Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.
The EU's regulatory stance on antitrust does not require a monopoly, it requires a dominant position in a market meeting use of certain criteria marked as abuse. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... From there when they tell a company they are breaching criteria for abuse and the company doesn't change the EU issues according fines.
As for "why" this is against the law, I assume that more to mean "why did the EU make this against the law" (since the other answer is simply "because the EU law was written as so". The arguments are largely the same as for why monopolies should not be allowed to operate: to ensure free market competition by preventing a few dominating companies from unduly pressuring the market. There are, of course, some who feel the freest market is one with no governmental regulations at all but they are not the majority (at least in the EU).
They do, in several areas, at least according to the definitions of EU law. This may not meet your individual definition of dominant position of course (e.g., one might hold you need 50% market share in certain markets to be dominant, but the EU definition does not hold this requirement).
They also meet the definitions of a gatekeeper (as defined by the DMA) in several areas, which is the related law this fine actually came from.
Apple has always allowed anyone into their club. You have to pay dues and follow some strict (but non-discriminatory) rules, but the result was a place which people liked going to.
Analogies aside, the REAL question is whether Apple is entitled to charge money for access to their developer APIs. Or whether Apple is entitled to place software license terms upon use of their intellectual property, e.g. when you link against Apple libraries which are then compiled into your binary.
We get up in arms about GPL violations, but also want Apple to suck shit. I don't think it's right to want it both ways.
The people of EU decided it will be law that Apple must allow for alternate app distribution means - you must be able to side load and/or install alternate app marketplaces. That is the law, like how other countries have different laws for parental leave, for example.
The EU regulators have found that Apple has not complied with this law because it makes using alternate app marketplaces purposefully unattractive and burdonsome for both developers and users. EU is clamping down on Apple's 'malicious compliance'.
It's not malicious compliance. If you want to distribute binaries which contain Apple intellectual property, you need a license, and the EU is not in a position to force Apple to abandon their intellectual property rights.
I am a hard-core fan of the GPL and I recognise that the GPL license requires intellectual property rights in order to work. You want copyleft worth a damn? You need copyright. And that means you get copyright. Apple has intellectual property rights over their software and that doesn't give anyone else the right to "do whatever they want" with it.
If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software, that's an interesting argument to make. But cancelling it under a few rare circumstances when some software irritates you seems like the height of absurdity.
Ignoring at first whether limiting distribution license terms actually relates to abandoning IP rights outright, the local government is the one who defines what rights businesses operating in their jurisdiction have. This, however, does not actually give the EU the ability to force Apple to do anything, as you insist. Apple is able pull out of the market if they feel the market's regulations are too heavy handed, at which point they no longer need to comply with local law. What the foreign company would like to enforce only layers on under the restrictions of local law, not above it.
As for IP license rights over all other law, I think most people are in alignment with a circumstance basis (or, more succinctly, "local law has priority" basis). E.g. most are indeed happy to declare a software license claiming women are not allowed to distribute the software is invalid in the jurisdiction - a company's "IP rights" be damned over a person's human rights, as an example.
If the club owner wants to have a fancy seat at the nicest table in the restaurant, that's not discrimination. It's their club. They built it. Everyone knows they built it, and they can think whatever they like about that fancy seat. If they want a similarly fancy seat, they can build their own club.
(Analogies aside, while I understand their rationale, it was wrong for Apple to lump the likes of Spotify and Netflix within their in-app purchase umbrella. And I also find it hilarious how people think 30% is highway robbery when 10+ years ago it was widely regarded as a fantastic deal for developers.)
Is it true, I have heard, that ACARS messages are like as expensive as sending data to Hubble, and airlines hate how expensive it is (hence it is not a viable method of transmitting more volumes of more desired data, like position data, regularly etc.) but have no great alternative that they can develop to replace it?
There is a handy rule of thumb called the "rule of 12ths", used in seamanship / ocean navigation / tidal calculations (maybe it is used elsewhere too, this just happens to be where I recognize it from). I think it can apply to solar, seasons, etc. -- well, anything sinusoidally cyclical -- as a useful mental model:
If you divide half the phase of a cycle (peak to trough) into 6 hours duration or whatever appropriate unit, like 6 months, i.e. x-axis --
then going down from the top of the peak (or up from trough), the amount of y-axis change in each unit/hour is:
Hour (or month #): amount of change vs. peak-trough total (i.e. total = 2*A)
1: 1/12
2: 2/12
3: 3/12
4: 3/12
5: 2/12
6: 1/12
For us, the peak / trough are: June 21 to December 21, and the x-axis is 1 month units. And assuming maybe a 2 hour peak-to-trough difference in daylight time y-axis (depends on latitude you live of course), then each 1/12th equals 10 minutes.
So these days (late March) we are in the middle of the fastest decrease part, and each month we gain 30 minutes of daylight. Or, each day we are seeing sunset get pushed by like 1 minute.
Sorry, but I think that statement is an incorrect perception that you're falling victim to due to a statistical blip in high publicity aircraft incidents in the last ~2 months.
We live in the safest era of commercial airline travel in history. The rate of serious aircraft accidents is so low that safety researchers almost don't have real life incidents to study for new issues to fix. That is why the recent few incidents seem like such an anomaly.
Certain things still need to be improved of course, and the DCA crash brings to attention ATC staffing, etc. But to say that you're sick and tired of aircraft incidents like they're happening every month is a bit ridiculous.
Although my conclusion is the same as yours, that flying has never been safer, it has felt like longer than 2 months that the state of aviation safety has been under scrutiny. I feel like the Boeing situation recently has caused a lot of people to really assume the worst of the industry.
Again, I'm in aviation. I believe the data indicates it's safe as it's ever been. But I don't blame people for being concerned
Seeing video of a missing door in flight, sure no one died, the fatality statistics don't look any worse for it, but it sure erodes confidence in the system. The findings of the following investigation only made it that much worse.
I can see how when owning a building in a place like that, you might be tempted to say, "not even going to dig, don't want to know what we might find under there" that will cause your property to completely change value and control.
I wonder who takes the loss, in case suddenly your building can no longer be developed and is essentially state property (although owned by you).
It's still your property. Through the "polluter pays" principle you (the developer) may have to pay for the archaeological dig (which is, by it's nature destructive).
In many cases if the archaeological finds are mobile (eg coins, shields etc) you may be compensated for them by a government fund.
But digging down in that part of London you're always going to hit something Tudor, Medieval, Saxon or Roman. It would be priced in as part of the development.
If we believe in markets, we would have to believe that the risk is priced into the cost of the property, much like the risk of a lemon is priced into the cost of a used car.
If there's one thing to admire/observe about old advertisements or documents like this (aside from the cycling-specific content), it's how much in a previous age, people publicly put their names behind the content and claims. Company names, schedules, assertions of opinion/fact, signed with someone's actual name.
Not like some website where you hardly know what the name is supposed to mean, or who in virtual land you're submitting information and payment to.
This is a little bit of a layman's question but maybe someone is interested:
When people go searching for prime numbers / bitcoin with massive compute, I assume that there are huge libraries of "shortcuts" to reduce the searching space, like prime numbers only appear with certain patterns, or there are large "holes" in the number space that do not need to be searched, etc. (see videos e.g. about how prime numbers make spirals on the polar coord. system, etc). I.e. if you know these you can accelerate/reduce your search cost by orders of magnitude.
For whatever various encryption algorithm that people choose to test or attack (like this story), is there somewhere such libraries of "shortcuts" are kept and well known? To reduce the brute force search need?
And is the state of sharing these to the point that the encryption services are designed to avoid the shortcut vulnerabilities?
There exist certain classes of prime numbers that should not be used for some cryptographic operations because algorithms exist that reduce the computation required for factoring attacks. This more often applies to cases where smaller primes are applied. Sources for this king of knowledge are mathematics or cryptography textbooks.
For other cryptographic operations, almost any sufficiently large prime can be used. Even a 50% reduction on a computation that will take trillions of years, has no practical impact.
That's not really how it works. There aren't any noticeable patterns in prime numbers (besides trivial ones like they are all odd numbers) and they remain dense (no big gaps) even for very large numbers like what are used in RSA. The best algorithm for generating prime numbers is to just pick a really big random odd number and then test if it is prime, repeat until you find one.
Now, factoring large numbers is a separate thing. You don't brute force all the possible factors, that would be a really bad approach. Modern algorithms are called "sieves," this is a gross oversimplification but essentially they keep picking random numbers and computing relations between them until they come up with enough that have a certain property that you can combine them together to find one of the factors. It doesn't have anything to do with shortcuts or patterns or tricks, it is just a fundamental number theory algorithm.
Why is is against the law?
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