It was Accenture (AUD$78m) with a side dish of Deloittes (AUD$35m).

Imagine that if in the beginning, Microsoft required any software that would run on a Windows machine must have been purchased through them. That for every single purchase on a Windows machine, a cut went to Bill Gates on top of what you paid to actually buy Windows. That would have never been allowed. But, over time, governments have capitulated to big corporate interests, whose sole mission is to extract as much profit out of the consumer (or other businesses) as much as possible.

Your argument that it "seems" to be "ok" for Microsoft to do this on XBOX is invalid and is mere whataboutism.

I have a pihole that I route all requests through, use firefox with ublock origin. Is there anything else I can do to prevent these parasites from tracking me?

Nonsense. Live in a city with great public transport, and it's not the public transport that sucks, but assholes who don't care about annoying others that sucks. And who are the biggest assholes in the city that I live? Why, the assholes in car who see fit to lean on their horns at all hours of the day.

Pricing fixing is illegal. Coordinating with your competition, even if it's through an app, is illegal. This isn't supply and demand, it's price fixing.

Video from More Perfect Union on how hotels are fixing prices: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

It's really a shame that there weren't some existing media in which short stories were popular --- they could have been made available on the Kindle in some periodic fashion, grouped by topic/subject, and to which folks could have subscribed....

Less gravity

Imagine you could only buy your Windows applications from Microsoft. That you couldn't install other applications from other places, for "security" purposes. And then when regulators finally did something about it, Microsoft would have the gall to say we're going to charge a "technology" fee to put your application on the computers people already PAID for! What a complete and total joke. That Apple is allowed to do this, and make these ridiculous claims, while having another platform (OSX) that doesn't, shows you how fucked up the corporatocracy really is.

You might have missed my previous post, I agree and want to add that to me it is even a bit more than that.

There is a complex interaction when you see a milk jug full of water hit by a bullet, or see the flow of plasma on the sun twisted by gravity and magnetic fields, or the plasma of the big bang as the expansion of the universe pulls it apart.

But they can be summed up as a expanding force vs a force of cohesion in all of them. Gravity is a force of cohesion on a cosmic scale, but so is magnetism. And at the great inflation, the lingering cosmic filaments of stars and galaxies look very similar to the water spreading from a hit from bullet where the cohesion is from more molecular forces.

If there was a "then a miracle occurs" part of cosmology that still existed, it would be the dark energy that continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe.

But it has one other side effect that isn't spoken of much -- creating clean entropy. How did we go from a homogeneous plasma at the big bang to such different hot/cold regions in the universe? Expansion, which has a similar effect on condensing gasses into liquids and even freezing them into solids. Only in this case some of that condensation ignites and creates the starts, pinpoints of very clean entropy to power whole solar systems. Expansion is what winds the clock of entropy, creating the differentials that then re-mix and make work happen.

So I completely agree, and if you ask me the story of creating entropy differentials for the universe to do work is the "then a miracle occurs" part of the story that still remains.

I've seen a lot of creation myths over the years, and the Genesis account is remarkable in how free it is from personifications or explaining how things came about through social circumstance. I think that is one reason it holds up as well as it does.

For instance in the nearly related Babylonian myths, people were an afterthought and a nuisance. Instead of waters representing dragons, it was dragons representing waters. Genesis has its own MCU llike moments, but far less than any other creation myth that I know of.

He's more of a mathematician theoretician than a scientist in my book.

He's done some brilliant mathematical hacks to come up with some very interesting theories. For instance, creating a boundary layer and applying different mathematical theories on both sides to come up with the idea of Hawking Radiation from black holes. And that has met with some observations as well ... https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fphys.org%2Fnews%2F2021-02-...

But like the hack itself, the observable evidence requires us to squint our eyes a bit to see past all the analogies required.

I've actually been here for a quarter of a century. It's amazing it is still around. I was using Linux before it was 1.0, and even had a patch accepted to the kernel but not the mainstream kernel. I haven't played a major part in the OSS movement, but I've been fairly involved.

To understand what I'm up to in this series you need to read my previous journal entries. The tldr; is that in an unexpected way Genesis has the drama, snappy pacing, and language that would work very well with 5 year olds learning science.

Genesis is such a battle ground. I anticipate as much pushback from the creationists as the science enthusiasts because I don't play by their rules of ex-post-nihlo or timelines either.

Its a lot like going back to a childhood playground and talking with the old neighborhood friends, nothing serious just interesting.