WheezyJoe writes: The NY Times brings us a story on the Disney Corporation laying off U.S. tech workers and replacing them with immigrants visiting the country under H1-B visas. The twist is that the immigrant workers are not your nice local visiting foreign guy from the university who wants to stick around ’cause he likes the people here… they are employees of foreign-based consulting companies in the business of collecting H1-B visas and “import[ing] workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units.” The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits (excerpts of the Disney’s layoff notice are included in the article). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the article:
Disney Making Laid-Off US Tech Workers Train Foreign H1-B Replacements
Dave Knott writes: Tron 3 won’t be coming to a theater near you. Disney had been developing a sequel to Tron:Legacy since the movie, made for $170 million, grossed $400 million worldwide. But now they have chosen not to move forward with a third installment in the sci-fi series, sources say. “Disney has had strong success with its live-action properties recently, including Maleficent and this year’s Cinderella, which earned $527.4 million worldwide. But it recently had a stumble with the $180 million live-action film Tomorrowland, which underperformed at the box office this past weekend with a $33 million U.S. debut.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The Guinness World Records says that Catalina Alexandru Duru just pulled off the farthest flight ever traveled on a real life hoverboard: 905 feet and 2 inches. You can see him rise up 16 feet in the air on the hoverboard and then start cruising through the air over a lake with nothing but invisible underneath him in the video below. Read more… 
Your typical 3D printer works by layering melted plastic to eventually build up a solid 3D object, but what happens when you swap plastic for fabrics? Suddenly you’ve got a machine that can create objects that are soft , deformable, and cuddly. Read more… 
ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas’s writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren’t interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, “The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn’t really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it’s not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens].” After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7’s plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The life of most migrant workers in Qatar is bleak—so bleak, it’s a human rights violation . The latest report from Doha reveals a new twist in the sad story. When they’re not toiling away at building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, many workers are being paid impossibly small wages to be fake sports fans . It doesn’t sound fun, either. Read more…