No no no, see, these regulations are working exactly as intended.

Google/Alphabet is looking for ways to extract more and more "Value(tm)" for their shareholders, and since they have already plumbed the legal avenues for revenue generation, the only options left are grey, and outright illegal methods of generating it, as it concerns user privacy, and as it relates to monopolistic business practices.

The "Innovation!!" that this, and other large companies are screaming about, is the "NEW! and AMAZING, MONEY MAKING OPPORTUNITIES!" presented by Flagrantly violating consumer and market ethics, and they are OH, SO VERY UPSET by this.

The pointed response to this, is to ask google, bluntly, what exactly it has really brought in terms of USEFUL PRODUCT in the past decade, because search is DEMONSTRABLY inferior to what it was in the past (which is enshitification, not innovation), and Google Play services are just a walled garden pretending to be open by comparison with apple's white-plastic-dystopia.

The only thing it's really invested in, is in new and increasingly awful ways to fuck over users of their platform for profit. (The a-fore mentioned Grey and Illegal practices I mentioned)

EU regulation is doing EXACTLY what it is supposed to be doing, and Google needs to be FUCKING TOLD THIS, VERY VERY FUCKING PUBLICLY.

Sadly, our regulators here are so bought and paid for by these trolls, that such a missive will be a very long day coming, but hopefully EU stands firm in actually fucking protecting their citizenry, as opposed to the fucking gilded age horseshit we have over here in the states about these matters.

If a Canadian engineering firm designs something to be built in America, nothing crosses the border but information. Specifications one way, blueprints flow the other. The work is taxed in the country of sale, where the customers are. It's always been that way, on both sides.

This is just a computer doing some work in America (and we all know the actual computer may be in Sweden), work that is sold as a service by Americans, to Canadians. It's no different than the specs and blueprints. A query is sent to America, services are performed, results are sent back to the customer in Canada.

And it's a friggin' THREE PERCENT TAX. God, quit whining. You got away with no-tax for years, and never should have.

Why use chrome when you can use an actually good browser with a proper ad blocker

They likely are stealing personal data and selling it to marketing companies, but the absurdly overpriced cloud storage is free money too. You could buy a 10TB HDD for $100 and use it for 5 years for an annual cost of $20/yr plus about $20 power cost, or you could pay MS for 1TB of cloud storage for $100/yr or $500 for 1/10th the storage and significantly worse performance.

It's pretty likely that if you use your storage for an encrypted container you're going to get banned too, so the cost is even higher when you realize everything is duplicated with other users.

The requirements are arbitrary. Windows 11 doesn't require memory protection unless it's on an intel processor, and it doesn't matter if the implementation is broken. Windows 11 also requires these security features to be available but doesn't require signed drivers to be compatible with them so it's highly likely that even if your system meets all the enhanced security requirements, they'll need to be disabled due to bad hardware or incompatible drivers.

None of this rules out malicious or fraudulent intent. It's possible that the arbitrary requirements are being driven because some beancounter has guessed that new computer sales kickbacks will earn them more than direct retail license sales.

Sounds like cope.

The next 18 months will bring wonders and horrors, the timeline is open but the conclusion is the same.

Intelligence will be commoditized.

Nobody wants to wear shit on their face or have another device to charge.

Money down the drain, but itâ(TM)ll be funny to watch again.

The best intel I got was from David Roberts "Volts" podcast, where he had on a genuine "China Expert" who has reported full-time on their business news for a long time. That guy pointed out that you can't get anything done in most provinces without appeasing the 'boss' of that province, generally the actual political head.

And a lot of those guys own coal mines, so you can't get your solar project approved without also putting in a coal plant. A lot of the power plants are solar with coal "backup", and a lot of those are barely turned on - just a few months of winter, say.

So, yes, they "build a coal plant every week" but at low capacity factors, so the coal usage can actually go down.

The metallurgical use is expected to decline sharply in the 2030s, even if no better process is found, simply because their building boom is over and a lot of it was for rebar.

I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.

Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually tossing of Macros that do database hits or invert pivot tables is just easier in Excel.

Thing is: IT Dept. HATED ALL THAT.

IT totally hated user programs of any kind, even when they were far more stable and reliable than their solutions. Even small ones that did one thing.

My solutions were always up for being replaced by some more-difficult usage of their Big Solutions, like PeopleSoft or the Formark Document Management system. Only the fact that they were so slow to deliver - by the time they'd started the project in earnest, the business needs would have changed; I'd adapt my Excel macro solution in a few days, and they'd be back to square one on a year-long process - kept my solutions going for years.

So, the bad news is that you won't be able to do some of the cool power-user solutions with Calc that you could with Excel; the good news is that your IT department will be happy about that.

They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.

Meat and Dairy aren't being overproduced or overconsumed, even if they have risks, they are standing against the biggest problems facing world health. Dieticians might be asking people to replace meat and dairy with asparagus and quinoa but people are fat and malnourished because they're eating too much corn and other low nutrition density, high calorie foods.

This stands as a good reminder that if your assumption is that everyone else is wrong there's a good chance it's actually you.

It gets a lot worse when you realize that state propaganda operations can greatly maximize on this.

You are quite correct that this is very old news (Cambridge Analytica was how many years ago now?) and that state propagandists have been using this for years now (I seem to recall the last TWO presidential elections being heavily influenced by a FUCKING RAFT of state misinformation campaigns by multiple foreign nations, and even some domestic thinktank operations).

I agree that the technology itself is not directly harmful. If it was kept inside word processors as advanced text prediction, or advanced grammar checking or something, it would be a fine, safe, and legitimate use of what it really is-- however, Money Talks, and if the empowered-and-unscrupulous demographic out there can further increase their grifting, *THEY FUCKING WILL*.

Sometimes it's important to understand and appreciate why we cannot have nice things.

Usually, those reasons revolve around the existence and activities of such people, and how cozy they are with government.

The baloney detection kit has never been more essential to install in children.

Unfortunately, this has been actively stymied by certain political groups (on both sides of the aisle, for different reasons), and almost nobody comes equipped with one, "Because its easier!"

Humanity is doomed.

It COULD (in theory, at least) get directly cabbaged up by something like ReactOS though.

MIT allows re-licensing under new terms (GPL Primacy), IIRC.

Whether or not ReactOS is .... Mature enough.... (giggle)... to accept the newly opened code as a viable POSIX subsystem provider is another matter entirely, however.

Still, Gift horses and mouths, and all that.

Unless, of course, you're giving $400,000,000 of airplane as a bribe to Trump.