70s). Microsoft has no need (one would hope) for nuclear weapons, but could definitely use the thorium promise of a far smaller radiation waste footprint.

We need to push courts to make speakers more accountable for their lies, not the platforms. It's currently too difficult to take people to court for intentionally, or grossly negligently, spreading lies -- especially those with big audiences and big money.

If you can't take the speaker to court, you shouldn't be able to scare the platform into censoring them.

Yeah, I admit, that I'm not gonna complain about an extra 7 days in space -- but these are millionaires who probably have lawyers on staff waiting for stupid things to do. Suing for the 'extremely long flight delay' under airline rules might be a good bit of fun in addition to the extra floating time.

Why is the above -1? that is a wonderful comment and exactly the perspective i was looking for when I read the parent. (pun not(?) intended)

It has been a while since I really got into gdpr but the point is that fb wants to do business inside eu (sell ads to eu companies). If they want to do that, and they hold any days on eu citizens, they have to abide by the regs

I agree. Sadly, software engineering is not engineering. Nobody, out side of safety critical systems, analyses the program structure and makes valid correctness claims for it as part of their quality process.

Software is at a stage that architecture went through before structural engineering really became widely adopted towards the back end of 19th century.

While we have pretty good tools these days that could do formal verification of our software, the process is incredibly time consuming. Moreover, all formal verification can ever do is show conformity to the specification. The specification can, of course, still be wrong. The move from the informal world of business to the formal specification of a system leaves a lot of room for mistakes.

How does a buyer of software know whether one piece of software is higher quality than another? Is there any real way for them to independently judge the quality of the code in most purchases?

My final thought to reflect on is that acceptable quality is enough quality and for most users that is reached fairly quickly. People will tolerate software that is really quite buggy. Games developers are actually giving us relatively deep insight in to that part of the economics. They still make money shipping games that are basically broken.

This point about game development is quite illuminating I think. The reason that most software is quite buggy is fundamentally an economic question - not an engineering question. Generally speaking, people are not prepared to pay for quality. They want enough quality that the software isn't a false economy - and we as an industry largely supply software of that quality.

You can find problems in either direction. Engineers without MBAs go for perfection without understanding the human and cost aspect. MBAs without engineers work to maximize profit at all costs -- without considering the safety and long term costs. The proper solution is a careful mix, BUT If I was going to fly in an airplane, I think I'd go for one built by engineers over MBAs.

Two comments:

1) Your preferred candidate model is at odds with the _data_. Observational data is what you have to test a model against, and your preferred model fails spectacularly: it can't explain the baryon acoustic oscillation spectrum, or the large scale intergalactic structure, or the polarization spectrum of the microwave background, or the accelerating cosmic expansion rate. That's _why_ the current concordance model became accepted as most probable: it explains the data ... even data that were not collected at the time it was proposed! You might try reading about the successes and challenges of the Lambda-CDM: model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Whether the dark matter and energy eventually have a particle solution or not - and this hasn't been "proclaimed" by anyone, there are many competing hypotheses - the data very strongly require more types of physics than are currently described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

2) People like to rag on the aether model, and it's true that we no longer believe there is an aether, but that's because the _data_ don't require it. However, it was _not_ a crazy expectation. All wave phenomena known to the time required a physical medium to propagate in; light was a wave; ergo, the hypothesis of the aether as the medium to support light propagation. The aether fell out of favor because every attempt to measure its properties failed, and physics eventually relegated it to an interesting historical footnote.

As others have mentioned, muon tomography can be used to study geological structure and do non-desrructive searches of shipping containers, for dxample, for fissile materials. Muon spin resonance can be used to study the magnetic structure if materials. They also do chemistry, so they can be used to understand properties of chemical compounds.