The EU's notable lack of success in the high tech field has been frustrating their government leaders for some time, but they have discovered a way to recover the tax money they would have been getting if they actually had some successful tech companies: They just fine the giant American tech companies every year and confiscate hundreds of millions of dollars from them. It's a major budget supplement for them and it costs them nothing. They just have to keep enacting intrusive laws they know the Americans will not obey.

Microsoft is upset about this because they are not getting a cut of the ad revenue. Next time LG will remember to let then dip their beak a little.

Why would anyone want to do this? Run an unreliable, bloated, privacy-invadfing mostrosity and then graft a good OS on the side of it? It's like screwing a Ferrari to the side of an old Chevy station wagon.

Punish the successful people by stealing their money and throwing it into a pool where it will be wasted by politicians. The justification? They have the money. We want the money. We can convince all the jealous non-billionaires to vote for a law forcing them to give us the money. Poof! Socialism at its best.

If this succeeds it will kill all entrepreneurial activity in California, most immediately in Silicon Valley.

If the EU wants to establish tech sovereignty that's a good thing for them, but it does not look too likely to me. Their Linux and Free Software adoption will probably be a success, but successful proprietary software from the EU is quite rare. The EU has been propping up its revenue for several years by imposing enormous cash penalties on US tech companies instead of nurturing their own tech companies and collecting taxes from them. The EU regulatory state will make it very difficult for anyone to start a profitable software or hardware business there.

One excellent consequence of this change is that you will be able to remove the battery from your phone and insure that it is really powered off. Currently, our phones continue to monitor us and send information back to Google whether they are powered on or not.

Even though you bought it, you don't own it. Even though you bought a "perpetual license" you can't use it. It's the brave new world of software and it's standard practice for Microsoft. After you've used it for a while, they just make it disappear and you can't do anything about it. Are you ready to switch to Linux yet, or do things need to get even worse?

In Japan, pedal-assist electric bicycles are very popular and can be used by anyone without a driving license. The bike itself, like all bicycles in Japan, must be registered. These pedal-assist models have legislated speed ceilings of about 20 MPH and are engineered to go no faster than this.

Other E-Bikes are considered motorcycles and need to be licensed as such. And the operators of the bikes are required to have a driver's license and liability insurance.

Most e-bike riders in Japan are housewives who use the pedal-assist models as their normal transportation, with child seats mounted in the front and in the back of the bike. In general, children do not have electric bicycles in Japan.

WSL is an unfortunate, but typical, Microsoft production and improving it is a waste of time. They bolted a bag onto the side of their bloated and unstable operating system to emulate an efficient operating system. The only advantages of this accrue to Microsoft, not to their users. Users get instability, poor performance, and no privacy while MS continues to get revenue from Windows sales, plus their all-seeing window into your every action and thought from Windows snooping telemetry. The enhanced snooping in Windows 11 is finally getting more and more people to see the light and ditch Windows entirely. Its time has passed.

It would seem to me that critical infrastructure is exactly the stuff that should require spare parts and repair manuals to be available. It's more important to keep machines doing useful work running than to fix toys like MP3 players.

It boggles my mind that anyone would trust their communications to MS when they are going into space and have no alternative available. Do we really want to export the Blue Screen of Death and irritating mandatory updates to the cosmos?

This book is the most realistic picture of the atmosphere in a real industrial development project that I ever have encountered -- outside my own experience of about 30 years doing this stuff. Every student contemplating a career doing this sort of work should read it, and so should everyone curious about what computer hardware and software development is really like.

If I had any choice at all, I would not agree to work for an employer who monitored every word I said with a machine, and evaluated my performance based on what the machine reported. Even George Orwell didn't anticipate this mechanized, comprehensive surveillance. Unfortunately, it seems to be possible now and employers are happy to take advantage of it.

Of course, protecting children is just a convenient lever to justify this giant overreach into everyone's privacy. The ultimate goal of these people is to minitor everything everyone does. Once the mechanisms are in place, they will be used. And they will eventually be used to their full extent no matter what assurances we are given at the start.

Your justification that the law will be easy to bypass if flawed, too. Passing laws that we know will be ignored or bypassed just destroys public respect for the laws that really are important. The new law is a bad idea from start to finish.

Apple's business plan from the beginning has been to make everything in their equipment as proprietary as possible so that users would have to come to them for repairs and modifications. If this was not true no one would ever come to them for hardware because of their inflated prices. I used their hardware for a short time in the 1980s but abandoned it then because of this problem. Nothing has changed that would make me want to try them again.