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Walmart is apologizing after a display seemed to market guns as back-to-school items

Walmart apologizes for sign marketing guns as back-to-school items

Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Kids to 'Own the School Year Like a Hero'?

The official Kek cult attire is now a trenchcoat.

FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

There Was a Ceooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
David Erik Nelson
July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction

I finally caught up on my reading, and the latest F&SF magazine has the best novella I've read in a long time. It will be on sale until September 4.

When I first started reading it, the thought occurred to me that the author was trying to cash in on last year's bogus controversy about black writers not being published (how would an editor know?), and perhaps he was, but it's a great story none the less. It starts out in Detroit with a black locksmith with four years of architectural training under his belt, and a large white man who is slightly retarded. They work for a real estate agent, who has just bought the house. Their jobs are to check it out.

Before they get close, they're hassled by the cops, with the locksmith in handcuffs until he shows his certification as a locksmith and his license for "burglar tools". The cops leave, the locksmith picks the lock, and his training tells him the door is installed backwards.

He steps inside and falls out the back door. I thought then that it was a remake of an old Heinlein story, especially after several such attempts, but it wasn't anything like that at all. They call the boss, who comes out and sees the oddities himself, and curses. He gives the locksmith a silver key.

Later, having met a foreign toourist who complained that there's nothing interesting to photograph, offers to show her the house. He uses the key--and the door opens from the other side. They go in, and it really starts getting wierd. Books by authors who didn't write them, like a memoir of William Shatner written in Esperanto, and the fact that outside the windows isn't Detroit. And a sneaker with a foot still in it.

Not to give too much awy, it involves superior creatures from... another dimention? I was two thirds of the way through it before I could see it was science fiction.

I plan on nominating it for a Hugo next year. It's well worth the cost of the magazine.

No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Now, I'm beginning to burn in my new laptop, and am starting to set up the software on it. This process is proving not quite as trivial as I hoped it would be, the main problem being the Galago's HiDPI display. It seems that a lot of applications make assumptions about screen sizes that break stuff. The next major application that suffers from problems due to the high screen resolution is Emacs. I enabled desktop scaling in System Settings > General, and that manages to fix almost all the important apps, but it does something unexpected with Emacs. With desktop scaling on, Emacs expands to fill nearly the entire screen, saying that its window geometry is only 80x20. Attempts to set Emacs' window geometry manually to something reasonable via the -geometry command line switch, or in .emacs set-frame-size or in default-frame-alist doesn't help. Either results in a smaller Emacs window briefly appearing before the window again explodes to an irritatingly large size. This had me stumped for a while, until I realised that it had something to do with desktop scaling. Turning off desktop scaling results in a reasonably-sized window. Eventually, some judicious searches turned up this link, and I found a useful workaround by adding env GDK_SCALE= to the launcher command. Most standard apps are okay, but some others need special settings to be usable on HiDPI displays.

Pale Moon also seems to be only partially scaled. Many display elements such as scroll bars, checkboxes, etc are very small, but I can live with that for now. Gimp and Inkscape both still have very small buttons that didn't properly scale. As I install more and more apps it seems far too many of them seem to make the assumption that the display isn't going to be much more than about 1280×720. This should change with time but right now is a bit of a pain.

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.