So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

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.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?

Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.

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.

If it were really so easy to bypass that restriction, then what was the point of putting that sentence in in the first place?

Except for denying a state equal representation on the Senate without its consent; the Constitution explicitlyforbids that.

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

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!

The founding fathers did not believe in universal suffrage; at the time only people who owned land could vote–to say nothing of even less privileged groups than that–and they were fine with that policy, in part because these were considered to be the people with the most skin in the game.

The resolution preferred by God himself.

If you are going to compare the United States to other political entities, I think that the better thing to compare it to is the European Union rather than other countries, because like the EU the US was formed from the union of sovereign member states and that is why it is designed the way that it is (for better or worse).

Given that, I have an honest question asked out of ignorance: Does the EU have more power over its member states than the United States does? (I am not super-familiar with it, so the answer may very well be yes.)

Thank you, I came to this comment section hoping someone would explain what exactly the basis in law was for this.