This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.
Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.
Sure, but once there is enough determination to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate that there are sufficient votes to amend the Constitution once in order to do this--which, as you have pointed out, is a very high bar--then it is no harder to go through the amendment process twice in order to first drop that sentence.
Sure, but obviously in that case it would no longer matter whether that state had Senators or not because it would no longer be subject to the laws of the U.S. government.
I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with "time vampires" who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.
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.
Fun fact: even when using an absolute scale like Kelvin, it's theoretically possible to have a negative temperature!
The reason for this is that temperature measures how much energy you have to pay in order to increase the number of possible microscopic states accessible to the system by a certain amount. In really weird systems it is possible that the amount of energy you can put into the system has a cap, so if you keep pouring energy into the system then eventually it will be forced into the unique microscopic state where every part of the system contains as much energy as it possible can. When this happens, the only way to increase the number of microstates that the system can be in is by removing some of the energy from the system--which you can visualize as creating the possibility of there being holes in the system where there is an absence of energy--and so the temperature is negative.
This kind of system is so weird, though, that is existence is primarily theoretical. Last time I checked, such a system has not yet been demonstrated to exist in a lab. Still, it is fun to think about!
What I like to tell people is that I am as good a programmer as I am for the simple reason that I began when I was about 8, which gave me a very early start on making all of the mistakes one can possibly make when learning how to code.
(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, "Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!")
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.
That is conceptually how dynamic programming works, but in practice the way you build the cache is from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It's a bit like how you can implement computation of the Fibonacci sequence in a top-down manner using a recursive function with caching, but it is a lot more efficient to instead build it in a bottom-up manner.
Sure, but shouldn't you want your generated markup to adhere to the complete standards so that you know it will be interpreted correctly, rather than hoping that the browser will make the correct guess about what you really meant?
I completely agree with that assessment, but what is weird to me is that most people use frameworks so they don't actually touch any of the markup themselves.
Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.