"he tried to use mumbo jumbo, mysticism, magic rocks, and fairy woo woo plants" Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla and Brian Josephson all believed in magic or the paranormal

How are a copyright holder or individual actor/actress going to prove that a movie used their likeness in a court of law and get paid?

Predict that we will see AI model trained on real data, then that model used to train a second generation model. The second generation model will be used to make the movies.

It's a problem because you can take a near lookalike to an actor or actress and claim that you licensed that person's likeness go generate a movie.

"Leaving without clearing out his office, CEO John Sculley ordered that Jobs’ possessions be disposed of if he wasn’t coming back to get them. Fortunately, the certificate was rescued by a smart (is there any other kind?) Apple employee, who held onto it for the next few decades."

If you use nuclear generated electricity there is only one cost. If you choose wind & solar, when the wind isn't blowing or it's dark you need to provide a backup power source e.g. nuclear. Consequently wind and solar can never be cheaper. And don't get me started on storage costs.

"We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need," chief executive Julie Sweet told analysts on a conference call.

Silly, stupid jargon. You're not fired! You're exited!

No one really knows the skills accenture consultants will need to prove added value on the age of AI. Or if there is any value to add when the LLMMs commoditize the market of generated pabulum.

So they're not really wrong...

One question then is why this hasn't happened in the US? One explanation is that the US had the illusion of a not deeply strong President, in part because everyone (including the Presidents) agreed tacitly not to push the limits of their authority that much. The precedent breaking nature here undermines that illusion, and makes it more likely that we'll have years (possibly decades) where the Democrats and Republicans will even more than usual treat everything as a zero sum game with no respects for democratic norms.

The bottom line is that everything about this is bad.

ChatGPT does correctly capture the attitude of the US mainstream news media, so I'll give it credit for that.

Ah, but are there cute cat videos?

There is nothing stopping a second employer sponsoring a new H1B for someone who just entered the country on an H1B. No penalty today.

What does tend to stop H1B visa holders from transferring to a new employer are contracts that require the employee to repay moving and other costs: sometimes, somewhat inflated costs.

I think for any company that truly is using H1B's to bring in talented workers who they want to employ it will encourage them to sponsor green card applications with a higher frequency rather than using the H1B model to keep workers as indentured servants. I'm good with that because someone coming in on a green card has the option to compete in the market and receive market rates. It may even cause companies to consider going back to hiring local talent and *gasp* actually doing career development.

Judging from what I've seen, if WDC trademarked the original Steamboat Willie character and renewed the mark as required, it has been in use continuously via pins, toys, etc..

You technically don't have to renew the mark - you just have to use it. Registering the mark is useful in legal proceedings, but even without registration it doesn't mean there's no protection in place. Most small businesses don't register their company name as a trademark, but the law still protects them from other companies trying to represent them falsely. It's just their damage claims will be limited and you'll have to prove usage.

Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so you are free to use it for your content. You cannot say it's Mickey Mouse, but you're free to do whatever you want - colorize it, etc. You can remove the ears off the mouse and modify the film that way to avoid trademark issues as well - you are free to create a derivative work of a public domain work. So if you wanted to replace Mickey with a human and use the rest of the imagery, you can.

In fact, wasn't there a pornographic movie that was using Steamboat Willie? Disney didn't sue them, likely because they didn't have anything to sue over.

Copyright law protects the author for 100 years, but there is no expiration date on a trademark as long as it is continuously in use and renewed every 10 years.