The theaters are contractually obligated to play the movie.
Sony can claim publicly that they don't have to play the movie, but those legally binding contracts are still in place, and remember, the theaters still want to play the movie. That's cash in their pockets and the threats are likely fake. So they show the movie anyways, and if a real attack happens, the first thing they are going to do is point at that contract and say Sony forced them to show the movie, they had no choice. Viola, Sony is now liable.
First up. Sony voluntarily suspended enforcement of the contract clause. The theaters would have real difficulty arguing in the court that "Sony forced them to show the movie" when Sony publicly declared they did not.
Second. Are you trained in contract law? I would be quite surprised to learn that if both parties in a normal two-party contract agree to temporarily suspend enforcement of one clause in a contract they are "breaking the law" in some way. What would be the aggrieved party that would bring suit? Who would have standing? Or are you saying this a criminal act? Cite a statute please?
More like a case of China with Alien Hand Syndrome. North Korea is geographically an appendage to China, a fact that cannot be changed. The problem for China is that the Kim dynasty runs North Korea and is not going away, it has no choice to deal with it. China supports the North Korean regime, but the regime knows how to manipulated the relationship to its own ends. All of the other options are much worse for China, outright collapse of the state and attending flood of desperate refugees into China, etc.; loss of a buffer state with a U.S. ally, etc.
The U.S. has had lots of experience itself with unruly client states that learned to yank the "puppet master's" strings and make him jerk.
Those aren't your tax dollars. Our country spends twice what it takes in.
According to this Conservative-run Federal budget reference website the current Federal budget deficit is $483 billion on a $3504 billion dollar budget, or 13.8%. That is a far cry for "twice what it takes in". Smart to remain anonymous, you would not want to reveal your math skills to those who know you.
I was unaware that Watson had been "blacklisted". After 39 years as Chancellor of CSHL, a good long run, which is largely a public relations function - he did show himself unsuited to continue filling that role due to his 'unfiltered' public expressed opinions (which had been occurring for quite awhile, even when he was not-so-old). Still his punishment was 'promotion' to Chancellor Emeritus with a perpetual $375,000 salary, still with a free mansion to live in. Few 'blacklisted' people are treated so favorably.
He is still knocking down $30,000-$75,000 minimum fees for public appearances. Pretty good money for someone who is 'blacklisted'.
What You really seem to be saying is that he should be above criticism, and not accountable for anything he says. I disagree.
It will empower the few - to put the majority of people out of work.
Seriously - we are in the early phase of the Cybernetic Revolution - whether you call it "AI" or not - that will cannibalize jobs like the First Industrial Revolution did. If you think automation has already done that, you ain't seen nothing. Between ubiquitous, cheap computing power, an always-connected-world, and robotics whole classes of jobs that still exist are going to be automated away over the next quarter century.
A rapid quench would destroy any magnet, sure, but a sacrificial safe quench system could probably be designed to handle this. Think of composite flywheels that can disintegrate safely. SCES can use conventional metal sacrificial busbar to dump energy into, kinetic energy absorbing materials, a strong case, etc.
Look at just the last few years of Linux at all the guts being just ripped out rather than building on what was there, Pulse, KDE 4, Gnome 3, unity, systemd, why do you think every time it looks like Linux is gonna become mature and stable that some major subsystem gets ripped out and goes back to square 1?
You hit the nail right on the head. It seems the Great New Thing in Linux is something for which there is no evident need, and often is undesirable in many ways, yet the desktop - even with a straight default install - is glitchy and rough in ways Windows (as much as I detest it) is not. The polish just does not go where it is needed. Who wants to detail someone else's car?
a million citizens revolting against their government with hand guns and rifles isn't even going to make a dent
Don't forget the great lesson of the Soviet debacle: all governments ultimately depend on the consent of the people. When that consent is withdrawn, the government collapses.
The great lesson of Romania is that a government shouldn't count on its armed forces to violently suppress their own people.
-jcr
Quite so. And in both cases the possession of small arms was utterly irrelevant. They played no role at all in the collapse of tyranny. Why do Americans suppose that they are less capable of peaceful overthrow than Russians or Romanians?
The mass purchase of books written by right-wing commentators and politicos by right-wing organizations is well established as a form of support (aka "pay-off") is well established.
Who in their right mind would pay 4 million for *his* Nobel prize? I know pure gold doesn't really tarnish... but that thing is tarnished.
Upthread the interesting theory is offered that the fix was in, and this was a way for rich fan of Watson's unsavory remarks to kick some money his way. The buyer was anonymous of course. It would be interesting to learn if the medal is eventually loaned back to him, or to CSHL, for display only of course.
You should pay attention to this technology: http://www.technologyreview.co... It might be able to eliminate the need for a generator completely.
All this material does is passively cool through radiation. If you want your house cooled all the time, and have no other need for electricity at all, then hafnium-shingling your house may work out for you.
i'm very wrong because your father has a very affordable and very usable service available to him?
...
AC industry shill. Color me surprised.
$180/month for a 3mbs link is a monthly charge of $60 per mbps. The EU average for this service unit is $3.50. Also a 2 GB monthly cap is "very usable"?! The average home use consumes about 25 GB of bandwidth monthly, the average mobile phone user is hitting 2 GB/month right now.
So the AC Shill, paying 17 times a competitive world service rate for only 8% of what a typical American consumes in bandwidth is "very affordable and very usable". But to anyone not taking industry astro-turf cash it is a rip-off.
... the fact he's being forced into giving up his Nobel (according to the first link in the summary)...
Forced? Forced??? The link says no such thing. He is selling this Nobel Prize because he wants to use the money to take up art collecting, and making philanthropic donations. This is the choice of a very comfortable man who wants to take up the hobbies of the rich.
Note that the link says that he "he has no income outside of academia" - given his multiple high level positions in academia over the years, those pensions could stack up into mid-six figures, making him wealthy by any normal standard.
Sorry, the poor, poor Mr. Watson shtick won't wash.
The the term used in the paper is "semi-relativistic" - fast enough that relativistic effects cannot be ignored in even routine calculations about its properties. At 1/3 the speed of light the time dilation effect amounts to a 5.7% difference for example.
"Close to the speed of light" is the summary author's attempt to render "semi-relativistic" in sensible common place terminology.
One faction claims it's Apple trying to sabotage upgrades, making it so that if you buy an after-market SSD rather than paying their insane markup performance will become awful. Another faction claims it isn't deliberate sabotage, but rather a lack of interest in testing for unsupported hardware configurations...
...Since the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the Seed Factory concept works just as well on Earth, so our first generation design is for here. Later versions will be for more hostile environments like the oceans, deserts, ice caps, and space. Where it gets really interesting is using an expanded factory to make new starter kits. This is very similar to how biological plants reproduce. An acorn doesn't make another acorn directly. It grows into an oak tree first, then produces more acorns.
Good for you! You are proposing to build an actual von Neumann machine. Such things are obviously possible (given the evidence of living things) - but I have never seen a proposal to actual build one, or even a defensible estimate of what would be required to build Humankind's first one.
Any estimate on when we will see this is more than just an electronic document? Currently the WikiBook about this flys at such a high level that it is impossible to tell whether there really is anything here.
top 1% AGI is $388,905 (in 2011, the most recent year for which the IRS has final data, reference).
If he makes $300,000 and he considers that a high six figure, then he is not lying at all. Note that $100,000 is a "six figure income", and these days not at all high in the scheme of things. So his statement may just be drawing the distinction of someone making a multiple of "six figure" (three in this case) as opposed to barely breaking that antiquated inflation-devalued benchmark.
Well, we treat them like crap. On top of that they come here and find that they have very few opportunities to advance any more. Why would they want to come here? They'd be better off going to a civilized first-world country rather than the third-world construct we are trying so hard to make the US into.
It might not be a cultural fit for you, but it is a good fit for over 300m citizens (less amnestied illegals).
Unlike other countries, US property is respected enough to not need legions of gated communities.
And yet, the U.S. haslegions of gated communities, despite not "needing" them! From the article: "By 1997, an estimated 20,000 gated communities had been built across the country. Approximately 40% of new homes in California are behind walls. In 1997, estimates of the number of people in gated communities ranged from 4 million in 30,000 communities up to around 8 million, with a ½ million in California alone." These are nearly all wealthy people, why are they seeking hidden enclaves?
Other countries have them in quantities large enough to suggest that property is not respected(SE Asia) or to show mass contempt for their citizenry(e.g. Russia).
Russia is the only country you can come up with by name I notice. Why not try one of the real industrial democracies?
In addition, citizens enjoy more personal freedoms (despite what some thinktanks would claim) than nearly any other country in the world. For example, self-defense with a firearm is encouraged in many parts of the country(not just Texas), when many parts of the world wish to restrict it. In addition, speaking up against politicians is not followed by a disappearance, house arrest, or defamation charge.
Let's unpack this bit. Last going first, in which industrialized democracies does speaking up against politicians cause "disappearance, house arrest, or defamation charge"? Your "Russia" example again?
So we are left with that all-essential freedom of unrestricted gun ownership - the freedom to easily murder others. Very, very few gun deaths each year are due to "self defense" killing: for each justified self-defense killing, there are about 35 fire-arm homicides.
Those measures are increasing my freedom - by making a selection of more efficient appliances for me to buy at low cost, and thus allowing me to lower my power bills, all of which puts more money in my pocket. I thought that was the very essence of the Conservative idea of freedom, more of my own money.
We know what corporations do when such measures are not in place. They don't innovate on efficiency, or provide cost effective efficient appliances. Only by moving the entire industry to more efficient standards to you get economies of scale.
Oddly, this would seem to be the "influence change on the producers" that you approve of.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
Technically, no. Shoreham's construction was completed - it actually ran low power tests. What happened was not it was not permitted to begin commercial operation -- due to its singularly poor siting on Long Island, and Long Island Sound after the local community and state had had time to reflect on the wisdom of this particular license. In light of Fukushima, safety concerns about the siting of one of these first generation nuclear power plant designs were quite reasonable. This was a plant that should never have been built.
Plants more distant from major population centers and critical transportation corridors have not had this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The theaters are contractually obligated to play the movie. Sony can claim publicly that they don't have to play the movie, but those legally binding contracts are still in place, and remember, the theaters still want to play the movie. That's cash in their pockets and the threats are likely fake. So they show the movie anyways, and if a real attack happens, the first thing they are going to do is point at that contract and say Sony forced them to show the movie, they had no choice. Viola, Sony is now liable.
First up. Sony voluntarily suspended enforcement of the contract clause. The theaters would have real difficulty arguing in the court that "Sony forced them to show the movie" when Sony publicly declared they did not.
Second. Are you trained in contract law? I would be quite surprised to learn that if both parties in a normal two-party contract agree to temporarily suspend enforcement of one clause in a contract they are "breaking the law" in some way. What would be the aggrieved party that would bring suit? Who would have standing? Or are you saying this a criminal act? Cite a statute please?
NK is just a puppet state of China.
More like a case of China with Alien Hand Syndrome. North Korea is geographically an appendage to China, a fact that cannot be changed. The problem for China is that the Kim dynasty runs North Korea and is not going away, it has no choice to deal with it. China supports the North Korean regime, but the regime knows how to manipulated the relationship to its own ends. All of the other options are much worse for China, outright collapse of the state and attending flood of desperate refugees into China, etc.; loss of a buffer state with a U.S. ally, etc.
The U.S. has had lots of experience itself with unruly client states that learned to yank the "puppet master's" strings and make him jerk.
Yeah, we have them on the ropes! Another 55 years should do the trick for sure!
Those aren't your tax dollars. Our country spends twice what it takes in.
According to this Conservative-run Federal budget reference website the current Federal budget deficit is $483 billion on a $3504 billion dollar budget, or 13.8%. That is a far cry for "twice what it takes in". Smart to remain anonymous, you would not want to reveal your math skills to those who know you.
That notorious Marxist rag The Wall Street Journal concurs.
I was unaware that Watson had been "blacklisted". After 39 years as Chancellor of CSHL, a good long run, which is largely a public relations function - he did show himself unsuited to continue filling that role due to his 'unfiltered' public expressed opinions (which had been occurring for quite awhile, even when he was not-so-old). Still his punishment was 'promotion' to Chancellor Emeritus with a perpetual $375,000 salary, still with a free mansion to live in. Few 'blacklisted' people are treated so favorably.
He is still knocking down $30,000-$75,000 minimum fees for public appearances. Pretty good money for someone who is 'blacklisted'.
What You really seem to be saying is that he should be above criticism, and not accountable for anything he says. I disagree.
It will empower the few - to put the majority of people out of work.
Seriously - we are in the early phase of the Cybernetic Revolution - whether you call it "AI" or not - that will cannibalize jobs like the First Industrial Revolution did. If you think automation has already done that, you ain't seen nothing. Between ubiquitous, cheap computing power, an always-connected-world, and robotics whole classes of jobs that still exist are going to be automated away over the next quarter century.
And only two days later the medal is being returned to him just I suggested!
It might make "no sense" to you, oh AC, but the fix WAS in from the beginning, Watson knew the billionaire who was going to buy it.
A rapid quench would destroy any magnet, sure, but a sacrificial safe quench system could probably be designed to handle this. Think of composite flywheels that can disintegrate safely. SCES can use conventional metal sacrificial busbar to dump energy into, kinetic energy absorbing materials, a strong case, etc.
Look at just the last few years of Linux at all the guts being just ripped out rather than building on what was there, Pulse, KDE 4, Gnome 3, unity, systemd, why do you think every time it looks like Linux is gonna become mature and stable that some major subsystem gets ripped out and goes back to square 1?
You hit the nail right on the head. It seems the Great New Thing in Linux is something for which there is no evident need, and often is undesirable in many ways, yet the desktop - even with a straight default install - is glitchy and rough in ways Windows (as much as I detest it) is not. The polish just does not go where it is needed. Who wants to detail someone else's car?
a million citizens revolting against their government with hand guns and rifles isn't even going to make a dent
Don't forget the great lesson of the Soviet debacle: all governments ultimately depend on the consent of the people. When that consent is withdrawn, the government collapses.
The great lesson of Romania is that a government shouldn't count on its armed forces to violently suppress their own people.
-jcr
Quite so. And in both cases the possession of small arms was utterly irrelevant. They played no role at all in the collapse of tyranny. Why do Americans suppose that they are less capable of peaceful overthrow than Russians or Romanians?
The mass purchase of books written by right-wing commentators and politicos by right-wing organizations is well established as a form of support (aka "pay-off") is well established.
I do like the "rich fiends" bit though!
Who in their right mind would pay 4 million for *his* Nobel prize? I know pure gold doesn't really tarnish... but that thing is tarnished.
Upthread the interesting theory is offered that the fix was in, and this was a way for rich fan of Watson's unsavory remarks to kick some money his way. The buyer was anonymous of course. It would be interesting to learn if the medal is eventually loaned back to him, or to CSHL, for display only of course.
You should pay attention to this technology: http://www.technologyreview.co... It might be able to eliminate the need for a generator completely.
All this material does is passively cool through radiation. If you want your house cooled all the time, and have no other need for electricity at all, then hafnium-shingling your house may work out for you.
i'm very wrong because your father has a very affordable and very usable service available to him?
...
AC industry shill. Color me surprised.
$180/month for a 3mbs link is a monthly charge of $60 per mbps. The EU average for this service unit is $3.50. Also a 2 GB monthly cap is "very usable"?! The average home use consumes about 25 GB of bandwidth monthly, the average mobile phone user is hitting 2 GB/month right now.
So the AC Shill, paying 17 times a competitive world service rate for only 8% of what a typical American consumes in bandwidth is "very affordable and very usable". But to anyone not taking industry astro-turf cash it is a rip-off.
... the fact he's being forced into giving up his Nobel (according to the first link in the summary)...
Forced? Forced??? The link says no such thing. He is selling this Nobel Prize because he wants to use the money to take up art collecting, and making philanthropic donations. This is the choice of a very comfortable man who wants to take up the hobbies of the rich.
Note that the link says that he "he has no income outside of academia" - given his multiple high level positions in academia over the years, those pensions could stack up into mid-six figures, making him wealthy by any normal standard.
Sorry, the poor, poor Mr. Watson shtick won't wash.
The the term used in the paper is "semi-relativistic" - fast enough that relativistic effects cannot be ignored in even routine calculations about its properties. At 1/3 the speed of light the time dilation effect amounts to a 5.7% difference for example.
"Close to the speed of light" is the summary author's attempt to render "semi-relativistic" in sensible common place terminology.
One faction claims it's Apple trying to sabotage upgrades, making it so that if you buy an after-market SSD rather than paying their insane markup performance will become awful. Another faction claims it isn't deliberate sabotage, but rather a lack of interest in testing for unsupported hardware configurations...
Seems like a distinction without a difference.
...Since the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the Seed Factory concept works just as well on Earth, so our first generation design is for here. Later versions will be for more hostile environments like the oceans, deserts, ice caps, and space. Where it gets really interesting is using an expanded factory to make new starter kits. This is very similar to how biological plants reproduce. An acorn doesn't make another acorn directly. It grows into an oak tree first, then produces more acorns.
Good for you! You are proposing to build an actual von Neumann machine. Such things are obviously possible (given the evidence of living things) - but I have never seen a proposal to actual build one, or even a defensible estimate of what would be required to build Humankind's first one.
Any estimate on when we will see this is more than just an electronic document? Currently the WikiBook about this flys at such a high level that it is impossible to tell whether there really is anything here.
The AC is right. This IUC tamper resistance scheme has nothing at all to do with launch authority controls.
top 1% AGI is $388,905 (in 2011, the most recent year for which the IRS has final data, reference).
If he makes $300,000 and he considers that a high six figure, then he is not lying at all. Note that $100,000 is a "six figure income", and these days not at all high in the scheme of things. So his statement may just be drawing the distinction of someone making a multiple of "six figure" (three in this case) as opposed to barely breaking that antiquated inflation-devalued benchmark.
Well, we treat them like crap. On top of that they come here and find that they have very few opportunities to advance any more. Why would they want to come here? They'd be better off going to a civilized first-world country rather than the third-world construct we are trying so hard to make the US into.
It might not be a cultural fit for you, but it is a good fit for over 300m citizens (less amnestied illegals).
Unlike other countries, US property is respected enough to not need legions of gated communities.
And yet, the U.S. has legions of gated communities, despite not "needing" them! From the article: "By 1997, an estimated 20,000 gated communities had been built across the country. Approximately 40% of new homes in California are behind walls. In 1997, estimates of the number of people in gated communities ranged from 4 million in 30,000 communities up to around 8 million, with a ½ million in California alone." These are nearly all wealthy people, why are they seeking hidden enclaves?
Other countries have them in quantities large enough to suggest that property is not respected(SE Asia) or to show mass contempt for their citizenry(e.g. Russia).
Russia is the only country you can come up with by name I notice. Why not try one of the real industrial democracies?
In addition, citizens enjoy more personal freedoms (despite what some thinktanks would claim) than nearly any other country in the world. For example, self-defense with a firearm is encouraged in many parts of the country(not just Texas), when many parts of the world wish to restrict it. In addition, speaking up against politicians is not followed by a disappearance, house arrest, or defamation charge.
Let's unpack this bit. Last going first, in which industrialized democracies does speaking up against politicians cause "disappearance, house arrest, or defamation charge"? Your "Russia" example again?
So we are left with that all-essential freedom of unrestricted gun ownership - the freedom to easily murder others. Very, very few gun deaths each year are due to "self defense" killing: for each justified self-defense killing, there are about 35 fire-arm homicides.
Neither link supports the claim you made. You will have to add that special sauce of wing-nut interpretation to make your case. Your turn.
Those measures are increasing my freedom - by making a selection of more efficient appliances for me to buy at low cost, and thus allowing me to lower my power bills, all of which puts more money in my pocket. I thought that was the very essence of the Conservative idea of freedom, more of my own money.
We know what corporations do when such measures are not in place. They don't innovate on efficiency, or provide cost effective efficient appliances. Only by moving the entire industry to more efficient standards to you get economies of scale.
Oddly, this would seem to be the "influence change on the producers" that you approve of.
I'm an environmentalist. I think converting coal to natural gas is a great idea. So, your general claim is disproven.
This was a Sierra Club lawsuit. The SIerra Club does not equal "all environmentalists".
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
Technically, no. Shoreham's construction was completed - it actually ran low power tests. What happened was not it was not permitted to begin commercial operation -- due to its singularly poor siting on Long Island, and Long Island Sound after the local community and state had had time to reflect on the wisdom of this particular license. In light of Fukushima, safety concerns about the siting of one of these first generation nuclear power plant designs were quite reasonable. This was a plant that should never have been built.
Plants more distant from major population centers and critical transportation corridors have not had this problem.