The fact that property tax and homeowners' insurance are based on property value makes it even more painful. When you're talking about a $1.5 million home, the property taxes will cost you $15,000 per year. And insurance averages out to about $3.50 for every thousand dollars of home. So that's another five grand. That means that in the hypothetical example above, property tax and insurance add up to 40% of your net income after income taxes and house payments.
Congress approves the people who manage it (as appointed by the President). That's a lot closer to direct control than merely being able to pass laws (which, almost by definition, cannot legally be created in such a way that they affect only one business and not all businesses of a particular type).
And don't forget poorly made printers in that list. Sometimes, manufacturers cut corners on the strength of their motors, and those printers jam constantly when a better printer would have been able to push the paper through. And sometimes, manufacturers have poorly designed paper guides that don't stay tight against the paper, causing the paper to be slightly turned as it goes in. If the printer doesn't have a lot of tolerance on both sides of the paper path, it will jam.
But my all-time favorite printer manufacturer screwup was the HP LaserJet 81xx series. These printers are tanks, and you wouldn't expect them to ever jam, but you'd be wrong. Thanks to a programming bug (at least in their most recent firmware), if you try to print 11"x17" double-sided, the printer starts pulling the next sheet of paper too early, and it jams EVERY SINGLE TIME. I reproduced this bug with multiple printers in that series, and even tried swapping out the duplexer before I realized what was going on. The only way to print double-sided content on 11"x17" paper with these things is to print two pages (front and back) at a time, and let the paper path completely clear before you print the next pair.
If the gradient banding problems hadn't already thoroughly turned me off towards HP printers, that experience would have. Now, I treat HP printers like people with the flu, and actively try to avoid dealing with them. My more recent experiences with their printers haven't been much better, with their Inkjet drivers on Mac having a bug that causes them to print 8.5"x11" pages at something like 110% enlargement (thus cutting off content) unless you use a custom paper size that just happens to also be 8.5"x11".
About the closest I get to jams on my Konica Minolta 7450 II grafx are false "paper tray full" errors, which can be fixed by flipping the little flipper on top with your finger. I've jammed it maybe twice in the better part of a decade, both involving trying to print on both sides of card stock. And my little Brother HL-1440 printer only jams if something prevents the paper from coming out at the top. Not all printers are created equal. Some are particularly bad.
A "small government" model is just as fundamentally defective by design as a "big government" model. Certain things simply work much better when owned by government, and infrastructure like power lines, broadband connections, etc. are very clearly examples of that. Why? Because competition in wire providers simply does not work, has never worked, and can never work.
As for running a profit, that's good, because it will cover those significant capital costs you're worried about. What will happen if it gets privatized? I can pretty much guarantee that they'll give those profits to shareholders. And then, when they need huge amounts of money to improve power generation, they'll come crying to the government for a bailout. And, forgetting that the purpose of small government was to keep the public from being on the hook for those costs, the government will dole out whatever they need.
It's all about privatizing profits while socializing risks and costs, which is almost the exact opposite of what is best for the general public. California tried to privatize its electrical power. What did they get? Rolling blackouts, plus some of the most expensive power anywhere in the United States. And they want to do that do the South now? Screw that.
There's a big difference between selling excess unused assets (e.g. closed military bases) and selling active assets (e.g. TVA). The former is just not letting buildings rot. The latter is potentially privatizing essential services.
The thing is, this is one of those ideas that sounds a lot better in theory than in practice. I mean, in theory, selling it to the various states that buy power from TVA might work. The problem is that you'd have no single legislative body that could control it, and getting several state legislatures to agree is even harder than getting Congress to agree. So in practice, that's not likely to work very well. And that's the only possible sale that wouldn't represent a high risk of causing the complete economic collapse of the entire South. After all, TVA's low-cost electricity is a major factor in keeping those states' manufacturing industries competitive with China, Mexico, etc.
The alternative — selling TVA to a private company — would be disastrous. If a conditions of sale was that TVA continued to be operated as a non-profit, nobody who could afford it would want it, because it would mean a lot of extra risk on the book for no financial benefit. And if they didn't make that one of the conditions, then... well, it takes a special kind of stupid to take a well-functioning nonprofit power company and sell it to a for-profit entity so that every single man, woman, and child in the southern United States can pay significantly more for the exact same electricity that they have now.
So proposing the privatization of TVA should raise more than a few eyebrows among anyone living in any of the states that it serves.
Precisely. Where has it been shown that this would reduce theft?
There's a well-known scam where people steal someone's credit card number, make a purchase scheduled to arrive when that person is unlikely to be home, and steal the resulting box off the person's front porch. Shipping the phones locked and then unlocking them after the user has activated his or her service and paid at least a couple of bills would essentially eliminate that particular approach.
Maybe, maybe not. It's an interesting idea, having a bacterium that multiplies, calcifies, and dies (or whatever), but I'm not sure it's really practical. You'd have to be able to provide nutrients to that bacteria, which means it would only be able to grow in a thin layer at a time, and you'd be limited to materials that can readily be transported through cell membranes in some interesting way without killing the bacteria immediately. I'd expect it to end up being orders of magnitude slower than growing trees. Maybe not, but....
You're more likely to be able to genetically engineer a multicellular plant to usefully create such a novel structure than a bacterium, IMO. And then, you're back to trees.
I'm well aware of what our planet is composed of. I'm also aware that when you've exhausted the veins of metals that are near the surface, it becomes much, much more difficult to locate additional veins of metal, even though they are there.
Dig deep enough and we'll hit an iron and nickel core.
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot.:-)
We are not going to run out of iron, aluminum, and titanium to construct buildings. Not in a million years.
If you assume that materials are distributed evenly, then you're right that we won't every truly run out, but that isn't a realistic model. Ores come in veins, separated by miles and miles of crap. At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common, but for other components of steel (e.g. chromium, which makes up 16% to 26% of stainless steel by volume), it seems a lot more plausible. Whether that will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand, I couldn't begin to guess; that was an entirely arbitrary number. The point is that eventually, some important raw materials used in making construction materials will be deep enough that other alternatives will start to make sense.
Using trees for building things (apart from decorative furniture and the likes) is as stupid as using fields to grow crops to then turn them into gasoline instead of food.
Even more stupid, at least in the short term, but in the long term, this might actually make sense (whereas ethanol as a fuel will never make sense).
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something. If you want to build a new building, you have to tear one down first, because there's no steel left to make the girders. Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
This one, I've been looking forward to for at least a decade, because it means we'll finally be able to put the abortion debate to rest once and for all. Victim of rape? Incest? At risk of death from pregnancy? No problem. We'll just transplant the fetus (intravaginally or by caesarean) into an artificial womb, and now the child has a right to life and the mother has a right to choose, all at the same time. No more false dichotomy promulgated by tyrants in their lust for power.
The real question is what the Republican party will do to hold onto the Christian vote once they lose abortion. After all, their positions on the death penalty, helping the poor, etc. won't do them any favors. Maybe, just maybe the Republican party will completely implode, and we'll end up with a choice between Democrats and Libertarians, along the other political axis this time. I'm not sure that will be a good set of choices, either, but it can't get much worse than the options we have now.
The Lisa could have a parallel port card installed. It did not come with one (unless they had an option for getting the card preinstalled or something).
Apple has a history of dropping old well established standards about 2 to 3 years before people can see they were right.
Well, we're almost at the three year mark now, and the majority of the industry is still saying that it was stupid, which probably is a good indication that you're wrong.
The reason you're wrong is that the way Apple did this is ridiculously un-Apple-like. Normally, when they drop something:
There is a higher quality replacement readily available. Bluetooth sucks when used with multiple devices, and it is fiddly even when used with only one, so FAIL.
They quickly drop it across their entire line, and the replacement is available across their entire line. I can't get a Mac with a Lightning port, so again, FAIL.
Quite frankly, the way Apple has done this actually encourages people to switch to Android, and that will continue to be true even if all the Android makers follow suit and drop the headphone jack. Why? Because I can use the same USB-C headphones with my Mac and my Android phone. They've actually made the Android-Mac experience better than the iPhone-Mac experience!
No, Apple screwed up badly. Maybe only a small percentage of users care—and obviously that's true, or else they'd be out of business right now—but for the users who do care, Apple needs to drop Lightning for USB-C sooner rather than later. Our iPhone 6s devices are starting to look seriously dated.
by requiring that any device plugged in met some higher level of service expectation they could write software that took advantage of that requirement sooner than their competition who had to have legacy support. I give you the WYSIWYG revolution as exhibit A.
That's complete and utter crap. We had WYSIWYG on the Apple IIgs, and it printed to the ImageWriter II just fine, complete with WYSIWYG, and that printer was still supported up through... what, Mac OS 9? (And if you really want to be horrified, there's a third-party macOS driver available for the ImageWriter II that *still* works, AFAIK.)
And there has always been support for a wide range of other non-Postscript printers. Brother uses PCL for some of their laser printers, Canon and HP do their own thing for their inkjets, etc. So at what point did Apple drop support for non-Postscript printers?
ASCII-only printers, sure, but those were only ever really directly supported in any meaningful way on the Apple II series, and nobody was even still building daisy-wheel printers by the time the Apple II line fully went away in 1993. (The last ones were designed in the mid to late 1980s.) Also, I can still print to one from a MacBook Pro today with the right adapters. Nobody would do so, though, because they stopped making those printers for a good reason. Apple didn't ever really drop support; WYSIWYG software never supported them in the first place, and non-WYSIWYG software still does.
Also, the very first Apple products that actually shipped with built-in ports used serial ports. Parallel ports were only available as an add-on card. So talking about Apple dropping that (back in what, the early 1980s?) is kind of a stretch, because it was never a core part of their product line.
And AFAIK, nobody thought that dropping ADB was a bad idea. They grumbled at having to replace their devices, but moving to an industry standard was generally seen as a good thing. Also, you could buy cheap adapters to use your existing ADB devices if you really wanted to.
Finally, with the exception of the floppy drive, none of those other ports/features were used while mobile. And Apple continued to provide the internal hardware needed for third parties (VST) to provide floppy drives inside their laptops until well after USB flash drives were firmly entrenched as a replacement. That makes this the first port designed for mobile use that Apple has ever dropped without a broadly available replacement th
... the world's tallest skyscraper is now built on sand...
If by "on sand", you mean on top of nearly a thousand pilings that go up to 282 feet down into the sand, then yes.:-) I think that stretches the metaphor a bit much, though.
That's pretty cool. The one unfortunate thing is that it still requires you to start out with viable eggs, albeit undeveloped viable eggs, which won't help anyone who has already undergone those sorts of medical treatments.
On the other hand, when we eventually do manage to grow eggs from normal cells, the medical ethics questions will get pretty crazy:
Should there be an upper age limit to prevent high rates of genetic defects?
Should it be illegal to create a baby with an unknowing girl by stealing a strand of her hair?
When it eventually happens anyway, what legal rights will the child have?
If you are asked to construct eggs from XY cells from someone who has undergone a gender change, are you ethically required to tell her husband?
When shaking the hand of your date, is it appropriate to wear a glove to prevent conception?
And so on.
As is often the case, I can't entirely tell if I'm joking or being serious with this comment. Moderate appropriately.:-D
If you have genes that make you susceptible to either dying or becoming sterile before mating age, those genes do not need to be rewarded. It's not like anyone dies if you don't have children, but a future grandchild may very well die because you chose to have children despite known problems.
There are three problems with that logic:
Most childhood cancers aren't caused by genetic defects. (Well, to be pedantic, they are caused by damaged genes, but not heritable genetic defects.)
Even for heritable genetic defects, there is also a possibility that the defect, in conjunction with some other combination of genes, A. will not cause the same harm, and B. might confer some unexpected advantage for the survival of the species.
There's a pretty good chance that by the time it causes problems for your grandchildren, we'll be using CRISPR or whatever to rewrite the defective genes, and it won't matter that you passed the bad genes on.
I am now imagining a pair of Uggs with googly eyes on top and a touchscreen below it showing the nose and mouth, to allow for adaptive facial expressions based on what you step in.
True. Similarly, I'm pretty sure most countries allow you to exchange that country's coins for its paper bank notes without treating it as a currency exchange.:-D
Exactly. By the metric he's using the US Dollar is a "security" as well.
By definition, non-coin U.S. dollars are a security, as are all other paper bank notes. Coins (actual, physical coins) have some intrinsic value because the raw material has nontrivial value. This is why coins are treated differently by financial law. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, and thus should be treated no differently than foreign currency, i.e. as securities.
If your problem was to prevent or oppose such a practice, what could you do? At best, it's hard.
Not really, no. You just use a primitive face detection algorithm to determine when a given face is in roughly full view, and combine this with a little bit of basic face recognition to reduce the number of duplicates, and now you have a series of frames that roughly represent the first time each performer's face was in full view. Then, you use any of a number of techniques for detecting similar photos from other movies in your database. If you find one that is similar overall, but in which certain portions of the image show significant differences, one of those two videos has likely been altered, with high probability. You can then search for a more exact frame match within the two videos to very nearly eliminate false positives.
The only way someone could really avoid being detected by such an approach would be by making a new porn video solely for the purposes of replacing one person's face with another person's face, which while possible, seems pretty unlikely to occur very often.
Slashdot Mirror
Err... "By the time". Stupid typos.
You could probably get away with that on southbound highway 85. My the time you moved far enough to need to turn the wheel, you'd be sober again.
The fact that property tax and homeowners' insurance are based on property value makes it even more painful. When you're talking about a $1.5 million home, the property taxes will cost you $15,000 per year. And insurance averages out to about $3.50 for every thousand dollars of home. So that's another five grand. That means that in the hypothetical example above, property tax and insurance add up to 40% of your net income after income taxes and house payments.
Congress approves the people who manage it (as appointed by the President). That's a lot closer to direct control than merely being able to pass laws (which, almost by definition, cannot legally be created in such a way that they affect only one business and not all businesses of a particular type).
And don't forget poorly made printers in that list. Sometimes, manufacturers cut corners on the strength of their motors, and those printers jam constantly when a better printer would have been able to push the paper through. And sometimes, manufacturers have poorly designed paper guides that don't stay tight against the paper, causing the paper to be slightly turned as it goes in. If the printer doesn't have a lot of tolerance on both sides of the paper path, it will jam.
But my all-time favorite printer manufacturer screwup was the HP LaserJet 81xx series. These printers are tanks, and you wouldn't expect them to ever jam, but you'd be wrong. Thanks to a programming bug (at least in their most recent firmware), if you try to print 11"x17" double-sided, the printer starts pulling the next sheet of paper too early, and it jams EVERY SINGLE TIME. I reproduced this bug with multiple printers in that series, and even tried swapping out the duplexer before I realized what was going on. The only way to print double-sided content on 11"x17" paper with these things is to print two pages (front and back) at a time, and let the paper path completely clear before you print the next pair.
If the gradient banding problems hadn't already thoroughly turned me off towards HP printers, that experience would have. Now, I treat HP printers like people with the flu, and actively try to avoid dealing with them. My more recent experiences with their printers haven't been much better, with their Inkjet drivers on Mac having a bug that causes them to print 8.5"x11" pages at something like 110% enlargement (thus cutting off content) unless you use a custom paper size that just happens to also be 8.5"x11".
About the closest I get to jams on my Konica Minolta 7450 II grafx are false "paper tray full" errors, which can be fixed by flipping the little flipper on top with your finger. I've jammed it maybe twice in the better part of a decade, both involving trying to print on both sides of card stock. And my little Brother HL-1440 printer only jams if something prevents the paper from coming out at the top. Not all printers are created equal. Some are particularly bad.
A "small government" model is just as fundamentally defective by design as a "big government" model. Certain things simply work much better when owned by government, and infrastructure like power lines, broadband connections, etc. are very clearly examples of that. Why? Because competition in wire providers simply does not work, has never worked, and can never work.
As for running a profit, that's good, because it will cover those significant capital costs you're worried about. What will happen if it gets privatized? I can pretty much guarantee that they'll give those profits to shareholders. And then, when they need huge amounts of money to improve power generation, they'll come crying to the government for a bailout. And, forgetting that the purpose of small government was to keep the public from being on the hook for those costs, the government will dole out whatever they need.
It's all about privatizing profits while socializing risks and costs, which is almost the exact opposite of what is best for the general public. California tried to privatize its electrical power. What did they get? Rolling blackouts, plus some of the most expensive power anywhere in the United States. And they want to do that do the South now? Screw that.
The federal government would no longer own it, and therefore would only be in a position to regulate it, not manage it.
There's a big difference between selling excess unused assets (e.g. closed military bases) and selling active assets (e.g. TVA). The former is just not letting buildings rot. The latter is potentially privatizing essential services.
The thing is, this is one of those ideas that sounds a lot better in theory than in practice. I mean, in theory, selling it to the various states that buy power from TVA might work. The problem is that you'd have no single legislative body that could control it, and getting several state legislatures to agree is even harder than getting Congress to agree. So in practice, that's not likely to work very well. And that's the only possible sale that wouldn't represent a high risk of causing the complete economic collapse of the entire South. After all, TVA's low-cost electricity is a major factor in keeping those states' manufacturing industries competitive with China, Mexico, etc.
The alternative — selling TVA to a private company — would be disastrous. If a conditions of sale was that TVA continued to be operated as a non-profit, nobody who could afford it would want it, because it would mean a lot of extra risk on the book for no financial benefit. And if they didn't make that one of the conditions, then... well, it takes a special kind of stupid to take a well-functioning nonprofit power company and sell it to a for-profit entity so that every single man, woman, and child in the southern United States can pay significantly more for the exact same electricity that they have now.
So proposing the privatization of TVA should raise more than a few eyebrows among anyone living in any of the states that it serves.
There's a well-known scam where people steal someone's credit card number, make a purchase scheduled to arrive when that person is unlikely to be home, and steal the resulting box off the person's front porch. Shipping the phones locked and then unlocking them after the user has activated his or her service and paid at least a couple of bills would essentially eliminate that particular approach.
Maybe, maybe not. It's an interesting idea, having a bacterium that multiplies, calcifies, and dies (or whatever), but I'm not sure it's really practical. You'd have to be able to provide nutrients to that bacteria, which means it would only be able to grow in a thin layer at a time, and you'd be limited to materials that can readily be transported through cell membranes in some interesting way without killing the bacteria immediately. I'd expect it to end up being orders of magnitude slower than growing trees. Maybe not, but....
You're more likely to be able to genetically engineer a multicellular plant to usefully create such a novel structure than a bacterium, IMO. And then, you're back to trees.
I'm well aware of what our planet is composed of. I'm also aware that when you've exhausted the veins of metals that are near the surface, it becomes much, much more difficult to locate additional veins of metal, even though they are there.
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
If you assume that materials are distributed evenly, then you're right that we won't every truly run out, but that isn't a realistic model. Ores come in veins, separated by miles and miles of crap. At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common, but for other components of steel (e.g. chromium, which makes up 16% to 26% of stainless steel by volume), it seems a lot more plausible. Whether that will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand, I couldn't begin to guess; that was an entirely arbitrary number. The point is that eventually, some important raw materials used in making construction materials will be deep enough that other alternatives will start to make sense.
Even more stupid, at least in the short term, but in the long term, this might actually make sense (whereas ethanol as a fuel will never make sense).
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something. If you want to build a new building, you have to tear one down first, because there's no steel left to make the girders. Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Ah. My bad. Off-by-one.
This one, I've been looking forward to for at least a decade, because it means we'll finally be able to put the abortion debate to rest once and for all. Victim of rape? Incest? At risk of death from pregnancy? No problem. We'll just transplant the fetus (intravaginally or by caesarean) into an artificial womb, and now the child has a right to life and the mother has a right to choose, all at the same time. No more false dichotomy promulgated by tyrants in their lust for power.
The real question is what the Republican party will do to hold onto the Christian vote once they lose abortion. After all, their positions on the death penalty, helping the poor, etc. won't do them any favors. Maybe, just maybe the Republican party will completely implode, and we'll end up with a choice between Democrats and Libertarians, along the other political axis this time. I'm not sure that will be a good set of choices, either, but it can't get much worse than the options we have now.
The Lisa could have a parallel port card installed. It did not come with one (unless they had an option for getting the card preinstalled or something).
Well, we're almost at the three year mark now, and the majority of the industry is still saying that it was stupid, which probably is a good indication that you're wrong.
The reason you're wrong is that the way Apple did this is ridiculously un-Apple-like. Normally, when they drop something:
Quite frankly, the way Apple has done this actually encourages people to switch to Android, and that will continue to be true even if all the Android makers follow suit and drop the headphone jack. Why? Because I can use the same USB-C headphones with my Mac and my Android phone. They've actually made the Android-Mac experience better than the iPhone-Mac experience!
No, Apple screwed up badly. Maybe only a small percentage of users care—and obviously that's true, or else they'd be out of business right now—but for the users who do care, Apple needs to drop Lightning for USB-C sooner rather than later. Our iPhone 6s devices are starting to look seriously dated.
That's complete and utter crap. We had WYSIWYG on the Apple IIgs, and it printed to the ImageWriter II just fine, complete with WYSIWYG, and that printer was still supported up through... what, Mac OS 9? (And if you really want to be horrified, there's a third-party macOS driver available for the ImageWriter II that *still* works, AFAIK.)
And there has always been support for a wide range of other non-Postscript printers. Brother uses PCL for some of their laser printers, Canon and HP do their own thing for their inkjets, etc. So at what point did Apple drop support for non-Postscript printers?
ASCII-only printers, sure, but those were only ever really directly supported in any meaningful way on the Apple II series, and nobody was even still building daisy-wheel printers by the time the Apple II line fully went away in 1993. (The last ones were designed in the mid to late 1980s.) Also, I can still print to one from a MacBook Pro today with the right adapters. Nobody would do so, though, because they stopped making those printers for a good reason. Apple didn't ever really drop support; WYSIWYG software never supported them in the first place, and non-WYSIWYG software still does.
Also, the very first Apple products that actually shipped with built-in ports used serial ports. Parallel ports were only available as an add-on card. So talking about Apple dropping that (back in what, the early 1980s?) is kind of a stretch, because it was never a core part of their product line.
And AFAIK, nobody thought that dropping ADB was a bad idea. They grumbled at having to replace their devices, but moving to an industry standard was generally seen as a good thing. Also, you could buy cheap adapters to use your existing ADB devices if you really wanted to.
Finally, with the exception of the floppy drive, none of those other ports/features were used while mobile. And Apple continued to provide the internal hardware needed for third parties (VST) to provide floppy drives inside their laptops until well after USB flash drives were firmly entrenched as a replacement. That makes this the first port designed for mobile use that Apple has ever dropped without a broadly available replacement th
If by "on sand", you mean on top of nearly a thousand pilings that go up to 282 feet down into the sand, then yes. :-) I think that stretches the metaphor a bit much, though.
That's pretty cool. The one unfortunate thing is that it still requires you to start out with viable eggs, albeit undeveloped viable eggs, which won't help anyone who has already undergone those sorts of medical treatments.
On the other hand, when we eventually do manage to grow eggs from normal cells, the medical ethics questions will get pretty crazy:
And so on.
As is often the case, I can't entirely tell if I'm joking or being serious with this comment. Moderate appropriately. :-D
There are three problems with that logic:
If your body produced sugar by photosynthesis, you'd have a point.
I am now imagining a pair of Uggs with googly eyes on top and a touchscreen below it showing the nose and mouth, to allow for adaptive facial expressions based on what you step in.
True. Similarly, I'm pretty sure most countries allow you to exchange that country's coins for its paper bank notes without treating it as a currency exchange. :-D
By definition, non-coin U.S. dollars are a security, as are all other paper bank notes. Coins (actual, physical coins) have some intrinsic value because the raw material has nontrivial value. This is why coins are treated differently by financial law. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, and thus should be treated no differently than foreign currency, i.e. as securities.
Not really, no. You just use a primitive face detection algorithm to determine when a given face is in roughly full view, and combine this with a little bit of basic face recognition to reduce the number of duplicates, and now you have a series of frames that roughly represent the first time each performer's face was in full view. Then, you use any of a number of techniques for detecting similar photos from other movies in your database. If you find one that is similar overall, but in which certain portions of the image show significant differences, one of those two videos has likely been altered, with high probability. You can then search for a more exact frame match within the two videos to very nearly eliminate false positives.
The only way someone could really avoid being detected by such an approach would be by making a new porn video solely for the purposes of replacing one person's face with another person's face, which while possible, seems pretty unlikely to occur very often.