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Category: entertainment – Page 93

China’s biggest streaming-music service reveals the details for its US IPO

  • Tencent Music on Monday set the price for its US initial public offering after global markets got a boost from a truce in the US-and-China trade war.
  • The company said American Depository Receipts will price between $13 and $15, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.
  • The IPO was initially scheduled for October 18, but was postponed due to stock-market volatility.
  • Monday’s filing comes after President Donald Trump agreed to postpone new tariffs on Chinese imports by 90 days and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to buy a substantial amount of US goods and name Fentanyl a controlled substance.

Tencent Music Entertainment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday to set the price for its US initial public offering — one day after President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a truce in the trade war between the US and China.

The China-based streaming-music service backed by tech giant Tencent said the offering price will be in the range of $13 and $15 per American Depository Receipt, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.

Chicago slaps PlayStation users with expansion of 9 percent amusement tax

PlayStation users will now see an extra 9 percent tax applied to some purchases on the platform.

Sony has agreed to comply with Chicago’s amusement tax, leaving PlayStation users to face an extra 9 percent tax on streaming and rental services, effective Nov. 14. This latest expansion of the city’s amusement tax will apply to purchases such as rentals, but not full sales of games.

The city’s amusement tax used to mostly apply to purchases of concert and sporting event tickets. However, the Chicago Department of Finance ruled in 2015 that the tax covered streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Spotify. This expansion of the amusement tax is commonly dubbed the “Netflix tax” or the “cloud tax.” In addition to being regressive, it is also likely illegal.

Engineers developing a HAL 9000-type AI system for monitoring planetary base stations

A team of engineers at TRACLabs Inc. in the U.S. is making inroads toward the creation of a planetary base station monitoring system similar in some respects to Hal 9000—the infamous AI system in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this case, it is called cognitive architecture for space agents (CASE) and is outlined in a Focus piece by Pete Bonasso, the primary engineer working on the project, in the journal Science Robotics.

Bonasso explains that he has had an interest in creating a real Hal 9000 ever since watching the movie as a college student—minus the human killing, of course. His system is designed to run a base situated on another planet, such as Mars. It is meant to take care of the more mundane, but critical tasks involved with maintaining a habitable planetary base, such as maintaining oxygen levels and taking care of waste. He notes that such a system needs to know what to do and how to do it, carrying out activities using such hardware as robot arms. To that end, CASE has been designed as a three-layered system. The first is in charge of controlling hardware, such as , life-support, etc.

The second layer is more brainy—it is in charge of running the software that controls the hardware. The third layer is even smarter, responsible for coming up with solutions to problems as they arise—if damage occurs to a module, for example, it must be sealed off from others modules as quickly as possible. The system also has what Bonasso describes as an ontological system—its job is to be self-aware so that the system can make judgment calls when comparing data from sensors with what it has learned in the past and with information received from human occupants. To that end, the system will be expected to interact with those humans in ways similar to those portrayed in the movie.

Human images from world’s first total-body scanner unveiled

EXPLORER, the world’s first medical imaging scanner that can capture a 3D picture of the whole human body at once, has produced its first scans.

The brainchild of UC Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, EXPLORER is a combined (PET) and X-ray computed tomography (CT) that can image the entire body at the same time. Because the machine captures radiation far more efficiently than other scanners, EXPLORER can produce an image in as little as one second and, over time, produce movies that can track specially tagged drugs as they move around the entire body.

The developers expect the technology will have countless applications, from improving diagnostics to tracking disease progression to researching new drug therapies.

Big test coming up for tiny satellites trailing Mars lander

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A pair of tiny experimental satellites trailing NASA’s InSight spacecraft all the way to Mars face their biggest test yet. Their mission: Broadcast immediate news, good or bad, of InSight’s plunge through the Martian atmosphere on Monday. Named WALL-E and EVE after the main characters in the 2008 animated movie, the twin CubeSats will pass within a few thousand miles (kilometers) of Mars as the lander attempts its dicey touchdown. If these pipsqueaks manage to relay InSight’s radio signals to ground controllers nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away, we’ll know within minutes whether the spacecraft landed safely.