Struggling Internet giant Yahoo has settled a shareholder lawsuit by altering the terms of a so-called “poison pill” severance plan for its employees that itadopted shortly after Microsoft announced its unsolicited takeover offer back in early 2008.The severance package was designed to keep Yahoo employees with the company in the event of a merger by making it very expensive for a new owner to jettison them; it also would have made moving Yahooemployees to Microsoft’s Seattle-area headquarters difficult.
Under the settlement with its own shareholders, Yahoo’s severance terms won’t go into effect if Yahoo were just to sell its Internet search business—the one part of Yahoo Microsoft might still be interested in buying. The settlement also reduces the period of time employees would be eligible for severance pay in the event of an acquisition: the original terms had Yahoo employees eligible to collect severance if laid off within two years of a takeover; now, the period is just one year.
The settlement also stipulates that the election of a new board of directors is not considered a “change of ownership” so far as activation of severance benefits is concerned.
The lawsuit challenging the severance terms was part of a class action brought by the police and fire retirement system of Detroit and other investors, including pension funds.
Yesterday, Yahoo began the process of formally laying off some 1,500 employees.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.