It's baffling to those of us who don't live in the USA that you put up with this nonsense.

It really isn't hard for a functional government to pass a law that says 'Don't lie about your price in your adverts'

- but we have to charge xxx fee
- do I have to pay that fee?
- yes
- ok, then that's your price and you have to advertise it
- but the government makes us charge it..
- do I have to pay it?
- yes, but
- no buts. If I have to pay it, then that is the price.

of course, we're also baffled at the way you allow your whole political system to be bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists...

The EU has a handful of sources of income.
- Contributions from the members
- Import duties
- Fines

the last two are significant, so the machine of the EU is unlikely to give up on this huge fine.
(as an aside, they're also incentivised not to agree free trade deals with the world)

And of course, referencing your sig; They're all living in essentially a socialist mini-society.

Healthcare, Accommodation, Education, Pensions, Security, even Food - all provided by the (military) state.

It isn't the same.
In the old days, if you wanted one of the 'premium' services, then you had to buy one of the most expensive bundles which included just about every channel.
If you lived in America, you probably had to go through a monopoly cable company to be able to buy anything.

Now if you want Netflix - you can just buy that (and stop when you're done).
If you want Amazon Prime - just buy that

you can go direct, you can pick and choose, you don't have to buy a gazillion channels you'll never watch, so competition is much more effective.

> I think you missed the whole "emulator to run your existing software" part

A lot of apps won't even need to be recompiled by developers. Apple already has the apps in bitcode format uploaded to the store. They can recompile to ARM (or whatever) with minimal pain.

For the rest; We (developers) will have to download the latest version of XCode, let it auto-enable arm compliation, recompile and release/submit.
That will probably be much less painful than the changes coming in with notarization in Mac OS 10.15

Some old apps won't be recompiled and will have to be emulated, but I imagine that will be a pretty small subgroup. Apple isn't being shy about killing off 32 bit apps with OS 10.15, so I doubt they'll stress about this.

The proposal here is that news organisations can negotiate collectively with platforms such as Facebook/Google on how their content will be distributed. The suggested bill gives them a temporary exemption from anti-trust law to enable this.

That's a lot more sensible than the EU's recent attempt to 'solve' the problem with a link tax.

Google/Facebook still have every right to say 'we don't like your deal',Individual newspapers still have every right to say 'We'll do our own deal thank you'

This seems like a very reasonable way to shift the balance of power without dictating a 'solution'.

Apple have got themselves into a mode where they're only interested in designing the best possible device in terms of features/tech/looks. Sadly all design is a set of compromises, and by being entirely uncompromising on features/tech/looks - it means price has to suffer.

I have no doubt that this is a great monitor and stand for the top-tier 'Lamborghini' crowd. You can probably even argue that they're good value for what they offer.

I'd love to see what Apple could do for some 'mid-range' products. Start with a budget of $1000 (or even $800) for stand and screen, then see what is the best product they can produce.
Apple have fantastic design teams, and a fantastic ability to manage their supply chains;
They ought to be able to blow the competition out of the water in this segment.

The EU annual budget is roughly €150 billion. That comes from a handful of countries who are net contributors, (the UK is the third biggest contributor). Fining US corporations is a fairly painless way to boost the budget.

The EU has been pretty broad in the past in terms of how they interpret anti-competitive behaviour.

This certainly seems like the kind of thing they could go with. It's one thing for Apple to demand a cut when they manage the payment; But denying apps from using any other payment method (or even linking to a web page that offers payment functionality) may be a step too far...

And the EU can fine up to 10% of annual turnover, ~$25 Billion

Failing games streaming company teams up with network offering uninspiring phone technology. They both say the combination will be AMAZING!

Exactly.
And arguably, that's a 'bug' in the GPLv2

That's hardly fair; For example; GPL is open source, but explicitly designed so that people who use it are under certain circumstances required to contribute back to it.

The way the GPL is written; Cloud providers like Amazon don't have to contribute back to the project - but that's probably not what people wanted when they came up with the GPL.

e.g. it's probably a legal bug, not a legal feature

there are a bunch of different licences, I'm just using GPL as an example here.

No doubt that stores help to sell cars. Equally, it seems likely that a 6% discount will help to sell cars.

So the question is which will sell more:

Car @ $40k - no store, but free return
Car @ $42.5 - you get to sit in a car and (presumably) do a test drive

(picking the $40k option as a representative middle ground)

as to the cost of doing returns, If we guess that 10% are returned, and those are then re-sold at a 15% discount, that's a cost of ~ $600/sale (ignoring the cost of delivery/collection)

the USB standard has already failed here. The fact is that there are already USB-C headphones that work on some devices and not on others. There are USB-C dongles that work for some phones and not others.

this isn't because they're not following the standard (at least that's not the only reason) - it's because the standard setters didn't start with the goal 'Every USB C Headphone will handle audio reliably in every device that outputs audio'

that's really not how incentives work. pick one of the following: 1) Degree A - leading to job earning $10million over next 10 years. (college cost $1million) 2) Degree B - leading to job earning $10thousand over next 10 years. (college cost $1thousand) Degree B is clearly lower cost - but you are still incentivised towards Degree A. The point is that this approach aligns the incentives of the provider and the consumer. The university no longer benefits from crappy courses that lead to low incomes. They benefit massively if they can train people such that the people end up earning well.