Not illegal? It is in various jurisdictions, but the law is quite convoluted.

Whereas even small towns in France are packed with bookshops. In fact if your local newsagent isn't also a pub or a bookies shop, it will almost definitely have an impressive range of paperbacks.

We should also remember that Amazon went years without profit, churning through venture capital like there was no tomorrow. They did this to muscle their way into the market, and to this day I don't know how they didn't get hauled up on anti-trust/anti-competitive charges for delivering loss-leaders.

Yes, competition is good for the consumer, which is why France wants to protect competition in the marketplace. Monolithic pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap outlets lead to monopolies. Amazon is increasingly dominant in more and more markets, and getting damned-near monopolistic.
The original fears in France weren't only about the loss of small shops, but also about the result loss of variety in the publishing sector (the supermarkets only stock a small selection of the most popular literature, much of which is pulp and/or translations). Amazon certainly doesn't pose a threat to variety of material, but the monopoly is still worrying. What France recognises is that employment makes the monetary system go round. Fewer jobs in your town means less money in your town, means less spending, means fewer shops, means fewer jobs, means...

They don't want to run a bigger batch, because it's not finished yet. If they had wanted to, they could have ramped up production months ago, satiated market demand then retired. But they would have been a flash in the pan. They're trying to build a long-term business, and while I'm not convinced they're going to solve the latency problems entirely, I at least respect their integrity for not rushing an unfinished product out the door.

Perhaps your car is valued less each year due to its decreasing reliability. Perhaps your premiums go up each year due to your car's decreasing reliability.

TFS says this is about safety. Which it clearly is not.

But the GP was talking about mobile development, and a heck of a lot of mobile development is Apple development. Have you ever heard of a mobile Matlab implementation? I hadn't. It exists, but I only know it does because I googled* it right now.

(* using Bing. because something I downloaded yesterday changed my search page.)

Selfish git.

But that aside, it does affect the rest of the world, as there are many people in the world who operate international web businesses, and they are going to lose access to a pretty large market thanks to this. I'm currently speccing up a service, and as a result of this legislation, I can no longer assume anything about the viability of a Russian translation, and I'm going to have to calculate the viability assuming only the Russian-speaking populations of places like Ukraine, Lithuania and various *stans.

This is a hugely important point that bears repeating.

Therefore it will be illegal, on a technicality, for any citizen to work overseas. In fact, it will be pretty difficult to even do any translation work.

What has gone little noted in the press (outside of non-Russian Russian-language newspapers is that Russia has implemented laws to try to prevent emigration. Dual citizenship is illegal, and if you get a residency permit for a foreign country, you have to deregister as Russian resident, and get a special foreign-resident-Russian passport. There have even been rumours of an imminent ban on exit visas for Russian academics.

Russia doesn't want its citizens mixing with foreigners, as we are seen as "corrupting" them. Russians who travel abroad are viewed with suspicion by their neighbours. It's a genuinely scary state of affairs.

No, companies that operate in the EU have operations in the EU -- offices, warehouses, datacentres etc. If I buy from Stewart-MacDonald's instrument-making supplies in the US and they ship the goods to my EU address, that's not "operating in the EU", they're operating in the US.

Yes, companies like Google did initially try to argue that they weren't really "operating" in the EU per se, but they were called up on their location-based advertising.

The EU directive isn't about local control, but about data protection standards -- non-EU countries can apply to be considered equivalent if their laws have suitable protections. Although the EU did kind of give up the moral high ground when it granted equivalent status to Israel, mere months after Mossad sent a death squad into one of the Arab countries on cloned EU passports....

Not for long -- Russia has made emigration almost illegal, but none of the international press have seen fit to pick up on this.

In Soviet America, witch hunts you, Sen. McCarthy.

Exactly the same, of course. My point is just that we shouldn't paint Google as the "good guys" for opposing a law that costs them hard cash.