Most places don't accept AmEx because their merchant fees are over twice anyone else (last time I dealt with them).

>> Only if your Xbox has an optical drive and supports optical drives.

Wrong again, right out the door.
https://www.amazon.com/EA-SPORTS-FC-25-STANDARD/dp/B0DG427QJ6
One of many different places, that sell for different prices, that MS doesn't get a percentage cut from the seller.

>> Of course, ultimately, the impact on commerce is still mostly the same whether you're talking about a device that only plays games or a device that you use for other things, so while from a consumer perspective, the harm is greater from Apple doing it, the harm to the free market is similar, just at a smaller scale.

No, again, it's how they are marketed and advertised. You keep wanting to compare two very different things and somehow want them to be the same. They aren't. It doesn't matter how from a consumers perspective, or how ever you want to rephrase it. These aren't the same. Apple's marketing killed that option, you can't say X and then claim that it's not X at the same time. It's like asking how come my car drivers license doesn't allow me to fly a plane, both get me from A to B. These aren't the same, and never will, no matter how you try to rephrase it.

>> No one is batting an eye about Apple TV because it is a niche platform that almost nobody actually uses, which means it doesn't cost anybody enough money to sue over. Apple has a single-digit percentage of the connected smart TV market, behind Amazon, Roku, and Google.

No, it's because it's not being marketed as a do all, but privately not do all.

Turbo coding in Swift.

>> this is an area when GenAI could go a long way to enhancing that.

GenAI isn't ready for this yet. The last time Rockstar tried it was with GTA 3 Remaster, and we saw how that went. And yes, that was a while ago, but then there is the Quake 2 AI demo that showed what could be, but that will be years away, and the first games that do use it will most likely not being a crowning game like GTA6 that could crash and burn hard if/when it fails in real world settings. (I also don't think the newest Xbox/PS5 would have the power to handle that, and trying to offload it online with something like ChatGPT servers wouldn't be a reasonable expectation as sign-in servers already crash when a new popular game comes out. This wouldn't be even in the same league of expectations.)

https://copilot.microsoft.com/wham?features=labs-wham-enabled Quake 2 AI

UnionPay is Chinese, and JCB is Japanese. These aren't American.

You mean like American Express, Discover, UnionPay, and JCB?

Not really, as from the article: "Most of Apple’s devices are assembled in the country, and investors are closely watching its efforts to shift final assembly of devices bound for the U.S. to India and other countries."

So India and Vietnam will do the final assembly of the devices. But I'm guessing from how this is worded that everything is still built in China, and then many the last minute gluing together/boxing up the device will be done in India/Vietnam so it can avoid the tariffs.

>> 2. It does not steal intellectual property that is of high importance to the United States as China has done.

Literally three days ago: The US on Tuesday again placed India on its 'priority watch list' stating that New Delhi remains one of the world's most challenging major economies with respect to protection and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights.

https://www.business-standard.com/external-affairs-defence-security/news/us-retains-india-on-priority-watch-list-over-ip-rights-enforcement-concerns-125042900780_1.html

"There's an app for that" defeated that agreement.

"Microsoft takes commission off of every sale, why can't Apple take?"

No they don't. Right out the gate, you are wrong.

I can buy Xbox games from Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon, GameStop, etc... And Microsoft doesn't get a percentage of that sale. This allows choice and price differences in the Xbox market, as the store selling the game box can set their own price. If a store sells an Xbox game for $40 or $400, they don't have to give Microsoft a percentage of the sale. These aren't the same thing, not matter how hard you want them to be.

Then there is the basic fact that Microsoft markets the Xbox as a very limited device, but Apple has done the opposite and marketed as a 'do all" device" ("There's an app for that', "Whats a PC?"). Again, this shows these are two very different matters.

This is why no one is batting an eye about Apple's control on Apple TV, because it's marketed and sold as a limited function device.

Ok, what does that that have to do with anything about any of this?

This isn't an issue with them saying Google shouldn't be dealing with issues/punishments about it's AdSense monopoly. No one is really complaining about that here. This is about why should the AdSense issue be dealt with by Google selling off Chrome, which has nothing to do with AdSense.

In your own example you made a comparison to Microsoft and Edge and Bing. This would be looking at that and saying "Ok, MS as punishment for this, you must sell off XBox." This don't help with the problem, and it really just hurts a completely different, and unrelated, market. (I'm sure that Sony and Nintendo would love it though. Which is in line with the point of them making of how Apple would love the Chrome selloff, because it takes out a competitor in a different market).

And if Google does have to sell off Chrome, how will that help deal with/prevent their AdSense monopoly? I don't see how it would do anything as these are, again, two completely and unrelated markets.

There is something to be said here that the part you agreed with about using AI in competitions was from the part written by the AI.

I think the difference here is that it's one thing for Word to offer suggestions to help me with spelling and basic grammar (which would be acceptable), vs just asking ChatGPT to build the answer for them.

But if you feel that using ChatGPT to answer their problems is ok, I asked it to generate an answer for your question which should be just as acceptable:

Yeah, every programmer builds on existing tools—no one's writing pure machine code from scratch. But in competitions like this, the point is to test a person’s problem-solving skills, not their ability to ask AI for answers.
The challenge is about:
- Thinking through a problem and designing an efficient solution.
- Writing clean, functional code without automated shortcuts.
- Debugging and improving your own work.

If AI-generated code is allowed, the whole competition changes—it’s no longer about individual skill but about who can prompt an AI best. That’s fine for real-world coding, where AI tools are super useful, but a contest is meant to judge what you can do, not what an AI can do for you.
That said, maybe it's time for coding competitions to rethink their approach and acknowledge that AI-assisted programming is here to stay.

Everything Republicans don't like is "woke". The usual.

The damage might not, but it also might catch fire. The choices are:

a) Land the flight (while still above land and possible airports) before the long flight over the Atlantic Ocean.

b) Keep flying and hope that it doesn't build up heat to the point of catching fire (again, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, in a 10 hour flight).

They have no way of being able to tell if the device's battery was damaged or not. They weren't even able to pull the tablet out to fully inspect it. All they could see was that it is there, and that it "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" So, when dealing with a possible fire outbreak, and a whole lot of questions about the device being answered with "We don't know", then yes, absolutely, land the plane.

When in a situation that could lead to a deadly event, and a whole lot of "don't know" answers to every question possible, you always err on the side of caution.