If I understand the summary correctly, this isn't about removing hotels from Maps. This is about removing the map at the top of the search listings when you search for "Hotels in [insert city]". The EU's complaint, again, assuming I understood the summary correctly, is that having a map result makes you more likely to book through Google or through a direct link or whatever, rather than by seeing search results for Hotels.com or Expedia or whatever.

From my perspective, having a map result makes it easier to figure out what hotels are good choices (and none of the booking sites have very good user interfaces for doing this, IMO, so I literally almost always end up in Google Maps to help me choose a hotel anyway). At the end of the day, though, I'm still likely to book through Hotels.com unless they are charging a significant premium over direct booking in exchange for those points towards a free night.

That said, in the last year or so, I've seen a lot more hotels charging a premium for booking through Hotels.com, which has significantly lowered the rate at which I book through them. This is, of course, anecdotal, and may be specific to the hotels that I happen to have booked. And I'm not in Europe, so that may not be true over there.

The fact that Hotels.com's website was reproducibly failing to accept credit card payments via their website for at least a couple of months in a row recently (with only the iPhone app working correctly) probably didn't help them much, either.

In other words, those booking sites might just want to look in the mirror and hire some competent people to run their sites rather than blaming a search engine for their IMO largely self-inflicted problems. Just saying.

In my experience, "never heard before" is almost always undesirable. If a particular sound were desirable, someone would likely have created it in the 40-to-60-thousand years that humans have been making music. (Bone flutes actually predate written language, notwithstanding pictographs.)

To be fair, even that review said it wasn't as good as Mobile Safari. :-)

Meh. Safari existed on Windows, as did Firefox. Having another browser on the desktop wasn't strictly needed at that point. At best, it was a nice-to-have.

Yeah, but the only reason it was absolutely necessary to kill those plugins was because they were battery killers on mobile devices with their tiny batteries. For desktop use, battery consumption reduction has always been more of a nice-to-have.

I would argue that this has always been the case. Even Netscape couldn't successfully sell a browser back in the 1990s. Everybody wants browsers, but nobody wants to pay for their development. That's why platforms treat it as part of the cost of having a platform. I can't imagine how browsers could realistically be paid for in any other way, and I can't imagine that any spun-off entity would not end up doing the will of the company paying the bills. It just seems implausible to me.

You think that instead of having standardised access to some software via a web app, users will be better off with half-baked platform-specific apps bending the knee to whatever Apple or Google decide to allow in their app store this week?

If so, I have news for you: a lot of software developers still aren't going to make Apple native apps and still aren't going to pay Apple's high cut to get listed on the App Store (unless the happen to decide on a whim that they shouldn't be). It is a fool's game for any small company to play by those rules. Web apps are a great equaliser and for many users doing many things they are more than sufficient. When they aren't, quite often it's because Apple refuses to support some useful web standard that everyone else does, and often has for a while.

Apple's browser limitations are anticompetitive behaviour that stifles competition with its lucrative App Store business, pure and simple. And there is a reason that this kind of anticompetitive behaviour is prohibited in most civilised places: it's extremely bad for users.

If you just want a cheap tablet, the Amazon Fire HD 8 costs $60. At least with the version I own, you can install the Play Store, and with that upgrade, it is pretty much good enough as a basic media consumption device unless you want a bigger screen.

Apple doesn't compete at the low end at all, and barely competes in the mid-range market. That's okay and all, but it makes their tablets mostly uninteresting to me, even as someone who uses a Mac and an iPhone. If I were trying to use a tablet as a laptop alternative their products might be more interesting, but for media consumption on the go, it's horrifically overpriced.

And the other thing I use tablets for is reading music. But for that, I find the largest iPad Pro to be barely half the size I want. So instead, I bought a 21.5-inch wall-mount Android tablet and VESA-mounted it on my organ desk so that I can see two pages at once. But what I'd really like to own is a two-page tablet that has an actual battery and is thin enough to put on a music stand. Unfortunately, nobody builds anything remotely like that.

Maybe using an iPad or similar paired with an external battery-operated display might work, albeit clumsily. I might try that someday. But for now, I don't have a very good solution.

Still, the fact that Android has a wide range of sizes from 7 inches up to 21.5 inches makes it way, way more useful for me than iOS when it comes to tablets. I really wish Apple would license iOS to third party hardware manufacturers, because I very much prefer iOS over Android, but Apple just doesn't build products in the form factors that I need.

Go read the Sherman Act again and see how many times the word "monopoly" appears. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Only a tiny fraction of antitrust law has anything to do with monopolies, and even the parts that do include attempting to monopolize as a violation of the law. Being a monopoly is basically not a requirement for anything, with the exception of a single clause, if memory serves.

No, 30% of iPhone users have a thin skin on WebKit that synchronizes bookmarks and similar with desktop Chrome.

That browser you're using contains approximately 95% of Safari. So yay, you're not using Safari's bookmark feature and a few other bits around the edges. You're still using WebKit, so you're still basically using Safari.

Google also finds value in Chrome because Android has to have a browser, and at the time it was created, the only other browser that would have been usable as a mobile browser was Safari. Google worked with their direct operating system competitor to make WebKit a platform that was good enough as a mobile browser, and used that platform as the basis for Chrome.

The sad reality is that there is no money in web browsers. They're a money pit. Users won't tolerate browsers that inject ads, and for the most part, users won't pay for web browsers, so there's no viable funding source except for the money that browsers get from making Google the default search engine. As a result, Google basically funds development of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, almost singlehandedly.

It isn't entirely selfless, of course. Without browsers, Google Search wouldn't be all that useful. So keeping browser development going does support Google's interests, but it has nothing to do with ads, except to the extent that ads pay the bills for Search.

I'm really not sure why the DOJ thinks anyone else would want Chrome. The best possible outcome would be Google spinning off Chrome into a separate company, but continuing to pay huge sums of money to that company for the purposes of keeping Chrome from instantly going bankrupt, and I'm really not sure what good that would do anyone. As long as Google is funding it, they'll still end up doing Google's bidding, and I don't see any realistic alternative, because almost nobody but Google has the deep pockets necessary to fund it, and almost nobody else has the motivation to do so, either, as evidenced by ~86% of Mozilla's annual budget coming from Google.

I mean... unless they think they can get Google to finance it with enough money that the resulting company can survive on the interest/stock market gains alone, who in their right minds would take Chrome? It would be as smart a business deal as buying 23andMe.

Accusing Trump of having incoherent and mutually contradictory positions is like complaining that the Earth orbits the sun. This is a revenge administration. Oh sure, it will end up in court, and in most cases will end up being thrown out, but the point is that it will be a series of costly fights that will chew up lots of money.

As always it's "First Amendment for thee, a boot on the neck for thee." But this is what Americans want.

You're close, anyway. In reality, every time Democrats talk about it, it reminds people that Trump claims that he'll be tough on border security (even though the border was actually more porous under Trump than under Obama), so it reminded the people who wanted more border enforcement to vote for Trump under the (possibly dubious) belief that he will do more about it.

Rolling my eyes here. To make a better life, these folks are swimming across razor wire traps in the Rio Grande, are getting packed into trucks by Coyotes who leave them out in the hot desert to die when the feds show up, and so on. It's not like these people "just show up". They're putting their lives on the line to come here out of desperation to get out of those "shithole parts of the world", as you put it. So your attitude towards them is more than a little bit offensive. Have some respect for the people who are still alive at the end of that process, and realize that not everybody has the good luck to be born into privilege. Some people have to risk death and *then* show up for that court date to gain that privilege, and that's for the lucky few that don't get sent back.

ROFL. Russian troll farms, at least from what I've read on the subject, do not support the left wing in the U.S. Rather, they try to maximize instability by attacking both sides, favoring only people and companies that support their interests.

The weirdness in universities is caused by most people being borderline sociopathic, and as a result, choosing to automatically believe the worst in people whenever somebody paints a picture of someone as a bad person, whether the picture is true or not. This has happened throughout all of human history — the McCarthy hearings, the Salem witch trials, the Me Too movement, etc. — destroying lives both figuratively and literally — sometimes deservedly so, but also sometimes not.

This has two unfortunate side effects.

First, people tend to easily believe false accusations of something bad (racism, sexism, antisemitism, sexual misconduct, etc.), at least when the accusations seem even remotely credible. This is doubly true if the accused seems even slightly "off" from the perspective of the listener, because people's "He/she is not like me" mentality results in the listener automatically othering the accused and giving the accused's response less credibility in their minds than the accuser's accusation.

Second, it takes an enormous effort to prove someone's innocence before those people will trust the accused, even if the accuser's claim is completely false and falls apart on closer examination. That's why most people, when accused, even if entirely innocent, try to distance themselves from everything and everyone related to the accusation. It's easier to hide from a lie than to stand up to it.

None of that has anything to do with Russian influence, of course, other than the fact that Russian influencers use their understanding of human nature to get people to believe lies and false accusations about both sides in an effort to destabilize our democracy and foment hatred among the populace.

In other words, humans' tendency towards othering behavior isn't evidence of Russian influence. It has always been that way. Russian influencers are just one of many groups who take advantage of it for their own purposes.

That wouldn't surprise me. Russia sells oil. Why would they want competition? And Russia as a country enjoys being able to invade neighboring countries without getting stomped into the ground. Why would they want that to be harder by having more western companies producing firearms? Both of those types of companies would logically be competing against the goals of Russian influencers, unlike the political left or right, who tend to be a mixed bag.

The "group buy" of microphones that I was part of a while back ended up having to go through back channels to reach a PayPal vice president to get their account reinstated. It's almost certainly not about guns, but rather about risk to the financial institution (e.g. chargebacks). I couldn't say specifically what about a gun club was considered high risk, but it seems far more likely than Russian influence. Just saying.

Except in my experience as an occasional teacher, the single parents are the most conscientious and most likely to turn in work on time, followed by the parents with small children, who occasionally ask for an extension, but not often and not egregiously. The folks turning in work massively late or not at all are the ones screwing around playing video games all day and wondering why they don't have any time to get their work done. Yes, life has priorities, and learning how to choose the right priorities matters for your future success. Just saying.

Similarly, in the workplace, you can either get things done on time or you can attend thirty hours of meetings every week. You can't realistically do both. So if they want on-time performance, the leadership has to prioritize that over all the other bulls**t. If they don't, that's not an indication that the schedule was unreasonable, but rather that too much unnecessary time was spent doing things other than making progress. And that's the difference between an efficient organization and an inefficient one.

No, not necessarily. It can also be the case that the person prioritized other things and therefore did not spend adequate time on the project to meet the deadline. Whether those prioritization decisions were reasonable or unreasonable largely determines whether the deadline was unreasonably early or not.

Apple would have been forced to open up their platform enough for third-party backups to be possible. And then there would be multiple competing companies creating backup services that actually back everything up reliably. That would help customers a great deal.

This is part of why Microsoft got in trouble with antitrust regulators. Their own apps used a bunch of private APIs that were not available to third parties, which gave them a competitive advantage. When you're a large market player, you really can't do that. Apple is large enough that when Apple provides an app or service that someone else might reasonably want to provide, it had better make sure that third parties can provide similar competing services, or else it is likely to run afoul of antitrust law.

That means that pretty much the entire iCloud suite should be audited for any use of private APIs, any use of elevated privileges that are not available to third-party apps, etc., and given the sandboxing model used by iOS, that audit is likely to conclude that significant sandbox escapes would be required for a third-party replacement, which is not a good position for Apple to be in, IMO.

You're fundamentally misrepresenting the right to bear arms, and that's why you're confused here.

The law absolutely DOES work differently depending on whether a law is binding upon individuals or upon the government.

Governments only have the right to compel companies to follow their laws when doing business within their respective countries. A government can bind a corporation doing business within its borders, compelling it to comply with that country's laws, requiring that products sold meet specific standards, etc.

Phone users' right to use apps without region locking limits is a right that is granted by a government by depriving the manufacturer of its right to region-lock the devices. Because that company is operating within the bounds of the European Union, the EU *does* have a legal right to pass laws that require that those products, when sold in the EU, permanently and irreversibly disable any support for region locking policies that would violate EU law.

A government cannot bind a foreign government in a manner that violates that country's sovereignty. The right to bear arms is a right that is granted by a government by depriving that same government of its right to regulate certain aspects of firearm sales and possession. The U.S. cannot compel another country's government to grant that right to others unless that country is a U.S. territory, is occupied by the U.S. military, or is otherwise compellable for some other reason that I can't think of right now.

In other words, international law very clearly says that it is okay for the EU to require Apple to permanently disable region locking for iOS devices sold in the EU as a condition of selling those devices in the EU. International law very clearly does not allow the U.S. government to force the right to bear arms on other countries around the world. So yes, this is *absolutely* how international law works. It has nothing to do with laws applying differently to individuals and corporations, and everything to do with whether the law affects another country's sovereignty, which the EU law does not.

This is not to say that some other country could not pass a law saying that all devices brought into their country must be region locked, but even that conflict of law would not grant Apple the right to region-lock a device sold in the EU. Rather it would simply mean that importing an EU iOS device into that country would be illegal, because it would not be possible for the device to simultaneously comply with both sets of laws, so the preexisting legal encumbrance (created at the time of sale) would automatically win over any new encumbrance. Adding the region locks would therefore be impossible, and the act of importing such a device would then be a violation of that second country's laws.

See how this works?

I figure maybe they're a little bit stoned. First, they get all paranoid, worried that the feds might go after them, so they buzz the aircraft to scare them off. Then, they get hungry and go for a burger.