On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Microsoft has admitted that it has indeed lifted code of micro blogging site plurk. Microsoft on it's blog has said The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property. putting the blame squarely on the vendor and has said that they have suspended the service called Juku indefinitely They also said when then when Plurk blogged about the code lift it was the middle of the night in China and had to wait till the morning before their employees could come and do something about it. The whole incident has left them reeling from embarrassment. when one of the largest companies in the world can allow such things to happen in the first place. No matter whatever the outcome this is the good for Plurk what, with all the publicity. An original post by Sociolatte