To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

Wow, it is impressive the lengths people are willing to go to vandalize Musk’s property as a form of political protest!

That’s completely fair. I personally really like the site because it feels like being part of a creative community, but that also makes the selection of games that are available more eclectic.

A Mortician’s Tale was a nice relatively short interactive experience about what it is like to work in that occupation and its ups and downs, and an opportunity to reflect a bit on the reality of death.

To The Moon

I have played that game five times (so I could share the experience with other people) and have broken down into tears at the end every time.

I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?

Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.

The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.

If the appellate court is unhappy with the lower court’s ruling, then there is no reason for it not to reverse it and tell Microsoft to stop the process of merging with Activision until the proceedings have completed. Admittedly this outcome might be inconvenient for Microsoft and Activison, but it is not the job of the court to care about this.

Yes, of course they have complained to the courts. That’s not the point.

That is moving the goalposts. In your other comment, you said, “What is the FTC going to do about it? Most likely do nothing, or issue a stern warning.” I have demonstrated that they are doing neither of these things but instead are going through the courts to get injunctive relief.

This simply will go nowhere, or do you expect that the court will somehow separate Activision out of Microsofts hands again to fix this?

If the appellate court decides that the lower court erred in its reasoning, then there is no reason why it could not issue such an order. It is not like this would be the first time that the government broke up a company.

Or punish the managers at Microsoft and make them withdraw the execution plan to remove redundant jobs?

There is no reason why the court could not issue an injunction preventing it from executing this plan until the proceeding concludes.

At the end of it, Microsoft will eventually pay a small, symbolic sum which they consider “cost of conducting business”. Nothing more.

If the FTC considered this to be a sufficient remedy then they probably would have settled with Microsoft by now rather than taking this to the courts.

This news story is literally about the FTC actively suing for injunctive relief; the “complaint” in question is actually a formal legal letter addressed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court.

Edit: fixed typo

Quoth the article:

As spotted by iMore, this indemnification stems from how Epic Games breached the developer agreement it had with Apple when it tried offering its own alternative payment system in August 2020.

In short: Epic Games pissed off the court when it consciously chose to violate the terms of its its contract with Apple before filing the lawsuit, rather than first filing the lawsuit and waiting for it to conclude. The court is taking the unusual step of billing Epic Games for Apple’s legal expenses precisely to disincentivize this kind of behavior in the future.