Its not an excuse, its the whole point. The EU exists to serve the public interest, in Europe, and when foreign companies trade in Europe then they follow europes laws.

And who gives a fuck if Apple are successful or not. Thats Apples concern, its not Europes concern. Europes concern is that foreign monopolists, or duopolists do not use their monopolie to leverage themselves into new markets. And to be clear they 100% have a monopoly. Can Epic create their own iPhone store if Apple chooses not to? No? Then its a monopoly. They have a complete monopoly on Software, Hardware and any other component (I'm not clear what other sort of component there is other than Software, or Hardware, but I'm humoring your wierd argument here out of respect) , on iphones . That isn't controversial, its a simple statement of reality. Unless you think other companies also make iPhones? Which would be an odd claim.

How is it for folks more atuned to Gnome? Back in the ancient days I used to use KDE but came to find it bloated and a little too expensive on the machines I'd run it on. Nowdays though, I'm finding gnome a little too sparse and it seems like even baseline laptops have caught up, power wise.

The gnarl toothed beast is still lurking around, but its mostly just used for hosting wordpress and throwing together templates and plugins for it. Theres still a bit of use of Laravel, but its paradoxically very much in the "burger flipper" category of least sought after and lowest paid jobs out there. Congrats for those graduating college with a coding qualification, you get to work on nonsense!

Honestly, I wish JS would go the same way. I hate working with the language, and web dev in general.

If the entire internet gets enshitified and put on dumb ass subscriptions whilst simultaneously getting jacked to the eyeball with useless chatbots, I'm pretty sure a Dark Age is coming for us all.

I mean shit, have a read of social media, its all lunatics screaming at each other about how tylenol causes autism *somehow*, the earth is flat, climate change isnt real and jews and scientists are all in on some vast conspiracy to make everyone die FOR SOME REASON.

My friend, the dark ages arived on mobiles over a decade ago.

Too little, too slow. Trying to promote things like insulation standards and massive public transportation upgrades won't move the needle quickly enough to deal with the crisis. We would have to start in the 1950s

Honestly, we should have started in the 1870s when scientists first started warning about this, after the invention of spectroscopy codified exactly how CO2 raised temperatures (absorbs IR). We've had 150 years of warning, and we STILL have shady organizations running around whispering into politicians ears that this is all some sort of evil communist plot.

Its turning into somewhat of a slow moving emergency, and we're just kinda ignoring it, even as it making even the simple act of going outside into something deeply unpleasant.

As an aussie, I'm convinced with the exception of cities with large Italian populations, Americans wouldn't know a good espresso if they where drowning in it. (This does NOT include NYC where you can get a fine coffee if you know where to look)

With that said, I've come to respect the drip coffee and filter coffee traditions. Its a very american thing and I think it deserves respect as its own unique style, closer to french than italian traditions.

But before writing off the "modern" espresso, I implore you to travel.

About 15 years ago Starbucks tried to set up in melbourne, and the coffee was considered so bad by the locals there where literal protest marches lol. Needless to say Starbucks didnt last long. Oh they are back now , but nobody thinks its "good" coffee.

Weirdly the one American chain that seems to have read the market here better and upped their coffee game is..... McDonalds.... Shit food, but actually a decent coffee, somehow.

The study does note that it's not controlling for this factor and recommends social media be looked at more closely. The question I suppose would be , is it Fortnite or Facebook (or whatever it is kids use now, Facebook has been considered "boomer" social media for some time now by the kids) responsible for this.

That said , your observation on Gramps cursing the TV is interesting. As a kid in the 70s and 80s, my father was so adamant the TV was bad for it, he sold the TV set. The question is, what's the difference between kids glued to TV sets and kids glued to screens.

Yeah thats actually a worry. The sale of 6ghz to mobile carriers could have some troublesome implications for wifi. In theory it could be moved elsewhere but that'd reqire the FCC to release bandwidth to the public and it currently seems more interested in selling public bandwidth to telcos instead.

Not a lawyer, but UK law doesn't apply across the world.

No, but it does apply in the UK, and international law has always been clear that when you serve customers in a country, you do so under the laws of that country.

UK law does not apply to what is served to US customers. It applies to what is served to UK customers. And if you break UK laws, you pay UK penalties.

This has been the standard internationally since Dow Jones vs Gutnick 23 years ago (That was an australian lawsuit that settled how international juristiction works in defamation cases and has been largely adopted internationally as it was based on the US model of international juristiction).

Note also, both OFCOM thing, and Twitters violations in Australia are both related to websites (4chan and twitter) refusing to provide information to cops doing child porn investigations.

Thats what these companies are protecting. Nothing to do with politics. Its pedophiles, not politicians.

tbh if all it did was chant "Remember your vows. defend the constitutioon" over and over again, that might end up being useful.

Not that I trust palmer or Thiel to give a shit about the constitution , with their authoritarian surveilance fantasies and all.

We have a joke in my band that we could do the most diabolical marketing ever by driving around the suburbs with a megaphone blaring out "Alexa, please buy the new album" really loud.

Not sure if it'd work, those devices are banned in my house since they day long ago I was woken up by a Google assistant at 3am in the moning by it reading out the Wikipedia page for "Human Skull". The GF wanted it gone straight away lol

That you at all think this is some how partisan is hilarious.

Just a pro-tip. Pointing out the actions of someone who happens to belong to one party or another isn't "partisan" its truth telling.

We know these laws are coming from template law orgs aligned with Thiel and the GOP. Demanding this fact be ignored in the name of "non partisanship" is dumb as shit. Anyway, whats wrong with partisanship. The best people of the 20th century where the partisans, especially when they where hanging fascists.

Perhaps. They likely might face some time in Juvie for it. As t whether they get hassled, thats a bit speculative. I'd suggest its more likely if they are hassled its because they are soft doughy little nerds.

(And yes, the Alchemy thing was a bit silly, but back in the day it was capital-S Science. Newton for all his brilliant contributions to math and physics, spent his waning years searching for the philosophers stone and trying to transmute lead to gold. Ironically at least half of the alchemists quest has been solved by physics. We CAN transmute lead to gold in the LHC. Although probably not enough of the stuff to do anything useful, or enough to actually turn the LHC into profit)

Theres kind of a principle thing as well though. If you look at the history of universities, philosophy, math and physics (and once upon a time alchemy, which eventually got tossed and replaced with chemistry) where kind of the big things a university did.

I'd argue that if an institution doesnt at least pay lip service to philosophy, math and physics, its not REALLY a unviersity, but an adult education college,.