What if you just give them a very loose summary and see. Do the minimum first
SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
91–100 of 478 posts
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.
I'll never understand how US court system basically allow you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to weaponize any case to your advantage.
[deleted]
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#93This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my…
> nor that they have an once of ethics
It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination.
The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong."
Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game.
Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game.
The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics.
When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society.
This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a "I'll know when I see it" situation. In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are and at least should be blocked from acquiring their competition. Breaking them up or taking actual action against them would require deeper investigation with FTC taking the lead rather than potentially handing sensitive documents over to the offending company. If the company wants to fight the bl…
> In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are Wait? What? It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right. I mean, if I said, all people the police arrest are probably guilty and should go to jail, I would hope you'd disagree.
> It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right.
Big cases against big companies are different. Since the company will have (nearly) unlimited resources to fight, the FTC will only bring a case if they're pretty sure they can win, otherwise it will be a big waste of money all around.
It's really not anything like the police arresting people.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mark wants to be able to sell apps and ads on his end-to-end controlled platform, that is it. He missed the boat on browsers and smartphones, so he is aiming for total monopoly of what he believes is the next-big-thing™.
I'm still skeptical that it is The Next Big Thing. I wonder if Zuckerberg suspects it might not be as well but, hey, Hail Mary!
Even if it’s the next big thing you know a better iHeadset will follow months later and be a much better product with less privacy and data theft built in.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#96If this is actually how US's justice system works it is even more bonkers than I thought. Could someone versed in this legal system explain, please? Is is any accused that can demand documents/data/free research from vaguely related third parties, or only large companies? Enquiring minds want to know!
If one is accused of antitrust practices (as Meta is by the FTC), your defense is to show that there's actually competition. It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate espionage (or whatever), but that they want to prove that SimulaVR is competing just fine in the market that contains Meta. This is explained in the article, which many here clearly didn't read past the headline. This is roughly the same…
So someone is sued for anticompetitive practices and that gives them alibi for looking directly into others' books, and they're just supposed to trust Meta will forget all the information afterwards?
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.
I'll never understand how US court system basically allow you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to weaponize any case to your advantage.
Like many things in the world, it all only works because the vast majority of people aren't assholes.
As it gets more and more weaponized the slow arm of the law will move to prevent it.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it matter how other companies are to their point?
I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size so it's a disengineous point to bring up. the deeper realization is that is not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical. this is more important in other discussions around rights of corporations (and other comparalby powerful institutions) in c…
> I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size
Sounds to me like an argument for breaking up Facebook.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#99[deleted]
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#100>We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta >...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and laptops. Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PC…
We understand Meta sometimes future projects that their devices will have broad office applications, but we're skeptical it has any teeth. Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_... It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a l…
Ben Thompson is fairly bullish on Enterprise Metaverses after having used Workrooms: https://stratechery.com/2021/enterprise-metaverses-horizon-w...
> I don’t want to go too far given I’ve only tried Workrooms out once, but this feels like something real. And, just as importantly, there is, thanks to COVID, a real use case. Of course companies will need to be convinced, and hardware will need to be bought, but that’s another reason why the work angle is so compelling: companies are willing to pay for tools that increase productivity to a much greater extent than consumers are.