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.

Neesh is actually the much newer pronunciation apparently, TIL.

The way read it they were using it as an example where absurdity makes sense to poke a hole in the logic that infinity can be used as a number.

Yeah, I think all of New England is down for this. Please.

Even more specifically, if we are talking a temporal teleport, then this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most mainstream fiction uses teleports for time travel, pop out of one time and into another without experiencing the time between. As opposed to the device Farnsworth made in The Late Philip J. Fry, where they actually just change speed through time instead of skipping through it. In the latter case, you shouldn’t have to worry about this issue at all. But with a teleport, any teleportation device is simultaneously a temporal and spatial teleport, due to causality and the nature of spacetime. So any teleport would need spacetime coordinates, not just spatial or temporal coordinates.

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.

To be a bit more precise, people did sometimes carry swords on their back, but generally not into battle. It was more comfortable for travel, but impossible to draw, so when they were expecting trouble they would move it to the hip.

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.

Never mention it. They will often ask questions about how you think a juror should or can act. If you answer them in a way that shows you might know about nullification, you are out. If you then later admit you know about it, they will point to those questions and know you lied about them. Safest answer is to just never, ever use the term, ideally you should go through the motions in deliberation of putting the the rules together, like you are just realizing it’s a possibility then and there.

Did you see what he was wearing? Was basically asking for it really.

These are very region dependant. My state has no income or sales tax, but the property taxes are higher, my 1 acre with a mobile home is basically 3k. It’s almost certainly cheaper than renting, but you can’t just make sweeping statements like that.

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.

That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

The reason the image is different using the same text prompt is because it randomly generates a seed for each time it runs. Presumably the copyright would include all the settings, including the seed. All of that kept the same will produce the same image, every time.

I think the logical conclusion of copyrighted prompts would include not just the input prompt but the version number of the program, any settings, the seed, etc. Basically everything you would need to copy that exact image, because all of that together would produce an exact copy.

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.

Teet Stracos I think. Which might be one of Luke’s buddies on that island…

Chackin Meese

Cheef Balupa

Joppie Sloe

Sapient, not sentient. Sci-fi has co-opted the word, but sentient basically means able to feel emotions. There are plenty of sentient species right here at home. Sapient is the word sci-fi usually wants, there are no known sapient species aside from humans. Though some may argue that a couple other animals may qualify, it’s a very fuzzy concept that is hard to identify with a being unable to communicate abstract concepts.