Epic Games may have ultimately won what it wanted and proven its ethical point, but they lost milions in a judgment that compels them to pay Apple for the time they were collecting sales through a third party payment gateway while they were still in the Apple App Store, in violation of the contract and terms of service.
But the judge ruled also that Apple, while they could collect from Epic for violating the contract as it was, can no longer, going forward, restrict developers from selling their apps through third-party payment gateways. One doubts Apple will let Epic back on its platform anytime soon, so Epic will not benefit from a ruling that now enables all other developers to do what Epic paid a hundreds-millions price for doing.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers handed down a decision in a closely-watched trial between Apple and Epic Games on Friday.
Rogers issued an injunction that said that Apple will no longer be allowed to prohibit developers from providing links or other communications that direct users away from Apple in-app purchasing, of which it takes 15% to 30% of gross sales.
The dream of American Corporate Empires has long been the golden opening of China’s massive market. Now, the dream looks like a trainwreck as China’s new regulatory moves within its country threaten the ability of US markets to ever gain anything approaching open, level access in that vast market.
As China ramps up regulatory crackdowns and targets major companies, C-suite executives face a tough choice when it comes to doing business in the country: stay and fortify security, or leave.
R “Ray” Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said China is a top concern for the C-suite as strategic planning for 2022 begins. Companies with operations in China will have to decide whether to remain, he said. If companies continue doing business in China, Wang said the focus should be on protecting data and IP, hardening privacy controls, establishing an exit plan for employees working in the country and preparing for risks like more regulatory action.
I often see true idiots build big audiences representing a faction and becoming the face of the faction to the degredation of that faction.
The republicans do this all the time, and, given the DNC advantage in signalling a narrative in ‘established’ channels (media, newspapers, movies, etc), when they do it, the world knows about it so that it becomes significantly branded to it.
I see the same kind of thing happening for the DNC this time with the whole Met Gala, only this time, their own media unwittingly did the work of making this moment of complete idiocracy become a significant part of the brand for a significant portion of casuals in the American lands.
The timing of the event itself, during a “pandemic,” one the DNC hypes and derives political capital from and the RNC downplays and derives political capital from downplaying it. So the party that helped make the pandemic an acutely felt emergency in the lives of many helped also to contribute to the terrible idiocracy moment that is the Met Gala.
I think even the Left are shaking their heads and thinking……wait a second, it’s almost as if you WANT to sabotage your chances to pass ‘progressive’ legislation. Hmmmmmmmmmm.
China’s President Xi Jinping is shown on a screen through digitally decorated glass during the World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China, November 23, 2020. REUTERS/Aly Song
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 8 (Reuters) – A misinformation campaign on social media in support of Chinese government interests has expanded to new languages and platforms, and it even tried to get people to show up to protests in the United States, researchers said on Wednesday.
Experts at security company FireEye (FEYE.O) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google said the operation was identified in 2019 as running hundreds of accounts in English and Chinese aimed at discrediting the Hong Kong democracy movement. The effort has broadened its mission and spread from Twitter (TWTR.N), Facebook(FB.O) and Google to thousands of handles on dozens of sites around the world.
This expansion suggests Chinese interests have made a deeper commitment to the sort of international propaganda techniques Russia has used for several years, experts said.
Some of the new accounts are on networks used predominantly in countries that have not previously been significant Chinese propaganda targets, such as Argentina. Other networks have users around the world but with a large proportion in Russia or Germany.
False information about COVID-19 has been a major focus. For example, accounts on social networking sites vKontakte, LiveJournal and elsewhere in Russian, German, Spanish and other languages have asserted that the novel coronavirus emerged in the United States before China and that it was developed by the U.S. military.
Multiple Russian-language LiveJournal accounts used identical wording: “U.S. Ft. Detrick was the source of COVID-19,” referring to the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick installation in Maryland.
In addition to promoting false information on the virus, researchers said priorities for the group include criticizing fugitive Chinese propagandist Guo Wengui and his ally, former Donald Trump strategist…
Taiwan is not playing games when it comes to the China threat, which is why it’s playing games, war games, that is. In these war games, the Taiwanese prepared for a biological and electronic attack that might be launched by the Chinese.
TAIPEI — Taiwan began annual military exercises Monday that prepared for a full-scale invasion by China, including response to biological and chemical warfare.
The five-day live-fire portion of the Han Kuang exercise kicked off early Monday morning in eastern Taiwan, an area China considers a weak link. F-16V and Mirage 2000 fighter jets were dispatched to simulate a response to an armed invasion.
The drills come during a month in which 19 Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, and in the wake of Chinese exercises that analysts say were intended to simulate an invasion across the Taiwan Strait. Taipei is responding by pouring money into missiles and other investments that it hopes will help level an uneven playing field.
The Han Kuang exercise, held every year since 1984, spans Taiwan’s main island as well as outlying islands, incorporating ground, sea and air forces. It envisions a wide range of avenues of potential attack — not only missiles, but also landing operations, electronic warfare, cyberattacks and bioweapons.
In the southern city of Tainan, a biological agent containment exercise was held in response to a mock assault where troops were attacked by bioweapons.
Soldiers were promptly sent to nearby hospitals to be treated by civilian doctors, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported. The military also rehearsed its procedures for the decontamination of vehicles and equipment during the Tainan drill.
A drill scheduled for Wednesday in the southern county of Pingtung will have F-16s practice takeoffs and landings using regular roads as runways, in case the air base there is destroyed by a ballistic-missile strike.
Taiwan, being much weaker militarily than China, has adopted an asymmetric defense strategy centering on the main island that aims to keep Beijing’s forces at as great a distance as possible, delaying an invasion and buying time for the U.S. or other powers to intervene.
The geopolitical significance of Ukraine to Russia was recently significantly reduced with the completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, which enables Russia to import her gas directly to Europe, going around Ukraine where once Russia had to go through to reach Europe’s markets.
The construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has been completed, Russian energy company Gazprom has said.
The pipeline will double the country’s exporting capacity and runs through the Baltic Sea, from Ust Luga in the east, near St Petersburg, to the German town of Greifswald, near the country’s border with Poland.
In doing so, it bypasses Ukraine, which has traditionally been the main route for Russian gas.
Moscow and Kiev have been in dispute since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Ukraine earns billions from gas transit fees, and agreed a deal last year with Russia after long-running talks.
Russia said it would not start using Nord Stream 2 until a German regulator gives its approval.
Carlos Torres Diaz, head of Power and Gas Markets at analysis firm Rystad Energy,…
Do you guys remember the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) group formed after George Floyd’s death? It was supposed to bail out those who protested and rioted in Minneapolis after he died.
Controversy has surrounded the group since its formation. It bails out people without any consideration to anyone. It even bailed out an alleged domestic abuser.
Now MFF is in trouble again. An alleged domestic abuser it bailed out is now charged with second-degree murder.
George Howard, 47, allegedly murdered Luis Ortiz, 38, on I-94 on Sunday:
Surveillance video reportedly showed Ortiz, in a blue BMW, and Howard, in a white Volvo, “get into a road rage incident” on the ramp entering the interstate.
Ortiz could be seen getting out of his vehicle and approaching Howard’s vehicle. Ortiz then collapsed and Howard could be seen driving away. Ortiz got back into his vehicle, drove down the ramp and subsequently crashed, surveillance video…
This article by NBC news is covering a growing trend in mostly inner city schools of black parents choosing to homeschool their children. Though this is a trend that’s nationwide, seeing homeschooling rising among black communities, especially poor communities, is something worth taking note. The NBC article interviews some black parents who talk about why they choose to homeschool their children. They chose to focus on these families that all seem to echo some shared concern that the schools themselves are still fundamentally racist, in terns of the inequality of the resources provide to predominantly black schools and in terms of how the teachers themselves teach their black students.
As NBC news is not a trusted source for news due to its ties to the DNC, one would easiliy be dismissive of the claims of racism in our public schools by these parents, but, to me, it fits my understanding of the nature of the moral supremacist who crows the most. These folks more often than not end up being the worst offenders of the very moral constructs they are seeking to police with great militant viligance.
These parents are in the very bellies of the DNC beasts, where political competition is dead, and they can bilk the land of its goods while giving voice to the plea of the needy in their communities that they continually faily to address. Rather, from within their own centers of power, the disenfranchised zones of America, it is their party that has reigned with an iron fist for more than 70 years, perpetually perpetuating, it you will, the oppressions of the disenfranchised they build their moral power around.
Unfortunately, many of these same parents will most likely not recognize that the source of this perpetuation of racist oppression is the power in their own neighborhoods, for 70 plus years, that continued to allow these same neighborhoods to be perpetual sources for moral power, bought by the very real oppression people face that are born into these uncertain, unsecure, unhealthy, undeveloping war zones dotted with crusing guards from outside the community (the police) who seem just as sick of the people they allegedly serve as the people they serve are sick of them as well.
Still, for whatever reason these parents are removing their children from school, and whoever they blame for their very real pain and suffering, it is good when people take steps towards self-sustainability and determination and away from dependence on a large-scale system that will always only see you as a useful cog, an expendible pawn, or detritus fit for the flames.
As schools begin reopening across the country, in Chicago, Angela Valentine says her 12-year-old son, Dorian, will not be returning. Instead, he will be home-schooled.
“I just began to see some telltale signs that things weren’t working to our advantage,” she said. “And started to see some discrepancies, some inequities.”
Some of those discrepancies involved her son’s academics. Valentine said that as Dorian’s grades slipped last year, before the coronavirus pandemic closed classrooms, his school failed to give him adequate support and solutions for subjects in which he was weak. Her son was one of only a few Black boys in his class, and he said his social interactions changed over time. Other students suddenly stopped playing with him. He told her that he spends recess on the swings by himself.
“We later found out that he was called the N-word,” Valentine said.
The writers of Boingboing would have you believe that is a crime, a moral indecency that school board members are retiring rather than face the angry mobs upset at the new moral standards our schools seem to ba adopting, standards that fundamentally clash with American Bill of Rights standards, such as the notion that humans are presumed of equal standing in the discourse of daily value exchange and only lose that standing when their direct action leads you to conclude they are not conducting themselves according to the parameters of these standards themselves.
The shothand version of what I just declared is this, we are all to be judged by the content of our character, not the (insert physiological trait here). This new moral supremacism many schools across America are adopting holds to the underlying assumption that life should be deefined within the historical power advantages and disadvantages of certain biological-based groups, and that the scarce traits of physicality within this mass should be elevated and praised over the more prevailing traits.
The simple version is this; White Heterosexual Cis-Gendered Males and their Female enablers invented all kinds of beliefs and sciences and custums and social mores to assure their continued dominance over all others in the world. They invented evil itself, and if only we rid the world of the very concepts of such things as white and heterosexual and gender and male can we hope to create a world where decent people, real people can openly and freely live.
Having this belief is fine, but forcing it on children is another matter altogether, and paretns across the board understand sometimes explicitely and sometimes implicitely the crime currently occuring under our own Federal, State, County, and Local governments across these lands, the crime of emotional terrorism against all of our children stuck in the schools that choose to perform these crimes against our own children, using our tax dollars to pay for the act.
Parents understand if you teach children to hate their own skin, either because they were the all-powerful evil oppressor skin variety or because they were of the all-weak, desperately-in-need of sin-skin allies (the sin-skinners willing to lay down their great power advantage to let their weak-skinned allies struggle for relief from the sin-skinned scourge)., you will pyschologicaly cripple them. You will destroy their sense of agency and safety. You will create enemies in homes, dividing families, further destroying the health and well-being of the very children you allege to be serving.
This isn’t an anti-anti-racist movement, it’s an anti-child-abuse movement. There are very few people that seek to sugar coat in our schools’ history books the sins of this land, but our choice is NOT between ignoring our racist and bigoted past and giving our government schools permission to teach a one-sided demonizing history that destroys the very mental and physcial health of our kids. We can teach the truth of our sins, and the hopes of our promises, for our history is filled with BOTH, not one.
If school board members are resigning from fear, I say good, it’s always much better when the state fears the people than when the people fear the state, something I am sure the writers of boingboing are for.
School boards meetings are being turned into chaotic shouting matches dominated by angry, threatening right-wing mobs. So the members are quitting, reports the AP.
In Vail, Arizona, speakers at a recent meeting took turns blasting school board members over masks, vaccines and discussions of race in schools — even though the board had no plans to act on, or even discuss, any of those topics. “It’s my constitutional right to be as mean as I want to you guys,” one woman said.
MAGAs, Qanons and antivaxxers make it impossible to get anything done and make everyone afraid. So the school board members quit. Then conservatives can take over the school boards. QED.
It’s a scene that has played out at other school boards and…
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