This is why the Music and Movie industries need to die -- no risk takers too many assholes looking for a "sure thing" and will rehash the "sure things" right into the fucking ground till they have nothing left.

I suppose the alternative is better, where Netflix and Google front-run your concept and actor preferences within a millimeter of their mathematical certainty, and then regurgitate that back at you, until they run it into the ground etc. etc.

I don't know, most feature films are original or original adaptations, you just don't hear about them because they get narrow releases or debut on VOD. Go to Apple trailers sometime and count the number of original films versus the number of sequels, you'll find the former easily outnumber the latter.

Don't pin the crimes "studios" or Disney executives (and they're by far the worst offenders) on the "industry."

From the summary Tron:Legacy grossed $400 million from $170 million - that's a success even by Hollywood "hide the profits to avoid royalty payments" maths.

Profits are not used to compute royalties. Royalties are not dividends.

"Market value, by definition, is what somebody is willing to pay."

Therefore it is impossible to overpay for something, as long as you're willing! :)

"Market value" in this meaning only applies in aggregate given the prior assumption of a liquid market. Is their a liquid market for autonomous car researchers?

You can't really apply commodity economic laws to "rockstars" like CEOs, entertainers or top researchers; when there's only one or a few of anything prices are more the result of rentierism and Veblen effects.

What good is going to do any of us if these guys end up working for Uber for 5 years, producing no useable products, and in the process destroying our best university autonomous vehicle program? Is that efficient? Or did Uber just have a huge checkbook and such a small marginal value for dollars they were happy to blow a few million dollars to slow down Google and Apple, with the completely speculative objective of maybe developing some product at some point.

It makes no sense to speak of market value when someone has so much money they can simply buy the best of everything and let it burn just to deny the other barons (er, capitalists) the prize.

(I really do think Uber has absolutely no idea what they're going to do with these people and zero wherewithal to run a R&D organization. This was just the rich parvenu buying the most expensive caviar to impress his friends...)

No they need at license to do that for any purpose. You want to send a link to someone for a picture you have in Google Photos? If someone follows that link that's a public display and Google needs a license to show the picture to them or else it is a copyright violation.

Copyright doesn't work like that, if you send a link to someone you are the one making the copy, not Google. All of the technical operations Google performs on your behalf are copies you are making, with Google as an agent; if you distribute a copyright image this way, you're the one that's liable, not Google, they're safe-harbored.

The relevant statute is Title 17 USC Section 512, the Transitory Network and System Cacheing safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. A service provider, like Google, may pass copyrighted works on the network, manipulate them and cache them without incurring any civil liability.

With regard to Tron 3, it's not so important that Tron 2 bombed-- what really matters is Escape from Tomorrowland bombed, and Disney has decided if it's going to make fantasy films, it'd rather plow money into it's wholly-owned subsidiaries, Lucasfilm and Marvel.

America, you will be getting all your science fiction and fantasy in Avengers form in Galactic Basic. This is a win if you like big scifi movies that make billions of dollars, it's a loss if you liked a little bit of diversity in your movies. Disney will now double down on sequels and reboots.

Think of everything people expect a photo hosting service to do. How to you think you can legally do them without those permissions?

The demands they make are ridiculously broad, not only do they ask for the right to take anything you upload and repurpose it in whatever way they please, they even demand this on the part of their partners, "those we work with." A picture (which you thought you deleted) of you and your ex-girlfriend at the zoo appears on a Samsung phone in an ad? Covered under the agreement. Can you tell me any other photo sharing service that demands this?

Apple's language on this point is instructive:

2. Changes to Content. You understand that in order to provide the Service and make your Content available thereon, Apple may transmit your Content across various public networks, in various media, and modify or change your Content to comply with technical requirements of connecting networks or devices or computers. You agree that the license herein permits Apple to take any such actions.

That's it, that's all you need.

Really important point: someone who holds media for someone else doesn't need to obtain any kind of license. You only need a license if you want to be able to make copies of something and put them in public for your own purposes.

Pftbt, I'd be impressed if any Google service lasts 20 years.

Just because they shut down Reader doesn't mean they threw the dataset away.

If you bought an iPhone last quarter, your Apple Tax was $252.

You can't see it in terms of cost-plus, you have to see prices in terms of marginal utility and premium over supplemental good. If an iPhone and a Galaxy S6 do the same thing, and the ASP of the Galaxy is $6 less, that's the baseline.

So then you can either say, either the Apple Tax is $6, or the Samsung discount is $6. And then you have to ask why exactly is Samsung selling phones short when they (putatively) have the same value? And why does Samsung even bother selling phones at the bottom of the range if they lose money on every sale? And if Apple is able to turn their profit over costs into marketing that buys them significant pricing advantage, why can't Samsung do the same thing?

If Google made a requirement that device makers provide "No Bullshit" builds of the OS for their devices (no TouchWiz, no bloatware, no crap) and made the carriers agree to allow for the use of that firmware set I think Android would be better off.

If Google did this, Samsung would pull out of the OHA and switch to Tizen. If Samsung did this, Android's marketshare would collapse, particularly in the US and at the high ranges where the app developers and ad buyers live.

Yes, it's technically correct, though I get tired of hearing this brought up all the time, as if it's some sort of weird conspiracy theory to make it sound like there's a "Nobel Prize" when there isn't one.

There is the matter that Nobel, nor his family, even those alive today, had any intention of giving an award to economists. The award is given in the memory of Alfred Nobel, which is nice, but taken to the extreme and you get David Miscavage giving Tom Cruise the "Albert Einstein Humanitarian Anti-Psychology Award." It's a shameless appropriation of the name Nobel simply to promote the award.

Alfred Nobel created his foundation as a humanitarian enterprise, mainly to atone for his invention of dynamite. He wanted to promote brotherhood between nations and the pursuit of knowledge. The Swedish National Bank created the Economics award because they wanted to promote economic science.

Let's just keep it simple: the entire story about a spontaneous demonstration and a mob angry about some video on YouTube was completely fabricated. They knew it wasn't true, and that's been obvious since the day it happened. Today's email dump makes it even more clear.

If you've found an email that substantiates any of this it would be news to everybody.

Purposeful, deliberate lying about the death of an ambassador and other Americans, all in the name of tamping down some prospectively unpleasant buzz that wouldn't resonate with the "Al Qeda is on the run!" narrative.

Even if this were true, even if you could establish intentional, premeditated lying, it's not illegal, nor am I sure it's in violation of any statute or guideline, unethical, or even just plain morally wrong. It was clearly established that everyone's talking points were based on reported intelligence at the time. That was over a year ago.

We've gone from "Hillary ordered SPECOPS to stand down!" to "We have an email (which I won't cite) where they weren't talking about Innocence of Muslims..." It's all just so dopey, even the Republicans in congress probably don't wanna keep investigating but they can't let it go because of all the dweebs at home passing around creepy conspiracy emails about Vince Foster. Boehner probably gave the job to Trey Goudy specifically to get him out of his hair and hopefully make some kind of career-ending overreach.

1. Getting elected senator from a state that is overwhelming democrat is an accomplish, really? What did she accomplish AS the carpet bag senator?

Note that she had to get around the entire Cuomo machine to do this. I don't know, go to a state that's overwhelmingly Republican and get yourself elected senator, just being from the right party isn't worth much.

2. Her being Sec of State was payback for supporting Obama's election.What did she accomplish AS Secretary of state besides getting an ambassador killed?

Note that she had to run neck-and-neck with him basically to the convention in order to get to that point, she won 48% of the Democratic popular vote and dozens of states, including New York, Florida and California. I don't know what you mean by "ambassador killed," Issa spent years on the Benghazi committee and got nowhere, he eventually quit and the Speaker had to establish a new select committee just to keep the faux outrage in the news. Stop reading your grandpa's emails.

3. Successful attorney of child rapists

John Adams: successful attorney of murderous british soldiers. Are you really suggesting that we should hold lawyers in any way accountable for the crimes of their clients? Do some people not deserve lawyers? Or do they only deserve bad ones?

4. On HRC's commodities trading ... It is pretty obvious that Hillary had something better than luck. She had well-placed friends who wanted her to have $100,000. The likelihood of such a return on such an investment was close to lottery odds, twenty-four chances in a million.44 This was in a decade in which no speculator made more than $400 profit a day with one contract of cattle futures. Yet Hillary managed to make $5,300 a day. Such a return would have required her holding thirteen contracts, involving 232 tons of beef with a value of $280,000.

In other words, you got nothing.

Since this is Rust/Swift day on /., I'd bring up that swift doesn't have `goto` but it does have named break statements.

processDocs: for doc in allDocs {
  for line in doc.allLines {
      let sum = parseLine(line)
      if sym == .EndOfDoc {
        break
      } else if sym == .StopProcessingAllDocs {
        break processDocs // breaks the outer loop
      } else {
        handleSym(sym)
      }
  }
}

One must always keep in mind that when the first guy called "C", "portable assembly language," he was saying it pejoratively.

So assuming you can just divert all the flights to JFK and Newark isn't going to work; split the number of flights between the two and now you have two airports handling about the same amount of traffic as LAX, [airnav.com] with 1741 flights/day.

Any solution that involves emulating LAX is probably a mistake...

2) Although it was the same actress, she wasn't playing Janice Rand in that scene but just a random Starfleet officer.

I dunno, most of the continuities identify that particular lieutenant commander as Janice Rand, and we see Grace Lee Whitney as Rand in Star Trek I, identified by name as Rand, and again in Star Trek VI as Excelsior's comm officer, not identified there, but later in that Voyager episode where Tuvok remembers his service on Excelsior and LtCm Janice Rand is identified as the officer and is a major character in the episode.