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Comment Actually Superman beat FF4 Opening Weekend Total (Score 1) 66

Actually Superman beat the Fantastic Four in the domestic opening weekend totals. Superman had a $125 million domestic opening weekend while Fantastic Four had a $118 million domestic opening weekend box office. Quoting the opening day figure is a bit disingenous when referring to a film's opening as the summary does.

A film's opening box office is usually understood to mean the opening weekend box office and not a one-off one-day figure.. weird. Anyway here are some additional articles from variety that reference the actual domestic opening weekend figures and other stats for each of those films:

Superman:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2025%2Ffilm%2F...

Fantastic Four:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2025%2Ffilm%2F...

Comment Perpetual License? (Score 1) 34

Shouldn't these customers be able to sue VMWare for damages and for VMWare to comply with the terms of the license? It seems really stupid that a company can enforce the terms of a license that a customer agreed but then a customer cannot. Aren't these licenses supposed to be a binding contract between vendor and customer?
What's so special about these VMWare licenses that allow them to renege on providing perpetual license holders with security updates simply because they want them to sign up for subscriptions?

Comment Re:So, wait a minute! (Score 1) 170

You make it sound like this is the first time a country has decided to make Meta (and others) pay news publishers for reuse of their content.

Check out the following for a couple examples of the end result of this same song and dance:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2021%2F10...
and
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2021%2F02...

Meta is playing hardball as it did in those other territories to get a better deal. Unfortunately for them the wildfires makes them look pretty petty at the moment and likely has weakened their bargaining position by more than they would like.

People really shouldn't be relying on Facebook for access to news but that's not the world we currently live in so it is what it is.

Comment Must protect search (Score 1) 15

Google would likely have a more compelling AI chatbot to showcase if they weren't so gung ho on figuring out how to integrate said chatbot with Google search without negatively impacting their ad revenue. Google's argument that they're taking it slow because of AI safety concerns is utter nonsense.

OpenAI has an undeniable lead at this point and with Microsoft's collaboration they're making even further strides. It's obviously better to make mistakes at the early stages of AI development before these things are used for mission critical services and iterate on those lessons learnd, which is exactly what OpenAI is doing.

Meanwhile Google is fumbling along with Bard (such a stupid non-easy name to say) and they haven't even gotten to the point where they can start improving the model via interactions with millions of users on the web.

It seems like they're playing catch-up with Copilot as well. Nothing that they've shown in the last few weeks has really instilled confidence that they'll be able to produce an industry leading AI, so I'm gonna guess Pichai et al are currently shitting themselves silly.

Comment Remote Work? Really? (Score 1) 233

Why would execs working in close proximity make a difference in whether this bank failed or not? Did all execs and workers being on-site during the 2008 economic meltdown somehow prevent that from happening?

Randomly including activities which irk you in a list of reasons as to why a bank failed is seriously shoddy reporting (if you can even call it that) from the Financial Times. This is obviously a pathetic attempt of trying to spread the blame around to hopefully obfuscate the actual reasons behind why this bank and a few others have failed.

You can literally hear the FT mouthpieces whispering:

don't look for any more reasons, trust us remote work is the bane of all evil and we need to get rid of it if we want the banking sector to return to its previous glorious heights, well ever since our last economic meltdown.. which happened less than 15 years ago when remote work wasn't really a thing.. but don't think about that.. or the fact that the 2018 banking deregulation law allowed banks like SVB to no longer have to undergo an annual federal reserve stress test to ensure that they maintain certain levels of capital (to be able to absorb losses) and liquidity (to be able to quickly meet cash obligations), etc... you know actions that would have not helped to prevent this situation at all right?
Right?

Yep, remote work is obviously at fault here...

Comment Losing money on Disney+? (Score 1) 204

Doesn't Disney own a huge amount of the content that is on Disney+? How exactly are they losing money on that venture when they've surely gained millions of subscribers over the past few years?

Is it really a case of losing money on their streaming service or is it a case of not making enough profits?

Comment Re:A little over the top there (Score 1) 298

"One solution is to import workers from other countries, such as the Philippines (which has a "robust" birthrate), but there is much resistance to that idea." I wondered why increasing the number of immigrants didn't seem to be mentioned in the summary. I took a look at the article and found the following:

"Japan is home to the oldest population in the world, after tiny Monaco. It is recording fewer births than ever before. By 2050, it could lose a fifth of its current population.

Yet its hostility to immigration has not wavered. Only about 3% of Japan's population is foreign-born, compared to 15% in the UK. In Europe and America, right-wing movements point to it as a shining example of racial purity and social harmony. But Japan is not as ethnically pure as those admirers might think. There are the Ainu of Hokkaido, Okinawans in the south, half a million ethnic Koreans, and close to a million Chinese.

Then there are Japanese children with one foreign parent, which include my own three.

These bi-cultural kids are known as "hafu" or halves - a pejorative term that's normal here. They include celebrities and sports icons, such as tennis star Naomi Osaka. Popular culture idolises them as "more beautiful and talented". But it's one thing to be idolised and quite another to be accepted.

If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start."


If what the prime minister is predicting actually ends up happening then they obviously only have themselves to blame.

Comment Re:Just haggling over the price (Score 1) 359

I still don't get why it's so hard for people to understand this point:

"If Twitter have defined how they calculate bots and given a 5% figure then even if the real figure by a better calculation was 20% it wouldn't matter because the figure was 5% by their methodology."

It doesn't matter how often Elon pretends in his supposed infinite wisdom that the bot numbers are wrong, he would need to prove that he used Twitter's methodology and arrived at starkly different numbers. Since Twitter's methodology of calculating bot numbers is good enough for the SEC, how exactly is Musk going to convince the court that he's right and Twitter and the SEC are wrong?

Thankfully, the bullshit that permeates the interwebs these days where too many people like to state opinions as facts because of their "feels" doesn't work in every situation.

Comment Musk is flailing (Score 1) 359

Before the stock market crash, Musk used his wealth and connections to force the acquisition of Twitter even though the company and shareholders were not interested in selling. He skipped the due diligence (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Fmarkets%2Fdeals%2Ftwitter-committed-elon-musks-44-billion-deal-2022-05-17%2F) that he should have done because I assume he figured he was on top of the world and what's 40+ billion USD of yours and your 'friends' money when you can easily make more?

Fast forward a couple months and he's now claiming that the deal should be axed because he's not being given the information now that he should have asked for before signing on the dotted line?

Even if you didn't factor in the near constant public bashing of the company that he's done over the last couple of months, it seems that Musk is in a very weak position here and should be made to either acquire Twitter at the agreed upon price or pay such a heavy penalty that he and others would think twice about playing fast and loose with a company's (and their employees) future like this.

Also, the SEC needs to start doing their job and start hitting guys like this with record fines instead of the drop in the bucket pocket change that they seem to currently require them to pay when they break the rules.

Comment Republicans stick together no matter what (Score 1) 406

DeSantis went after Disney because they had the audacity to oppose his don't say gay bill and to stop donating to Republicans in Florida. Hawley now out of nowhere (yea right) introduces a bill to reduce Disney's copyright protections. Hawley has been in office since 2019 and I'd bet there has been zero attempts on his part in the past 3 years to introduce a bill related to reducing these companies' copyright protection, so why now? We all know the obvious answer. Even though these copyright changes will likely be a good thing and should have been done a long time ago, it's ridiculous that elected officials are able to even attempt threatening and/or punishing companies with things like this when said companies decide to oppose them or stop donating to them. Outside of the political world this would likely be classified as a crime and an investigation would soon follow. What do you think will happen to either DeSantis or Hawley?

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