From the politico article: >....Dubelier's firm was representing both Concord Management and a related company known as Concord Catering... >Dubelier said he wasn't authorized to appear in court for Concord Catering, a firm which he contended should never have been listed in the indictment returned in February. >"The government indicted a proverbial ham sandwich â" somebody that didn't exist ... at the time period alleged by the government," the defense attorney said. The focus of the case is on Concord management, which did exist. The lawyer also represents the "related" company Concord catering (which did not exist) which is named in the case. I don't know the minutia of why the catering firm would be named but I think focusing on that is a red herring compared to the actual suspicion on Concord management.

The important high level idea here is the difference between granting a license to the underlying media content, vs granting a license separately for each medium of distribution.

This is an example of how hollywood is trying to have it both ways. I buy DVD's, and I'd like to rip them to my PC to host a digital version for myself on plex or kodi. Technically, using a decoder to rip the DVD is illegal - I don't have the legal right to duplicate the content for myself in a different medium. My license is only for "Movie X on DVD", not "Movie X generally" (generally as in - the underlying media content independent of distribution medium).

In Disney's current fight, they are trying to say that they sold redbox a license for "Movie X generally", and that license was fulfilled in two separate mediums (physical DVD, and digital download). If that were true, then clearly redbox would be violating it's single license for "Movie X generally" by giving one of the distribution mediums to someone else. Unfortunately for Disney, hollywood has been greedy and wanted to cash in separately on each distribution medium so they've established a system where effectively they grant licenses only on a per-medium basis.

I wish that Disney got what they wanted and a license was for the underlying content, not per distribution medium. Then I could legally digitize/stream my DVD's and I wouldn't have to put up with buying ebooks from amazon that I can't export to pdf or let a computer synthetically read aloud for me (which amazon restricts because they want to sell you the audible copy also).

Publishers are reaping what they have sown - you can't charge people separately for each distribution* medium then get mad when people re-sell each medium separately. (* of course in this instance they didn't charge separately because they bundled the digital download. In a non-legal sense, it's fair then for disney to win this case. But in a legal sense, they've established this crappy system and now they are justly suffering it's results)

While I don't doubt robots will be performing sutures before long, I don't think it's comparable. It's a fundamentally different mechanical challenge. The challenge of sutures is exact alignment of the connection point and balancing the stretching/elasticity of the surrounding material (skin). I believe the challenge of automated fabric sewing has a lot less to do with the connection point and more to do with traversing large sections of fabric and still sewing a new location precisely relative to the previous location. It's hard to consistently holding the fabric still (preventing folds) so it's impossible to employ a identically repeated mechanical process - there will have to be custom adjustments for everything shirt, and thus you need a system that can both track movement along the fabric precisely, and respond adaptably to changes. That's the hard part. Early sewing robot attempts just heavily starched the fabric so it wasn't flexible/unpredictable. I think the successful newer technique is to basically put a high speed camera right next to the sewing needle that counts threads as it moves across the material. Thus precisely tracking location on the fabric so that you can adjust if something folded our flexed in an unexpected way.

Shouldn't the football field be measured corner to opposite corner though? That's how all the cool kids measure screens

Then we are the employers of Congress, and we will then have a right to their genetic information? *Drops mic*

I guess not everyone is aware because it seems unexpected, but the DoE is a major funder of science in the US. They are in charge of the 10 United states national labs where a big portion of major US research projects reside. I just finished grad school in physics working at Brookhaven National Lab and a lot of science happens at these places in a wide range of fields. There are some US government employed scientists/researchers but there is also huge involvement from all manner of Universities across the the world. Go google the DoE office of science to learn more. They fund a lot of energy and nuclear focused research to be sure, but there is a lot of other fundamental science research as well. As you can see in their budget here (http://science.energy.gov/~/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-request-to-congress/fy-2016/FY_2016_Office_of_Science-Overview.pdf), they have a 5 Billion dollar line item for "Science" in 2016.

This situation is a big deal because Trump's administration is basically approaching a central chunk of the US (and to some extent international) scientific community saying he want's a list of everyone who supports climate research. This is bad news if you support climate research and bad news if you support a free and independent scientific community.

Is there anything we can do as the public to keep the FCC going in the same direction? Preferably with Tom Wheeler still around? I was just telling my wife that the last few years of the FCC has been a rare example of excellently functioning government that benifits citizens. And now there's all this talk of Trump killing it. Are there seriously any public actions that could even possibly support Wheeler's FCC enough to not die?

Election Fixing?