Because large companies lobbied to have laws written up so that the companies are allowed to move money to different jurisdictions as expenses, the lawmakers wrote the laws, and had them enacted. It's not just in the EU that this happens. It occurs everywhere in the world where the corporate taxes are high (well, higher than 0%) and money is funnelled in tax havens, including South Dakota in the US (which the US conveniently never mentions).

The corporations aren't doing anything illegal. If the lawmakers are so upset about this then all they have to do is enact laws that stop the false transfer of license fees to the tax havens. For example, state that the license fees must go to where they intellectual property was created. So, in Apples' case they would not be allowed to transfer the license fees to some tax haven but would, most likely, have to send it to the US, specifically California, as they say all of their products are designed in California. No global minimum tax rate required. It respects the intellectual property. Probably putting a proper value on it instead of the inflated values now used to transfer funds to tax havens. Just that change alone might see more money kept in other countries because less would be transferred to the country of origin of the intellectual property.

Ideally, these companies would be paying income tax in each country that they generate sales in. Of course then you still have the US coming in and claiming income tax from US companies on their worldwide sales.

Then I guess that you find the idea of the US taxing US citizens and corporations based on their worldwide income just as much of a monstrous perversion of sovereignty. The only way for an American living outside of the US to stop having their income taxed by the US government is to give up their citizenship (as long as they have citizenship of another country beforehand).

If an app keeps bugging you for a review then post an honest review, including stating that it bugs you for the review. Apple's app development guidelines used to state that an app was allowed to ask for a review once per release (something like that, it might have been per device also) and no more.

While Apple tests each app before it is released, it is mostly an automated test to ensure that it meets the requirements of that App Store (for examples, resources for all of the platforms the app is to be available for, statements for in-app purchases, etc). They don't have someone use the application for hours to find out that it bugs the user for a review more than the development guidelines permit.

For some things, such as the QR reader that charges $4.99 a week, people must take their own responsibility for. There are many QR readers on the App Store and a good number of them are free. I'm not saying anyone whom was stupid enough to pay $4.99 for a QR reader deserved to be fleeced but they definitely were not a careful enough shopper so that the blame can't be on Apple. This was before the functionality was built into iOS 14. (Apple has the habit of building in useful functionality which developers need to be careful of or else lose their income.)

Apple's blame with subscriptions is that they made ending them "confusing" for some people. To stop a subscription associated with any app, one needs to go into the Settings -> Apple ID -> Subscriptions instead of going into the App or the settings for the App. There are many bad reviews from people whom have had issues with free trials turning into paid subscriptions because they didn't know how to cancel the free trial (even though Apple requires developers to post this information on the page of the app in the App Store).

For those who don't want to see the things governments don't want them to see. Tiananmen Square square and Tank Man not showing up

The F-35 is also about extending US sovereignty into the air forces of the countries that buy the plane. It has been designed to send home (to the US, not the country that bought it) massive amounts of data including exactly where it has flown and when all in the name of preventative maintenance. Additionally, major fixes won't be done on the airbase but at one of a few locations set up by the manufacturer. I believe that there will be only four in total in Europe once they are all running and more than four countries there have purchased the F-35. I don't know if the plans were changed but the first maintenance facility was to be based in Turkey! Major changes include engine replacement, something that any airbase can easily do.

I really hope that Canada doesn't choose the F-35 to replace the F-18s. It would be nice if we got the Gripen E's from Sweden.

Yes. It started with their mobile version because Apple only allows WebKit to render HTML on iDevices so Opera got around this by rendering the pages on their servers and sending some modified version to be rendered on the device.

This Mighty isn't new, isn't a good idea, and hopefully will fail quickly. It only exists because people in Silicon Valley have too much money to invest and they are throwing it away on useless crap like this. Meanwhile there are worthwhile projects that are screaming for funding but won't get it because they won't show a profit. This won't show a profit either and won't do a thing to help humanity. What a waste.

Please, American did everything first. Hasn't Hollywood taught us that yet? Obviously the existence of the Egyptian city of Memphis is proof that time travel capable of going back into the past will be (or has been already) by the US and they have gone back in history to important times when famous cities were founded. Then, and I mean when these Chrononauts (time travellers) are in the past, manage to get the cities named after (or before?) the American cities.

There wouldn't be censorship on any American government sites because they would have to follow the law and the Constitution. Posters would still be held accountable for what they posted so they wouldn't be allowed to post the equivalent of shouting "Fire," in a crowded theatre ( for example, "There's a bomb going to go off in five minutes in city hall!").

A government site probably wouldn't happen because there are many lobbyists all over America, at all levels of government, trying to prevent governments from providing services that private industry is wanting to charge money for. Just look at how strongly companies are fighting against municipalities that are trying to put in municipal broadband for their citizens.

Government would love to have site(s) that allow the public to post their opinions on without restrictions. It would allow them to easily gather up intel about whom to watch out for without having to get a warrant for the information from a private company (though there are some companies that serve the information quite freely to the government without a warrant, the bastards).

Why would it replace USB/Thunderbolt? Those are just protocols that run on top of the physical layer. It doesn't matter if if the physical layer is copper, glass, or plastic. Just like TCP/IP doesn't care if it's packets are being sent across copper or glass or streamed across the spectrum.

It's Firefox, if something doesn't get changed every so often they will get rid of it like so many stable features that people liked in their browser. So they have to keep changing the logo or else they will have to get rid of it and you can't have an app without a logo!

An OS can't protect you from a bad app giving away your information that you've put into that app. However, an OS should protect you from an app misbehaving, whether intended or through ill ways, and accessing your information in ways that the app does not have normal permissions for. An app shouldn't have access to RAM not in it's address space, or be able to read the keyboard buffer when it doesn't have the focus (ie a key logger), or a multitude of other ways that have been worked out to steal your information.

Sometimes it is the place of the OS for allowing the conditions to exist that allow the apps to take advantage of a situation. It's all about design choices and unintended, and sometimes intended, consequences.The examples you give about 3rd-party cookies and tracker images are both unintended consequences of technologies that came about decades ago and have been taken over by companies desperate to gain every last bit of information about everyone that they can.

Pick your favourite Linux distribution, install it, and unplug and power sources to the computer. Secure. The functionality sucks but at least it's as secure as it will ever be without putting the computer into a national gold reserve.

At my first job after university part of what I had to do development on an AIX server that the system administrator had not installed, and would not (was not able to?) install, the man pages. How the @#$^#!* do you install a UNIX server and not install the man pages!

Mind you, this was an organization in which the the team lead had the programmer above creating shell scripts to see if a variable changed in the called script is reflected in the script that did the calling. They wouldn't believe me when I said that it wouldn't be impacted by anything the called script did. Needless to say I found another job before long. A couple of years later I ran into my old team leader as he was doing an inventory for Y2K and he was dropping by to see if the program I was maintaining and adding capabilities to was compliant, which it was.

I agree in general with you but I would put Microsoft on the side with Facebook because Microsoft still treats users of its' software as huge sources of data that they don't require.

There's a third side in this exchange or battle, open source. It has struggled for a long time to gain popularity and it has in some areas. Open source products are used by both of the other sides. Perhaps it is time to extend the licenses of some open source projects to include provisions that prohibit the use of the product to gather data in the spirit of open source principles. (Let the lawyers figure out how to explain not taking more data than needed just because it's available, taking data on users that don't have accounts, etc).

I'm afraid that the openness and spirit. that was seen in the first ten to 15 years of the Web (and on the Internet as a whole until this time) is disappearing. My first experience of the Web was in 1994 and it was amazing. Of course it was nothing like today but in a way it was more magical. One was able to email someone halfway around the world with a question and they would likely respond, even about something trivial. Today your message would likely end up in a spam folder. There was a spirit of togetherness that has gone missing. (As an aside, I have this feeling in the 3D printing community and it's wonderful to find that again.)

After getting my 3D printer last year I had to download VS Code, the free version at least, in order to update the firmware of my printer. I'm not doing any development with it. If I add something to my printer or want to update the firmware I compile the firmware and send it to the printer with VS Code.

So how many of those 5M new people last year were just people that got 3D printers. I was one of them.