List of largest European companies by revenue

There are a lot of very large companies in the EU. Everyone forgets tech companies are relatively small in terms of revenue and profits, they just have ridiculously high share prices...

People would notice.

Right at the top of the Wikipedia article...

"LTE is commonly marketed as "4G LTE and Advance 4G",[citation needed] but it does not meet the technical criteria of a 4G wireless service, as specified in the 3GPP Release 8 and 9 document series for LTE Advanced. LTE is also commonly known as 3.95G"

Stupid questions, people have already said to run it like Jury Duty. If you have a valid reason for being unable to serve (pregant, student, self-employed, terminally ill) then you can be made exempt.

Automation doesn't make things cheaper anymore. It increases profits, and that's the biggest reason any company invests in it...

Well government funding is extremely well-suited to endeavours that you do not want to be tied to a profit motive. Healthcare, military, and education are perfect examples.

High-quality unbiased journalism fits the same category, and is a "public good". The BBC model is a very good one (not quite perfect). It relies on a "tax" of sorts, but it's legally structured in such a way that it is not beholden to the government in any way and is not a state news service.

(If you're from the USA you might have different views on what government should fund)

As Megol mentions, no that's not the reason at all.

The first company to develop an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine will make an enormous amount of money quickly.

Facebook should not be the arbiter of what is "true.

To an extent you're right. But facebook is the arbiter of what is popular. Incendiary, outrageous and controversial things make for more clicks. If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

"So people simply stopped reading news because Google went away?"

Pretty much yes, the loss was a loss in total traffic/viewer, directly attributed to Google News going away.

"healthy food is expensive" is a lie for the most part. It just takes slightly longer to make than an instant meal.

In the UK you can get a bag of 7 or 8 carrots for 60p, a bunch of bananas for less than £1, a bag of onions for less than £1, most vegetables are very cheap. Some fruit are expensive but that depends on the season. You might be talking £1.60 for a bag of bananas.

1kg of lentils for less than £2. 1kg of chopped tomatoes for less than £3. 1kg of spinach for less than £3.

Fruit and vegetables are absurdly cheap these days.

Sure for the same cost of all of that you can get 25 packets of cheap, barely flavoured noodles. Or you could buy half the noodles, a load of cheap vegetables, and make up a nutritious dinner.

High-speed rail is a reality and has been for a over 50 years.

I've called lots of companies for various reasons. Almost always they have an automated IVR system up front, and never do they disclose that it isn't a human you're speaking to.

Granted, it's usually obvious very quickly that it's automated, but there's still no disclosure.

(I agree it should be disclosed though.)

I dunno

In the UK I think they use their own keys. You have to provide your name, some other misc. items like phone number, date of birth and your postal address history. They use a combination of a lot of data items to point to "you".

This has some problems, but seems to work well enough. I also dislike them intensely and don't trust them at all, just FYI.

Most of the western EU countries are already 90% of the way to GDPR compliance with their existing Data Protection legislation.

GDPR will cost large corporations money for failing to comply, again they should be mostly compliant anyway thanks to existing legislation. GDPR just harmonises it all and gives powers back to individuals.

The UK has a constitution. It's just not a single, written document.

Brand new countries (like the USA, relatively speaking) can easily codify their constitution into a single item. But for the ones that have been around in one form or another for over a thousand years, it's harder to scrap the unwritten constitution and create a new one.