Given Epic's premeditated nature of the initial contract break, and subsequent media campaign, I wouldn't rule out this is just the second wave of Epic's persuasion war.
Apple just seems to be an odd foe for the U.S. to fight in this area. I'll get the tin foil.
Apple is power (money) and influence for the US, and there is increasing geopolitical tension. It's pretty easy to see this as shooting yourself in the foot.
I am increasingly astounded at the creativity with which people find reasons to NOT hold power to account. This is a good one: because to hold a US business to account is to weaken the US. And the situation is so "tense" right now, how can we afford it? Is there anyone who actually believes this argument, and if they do, do they understand it implies that one should never hold a US firm to account, since there is always geopolitical tension? (The other one is the so-called "prosperity gospel" - basically, the rich and powerful could only possibly get that way if they were good and Godly people. Wealth and power become evidence for goodness! Incredible!)
seems basically a restatement of the whole what's good for GM is good for America misquote https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2016/04/when-a-quote-is-n...
which is anyway from a different time when all of a company's production was centered in the country they headquartered at.
The thing about transnational corporations like Apple is that due to their size they are, to some extent, independent of the diktats of any one state like the US. While the usual power relationship between the state and a corporation is, roughly speaking, obey the law or we will dissolve you and lock up your executives, that relationship is less clear when it comes to a company such as Apple. This is due to two reasons. First its' transnational nature means it is not wholly reliant on remaining on the good side of a single state for its continued existence and income, and secondly the state itself comes to rely on the transnational corporation to provide employment, resources and expertise by way of its products, and tax revenues because of its' outsize nature. The result of this is that states find it difficult to wield corporations as tools in geopolitical conflicts and, at the margins, find themselves being wielded. There is thus a tension between the state's need to protect transnationals and promote their interests, and its' need to protect itself (and secondarily its citizen consumers) from their depredations. Actions such as this can be seen within this context. It is partly about protecting citizen consumers from the predatory behaviour of transnational corporations, but it is also about protecting the state and its ability to act independent of the interests of corporations. Finally the state itself is a consumer and has interests as such.
I keep losing track of if they're supposed to be so powerful they answer to no one, or so cowed that they're going to get me extradited to China and sent to jail for life for looking at Winnie the Pooh cartoons.
> Apple is power (money) and influence for the US, and there is increasing geopolitical tension.
They're an international company. Apple has already demonstrated a willingness to bow to pressure from China and censor apps etc. China is where their manufacturing and supply chain is, and the consumer market in China is nearly as big as it is in the US.
So it seems more of a liability than a benefit in a geopolitical conflict.
Any country, including the US, would do well to not swallow up the propaganda of the big tech PR departments, using foreign nations as an excuse to prop up national oligarchs.
What's best for any country is creating a healthy ecosystem that is long term competitive. We already went through 20 years of shitty cars because of Japan scares in the 80s, wasn't that enough?
in the late 70s/early 80s fueled by the oil crisis initially, the American car industry went into pretty steep decline and together with political fears of a rapidly growing Japan the US started to cap the imports of Japanese cars (also motorcycles and punitive measures on other industries) given that they were fuel efficient and appealed to consumers. The American auto industry became more profitable short term but generally up until the late 90s continued to stagnate or decline in particular in quality and efficiency.
American cars had a bad rep internationally (and domestically) probably until the mid 2000s when the industry started to become more competitive again.
Today Tesla is probably one example of an American carmaker that is innovative and I doubt you'll see them demand protectionist measures. International competition remains one of the best drivers for better products.
> Today Tesla is probably one example of an American carmaker that is innovative and I doubt you'll see them demand protectionist measures
For certain values of "American carmaker". It already manufactures more cars in Shanghai than in Fremont, it is controlled by a South African who is certainly not beholden to US interests, and whenever convenient can do a tax inversion to move abroad easily...
Indeed, there has to be per the "case or controversy" clause of the constitution. For a plaintiff to meet standing, there must be an "injury in fact".
Epic must violate Apple's terms of use in order to be injured by the application of them, in order for Epic to have standing to allege those terms are an abuse of monopoly power.
That is incorrect, the 30% that Epic was paying Apple was sufficient to establish standing, they did not need to break the contract on top of that. The judge said so herself during the trial.
Fun related fact. Cases where a law is violated specifically to seek a precedent on appeal is sometimes called a test case. Tons of famous civil rights litigation were test cases where one or both of the parties purposefully sought an unfavorable verdict in order to appeal. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Scopes Trial, and Brown vs. Board of Education were all test cases.
IIRC the legal community used to kind of dislike these, and I think there might have been a penalty for doing it. But obviously that’s no more
He continues to podcast that way, in the morning. I wouldn't call a pay-to-play audio file, a podcast. A value for value donation structure seems the only way to sustain podcasts.
For anyone else confused, today is the first anniversary of the Charlottesville incident, where violence occurred between the "Unite the right" group, and a counter protest. A car was also driven into protesters, killing 1.
Today a state of emergency was put in place by the state, to give specific state powers to the police, to keep the peace.
Mine returned Oymyakon, Russia. Nearly 8,000km from my location, or IP address geoloc. I'm assuming it's possibly picking up some hop in between, maybe?
Mine too, but at the very bottom, it says "We were unable to find your location
so we have brought you to Oymyakon,
one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on the planet."
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> Agree
Obviously I didn't agree even if I have all the extensions to block and delete ads, cookies and the like.
That's actually a grey/black hat way of boosting your ad sales numbers, even if you didn't click.
You buy x at y store, y store has an ad buy with ShadyAdCo. If you see product x in an ad within z time afterwards, it counts as an influence towards your purchase. ShadyAdCo just made money, and y store can give record numbers.
Huh, I never thought of that.
Only works if you're using basic/bad metrics.
I believe google's stuff is a little more advanced than that and you can see your click-through all the way to buying rate etc.
That only works if you actually click and buy. If you see an ad for a part you need, then go to hardware store and buy it they have no way of knowing that you saw the ad, much less how much influence the ad had.
It also fails to account for awareness being a major reason to buy ads. Ford want to advertise to everybody (probably including Amish) because most people will eventually buy a car, and it is important that you think Ford then. Even if you bought a car yesterday it is important to them that you not forget that you can buy a Ford - they know you won't buy for a few years, but they still want you to think of them.
Google has been trying to tie store purchase to ad impression [1]:
"This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers. Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated."
Ask yourself why Facebook counts "post-view" conversions instead of only post-click like AdWords and most others.
New client had been working off the assumption they were seeing ROAS of around 3 (not terrible). When we showed them how to see just the post-click, ROAS is now at 1. That means even if they are selling a product they received for free or stole, ie COGS = 0, they still only breakeven.
Attribution is the key. All this assumes that ad companies and Facebook are honest in the first place about the number of views and clicks an ad has received. Their behavior does not engender much good will for a benefit of the doubt situation.
- TV's are generally low framerate, as much as they'd like to claim 240FPS, it's mostly all 30FPS, with software interpolation to increase the frames.
- Bulk. TV's are solid in higher numbers, justifying the lower price
- Distance from face. Your 60" TV can be two smaller panels "glued" together. Not noticeable from watching distance, but having a monitor so close to your face, you're more likely to notice the millisecond tearing.
"- TV's are generally low framerate, as much as they'd like to claim 240FPS, it's mostly all 30FPS, with software interpolation to increase the frames."
That makes absolutely no sense. If the panel is incapable of 240 refreshes per second, how does software interpolation "increase the frames"? You are confusing content and panel.
Mainly it is that for more than 60fps you need dual-link DVI, display port or HDMI 2.0 and you won't find many TVs with either of those. So even though the screen can do more than 60fps the input and processor can't take it.
That’s not what was said in the comment. Obviously, the point of a interpolation is to take a signal with little samples and increase those. What the comment said was that the hardware (panel) was not capable, so the software somehow was able to do it. It makes no sense.
More like: the panel supports 240hz, but you can't get 240hz content into the TV (they don't exist and require high end interfaces), so you interpolate 30hz (which you do have) to 240 hz. Why go through all this trouble for fake 240hz? Probably because it sounds good as marketing.
Apple just seems to be an odd foe for the U.S. to fight in this area. I'll get the tin foil.