AFAIK, if a company has no presence in the EU, and provides no services within the EU, then the act would not apply.

Out of curiosity, which major company or companies did you have in mind? I can't think of any that don't operate in some manner within the EU. (It's a big market!)

Also AFAIK, the act only applies to those within the EU. The big companies can continue to screw users and businesses outside the EU to their heart's content! Unless, of course, those counties (like the UK) have similar or equivalent acts.

The NHS (England and Wales) advice seems to be not to rinse immediately after brushing, but to spit out. No mention of swallowing.

How to keep your teeth clean

Similarly for Scotland:

Teeth cleaning guide

Again no mention of swallowing.

No, it's also in Europe:

‘I felt nothing but disgust’: Tesla owners vent their anger at Elon Musk

As someone from the UK, I thought his comment quite a good view of the situation (although the transition to a services economy started well before Brexit).

Perhaps for us unenlightened ones you could give links to some of your "authoritative sources from the UK and the EU".

Here are some sources I found:

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-de...
https://www.london.gov.uk/new-...
https://www.theguardian.com/ed...
https://migrationobservatory.o...

Brexit isn't the only cause, but is at the very least a contributing factor.

Apparently it's not the coders, it's the standard they've got to code against - BS7666

From Annex D. Explanation of Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation:

So no apostrophes.

Then what is?

Although it is the UK government making the decision, this only covers England. The devolved administrations (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) will no-doubt make their own decisions on the matter. I very much doubt the current Scottish administration will diverge from the directive as the SNP/Green administration want to keep in sync with the EU regulations as far as possible. Not only that, the Green part of the coalition are unlikely to agree any (seemingly) weakening of any environmental regulations, whether in sync with the EU's regulations or not.

Wikipedia possibly

Wikipedia will not perform Online Safety Bill age checks

It will eventually cost money, but then as with any commercial product you don't have to use it. There is currently a free Rust plugin for IntelliJ (to be deprecated, but will remain free and open source). There may also be a rust plugin for Eclipse (which is another alternative. I haven't looked into this). There is always vim if you want free!

As to being a cash cow, in my experience IntelliJ is the most used IDE (for Java certainly) in the commercial environment, probably as it is one of the best! And the reason it is one of the best may be due to the fact that JetBrains can afford to pay dedicated developers. (As a Software Developer myself, I can appreciate being paid for what I do!)

I will hopefully get RustRover included in my All Products Pack subscription, which I pay for. I'm happy to pay for this as I consider it an investment in my career (in the same way I consider the books I purchase an investment in my career). If you don't need to invest in your career, then by all means wait for the free alternatives, but don't begrudge those who produce (or purchase) the commercial products.

Also from the website:

Looks like those of us who purchase the All Products Pack will get this included.

GNU Hurd?

The Reuters article linked to in the summary refers to an article on the BBC News website.

For those interested, the BBC article is here:

Minister defends safety law on messaging apps

In my experience, I've never got a vanilla work phone. The apps that are on it are those the company want on it, not the phone manufacturer. Then again, I only use my work phone for work. It would never occur to me to put TikToc on it.

Then again, it would never occur to me to put TikTok on my personal mobile either!

There are a number of non-Ukrainian reporters in Ukraine at the moment, doing there stuff. None of them under the threat of 15 years imprisonment for reporting stuff the government (Ukrainian or otherwise) deem to be 'not true'. Same cannot be said on the Russian side, where all the independent media seem to have been shut down.

I don't think its right imply some sort of misinformation equivalence here.

Reminds me of the H.L. Mencken quote "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.". Well, we definitely got it good and hard!