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In the latest episode of the Sony hack, Hollywood Reporter says that Carmike Cinemas, which operates 278 theaters and 2,917 screens in 41 states, will not show the Sony comedy "The Interview" following threats of violence from hackers. Sony Pictures told exhibitors who had booked The Interview that it planned to move forward with the movie's release, but that they were free to decide not to show the film, and that the studio would support them in whatever decision they made. Citing 9/11, the hackers issued a warning and said, "We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places The Interview be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to." The situation is also raising concerns among studios that the threat of violence could keep some moviegoers away from the multiplex over the lucrative holiday moviegoing period. "This is bad for everyone. This will stop people from going to theaters, and that affects all of us," says one source at a rival studio. "If somebody called a bomb threat for a concert, and it was credible, you'd have to cancel or postpone the concert."

Claire Cain Miller writes at the NYT that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.

When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. “We’re going to enter a world in which there’s more wealth and less need to work,” says Erik Brynjolfsson. “That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there’s no guarantee this will work out.”

Lex Berko writes in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service’s growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers—financial, temporal, health-related—barring them from attending a funeral. “It’s not designed to replace folks attending funerals,” says Walker Posey. “A lot of folks just don’t live where their family grew up and it’s difficult to get back and forth.” But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there’s a technical problem with the webcast—will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? “The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well,” says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. “To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?”

Nathaniel Popper writes at the NYT that the Citizens Bank of Weir, Kansas, or CBW, has been taken apart and rebuilt, from its fiber optic cables up, so it can offer services not available at even the nation’s largest bank. The creation of the new bank, and the maintenance of the old one, are the work of Suresh Ramamurthi and his wife, Suchitra Padmanabhan who were born in India and ended up buying the bank in Kansas in 2009 after living in Silicon Valley and passing through jobs at Google and Lehman Brothers. Their goal was to find solutions to logjams that continue to vex consumers all over the country, such as the obstacles that slow money moving from one bank to another and across international borders. The new services that CBW is providing, like instant payments to any bank in the United States, direct remittance transfers abroad and specialized debit cards, might seem as if they should be painless upgrades in an age of high-frequency trading and interplanetary space missions. But the slowness of current methods of moving money is a widely acknowledged problem in the financial industry.

In the United States the primary option that consumers have to transfer money is still the ACH payment. Requests for ACH transfers are collected by banks and submitted in batches, once a day, and the banks receiving the transfers also process the payments once a day, leading to long waits. ACH technology was created in the 1970s and has not changed significantly since. The clunky system, which takes at least a day to deliver money, has become so deeply embedded in the banking industry that it has been hard to replace. CBW went to work on the problem by using the debit card networks that power ATM cash dispensers. Ramamurthi’s team engineered a system so that a business could collect a customer’s debit card number and use it to make an instant payment directly into the customer’s account — or into the account of a customer of almost any other bank in the country. The key to CBW's system is real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring - software that can judge the risk involved in any transaction in real time by looking at 20 to 40 factors, including a customers’ transaction history and I.P., address where the transaction originated. It was this system that Elizabeth McQuerry, the former Fed official, praised as the “biggest idea” at a recent bank conference. "Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form -- a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi. "We'll now be one of the first banks in the world to offer customers a reliable, compliant, safe and secure way to instantly send and receive money internationally."

Binyamin Appelbaum writes at the NYT that the share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent as many men have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment. Technology has made unemployment less lonely says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, who argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations. Perhaps most important, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs as foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs open to high school graduates. The trend was pushed to new heights by the last recession, with 20 percent of prime-age men not working in 2009 before partly receding. But the recovery is unlikely to be complete. "Like turtles flipped onto their backs, many people who stop working struggle to get back on their feet," writes Appelbaum. "Some people take years to return to the work force, and others never do "

A study published in October by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies estimated that 37 percent of the decline in male employment since 1979 can be explained by this retreat from marriage and fatherhood (PDF). “When the legal, entry-level economy isn’t providing a wage that allows someone a convincing and realistic option to become an adult — to go out and get married and form a household — it demoralizes them and shunts them into illegal economies,” says Philippe Bourgois, an anthropologist who has studied the lives of young men in urban areas. “It’s not a choice that has made them happy. They would much rather be adults in a respectful job that pays them and promises them benefits.”

Andrew Pollack reports at the NYT that a federal judge has blocked an attempt by the drug company Actavis to halt sales of an older form of its Alzheimer’s disease drug Namenda in favor of a newer version with a longer patent life after New York’s attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the drug company of forcing patients to switch to the newer version of the widely used medicine to hinder competition from generic manufacturers. “Today’s decision prevents Actavis from pursuing its scheme to block competition and maintain its high drug prices,” says Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. “Our lawsuit against Actavis sends a clear message: Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients.” The case involves a practice called product hopping where brand name manufacturers (“product hoppers”) make a slight alteration to their prescription drug (PDF) and engage in marketing efforts to shift consumers from the old version to the new to insulate the drug company from generic competition for several years. For its part Actavis argued that an injunction would be “unprecedented and extraordinary” and would cause the company “great financial harm, including unnecessary manufacturing and marketing costs.” Namenda has been a big seller. In the last fiscal year, the drug generated $1.5 billion in sales. The drug costs about $300 a month.

The NYT reports that Peruvian authorities say Greenpeace activists have damaged the fragile, and restricted, landscape near the Nazca lines, ancient man-made designs etched in the Peruvian desert when they placed a large sign that promoted renewable energy near a set of lines that form the shape of a giant hummingbird. The sign was meant to draw the attention of world leaders, reporters and others who were in Lima, the Peruvian capital, for a United Nations summit meeting aimed at reaching an agreement to address climate change. Greenpeace issued a statement apologizing for the stunt at the archaeological site and its international executive director, Kumi Naidoo, flew to Lima to apologize for scarring one of Peru’s most treasured national symbols. “We are not ready to accept apologies from anybody,” says Luis Jaime Castillo, the vice minister for cultural heritage. “Let them apologize after they repair the damage.”

But repair may not be possible. The desert around the lines is made up of white sand capped by a darker rocky layer. By walking through the desert the interlopers disturbed the upper layer, exposing the lighter sand below. Visits to the site are closely supervised - ministers and presidents have to seek special permission and special footwear to tread on the fragile ground where the 1,500 year old lines are cut. “A bad step, a heavy step, what it does is that it marks the ground forever,” says Castillo. “There is no known technique to restore it the way it was.” Castillo says that the group walked in single file through the desert, meaning that they made a deep track in the ground then they spread out in the area where they laid the letters, making many more marks over a wide area. “The hummingbird was in a pristine area, untouched,” Castillo added. “Perhaps it was the best figure.”

Vindu Goel reports at the NYT that Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, addressing questions from Facebook users at his second town hall meeting with the public, shared the secret of his success telling users that mistakes are good and that successful people not only learn from their mistakes but spend most of their time making mistakes. “If you’re successful, most of the things you’ve done were wrong,” said Zuckerberg. “What ends up mattering is the stuff you get right.” If you get a few big things right, he said, “you can make some pretty important changes in the world.” Zuckerberg also discussed the importance of software programming skills. “If you can code, you have the power to sit down and make something and no one can stop you,” he said, predicting that schools would eventually require everyone to learn a little coding because it sharpens analytical skills that are useful in a wide variety of professions.

When asked what he thinks about Facebook becoming synonymous with wasting time, Zuckerberg said he wasn't sure he agreed with the premise of the question. He explained everyone is told they'll have time for life after finishing school or their homework, but they forget to realize that friends and family is what matters in life. Facebook, he said, helps connect people in a way society doesn't always offer. "We're proud of our contribution there," Zuckerberg said. "If we could make people a little more connected then I think that's valuable."

Lily Hay Newman reports at Slate that Sony is counterhacking to keep its leaked files from spreading across torrent sites. According to Recode, Sony is using hundreds of computers in Asia to execute a denial of service attack on sites where its pilfered data is available, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Sony used a similar approach in the early 2000s working with an anti-piracy firm called MediaDefender, when illegal file sharing exploded. The firm populated file-sharing networks with decoy files labeled with the names of such popular movies as “Spider-Man,” to entice users to spend hours downloading an empty file. "Using counterattacks to contain leaks and deal with malicious hackers has been gaining legitimacy," writes Newman. "Some cybersecurity experts even feel that the Second Amendment can be interpreted as applying to 'cyber arms'.”

A/B testing, or two sample hyposthesis testing, happens all the time on the Internet. Netflix A/B tested its queue design to maximize binging; Google A/B tested the color of its ad links to maximize clicks; the Obama campaign A/B tested its website to maximize campaign donations. Now Rebecca Greenfield writes in Fast Company that the lingerie company Adore Me goes many steps further in A/B testing shooting multiple versions of images to run on its website. The distinctions between the pictures might include different models wearing the same set in the exact same position, or the same model in the same set in a different position, for example. For every thousand people that come on the site, 500 will see picture A, another 500 will see picture B and over time, one will sell better than the other. Some of AdmoreMe's discoveries: Sex doesn't sell, so forget the boudoir shot. Props distract. Couches are fine. Playing with hair is ideal. Interestingly enough while natural blondes make up about 16% of the US population, and science says that men prefer blondes, nobody wants to buy lingerie from them. So far, no one with golden locks has sold well.

Scrolling through the site, the models could all be related—long legs, olive skin, dark hair, insanely hot. "Picture has a huge impact on sale when it comes to fashion," says CEO Morgan Hermand-Waiche who studied math and computer science at Ecole de Mines, which he describes as the MIT of Paris. "You buy the product not only for what it looks like, but for the emotions that the product conveys to you and that you want to convey through the product."