There is a massive cost of entry and a massive cost of switching, we aren't talking about web users who can switch search engines, we are talking about businesses that need to advertise their services, switching to another service means they don't get the exposure and advertising they need to survive as google has a monopoly on the advertising industry, building your own service would cost billions as you need to gain a foothold to make your advertising have some value, to do so would likely cost 10's of billions in free advertising to attract enough customers to make your advertising business viable.

google doesn't just have a head start, they have a monopoly position, once you are a monopoly the rules of fairness change and it isn't enough to simply say someone can start their own business.

It is a shitful practise, but if you are in the US then you are living in the land of Geo blocking. Just about every major service in the US uses geo blocking. I personally have to use a VPN/Smart DNS to access much of the content I SUBSCRIBE to from the US. At least the BBC is free once you get around the Geo Blocking (funded by tax dollars).

I am no partition manager expert, but if the existing most popular one is missing some features then why not implement them rather than producing yet another piece of software to fragment and complicate things. Are the existing ones that bad that they can't be improved?

Ahhh yes, lets punish apple for punishing their employee's by punishing even more of them.

WTF? of all the idiotic things they have done, leaving the debug information available in the consumer-level OS was one of the BEST ideas. It gives even the most clueless user a chance to google it, or read the screen to someone that understands it, or in the case of my mother send a photo of it so someone can look up what went wrong.

The engineering community has never had a problem with someone being called a software Engineer. The objection has always been people being labelled software engineers without needing any formal certification and hence degrading the term engineer. Where I work here there are 3 hundred people that label themselves software engineers, of that maybe a dozen have any real certification in the field that would approach that of a real engineer, the rest just have computer science degrees or on the job training.

Only in the USA are such low levels of insurance appropriate, in the rest of the world a million dollars for a taxi would mean the taxi is UNDERINSURED. most countries I am aware of require between $5 million-$10 million minimum, I believe Germany is even higher. $1 million is underinsured even for a private car.

$1 million insurance is actually very low level of insurance for commercial operators and is far below that which is required in many countries. Insurance is also only valid if the driver is licensed, driving for hire vehicles in many countries requires a different license, therefore the drivers are in many cases driving unlicensed.

They didn't outright outlaw Uber, they outlawed their illegal practices. Such laws are common in many countries, e.g. Australia it is also illegal to act as a for hire car without appropriate license and insurance, but here they have been directly targeting any driver that drives for them with multi thousand dollar fines. I also don't think the laws around this are absurd, they are about ensuring people are correctly protected by the for hire vehicle as without the regulations it is a cut throat industry with everyone looking to screw over their competitors for an edge.

Ukraine, "previously" held control of Russia's only viable winter port for the Russian fleet. The US's intervention in forcing a government change to a pro west/anti Russian government meant Russia was at risk of losing access to a vital military facility as well as have a close friendly neighbour suddenly become a NATO stronghold, wrongly or rightly Russia still view NATO with a great deal of suspicion if not as an outright enemy. If that isn't backing him into a corner and prodding the bear with a massive cattle prod then I don't know what is. It would be the equivalent of mexico and Canada suddenly becoming communist north Korean and expecting the US would not react.

The interesting part is Both US and Russia have breached item 1, 3 and 6.

Given the French revolution was a direct response in part to the excess, privilege and abuses committed by the church and state the actions their while excessive are hardly surprising and the pre French revolution time is an excellent example of why the church should never be permitted to have any sort of power in society. It is important to note though the revolution WASN'T based on atheism at all, it was based on overthrowing an aristocracy and class system that was oppressing the people through taxes and starvation.

They aren't the only country wanting to remain in the 8th century, their are still supposedly modern countries that ban teaching or evolution and insist on teaching their kids at school creationism.

I don't think he denied anything, the fact you are equating the USSR and Russia is a problem though. Ukraine was part of what happened in Hungary so why are you blaming only Russia? Ukraine was as much a core of the USSR as Russia was back then.