Stan Lee was a beloved American icon—but he also may have been more exploitative and more exploited than most people realize. In recent years, Josie Riesman's fantastic book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee and Tom Scioli's comic book-styled biography I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee have both explored the nuances and complexities around the man's self-styled myth-making. — Read the rest

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So what is Qualcomm launching at IFA this year?
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SemiAccurate has a little more on Intel executive departures even though this one is half known.
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Looks like a big name Intel executive is leaving the company.
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Qualcomm's new AI/Copilot PCs has overwhelming hype but their actions point to a far murkier picture.
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Microsoft seems to be on a roll of late stabbing all of their 'partners' in the back.
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It looks like Microsoft is turning on Intel and AMD over AI PCs.
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Cathleen Nilson has been appointed Xsolla's new chief financial officer.

The global game commerce firm confirmed Nilson's new appointment after she served a year at software-as-a-service AI company Kami Vision.

Before then, Nilson served at other technology and game firms such as Samsung, Turing, and Electronic Arts (EA).

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People are so excited for the next-gen Switch, they're likely holding off on buying Nintendo's current consoles and games. At least that's what the company's latest earnings report seems to indicate. For the quarter ending on June 30, Nintendo posted a net profit of 80.9 billion Japanese Yen, which is higher than its forecast but over 50 percent lower than its net profit for the same period last fiscal year. In addition, the company said it only sold 2.1 million Switch consoles for the quarter. That means it experienced a 46.3 percent decline on unit sales year-on-year. Even its games didn't sell well, seeing as Nintendo posted a software sales figure that's 41.3 percent lower than last fiscal year's at 30.64 million units sold. 

In its report, Nintendo admits that the low sales figures for games was caused by the lack of big releases, such as the previous year's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The Super Mario Bros. Movie also helped "energize" its business back then. But since hardware sales for this quarter are similar to the previous one's, Nintendo considers its Switch sales to be stable. 

Nintendo is expected to launch its "Switch 2" console soon. It was expected to come out sometime this year, but according to reports published in the previous months, it will be released in early 2025 instead. There's still very little known about the upcoming console, but rumors say it will have backwards compatibility, as well as 4K capabilities. 

In a crushing quarterly update, Intel disclosed that it will cut more than 15 percent of its workforce. The layoffs, which could impact over 15,000 jobs, are part of the company's $10 billion cost-reduction plan to recover financial stability. Intel posted a second-quarter net loss of $1.6 billion, plunging from the net income of $1.5 billion it reported in the same period of 2023.

CEO Pat Gelsinger addressed employees with a memo acknowledging the scope of today's announcements. "This is painful news for me to share," he said. "I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history."

As well as the job cuts, the cost-reduction plan includes creating separate financial reporting for Intel Products and Intel Foundry. The Intel Foundry branch saw an operating loss of $2.8 billion in Q2, even more than the $1.8 billion operating loss it saw during the second quarter last year. Intel has been in the process of overhauling its foundries to make them more competitive. In the interim, it has had to rely on other companies for some production. TSMC, the same manufacturer used by Apple, Qualcomm and AMD, is producing its new Lunar Lake chips.

The company took an additional hit in the public eye when its 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs began experiencing instability issues. While a fix is expected this month to prevent any further problems, any damage that the microcode errors caused to CPUs appears to be permanent.

Intel is offering 'upgradeable' features on their new Xeons, an idiotic move that will hurt the company.
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Meta is announcing their new AITemplate framework for GPUs.
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There has been a lot of talk lately about Intel delaying their upcoming Meteor Lake CPU but what is really happening?
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There has been a lot of talk about Intel and price increases over the past week or two, some wild some less so.
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SemiAccurate hasn't done an update on Intel's consumer offerings in a while so lets rectify that.
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People are so excited for the next-gen Switch, they're likely holding off on buying Nintendo's current consoles and games. At least that's what the company's latest earnings report seems to indicate. For the quarter ending on June 30, Nintendo posted a net profit of 80.9 billion Japanese Yen, which is higher than its forecast but over 50 percent lower than its net profit for the same period last fiscal year. In addition, the company said it only sold 2.1 million Switch consoles for the quarter. That means it experienced a 46.3 percent decline on unit sales year-on-year. Even its games didn't sell well, seeing as Nintendo posted a software sales figure that's 41.3 percent lower than last fiscal year's at 30.64 million units sold. 

In its report, Nintendo admits that the low sales figures for games was caused by the lack of big releases, such as the previous year's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The Super Mario Bros. Movie also helped "energize" its business back then. But since hardware sales for this quarter are similar to the previous one's, Nintendo considers its Switch sales to be stable. 

Nintendo is expected to launch its "Switch 2" console soon. It was expected to come out sometime this year, but according to reports published in the previous months, it will be released in early 2025 instead. There's still very little known about the upcoming console, but rumors say it will have backwards compatibility, as well as 4K capabilities. 

In a crushing quarterly update, Intel disclosed that it will cut more than 15 percent of its workforce. The layoffs, which could impact over 15,000 jobs, are part of the company's $10 billion cost-reduction plan to recover financial stability. Intel posted a second-quarter net loss of $1.6 billion, plunging from the net income of $1.5 billion it reported in the same period of 2023.

CEO Pat Gelsinger addressed employees with a memo acknowledging the scope of today's announcements. "This is painful news for me to share," he said. "I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history."

As well as the job cuts, the cost-reduction plan includes creating separate financial reporting for Intel Products and Intel Foundry. The Intel Foundry branch saw an operating loss of $2.8 billion in Q2, even more than the $1.8 billion operating loss it saw during the second quarter last year. Intel has been in the process of overhauling its foundries to make them more competitive. In the interim, it has had to rely on other companies for some production. TSMC, the same manufacturer used by Apple, Qualcomm and AMD, is producing its new Lunar Lake chips.

The company took an additional hit in the public eye when its 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs began experiencing instability issues. While a fix is expected this month to prevent any further problems, any damage that the microcode errors caused to CPUs appears to be permanent.

The Switch is in its eighth year. That’s longer than any Nintendo system has gone without getting a successor. But the company is still bullish on the hybrid console’s future even as fans wait to hear about a Switch 2 as soon as this September. Nintendo is planning to sell over 12 million new Switches this year and…

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Sony purchased Bungie, the original studio behind Halo and the maker of Destiny 2, for a whopping $3.6 billion in 2022. Following the sale, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons purchased over 20 classic cars in online auctions costing millions of dollars, according to his account on the website Bring A Trailer. He continued buying…

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In 2024, the federal budget deficit is estimated to reach nearly $2 trillion, according to new projections released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week. In February, the agency predicted that the deficit would only be $1.58 trillion. However, spending increases have caused the projected deficit to increase by $400 billion, a staggering 27 percent hike. 

According to the CBO, 80 percent of the spike in the deficit can be blamed on four sources of government spending.

The largest source, responsible for $145 billion of the increase, is changes to the federal student loan program that have resulted in massive waves of federal student loan forgiveness and increased forgiveness going forward.

Second, the CBO's report details how the costs for "deposit insurance have increased by about $70 billion because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is not recovering payments it made when resolving bank failures in 2023 and 2024 as quickly as CBO previously anticipated."

Third, an additional $60 billion in cost increases came from additional legislation. And lastly, $50 billion in increased spending came from higher-than-expected Medicaid costs.

The long-term outlook for the budget deficit has increased too. In February, the CBO estimated that in 2034, the deficit would climb to $2.5 trillion. Its latest estimate now places that number as over $2.8 trillion.

"For the 2025–2034 period, CBO now projects that if current laws generally remained unchanged, the cumulative deficit would be $22.1 trillion. That amount is $2.1 trillion (or 10 percent) more than the $20.0 trillion the agency projected this past February," reads the CBO's report. "Measured in relation to the size of the economy, federal debt at the end of 2034 is now projected to equal 122 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); in February, debt at the end of that year was projected to equal 116 percent of GDP."

If the deficit continues to increase as the CBO predicts, the outcome could be disastrous. 

"As debt grows unabated, there is the risk of a sudden loss of confidence in bond markets, with investors demanding much higher interest rates that could trigger a debt doom loop and broader fiscal crisis," Cato Institute researchers Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett warned this week. "Congress and the Biden administration should cut spending now while the economy is growing and conditions are favorable for deficit reduction, alleviating pressure on interest rates and the federal debt to grow, and before a fiscal crisis forces their hands."

The post Federal Budget Deficit Forecast Jumps $400 Billion, Fueled by Student Debt Forgiveness appeared first on Reason.com.

Qualcomm's new AI/Copilot PCs has overwhelming hype but their actions point to a far murkier picture.
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"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, quoting Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda."*

Since those 34 felonies involved falsified business records that were produced in 2017, that claim is logically impossible. Yet this gloss on the former president's New York conviction echoes similarly puzzling claims by many smart and ostensibly well-informed observers. In their eagerness to embrace the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, they nonsensically assert that Trump retroactively ensured his 2016 victory by disguising a 2017 hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services.

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from telling her story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. When Trump paid Cohen back in 2017, prosecutors said, he caused the falsification of business records to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by misrepresenting the reimbursement as compensation for legal work. However you view that misrepresentation, it obviously had no impact on the outcome of the election. Yet Tribe, Elias, and other people bizarrely insist that it did.

"Two years shy of this country's 250th birthday," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said on CBS last Sunday, "12 New York jurors have convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election." The dates of those records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—ranged from February 14, 2017, to December 5, 2017. All of them were created after Trump was elected. You might expect that a historian would pay attention to chronological consistency.

You might expect the same from editorialists at major newspapers. Yet according to a May 30 Washington Post editorial, the jury found Trump "guilty of felony falsification of business records in order to influence the 2016 election." A New York Times editorial published the same day likewise claimed the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." Barring time travel, of course, nothing Trump did in 2017 could have "influence[d] the 2016 election" or "prevent[ed] voters from learning about" that "sexual encounter" before they cast their ballots.

The same temporal difficulty is apparent in news coverage of Trump's trial. "Prosecutors will attempt to make the case that Trump falsified business records to tip the 2016 race," Al Jazeera said in April. "Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported a week later.

Judging from some accounts of the trial's outcome, prosecutors succeeded in proving that the 2017 records reached back in time to influence the 2016 election. "Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported. The subhead of a Times story published the day after the verdict said, "The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 campaign." The Associated Press reported that the jury found Trump "guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex."

These confounding characterizations reflect the bait and switch at the heart of the case against Trump. "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in January. "It's an election interference case." In his opening statement, lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo claimed the case was about "election fraud, pure and simple."

There was nothing "pure and simple" about the case, which did not involve "election fraud" at all. Although the prosecutors repeatedly insinuated that there was something inherently criminal about trying to hide potentially damaging information from voters, that is not true. And although they averred that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an illegal campaign contribution under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), that interpretation of the statute is controversial. In any case, fronting the hush money did not constitute "election fraud," which is usually understood to mean interfering with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.

Trump was not charged with violating FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution." The Justice Department declined to bring that case, probably because it would have been hard to prove that Trump "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute, given the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Even if the deadline for prosecuting Trump under FECA had not passed, Bragg would have no authority to enforce that statute. So instead he resorted to an elaborate workaround that relied on various possible combinations of interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.

The FECA claim was just one of three dueling theories for treating Trump's alleged falsification of business records as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. The other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the Daniels payment was illegal. And since the jurors were told they did not have to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear which one they found most compelling. Even if they split three ways on that crucial point, they were still allowed to reach a guilty verdict.

All of this is pretty confusing, so it is not surprising that many people have inaccurately described the meaning of the verdict, especially since Bragg and his underlings repeatedly misrepresented the nature of the case. But it is surprising that so many people who should know better have described the verdict in a way that could not possibly be true.

*CORRECTION: This post has been revised to clarify that Tribe was quoting Elias.

The post Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017 appeared first on Reason.com.

Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case."

That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and Trump had already been elected. The prosecution's case against Trump, which a jury found persuasive enough to convict him on all 34 counts yesterday, was peppered with temporal puzzles like this one.

A New York Times editorial concedes that "many experts" have "expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor." Yet the Times also claims the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." How did records created in 2017 "prevent voters from learning" about the Daniels tryst before they cast their ballots the previous year?

The editorial's characterization of Cohen's payment to Daniels is confounding for a similar reason. "A payoff like this is not illegal by itself," the Times concedes. "What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Mr. Trump get elected." Again, the "doctoring" of business records happened in 2017. Contrary to what the Times claims, it did not retroactively make the Daniels payment "illegal."

The Times also says the verdict "establishes that Mr. Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." The verdict does not establish that. Trump was not charged with breaking the law by instructing Cohen to pay off Daniels. And while the contentious characterization of that payment as an illegal campaign contribution figured in one theory for treating the falsification charges as felonies rather than misdemeanors, the other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the payoff was illegal.

Since the jurors were instructed that they did not need to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear that they unanimously accepted the idea that Trump "committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." That description, however, is consistent with the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, which falsely implied that "hiding pertinent information about himself" was inherently criminal.

Although it seems clear that the jury accepted that narrative, even the prosecutors sometimes forgot what they claimed the case was about. They argued that Trump violated an obscure, rarely invoked state law by conspiring with Cohen to influence the presidential election "by unlawful means." They further argued that Trump caused the falsification of business records with the intent of aiding or concealing that crime, which is the element that transformed the charges into felonies. But some versions of that theory were logically impossible.

According to one theory of "unlawful means," Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. But since Cohen filed those allegedly fraudulent tax returns in 2018, after Trump had been president for more than a year, his misrepresentation could not possibly have helped Trump win the election.

Under another theory, Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of other business records, including the 1099-MISC forms in which the Trump Organization inaccurately described Cohen's reimbursement as income. Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory.

These logical difficulties were just one of several reasons to question the prosecution's case, which relied on convoluted theories involving interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent. But instead of zeroing in on those weaknesses, Trump's lawyers, presumably at his behest, were determined to deny everything, starting with Daniels' story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.

That strategy invited embarrassingly detailed testimony by Daniels, who described a presumptuous Trump abruptly disrobing while she was in the bathroom before engaging in a "brief," condomless sexual encounter "in the missionary position." Contrary to her previous accounts, Daniels implied that the sex was less than fully consensual, citing "an imbalance of power," noting the presence of a bodyguard at the door to Trump's hotel suite, saying Trump's failure to use a condom worried her, and describing her own mental state as hazy, although she added that she was not drunk and had not been drugged.

None of this was legally relevant. When it came to the questions of whether Trump had caused the falsification of business records and his intent in doing so, it did not matter exactly what happened in that hotel suite. Even if Daniels had made the whole thing up, Trump still would have been keen to keep her quiet, whether for personal reasons, business reasons, political reasons, or some combination of the three.

The defense team also insisted that Trump really thought he was paying Cohen for legal work, even though Trump had publicly admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the Daniels payment. And Trump's lawyers disputed that he "knew about this payment" at the time, even though it defies belief to suppose that Cohen, who was eager to please Trump and conferred with him frequently, would have hatched this scheme on his own, or that he would have fronted $130,000 of his own money without the promise of reimbursement.

Whether Trump approved the misleading records related to Cohen's reimbursement, as Cohen claimed, is less clear. Trump's lawyers hammered at Cohen's credibility on that point, saying jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But because they were also implausibly claiming that Cohen lied when he said Trump approved the Daniels payoff, the jurors may have discounted any doubts about the veracity of Cohen's account.

If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; they insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.

"Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti observes. "That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump's team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn't a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump's attorneys was lost amid all the clutter."

The post The Prosecution's Story About Trump Featured Several Logically Impossible Claims appeared first on Reason.com.

After deliberating for a little more than a day, a Manhattan jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying 34 business records to aid or conceal "another crime," an intent that turns what would otherwise be misdemeanors into felonies. If you assumed that the jury's conclusions would be driven by political animus, this first-ever criminal conviction of a former president is the result you probably expected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 9 to 1. But in legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom.

That's not because there were so many counts to consider, each related to a specific invoice, check, or ledger entry allegedly aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Once jurors accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, it was pretty much inevitable that they would find Trump guilty on all 34 counts. But that theory was complicated, confusing, and in some versions highly implausible, if not nonsensical. Given the puzzles posed by the charges, you would expect conscientious jurors to spend more than an afternoon, a morning, and part of another afternoon teasing them out.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's case against Trump stemmed from the $130,000 that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer and fixer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. When Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, prosecutors said, he tried to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by pretending that he was paying Cohen, whom he had designated as his personal attorney, for legal work.

Cohen testified that Trump instructed him to pay off Daniels and approved the plan to mischaracterize the reimbursement. Cohen was the only witness who directly confirmed those two points, and the defense team argued that jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But even without Cohen's testimony, there was strong circumstantial evidence that Trump approved the payoff and went along with the reimbursement scheme.

The real problem for the prosecution was proving that Trump falsified business records  with "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof"—the element that was necessary to treat the misleading documents as felonies. Prosecutors said the other crime was a violation of Section 17-152, an obscure, little-used provision of the New York Election Law. Section 17-152 makes it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means." But prosecutors never settled on any particular explanation of "unlawful means," and Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the trial, told the jurors they could find Trump guilty even if they could not agree on one.

According to one theory, Cohen made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), when he fronted the money to pay Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018 as part of an agreement that also resolved several other, unrelated federal charges against him. Cohen therefore had a strong incentive to accept the characterization of the Daniels payment as an illegal campaign contribution. While jurors heard about Cohen's guilty plea during the trial, CNN notes, Merchan instructed them that they should consider it only "to assess Cohen's credibility and give context to the events that followed, but not in determining the defendant's guilt."

It is unclear whether Trump violated FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution," a question that hinges on the fuzzy distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Given the uncertainty on that point, it is plausible that Trump did not think the Daniels payment was illegal, which helps explain why he was never prosecuted under FECA: To obtain a conviction, federal prosecutors would have had to prove that he "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute.

The New York prosecutors said Cohen and Trump conspired to promote his election through "unlawful means." Under New York law, a criminal conspiracy requires "a specific intent to commit a crime." Trump's understanding of FECA was relevant in assessing whether he had such an intent, meaning he recognized the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels as "unlawful means." Trump's understanding of FECA therefore also was relevant in assessing whether he falsified business records with the intent of covering up "another crime."

That theory assumed three things: 1) that Trump recognized the Daniels payment as a FECA violation; 2) that he knew about Section 17-152, a moribund, rarely invoked law; and 3) that he anticipated how New York prosecutors might construe Section 17-152 in light of FECA. The first assumption is questionable, the second is unlikely, and the third is highly implausible. Yet you would have to believe all three things to conclude that Trump approved a plan to misrepresent his reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services with the intent of covering up a FECA-dependent violation of Section 17-152.

According to a second theory, Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. Although that violation is described as "criminal tax fraud," Merchan said it did not matter that Cohen's alleged misrepresentation resulted in a higher tax bill. The judge noted that it is illegal to submit "materially false or fraudulent information in connection with any return," regardless of whether that information benefits the taxpayer.

Putting aside that counterintuitive definition of tax fraud, this theory required believing that Trump, when he reimbursed Cohen, not only contemplated what would happen when Cohen filed his returns the following year but also thought that "unlawful means" somehow would influence an election that had already happened. The logic here was hard to follow.

Likewise with the third theory of "unlawful means." Prosecutors suggested that Trump's falsification of business records was designed to aid or conceal the falsification of other business records. CNN reported that the latter records could involve, among other things, the corporate bank account that Cohen created to pay Daniels, Cohen's transfer of the money to Daniels' lawyer, or the Trump Organization's 1099-MISC forms for the payments to Cohen.

Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory. And although the other records predated the election, this theory involves a weird sort of bootstrapping.

Prosecutors said the records related to Cohen's dummy corporation, for example, were falsified because they misrepresented the nature and purpose of that entity, which by itself is a misdemeanor. That misdemeanor was the "unlawful means" by which Trump allegedly sought to promote his election, another misdemeanor. And because Trump allegedly tried to conceal the latter misdemeanor by falsifying the records related to Cohen's reimbursement, those records are 34 felonies instead of 34 misdemeanors.

The theory that Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of business records was "so circular as to produce vertigo in the jury room," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said. If so, the jurors seem to have quickly recovered from their queasiness. They accepted either this dubious theory, one of the others, or possibly some combination of them. Since unanimity was not required, it is possible that some jurors bought the FECA theory, some preferred the double falsification theory, and some concluded that the case was clinched by a tax fraud with no pecuniary benefit.

To disguise the difficulties with its dueling theories, the prosecution averred that Trump committed "election fraud" when he directed Cohen to pay Daniels for her silence, thereby concealing information that voters might have deemed relevant in choosing between him and Hillary Clinton. "This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior," lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the jury in his opening statement. "It was election fraud, pure and simple."

During his summation, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass called the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels "a subversion of democracy." He said it was an "effort to hoodwink the American voter." He told "a sweeping story about a fraud on the American people," as The New York Times put it. "He argue[d] that the American people in 2016 had the right to determine whether they cared that Trump had slept with a porn star or not, and that the conspiracy prevented them from doing so."

Did the American people have such a right? If so, Trump would have violated it even he had merely asked Daniels to keep quiet, perhaps by appealing to her sympathy for his wife. If Daniels had agreed, the result would have been the same. As the prosecution told it, that still would amount to "election fraud," even though there is clearly nothing illegal about it.

The jurors evidently bought this cover story. During deliberations, they revisited the testimony of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, a Trump buddy whom prosecutors implicated in that "long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election." Pecker's arrangement with Trump, which he described as mutually beneficial, was not the basis for any of the charges against Trump. But his testimony reinforced Bragg's legally dubious claim that Trump engaged in "election interference" when he sought to avoid bad press.

Pecker said he agreed to help Trump in several ways. He would run positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. He also would keep an eye out for potentially damaging stories about Trump and alert Cohen to them. The latter promise resulted in two agreements that the Enquirer negotiated with Dino Sajudin, a former Trump Tower doorman who falsely claimed that Trump had fathered a child with a woman hired to clean the building, and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who described a year-long affair with Trump. After paying $30,000 to Sajudin and $150,000 to McDougal for exclusive rights to their stories, the Enquirer sat on them.

Again, Trump was not charged in connection with any of this, and much of what Pecker did was constitutionally protected, albeit journalistically unethical. The fact that the jury nevertheless wanted to be read excerpts from Pecker's testimony suggests they accepted the prosecution's commodious understanding of "election fraud," which did not necessarily require any actual lawbreaking, let alone any attempt to interfere with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.

In short, there was a glaring mismatch between the charges against Trump and what prosecutors described as the essence of his crime, which is not a crime at all. Since they could not charge him with "election fraud" merely because he tried to hide embarrassing information, they instead built a convoluted case that relied on interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.

That approach suggests several possible grounds for appeal. It is not clear, for example, whether a violation of federal campaign finance regulations, even when filtered through Section 17-152, counts as "another crime" under the state law dealing with falsification of business records. Nor is it clear that Section 17-152 applies in the context of a federal election, where federal law generally pre-empts state law. There are also questions about what is required to prove that Trump had "an intent to defraud" when he signed the checks to Cohen.

Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., after lengthy consideration of possible state charges based on the Daniels payment, decided they were too legally iffy to pursue. Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in Vance's office who worked on the Trump investigation, concluded that "such a case was too risky under New York law." In a 2023 book, Pomerantz noted that "no appellate court in New York had ever upheld (or rejected) this interpretation of the law."

Last week, New York Times columnist David French worried about the consequences of a conviction that is overturned on appeal. "Imagine a scenario in which Trump is convicted at the trial, Biden condemns him as a felon and the Biden campaign runs ads mocking him as a convict," he wrote. "If Biden wins a narrow victory but then an appeals court tosses out the conviction, this case could well undermine faith in our democracy and the rule of law." In his desperation to prevent Trump from reoccupying the White House, Bragg has already accomplished that.

The post Trump's Conviction Suggests Jurors Bought the Prosecution's Dubious 'Election Fraud' Narrative appeared first on Reason.com.

To convert a single hush payment into 34 state felonies in the New York case against former President Donald Trump, prosecutors are relying on several interacting statutes, which makes their legal theory convoluted and confusing. Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump's trial, added to the confusion on Wednesday when he instructed the jurors on the conclusions they must reach to find Trump guilty.

Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, then a lawyer working for Trump, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. When Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, prosecutors say, he caused the falsification of 34 business records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—that were aimed at disguising the reimbursement as payment for legal services.

Ordinarily, falsification of business records, which requires "an intent to defraud," is a misdemeanor. But it becomes a felony when the defendant's "intent to defraud" includes "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." The prosecution's theory of "another crime" relies on Section 17-152 of the New York Election Law—a statute so obscure that experts said they had never seen another criminal case based on it. That provision makes it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."

Merchan laid out three possible candidates for "unlawful means" to which prosecutors have alluded. One is debatable, while the other two make little or no sense in the context of Section 17-152. Merchan said the jurors need not settle on any particular theory of "unlawful means," provided they agree that Trump was trying to aid or conceal a violation of Section 17-152.

By fronting the hush money, prosecutors say, Cohen made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). Cohen pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018 as part of an agreement that also resolved several other, unrelated federal charges against him. While jurors heard about that guilty plea during the trial, CNN notes, Merchan instructed them that they should consider it only "to assess Cohen's credibility and give context to the events that followed, but not in determining the defendant's guilt."

It is unclear whether Trump violated FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution," a question that hinges on the fuzzy distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Given the uncertainty on that point, it is plausible that Trump did not think the Daniels payment was illegal, which helps explain why he was never prosecuted under FECA: To obtain a conviction, federal prosecutors would have had to prove that he "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute.

The New York prosecutors say Cohen and Trump conspired to promote his election through "unlawful means." Under New York law, a criminal conspiracy requires "a specific intent to commit a crime." Trump's understanding of FECA is relevant in assessing whether he had such an intent, meaning he recognized the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels as "unlawful means." Trump's understanding of FECA therefore also is relevant in assessing whether he falsified business records with the intent of concealing "another crime."

This theory assumes three things: 1) that Trump recognized the Daniels payment as a FECA violation; 2) that he knew about Section 17-152, a moribund, rarely invoked law; and 3) that he anticipated how New York prosecutors might construe Section 17-152 in light of FECA. The first assumption is questionable, the second is unlikely, and the third is highly implausible. Yet you would have to believe all three things to conclude that Trump approved a plan to misrepresent his reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services with the intent of covering up a FECA-dependent violation of Section 17-152.

The other two theories that Merchan mentioned seem even less promising.

According to one theory, Trump was facilitating a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. Although that violation is described as "criminal tax fraud," Merchan said it does not matter that Cohen's alleged misrepresentation resulted in a higher tax bill. The judge noted that it is illegal to submit "materially false or fraudulent information in connection with any return," regardless of whether that information benefits the taxpayer.

Putting aside that counterintuitive definition of tax fraud, this theory requires believing that Trump, when he reimbursed Cohen, not only contemplated what would happen when Cohen filed his returns the following year but also thought that "unlawful means" somehow would influence an election that had already happened. The logic here is hard to follow.

Likewise with the third theory of "unlawful means." Prosecutors say Trump's falsification of business records was designed to aid or conceal the falsification of other business records. CNN reports that the latter records could involve, among other things, the corporate bank account that Cohen created to pay Daniels, Cohen's transfer of the money to Daniels' lawyer, or the Trump Organization's 1099-MISC forms for the payments to Cohen.

Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory. And although the other records predated the election, this theory involves a weird sort of bootstrapping.

Prosecutors say the records related to Cohen's dummy corporation, for example, were falsified because they misrepresented the nature and purpose of that entity, which by itself is a misdemeanor. That misdemeanor was the "unlawful means" by which Trump allegedly sought to promote his election, another misdemeanor. And because Trump allegedly tried to conceal the latter misdemeanor by falsifying the records related to Cohen's reimbursement, those records are 34 felonies instead of 34 misdemeanors.

"One of the three crimes is so circular as to produce vertigo in the jury room," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observes. "The prosecutors zapped a dead misdemeanor back into life by claiming a violation under New York's election law 17-152. The argument is that the crime was committed to further another crime as an unlawful means to influence the election. However, that other crime can be the falsification of business records. So the jury (or some jurors, at least) could find that some documents were falsified as an unlawful means of falsifying other documents."

Because Merchan said jurors need not agree on which of these theories has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the rationale for convicting him is apt to be muddled. "The judge has ruled that the jury does not have to agree on what actually occurred in the case," Turley says. "Merchan ruled that the government had vaguely referenced three possible crimes that constitute the 'unlawful means' used to influence the election: a federal election violation, the falsification of business records, and a tax violation. The jurors were told that they could split on what occurred, with four jurors accepting each of the three possible crimes in a 4-4-4 split. The court would still consider that a unanimous verdict so long as they agree that it was in furtherance of some crime."

Merchan's instructions did include a caveat that could help Trump. "He said mere knowledge of a conspiracy does not make [the] defendant a co-conspirator," Fox News correspondent Lydia Hu notes. "Prosecutors must prove intent. Also, being present with others when they form a conspiracy does not mean that the defendant is a part of the conspiracy."

On its face, Cohen's testimony regarding Trump's participation in the alleged conspiracy seems crucial in establishing his intent. Cohen said Trump instructed him to pay Daniels. He also said Trump Organization Allen Weisselberg described the plan to reimburse Cohen during a January 2021 meeting, and Trump did not object. Cohen was the only witness who directly testified on those points, and Trump's lawyers argued that he cannot be trusted, noting that he is a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss.

Merchan said "the jury cannot convict Trump on the testimony of Michael Cohen alone because he is an accomplice, but they can use it if they corroborate it with other evidence," CNN notes. "Even if you find the testimony of Michael Cohen to be believable," Merchan said, "you may not convict the defendant solely upon that testimony unless you also find it's corroborated by other evidence." The other evidence is circumstantial. It includes testimony suggesting that Trump was worried about the impact that Daniels' story would have on the election, that he conferred regularly with Cohen, and that he was a proud penny-pincher who never would have paid Cohen without knowing exactly what it was for.

That evidence supports the inference that Trump knew he was reimbursing Cohen for the Daniels payment (which he has publicly admitted). It also supports the idea that Trump recognized that payment as a campaign expenditure and therefore an illegal contribution. But it does not prove that second claim beyond a reasonable doubt, which helps explain why the prosecution offered jurors two other possible theories of "unlawful means." If they are squeamish about the FECA theory, they can instead rely on the tax theory, despite its temporal difficulties, or they can accept the idea that Trump fabricated business records to conceal the fabrication of business records, even though that proposition makes the mind reel.

Since the jurors do not have to agree on the nature of Trump's "unlawful means," Merchan's instructions invite them to convict him based on a hodgepodge of three dubious theories. But if each of these theories is faulty, mixing them together cannot compensate for their weaknesses.

The post Trump Jury Instructions Invite Conviction Based on a Hodgepodge of Dubious Theories appeared first on Reason.com.

It looks like Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two is trying to get rid of its indie label, Private Division. This is according to a new IGN report that details how the company’s recent studio closures and mismanagement have been “quietly killing” the indie publisher.

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Sony recently held a business briefing for investors where it painted an incredibly rosy picture around the PlayStation 5 and its future outlook. Despite recent layoffs and failing to reach its sales goals for 2023, the company seems confident that the console’s best days are still ahead.

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Grand Theft Auto VI’s return to Vice City is officially scheduled for fall 2025. On Thursday, parent company Take-Two Interactive wrote in its Q4 2024 earnings report that it’s narrowed GTA 6’s previously announced 2025 window to autumn of next year.

“Our outlook reflects a narrowing of Rockstar Games’ previously established window of Calendar 2025 to Fall of Calendar 2025 for Grand Theft Auto VI,” Take-Two Chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick wrote in the earnings report. “We are highly confident that Rockstar Games will deliver an unparalleled entertainment experience, and our expectations for the commercial impact of the title continue to increase.”

The sixth mainline installment in the open-world series will be set in Leonida (Rockstar’s Florida equivalent), focused mostly on Vice City (Miami). The game appears to have a contemporary setting, as opposed to the charming '80s cheese from 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. You can catch a glimpse of protagonists Jason and Lucia in the trailer below.

FaZe Clan, the massively popular conglomerate of pro gamers, streamers, and online personalities, is trying to reinvent itself after a catastrophic IPO and recent purge of a majority of its members. It’s now partnering with DraftKings to do that, taking $11 million from the sports betting app to explore new…

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In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem."

Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. 

An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. 

The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. 

Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. 

In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem."

Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. 

An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. 

The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. 

Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. 

Your cable streaming bill may be getting more expensive once again. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is reportedly planning another price increase for Max. Bloomberg didn't reveal how much WBD is expected to jack up the subscription by. The cheapest ad-free plan is currently $16 per month after a $1 increase in early 2023. WBD is said to be aiming for $1 billion in earnings from Max and Discovery+ next year.

We could find out about any Max price increase as soon as Thursday. That's when WBD will report its earnings for the first three months of the year.

The price increase may be on the way as part of WBD's seemingly never-ending cost-cutting drive. As part of that, more layoffs may be in the pipeline. Over the last year, the company has fired more than 2,000 people and eliminated their positions.

Very soon after WBD formed in 2022 following a merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, CEO David Zazlav went into extreme costcutting mode as the company was saddled with over $50 billion in debt. The company quickly axed the just-launched CNN+, laid off staff, canceled projects, moved shows and movies from Max to ad-supported streaming services and shelved completed or nearly finished movies in favor of tax breaks.

Zazlav has reduced WBD's debt load by around $10 billion so far, according to Bloomberg. However, his decisions have infuriated creatives and many fans, such as those who are clamoring for the company to release the highly regarded live-action Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme instead of canning it for a tax rebate.

Coincidentally, Variety on Wednesday published a list of media and tech CEOs' pay packages for 2023. Zazlav's compensation is said to have shot up by 26.5 percent to $49.7 million. That's around 290 times what the median WBD employee makes.

Microsoft seems to be on a roll of late stabbing all of their 'partners' in the back.
Read more ▶

The post Microsoft Throws Qualcomm Under The Bus Too appeared first on SemiAccurate.

It looks like Microsoft is turning on Intel and AMD over AI PCs.
Read more ▶

The post Microsoft Absolutely Screws Intel and AMD Over AI PCs appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

AMD just let out some of their MI300 plans albeit in a rather backhanded way.
Read more ▶

The post AMD outs MI300 plans… sort of appeared first on SemiAccurate.

In a past article SemiAccurate mentioned the Altera Max 10 FPGA seen on Intel Birch Stream boards.
Read more ▶

The post Why is there an Altera FPGA on QTS Birch Stream boards? appeared first on SemiAccurate.

When SemiAccurate saw the Birch Stream boards at MWC, there was something we noticed.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Birch Stream Boards Speak From The SIde appeared first on SemiAccurate.

In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem."

Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. 

An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. 

The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. 

Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. 

Your cable streaming bill may be getting more expensive once again. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is reportedly planning another price increase for Max. Bloomberg didn't reveal how much WBD is expected to jack up the subscription by. The cheapest ad-free plan is currently $16 per month after a $1 increase in early 2023. WBD is said to be aiming for $1 billion in earnings from Max and Discovery+ next year.

We could find out about any Max price increase as soon as Thursday. That's when WBD will report its earnings for the first three months of the year.

The price increase may be on the way as part of WBD's seemingly never-ending cost-cutting drive. As part of that, more layoffs may be in the pipeline. Over the last year, the company has fired more than 2,000 people and eliminated their positions.

Very soon after WBD formed in 2022 following a merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, CEO David Zazlav went into extreme costcutting mode as the company was saddled with over $50 billion in debt. The company quickly axed the just-launched CNN+, laid off staff, canceled projects, moved shows and movies from Max to ad-supported streaming services and shelved completed or nearly finished movies in favor of tax breaks.

Zazlav has reduced WBD's debt load by around $10 billion so far, according to Bloomberg. However, his decisions have infuriated creatives and many fans, such as those who are clamoring for the company to release the highly regarded live-action Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme instead of canning it for a tax rebate.

Coincidentally, Variety on Wednesday published a list of media and tech CEOs' pay packages for 2023. Zazlav's compensation is said to have shot up by 26.5 percent to $49.7 million. That's around 290 times what the median WBD employee makes.

Microsoft seems to be on a roll of late stabbing all of their 'partners' in the back.
Read more ▶

The post Microsoft Throws Qualcomm Under The Bus Too appeared first on SemiAccurate.

It looks like Microsoft is turning on Intel and AMD over AI PCs.
Read more ▶

The post Microsoft Absolutely Screws Intel and AMD Over AI PCs appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

AMD just let out some of their MI300 plans albeit in a rather backhanded way.
Read more ▶

The post AMD outs MI300 plans… sort of appeared first on SemiAccurate.

In a past article SemiAccurate mentioned the Altera Max 10 FPGA seen on Intel Birch Stream boards.
Read more ▶

The post Why is there an Altera FPGA on QTS Birch Stream boards? appeared first on SemiAccurate.

When SemiAccurate saw the Birch Stream boards at MWC, there was something we noticed.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Birch Stream Boards Speak From The SIde appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Donald Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan, yesterday denied a second defense motion for a mistrial. Trump's lead attorney, Todd Blanche, has objected to aspects of porn star Stormy Daniels' testimony about her purported 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, saying some of the details were legally irrelevant and "so unduly and inappropriately prejudicial" that a mistrial was the only remedy. Merchan rejected that argument on Tuesday and again on Thursday, saying the problem that Blanche perceives was largely a result of the defense team's failures during Daniels' testimony and cross-examination.

Among other things, Blanche cited testimony suggesting, for the first time, that Daniels' alleged encounter with Trump was not fully consensual. This dispute illustrates the risk that the salaciousness of Daniels' account will overshadow the legal issue at the center of the case.

Trump is not charged with adultery or sexual assault. He is not charged with trying to keep Daniels from talking about what she says happened, although Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has misleadingly suggested that the essence of Trump's crime was keeping that information from voters during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is not even charged with instructing his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay Daniels $130,000 shortly before the election in exchange for her silence. Rather, he is charged with falsifying business records to disguise his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services.

Proving those 34 charges does not require demonstrating that Daniels is telling the truth at all, let alone that every detail is accurate. Under the prosecution's theory, Trump would be guilty of falsifying business records even if Daniels made the whole thing up. And assuming that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an excessive campaign contribution (a characterization that Cohen accepted when he pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018), Trump's falsification of business records would be a felony if he was trying to conceal that violation of federal campaign finance regulations.

There are several problems with that theory, including the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures, the question of whether Trump recognized that the Daniels payoff fell into the latter category (assuming that it did), the uncertainty about Trump's involvement in generating the relevant business records and his motive in doing so, and the attempt to convert a 2016 federal campaign finance violation into a state felony via a moribund New York election law that apparently has never been used before. But one thing is clear: Trump's criminal liability in this case has nothing to do with exactly what happened in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.

Jurors nevertheless heard a lot about that. For years, Daniels has said she consented to sex with Trump. But during her testimony on Tuesday, she cast doubt on that characterization, saying "I just think I blacked out," although she added that she was not "drunk" or "drugged." She also noted that "there was a bodyguard right outside the door" and said "there was an imbalance of power for sure," since Trump "was bigger and blocking the way," although she conceded that she "was not threatened verbally or physically."

When Blanche complained that Daniels had changed her story, Merchan disagreed. "I disagree with your narrative that there is any new account here," the judge said. "I disagree that there is any changing story." Yet Blanche's complaint is at least partially valid.

It's true that Daniels has mentioned the bodyguard, Keith Schiller, before. He figures prominently in the account she gave in her 2018 memoir Full Disclosure. In that book, she also mentions that Trump did not wear a condom—another detail that Blanche described as irrelevant and prejudicial.

"I was surprised he didn't even mention a condom," Daniels says in Full Disclosure. "I didn't have one with me anyway, because I wasn't meeting him for sex. If I had been, I always brought my own, because I am allergic to latex. Back then I used Avantis"—a brand of nonlatex condoms. While Daniels' testimony on that point was similar, it introduced an element of concern that is not mentioned in the book:

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger: Was he wearing a condom?

Daniels: No.

Hoffinger: Was that concerning to you?

Daniels: Yes.

Hoffinger: Did you say anything about it?

Daniels: No.

Hoffinger: Why not?

Daniels: I didn't say anything at all.

That exchange, Blanche noted, came after Daniels' testimony that the men with whom she performed in adult films were always required to wear condoms. On Thursday, the defense described the discussion of condoms as "a dog whistle for rape." While that may be an exaggeration, Daniels' testimony that Trump's failure to use a condom worried her certainly reinforced the impression that Daniels was doing something she did not want to do.

Full Disclosure leaves a similar impression—up to a point. After a conversation in which Daniels felt that Trump was treating her respectfully and taking her seriously as a businesswoman, she says, she emerged from a bathroom where she had touched up her makeup to find Trump sitting on a bed in his underwear.

"I had the sense of a vacuum taking all of the air out of the room, and me deflating with it," Daniels writes. "I sighed inwardly, keenly aware of two thoughts in that one moment. There was the simple Oh, fuck. Here we go. But there was also a much more complex, sad feeling that none of what he said was true. He didn't respect me. Everything he said to me was bullshit."

Daniels says she "should have…let him know this wasn't okay." But she didn't. "So, here we go," she writes. "It was an out-of-body experience….I just kind of lay there. A lot of women have been there. He wasn't aggressive, and I know for damn sure I could have outrun him if I tried, but I didn't. I'm someone who doesn't stop thinking, so as he was on top of me I replayed the previous three hours to figure out how I could have avoided this."

In her book, Daniels describes brief, sad, regrettable, and unsatisfying sex, but she emphasizes that it was an experience she easily could have avoided. Although she never quite explains why she decided to go through with it, there is no suggestion that she was incapacitated. But in her testimony, she said "I blacked out," which she suggested explained why "I don't remember" exactly what happened. Blacking out is not the same as "an out-of-body experience," which involves feeling detached from your body while fully conscious.

"I was not drugged," Daniels said. "I never insinuated that I was on drugs. I was not drunk. I never said anything of that sort." In a sidebar discussion, defense attorney Susan Necheles nevertheless objected that "she is making it sound like she was drugged." Hoffinger suggested that Daniels merely meant that she was "dizzy," possibly because she was hungry for the dinner that was promised but never materialized—a point she emphasizes in her book and mentioned in her testimony.

Merchan sustained Necheles' objection. But that did not stop the jury from hearing Daniels imply that she was not fully aware of what was happening that night. Combined with Daniels' references to the bodyguard and the "imbalance of power," that description strongly suggested her consent was not only passive and unenthusiastic but the product of pressure and incapacity.

Daniels strengthened that impression by saying she could not "remember how your clothes got off." There was Trump in his underwear, she said, and "the next thing I know" she was "on the bed," naked. Hoffinger asked whether she "remember[ed] anything other than the fact that you had sex on the bed." Not really, Daniels implied: "I was staring at the ceiling. I didn't know how I got there. I made note, like I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there." That also prompted an objection from Hoffinger, which Merchan sustained.

In Full Disclosure, by contrast, Daniels recounts the sex in considerable detail, calling Trump "a terrible kisser," quoting what he said to her, describing the position he used, recalling the size and "unusual" shape of his penis, and remarking on his crotch hair. While these are just the sort of details that the defense (and Merchan) would deem out of bounds, they contradict the idea that Daniels was just "staring at the ceiling," that she didn't know "how I got there," or that she was only dimly aware of "what was happening there."

What does all this have to do with Trump's alleged falsification of business records? "All of this has nothing to do with this case," Blanche told Merchan on Tuesday. "The only reason why the government asked those questions, aside from pure embarrassment, is to inflame this jury to not look at the evidence that matters." He noted that Daniels "has testified today about consent, about danger," which is "not the point of this case."

The prosecution argues that the details of Daniels' story matter because they rebut Trump's contention that she invented the whole episode, which in turn goes to his motivation in arranging her nondisclosure agreement and in trying to keep it a secret with phony invoices, mislabeled checks, and fraudulent ledger entries. "Her account completes the narrative of the events that precipitated the falsification of business records," Hoffinger told Merchan. "Her account is highly probative of the defendant's intent, his intent and his motive in paying this off, and making sure that the American public did not hear this before the election. It is precisely what the defendant did not want to become public."

Merchan agreed with Blanche that "there were some things that would probably have
been better left unsaid." But he said the fault for that lay partly with Trump's attorneys. "The objections, for the most part, were sustained," he said. "Where there was a motion to strike testimony, for the most part, that motion was granted as well. I will also note that I was surprised that there were not more objections at various times during the testimony….So when you say that, you know, the bell has been rung, the defense has to take some responsibility for that."

Merchan was less patient on Thursday, when the defense again moved for a mistrial. "There were many times when you could have objected but didn't," he told Necheles. She objected when Daniels testified that she "touch[ed] his skin" and when she said "we were in the missionary position," for example, but did not object during the condom exchange, which Blanche later argued was prejudicial and irrelevant. Nor did Necheles object when Daniels described the "imbalance of power" or when she noted that Trump was "definitely several inches taller and much larger" than her. And Necheles' objection to "I just think I blacked out" came late, five sentences after Daniels said it.

Merchan also "chided Mr. Trump's lawyers for missteps during their cross-examination of Ms. Daniels," The New York Times notes, "and suggested that the former president's insistence on entirely denying any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels had opened the door for the prosecution to introduce specific—and graphic—evidence that the encounter did occur." The judge conceded that some details of Daniels' testimony were so needlessly prejudicial that he would have sustained objections to them if the defense had made them. At the same time, he said Daniels could "corroborate her account" by describing details of the encounter because a truthful story "increases the motivation to silence her."

That rationale seems like a stretch, especially since the prosecution has argued that Trump was eager to suppress negative stories even when they were not true. According to testimony that prosecutors presented to establish that pattern, Cohen arranged for the National Enquirer to pay former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story, which alleged that Trump had fathered a child with a woman hired to clean the building. Although the Enquirer investigated that story and determined that it was not true, prosecutors say, Trump was still keen to stop Sajudin from telling it. That suggests Trump would have wanted to silence Daniels even if her story was equally fictitious, making all the quibbling about the details of that story irrelevant.

The post The Details of Stormy Daniels' Story About Sex With Trump Are Legally Irrelevant appeared first on Reason.com.

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The pandemic sucked. Four years ago we were all stuck at home, and would continue being stuck at home for months on end. With all of us trapped in our houses, some products experienced a serious COVID-19 bump. Grocery delivery services absolutely blew up, as did Zoom and the perfectly-timed Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

The same goes for Peloton and its line of exercise equipment. People were buying bikes and treadmills in droves, ballooning the company’s market cap from $6 billion to $50 billion. However, what goes up must come down, and Peloton’s market cap shrank to $10 billion by 2022 and now it rests at around $1 billion. The company’s pandemic-era success story has officially ended, and now it's focused on cutting costs. So that means layoffs. Peloton is laying off 15 percent of its workforce, according to TechCrunch, which amounts to 400 people.

Aside from those massive cuts, the company is continuing to shut down brick-and-mortar showrooms. Barry McCarthy, the CEO, president and board director, is also stepping down after two years in the job. He was previously CFO at both Spotify and Netflix. Peloton says it's currently in the process of finding a successor, with current chairperson, Karen Boone, and director, Chris Bruzzo, to serve as interim CEOs.

However, it is expanding international reach, announcing a more “targeted and efficient” marketing strategy overseas. Peloton hopes all of these steps combined will reduce annual expenses by $200 million by the end of its fiscal year 2025.

All of this comes after the company reported some really bad Q3 2024 revenue and loss numbers, with a 21 percent decline in paid subscriptions compared to 2023. Unfortunately, Q2 wasn’t much better. Not that the stock market really means anything, just look at Tesla or that bizarre Trump stock, but Peloton’s shares have gone from $156 in 2021 to, uh, less than $3 today.

These aren’t just “people going outside again” numbers, as the company has experienced its share of controversies that have nothing to do with the pandemic. The Tread+ treadmill was recalled after being linked to 90 injuries and the death of a child. Peloton also recalled over 2 million bikes over a safety issue. It's been a bad few years. 

All of this doesn’t mean that Peloton can’t turn things around, as it's a fairly iconic brand in the space. It sure has some work to do, however, to reverse this decline.