People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Everything bends when you move it, usually to such a small degree that you can’t perceive it. It’s impossible to have a truly “rigid” material that would be required for the original post because of this. The atoms in a solid object don’t all move simultaneously, otherwise swinging a bat would be causing FTL propagation itself. The movement needs to propagate through the atoms, the more rigid the object the faster this happens, but it is never instantaneous. You can picture the atoms like a lattice of pool balls connected to each other with springs. The more rigid the material, the stiffer the springs, but there will always be at least a little flex, even if you need to zoom in and slow-mo to see it.

It wasn’t as unrelated as it might appear. Firstly, they used their D+ account to make their Disney account. Secondly, the whole point of that argument was that in the Disney account EULA, the relevant one, there is an arbitration clause. They only brought up the D+ account in passing because it has the same clause, emphasizing that they had to read and agree to the clause twice, and if they didn’t catch it it’s not Disney’s fault they lied about reading it. They basically said “look, this is an issue regarding the Disney account, and they said right here they read and understood the terms that include arbitration. And here, they read and agreed to the exact same terms a few months earlier on D+. This shouldn’t be any surprise if they were truthful when they claimed to have read it.”

Disclaimer, arbitration clauses are bullshit and need to be reworked/eliminated as they are generally very anticonsumer and I don’t think it’s good that they have that clause. But accepting that this exists, Disney didn’t really do anything particularly scummy.

Specifically skeletons are a big deal. Lots of games edit them out, WoW had alternate models for the Undead players, who generally have exposed bone joints and other bits of bone protrusions, to cover them all in flesh. I think it is sometimes OK to use skeletons as enemies, but never for player characters, IIRC.

I mean the graph starts in 09, and Chrome launched in 08. I assume that did more to them, but both were probably notable.

The last thing the US wants is a civil war and mass instability in a nuclear nation. That has the capability to shatter MAD. At best, the US wants a regime change.

I suspect you’re right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.

Makes sense, it’s basically just a Bing wrapper.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

I agree, but it isn’t so clear cut. Where is the cutoff on complexity required? As it stands, both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes. It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale. The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.” But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.

Yeah there was a compress all your favorites into the device bit, and cashing in on the semi-current trend of check out how cool it is to crush stuff bit, and they just didn’t connect.

Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.

In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.

Toyota man. Shit never stops running if you even sort of take care of it. If you’re trying to stay with US built then most of their cars sold in US are made here. In 2017 their US sales were:

Built in America 56%
Built in Canada 25%
Built in Mexico 6%
Built outside N.A. 13% (Mostly Lexus Models)

I mean, they will probably be relying on many unammed missions that deliver payloads to deliver all the construction material for the outpost before sending any people. While you’re at it you could send the return craft too.

I recall a similar study years ago. They concluded 32 was minimal viable, assuming a strict breeding regiment over several generations, with 8 men and 24 women. They also concluded about 500 would be the smallest practical size, given people aren’t robots and losing even a couple people before leaving the breeding pool would be very bad. That was a fundamentally different study though, looking at long term, self sufficiency. This one seems more focused on an Antarctica like outpost that would be able to cycle people in and out, and not establishing a full on colony.

The industrial revolution and adoption of computers also introduced a ton of new jobs. We haven’t seen any evidence of this happening with AI. AI will eventually come for all of us, it needs to either be curtailed, which is unrealistic and stifling, or we will need to radically shift our economy, which is even more unrealistic. The only other option is collapse. AI has been eating jobs behind the scenes for years without anyone noticing, and there has been no comparable expansion of new jobs like previous revolutions. This was all true ages before the current controversy.

If you’re talking about that recent legal case, look again. The artist made the claim that the AI was the sole author, but that he should own the IP. I think the vast majority of people would claim that, in it’s current state, the AI is a digital tool an author uses to make art. The recent ruling just reconfirm that A machines aren’t people, and B you can’t just own another author’s work.

Have you used Stable Diffusion. I defy you to make a perfect clone of any image. Take a whole week to try and refine it if you want. It is basically impossible by definition, unless you only trained it on that one image.