Meh, not had your experience. HP's hardware is cheap, but my PC, my wife's PC, and wife's laptop (all HP) have turned out to be huge improvements on their various predecessors from Gateway, Acer, Lenovo, et al.
I just wish virtually all manufacturers, with the possible exception of Apple, who existed 20 years ago and had a reputation then for quality, weren't so much worse today (that's not a compliment aimed at Apple BTW, their hardware 15 years ago was pretty awful.)
That's a great idea. Remove the inadequate tool you've given them and replace it with something even more inadequate, rather than do your job.
I wish I could blame the user every time a cascading pile of decisions made by numerous third parties with little thought to the consequences cause that user to have a bad day.
Probably because downloading stuff overnight is so sufficiently niche that a marketing campaign wouldn't be worth spending the money on.
Free nights and weekends (not to mention tiered pricing based upon time periods) worked because it was when the networks were naturally idle, but a time when a lot of people wanted to make personal calls. The networks were more idle during these periods because businesses were (mostly) closed and so fewer people had to make calls, but that didn't mean subscribers didn't want to talk to friends and family, it's just they couldn't justify the costs.
The networks were even more idle during the periods you're now talking about because people neither had to make calls, nor wanted to, but the operators didn't make them even cheaper because there was no point.
The number of people who want to download huge files for offline use and who are willing to stay up until a particular time of night to start the download is similarly tiny,
In fact, the number of people who download huge files, period, is tiny. Want to know why so many people are now routinely breaking the bandwidth cap? Look at Roku, the Amazon Streaming Stick, and SmartTVs.
You certainly can contrive situations where that happens. They are relatively few and far between though. Most people who've told me that they just cannot live without their car in the UK have made a combination of certain choices, living far away from their employer because they have a car, and exaggeration of the circumstances they're currently in.
I've lived all over Britain, Oxford, Reading, Aylesbury (urgh), Norwich, Leeds, and Milford Haven (double urgh) to name a few. Only the latter I'd argue came close to US styles of mandatory driving. And even there driving was not mandatory. I didn't drive, I used a bicycle and the public transport that existed.
Coming to the US was an utter shock as a result. In most parts of the US, even a bicycle isn't going to get you very far. There are no urban centers, buildings are deliberately spaced far apart (imagine walking 1,000 feet and passing 5 stores. That's typical. The space in between? "Free" parking.)
In the US, not owning a car outside of a small number of decent cities means you're no longer able to support yourself. By all means tell me that your current job and current home means a car is more optimal, but tell me seriously that if you didn't have a car, you wouldn't be able to have a job capable of supporting yourself. That's not true for anyone in Britain. That's true for 90% of Americans.
In most of the UK, a car isn't merely unessential, it's a liability, with no space on the roads and great difficulty parking it. On the odd occasion a city's bus system is subadequate, a bicycle is almost always a superior way to get around compared to a car.
British people bitch and moan about transit, sure. That's partially because it's transit, and like the weather, the post office, and TV, it's something everyone bitches and moans about regardless of quality; but it's also partially because that's what British people do, about everything.
I've only been in one place, a part of rural Wales, where a car was probably something you'd want, but even so I didn't need one, I used bicycles and rail and the occasional bus to get where I wanted to go.
It helps that driving is entirely optional in the UK, which has an excellent transit system. As a result, driving is considered a luxury, and it's legitimate to crack down hard on people who drive badly.
We need to make driving entirely voluntary (it isn't in most of the US) before we can legitimately remove someone's license.
I know that's an unpopular view, but you're literally destroying someone's ability to support themselves by banning them from driving in most of the US. That needs to change, the right way is to end bad zoning and to re-introduce public transport where possible, but until that's done (and we're nowhere near that) revoking driver's licenses is reprehensible and evil.
I'm pretty sure there's more than one he excludes;-)
As it is, he's saying he thinks it's more than likely there's a "creator" of some sort, a (sentient?) entity or group thereof living outside of this universe that created this one. However, that, by itself, doesn't confirm Christianity, for two reasons:
1. Christianity is an extremely specific case of "Some entity or group thereof living outside of this universe created this one." If you see a cat walking across the road, and I explain that it's on a journey to rescue its kittens and their mother from maker of fur coats, aided by an invisible mouse and rough but loveable dog, and your friend says "No, that's absurd, its owners moved, and left the cat behind, and now he's on a journey to find them", and another says "No, the cat is crossing the road to get a carton of cigarettes from the convenience store across the road" (and so on), the chances of any of us being "right" simply because we observed a cat, that we know nothing about, crossing the road, is pretty low.
2. It doesn't explain the school kid's objection to Christianity, that is, "Who created God"? Christianity just says "Oh, he just is / he's the creator / nobody created him", but Tyson is referring to theories that say "Well, the things that created us might themselves be living in a simulation, there's just no way to know." - which, BTW, is an explicit rejection.
Finally, it's worth noting that Christianity is more than the theory the universe was created by some homophobic violent game-playing asshole (American version). It also requires we believe a particular set of stories about what happened in that universe and how that creator interacts with it. It also, and this is kinda important, implies we have some duty to worship such a creator.
This is not to say I agree with Tyson here. I just don't see his theory of everything being as close to Pat Robertson's, or the Ayatollah Khomeini's, as you do.
The lightbulbs cartel has nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with economies of scale and businesses colluding.
Case 2: cell phone modems. This technical patent expired around '99 and those companies selling beepers upgraded to selling cell phones.
Nope. There wasn't some big move to use data over analog networks in 1999, if ever. Indeed, in the very late nineties and early 21st Century the digital standards started to take over in the US making analog devices obsolete and making data services widely available. Companies making beepers moved over to other markets because beepers, in a world of SMS messaging, were obsolete. They never, to my knowledge, started making mobile modems.
In Europe, where GSM had been standard for a while, most mobile manufacturers were making phones that supported data and messaging since about 1995. Again, beepers became pretty much non-existent at that time.
Case 3: K-cups
Keurig is hardly sitting on the technology. In addition to building K-Cup coffee machines themselves they've been aggressively licensing the technology too.
Case 4: 3D printing - the entire industry kick started in 2013 once the patents expired , and then in 2014 when most of the rest expired
Possible, I don't know enough about 3D printing.
Case 5: Kodak and the digital photography patent
Any evidence that they sat on this? Kodak was an early pioneer of digital photography, producing some of the first mass market digital cameras - starting in the mid-1990s which was about the time digital photography could become mass market (eg true-color computer monitors and hard drives had finally become de-facto standards on most personal computers.) Their problem with the technology wasn't that they didn't adopt it or tried to suppress it, it was that they couldn't adapt to it - that is, Kodak couldn't find a business model for digital photography while their chemical business declined to (near) irrelevency..
case 6: home telephones: At&t used to lease telephones to people who paid for a home phone - thats why we all grew up with a phone that all looked the same in the 40's 50's 60's 70's and 80's. In the 80's however they were sued that it was unfair to hold the patent and make people pay for the phone... then all these new shaped phones came out... and the cords got longer which was great.. then they got tangled... which was bad
Absolutely nothing to do with patents. Also the rules requiring AT&T open up their networks to third party devices came in the 1960s, not 1980s. Most people still rented the phones because of ease (and the fact the phones were built like tanks), not because of "patents".
While it's arguable that "someone" "invented" an everlasting lightbulb, what is true is that the industry organized into a cartel in the early 20th Century and specifically banned their members from producing longer lasting lightbulbs, something that is relatively easy (albeit at the expense of efficiency.)
So did they forget to tell their own programmers? (This is their bug, not our's. Oh, and BTW, did I tell you that if an end user manually fixes the problem, a cron job installed by Chrome automatically reverts it to default-architectures version?)
Chrome comes as a.deb (so it opens by default in a nice GUI tool that installs it with one click) that adds and enables its own repo, so there's always that.
Of course, Chrome's version is also broken (it doesn't bother to specify architecture, which means everyone using a combination 32 bit + 64 bit Ubuntu has lately started to get errors whenever they apt-get update because Chrome isn't available for ix86-32 any more. But that's another issue.)
My Dish Network bill is about 60% of the price offered by Comcast for roughly the same thing, so if they're colluding in some way to fix prices, they're not doing a very good job.
The reality is your anger is misplaced. Cable costs a lot because of the pricing structures of content providers, not so much the cable operators. Most of us would be happy with TBS, TNT, USA, perhaps a sports channel, MTV, and the antenna channels. The cable companies literally cannot offer that package, they're obliged to tack four or five additional channels on for each of those from the same content provider, because that content provider only offers them in a bundle.
Does that mean Comcast is innocent? No, their customer service sucks, as does their selling practices. But if Comcast were to be reformed tomorrow, banned from offering special offers (that expire midway through your contract, etc) and contracts, your cable rates would probably still stay steady at a relatively high amount of money, more than satellite because the latter doesn't cost as much to provide.
TL;DR: Just because Comcast is dishonest and shadowy and generally sucky doesn't mean they're to blame for everything that makes cable TV in general suck. Their high prices are the fault of Disney ABC, NBC Universal, Viacom, et al. As is the fact you may have 100 channels, but there's never anything good on...
In some parts of country that may once have been true. It's not true now and it's complete nonsense anyway. Most of us have at least two, sometimes more, TV providers. Over here, at minimum, I can think of Comcast, at&t, and Dish Network. There's probably a microwave provider as well that I'm missing.
Because this has nothing to do with CableCards? I mean, I know the headline is kinda basic and could be read as meaning they're finally providing some alternative to STBs, but what the headline actually meant is explained in the summary, which is talking about Comcast offering itself on some IPTV platforms such as Roku.
I think the idea is that snaps replace.debs, which in fairness can be awkward to install outside of a repository if they have dependencies, and can break things if they don't integrate with the packages already installed.
How it does that isn't fully explained. The articles I've read imply that you could, for example, use a snap to install the latest version of GNOME on an older LTS release of Ubuntu, but doesn't go into the consequences (would both GNOMEs be available? Are they using something like Linux Containers to do this?)
The bottom line though appears to be that someone distributing proprietary software (or software just precompiled to make things easier) no longer has to either maintain a repo or offer.debs to be installed with a long list of instructions.
Outside of a professional context, where third party (and second party - other employees, etc) support is critical, I have no problems using Ubuntu Server. It's an extremely easy to put together, easily used, distribution.
As for the desktop, well... I use Mint at home, which actually is Ubuntu with an added repo that overrides some packages. If and when Cinnamon becomes a first class citizen on Ubuntu I'll probably dump the Mint part of Mint. I don't particularly like Unity, but I don't understand the hatred of it either. It's not my thing, and I dislike the "tap Windows key by accident" => wonder why entire computer has frozen => after 10-20 seconds suddenly an unwanted and not terribly usable menu thing appears in top left corner thing, but I've seen much, much, worse. GNOME 1 anyone?
Fry? He's a comedian that rose to fame during the mid-1980s in Britain where he partnered with Hugh Laurie (more recently of "House" fame) and worked with Ben Elton and other comedians in the contemporary "Alternative Comedy" circuit, first coming to the public attention on "Saturday Live", a UK alt-com counter part to America's SNL. In addition to his (and Laurie's) show "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" he's famous for his roles in the Blackadder TV series.
In the 21st Century he's been less prominent. He's bi-polar, and unfortunately his mental illness has probably contributed to some unfortunate clashes on social media, including some - ill advised and somewhat ironic considering his alt-com origins - complaints about "political correctness" including an attack on rape victims which he's since walked back.
I think he's a decent guy, but not one that's comfortable with the way media and "what it means to be a celebrity" works in 2016.
I'm not justifying the action in any way, but be aware that regulators tend to look at market power when determining whether a business's marketing violates competition regulations. Coke and Pepsi are more or less equals, so Coke discriminating against a store that sells Pepsi isn't something that necessarily violates monopoly laws.
I suspect the logic here is that Android with Google's services is installed on virtually everything that isn't Apple. Moreover, Google's middleware with Android is the only real choice for mobile phone manufacturers as iOS isn't available to them, and nothing else is taken seriously by the market. Therefore, an argument can be made that Google has market power, and has to tread more carefully than other businesses when determining when its products can be used.
I suspect some of these are the EU overreaching whereas others Google could comply with relatively easily. Google can drop the search page and bundled software requirement, allowing manufacturers to license just Play Services and the Play Store, which would be enough as far as most end users are concerned.
The question is whether Google wants to fight what, to many of us, is a pointless war by both sides with some negative consequences when it comes to motivating private, profit seeking, businesses to contribute to free software.
Now hold on. No mainstream politicians are proposing banning any of those - restricting, yeah, but banning? Even Hillary Clinton isn't planning to take your guns away, and Mayor Bloomberg merely wanted to make it inconvenient to buy ridiculously large sodas. Smoking is still legal and largely unrestricted except that you can't any longer make your habit a problem for others by, say, smoking in public places - and, one hopes, vaping is about to make that entire problem a non-issue anyway.
As for porn: objective observers can point at specific problems with all three of the things you mention (smoking causes cancer, sugar causes obesity and other health issues, armed toddlers kill more people than terrorists, etc) whereas whether porn actually harms viewers (or helps them) is still open to debate.
Come to think of it, it would be amusing if the British government confiscated the private pension payments of Americans living in the UK. I mean, those are blatant IRA contributions - and as such obviously terrorist in nature...
Why not? Since when has a certain terror group (which doesn't even call itself ISIS) have a monopoly on that sequence of letters? Just for reference, I know of at least one school called the Isis Middle School, and it's in Oxford, England (or was, apparently it closed a few years ago, but not due to any terror ties...)
Blocking funds because those four letters appear in the description is utterly absurd.
They're still here, and a sizable number of Youtube channels are podcasts in all but the name. I don't understand the popularity either given the number of cases I've tried to listen to the latter, with the first minute being occupied with nothing but "Uh, so, uh, welcome to, uh, another episode of the, uh..."
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, not had your experience. HP's hardware is cheap, but my PC, my wife's PC, and wife's laptop (all HP) have turned out to be huge improvements on their various predecessors from Gateway, Acer, Lenovo, et al.
I just wish virtually all manufacturers, with the possible exception of Apple, who existed 20 years ago and had a reputation then for quality, weren't so much worse today (that's not a compliment aimed at Apple BTW, their hardware 15 years ago was pretty awful.)
That's a great idea. Remove the inadequate tool you've given them and replace it with something even more inadequate, rather than do your job.
I wish I could blame the user every time a cascading pile of decisions made by numerous third parties with little thought to the consequences cause that user to have a bad day.
Probably because downloading stuff overnight is so sufficiently niche that a marketing campaign wouldn't be worth spending the money on.
Free nights and weekends (not to mention tiered pricing based upon time periods) worked because it was when the networks were naturally idle, but a time when a lot of people wanted to make personal calls. The networks were more idle during these periods because businesses were (mostly) closed and so fewer people had to make calls, but that didn't mean subscribers didn't want to talk to friends and family, it's just they couldn't justify the costs.
The networks were even more idle during the periods you're now talking about because people neither had to make calls, nor wanted to, but the operators didn't make them even cheaper because there was no point.
The number of people who want to download huge files for offline use and who are willing to stay up until a particular time of night to start the download is similarly tiny,
In fact, the number of people who download huge files, period, is tiny. Want to know why so many people are now routinely breaking the bandwidth cap? Look at Roku, the Amazon Streaming Stick, and SmartTVs.
You certainly can contrive situations where that happens. They are relatively few and far between though. Most people who've told me that they just cannot live without their car in the UK have made a combination of certain choices, living far away from their employer because they have a car, and exaggeration of the circumstances they're currently in.
I've lived all over Britain, Oxford, Reading, Aylesbury (urgh), Norwich, Leeds, and Milford Haven (double urgh) to name a few. Only the latter I'd argue came close to US styles of mandatory driving. And even there driving was not mandatory. I didn't drive, I used a bicycle and the public transport that existed.
Coming to the US was an utter shock as a result. In most parts of the US, even a bicycle isn't going to get you very far. There are no urban centers, buildings are deliberately spaced far apart (imagine walking 1,000 feet and passing 5 stores. That's typical. The space in between? "Free" parking.)
In the US, not owning a car outside of a small number of decent cities means you're no longer able to support yourself. By all means tell me that your current job and current home means a car is more optimal, but tell me seriously that if you didn't have a car, you wouldn't be able to have a job capable of supporting yourself. That's not true for anyone in Britain. That's true for 90% of Americans.
In most of the UK, a car isn't merely unessential, it's a liability, with no space on the roads and great difficulty parking it. On the odd occasion a city's bus system is subadequate, a bicycle is almost always a superior way to get around compared to a car.
British people bitch and moan about transit, sure. That's partially because it's transit, and like the weather, the post office, and TV, it's something everyone bitches and moans about regardless of quality; but it's also partially because that's what British people do, about everything.
I've only been in one place, a part of rural Wales, where a car was probably something you'd want, but even so I didn't need one, I used bicycles and rail and the occasional bus to get where I wanted to go.
It helps that driving is entirely optional in the UK, which has an excellent transit system. As a result, driving is considered a luxury, and it's legitimate to crack down hard on people who drive badly.
We need to make driving entirely voluntary (it isn't in most of the US) before we can legitimately remove someone's license.
I know that's an unpopular view, but you're literally destroying someone's ability to support themselves by banning them from driving in most of the US. That needs to change, the right way is to end bad zoning and to re-introduce public transport where possible, but until that's done (and we're nowhere near that) revoking driver's licenses is reprehensible and evil.
I'm pretty sure there's more than one he excludes ;-)
As it is, he's saying he thinks it's more than likely there's a "creator" of some sort, a (sentient?) entity or group thereof living outside of this universe that created this one. However, that, by itself, doesn't confirm Christianity, for two reasons:
1. Christianity is an extremely specific case of "Some entity or group thereof living outside of this universe created this one." If you see a cat walking across the road, and I explain that it's on a journey to rescue its kittens and their mother from maker of fur coats, aided by an invisible mouse and rough but loveable dog, and your friend says "No, that's absurd, its owners moved, and left the cat behind, and now he's on a journey to find them", and another says "No, the cat is crossing the road to get a carton of cigarettes from the convenience store across the road" (and so on), the chances of any of us being "right" simply because we observed a cat, that we know nothing about, crossing the road, is pretty low.
2. It doesn't explain the school kid's objection to Christianity, that is, "Who created God"? Christianity just says "Oh, he just is / he's the creator / nobody created him", but Tyson is referring to theories that say "Well, the things that created us might themselves be living in a simulation, there's just no way to know." - which, BTW, is an explicit rejection.
Finally, it's worth noting that Christianity is more than the theory the universe was created by some homophobic violent game-playing asshole (American version). It also requires we believe a particular set of stories about what happened in that universe and how that creator interacts with it. It also, and this is kinda important, implies we have some duty to worship such a creator.
This is not to say I agree with Tyson here. I just don't see his theory of everything being as close to Pat Robertson's, or the Ayatollah Khomeini's, as you do.
The lightbulbs cartel has nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with economies of scale and businesses colluding.
Nope. There wasn't some big move to use data over analog networks in 1999, if ever. Indeed, in the very late nineties and early 21st Century the digital standards started to take over in the US making analog devices obsolete and making data services widely available. Companies making beepers moved over to other markets because beepers, in a world of SMS messaging, were obsolete. They never, to my knowledge, started making mobile modems.
In Europe, where GSM had been standard for a while, most mobile manufacturers were making phones that supported data and messaging since about 1995. Again, beepers became pretty much non-existent at that time.
Keurig is hardly sitting on the technology. In addition to building K-Cup coffee machines themselves they've been aggressively licensing the technology too.
Possible, I don't know enough about 3D printing.
Any evidence that they sat on this? Kodak was an early pioneer of digital photography, producing some of the first mass market digital cameras - starting in the mid-1990s which was about the time digital photography could become mass market (eg true-color computer monitors and hard drives had finally become de-facto standards on most personal computers.) Their problem with the technology wasn't that they didn't adopt it or tried to suppress it, it was that they couldn't adapt to it - that is, Kodak couldn't find a business model for digital photography while their chemical business declined to (near) irrelevency..
Absolutely nothing to do with patents. Also the rules requiring AT&T open up their networks to third party devices came in the 1960s, not 1980s. Most people still rented the phones because of ease (and the fact the phones were built like tanks), not because of "patents".
While it's arguable that "someone" "invented" an everlasting lightbulb, what is true is that the industry organized into a cartel in the early 20th Century and specifically banned their members from producing longer lasting lightbulbs, something that is relatively easy (albeit at the expense of efficiency.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So did they forget to tell their own programmers? (This is their bug, not our's. Oh, and BTW, did I tell you that if an end user manually fixes the problem, a cron job installed by Chrome automatically reverts it to default-architectures version?)
Chrome comes as a .deb (so it opens by default in a nice GUI tool that installs it with one click) that adds and enables its own repo, so there's always that.
Of course, Chrome's version is also broken (it doesn't bother to specify architecture, which means everyone using a combination 32 bit + 64 bit Ubuntu has lately started to get errors whenever they apt-get update because Chrome isn't available for ix86-32 any more. But that's another issue.)
My Dish Network bill is about 60% of the price offered by Comcast for roughly the same thing, so if they're colluding in some way to fix prices, they're not doing a very good job.
The reality is your anger is misplaced. Cable costs a lot because of the pricing structures of content providers, not so much the cable operators. Most of us would be happy with TBS, TNT, USA, perhaps a sports channel, MTV, and the antenna channels. The cable companies literally cannot offer that package, they're obliged to tack four or five additional channels on for each of those from the same content provider, because that content provider only offers them in a bundle.
Does that mean Comcast is innocent? No, their customer service sucks, as does their selling practices. But if Comcast were to be reformed tomorrow, banned from offering special offers (that expire midway through your contract, etc) and contracts, your cable rates would probably still stay steady at a relatively high amount of money, more than satellite because the latter doesn't cost as much to provide.
TL;DR: Just because Comcast is dishonest and shadowy and generally sucky doesn't mean they're to blame for everything that makes cable TV in general suck. Their high prices are the fault of Disney ABC, NBC Universal, Viacom, et al. As is the fact you may have 100 channels, but there's never anything good on...
In some parts of country that may once have been true. It's not true now and it's complete nonsense anyway. Most of us have at least two, sometimes more, TV providers. Over here, at minimum, I can think of Comcast, at&t, and Dish Network. There's probably a microwave provider as well that I'm missing.
Because this has nothing to do with CableCards? I mean, I know the headline is kinda basic and could be read as meaning they're finally providing some alternative to STBs, but what the headline actually meant is explained in the summary, which is talking about Comcast offering itself on some IPTV platforms such as Roku.
Thanks! I'll upgrade my "pure" Ubuntu system and see how well it works.
I think the idea is that snaps replace .debs, which in fairness can be awkward to install outside of a repository if they have dependencies, and can break things if they don't integrate with the packages already installed.
How it does that isn't fully explained. The articles I've read imply that you could, for example, use a snap to install the latest version of GNOME on an older LTS release of Ubuntu, but doesn't go into the consequences (would both GNOMEs be available? Are they using something like Linux Containers to do this?)
The bottom line though appears to be that someone distributing proprietary software (or software just precompiled to make things easier) no longer has to either maintain a repo or offer .debs to be installed with a long list of instructions.
Outside of a professional context, where third party (and second party - other employees, etc) support is critical, I have no problems using Ubuntu Server. It's an extremely easy to put together, easily used, distribution.
As for the desktop, well... I use Mint at home, which actually is Ubuntu with an added repo that overrides some packages. If and when Cinnamon becomes a first class citizen on Ubuntu I'll probably dump the Mint part of Mint. I don't particularly like Unity, but I don't understand the hatred of it either. It's not my thing, and I dislike the "tap Windows key by accident" => wonder why entire computer has frozen => after 10-20 seconds suddenly an unwanted and not terribly usable menu thing appears in top left corner thing, but I've seen much, much, worse. GNOME 1 anyone?
Fry? He's a comedian that rose to fame during the mid-1980s in Britain where he partnered with Hugh Laurie (more recently of "House" fame) and worked with Ben Elton and other comedians in the contemporary "Alternative Comedy" circuit, first coming to the public attention on "Saturday Live", a UK alt-com counter part to America's SNL. In addition to his (and Laurie's) show "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" he's famous for his roles in the Blackadder TV series.
In the 21st Century he's been less prominent. He's bi-polar, and unfortunately his mental illness has probably contributed to some unfortunate clashes on social media, including some - ill advised and somewhat ironic considering his alt-com origins - complaints about "political correctness" including an attack on rape victims which he's since walked back.
I think he's a decent guy, but not one that's comfortable with the way media and "what it means to be a celebrity" works in 2016.
I'm not justifying the action in any way, but be aware that regulators tend to look at market power when determining whether a business's marketing violates competition regulations. Coke and Pepsi are more or less equals, so Coke discriminating against a store that sells Pepsi isn't something that necessarily violates monopoly laws.
I suspect the logic here is that Android with Google's services is installed on virtually everything that isn't Apple. Moreover, Google's middleware with Android is the only real choice for mobile phone manufacturers as iOS isn't available to them, and nothing else is taken seriously by the market. Therefore, an argument can be made that Google has market power, and has to tread more carefully than other businesses when determining when its products can be used.
I suspect some of these are the EU overreaching whereas others Google could comply with relatively easily. Google can drop the search page and bundled software requirement, allowing manufacturers to license just Play Services and the Play Store, which would be enough as far as most end users are concerned.
The question is whether Google wants to fight what, to many of us, is a pointless war by both sides with some negative consequences when it comes to motivating private, profit seeking, businesses to contribute to free software.
Now hold on. No mainstream politicians are proposing banning any of those - restricting, yeah, but banning? Even Hillary Clinton isn't planning to take your guns away, and Mayor Bloomberg merely wanted to make it inconvenient to buy ridiculously large sodas. Smoking is still legal and largely unrestricted except that you can't any longer make your habit a problem for others by, say, smoking in public places - and, one hopes, vaping is about to make that entire problem a non-issue anyway.
As for porn: objective observers can point at specific problems with all three of the things you mention (smoking causes cancer, sugar causes obesity and other health issues, armed toddlers kill more people than terrorists, etc) whereas whether porn actually harms viewers (or helps them) is still open to debate.
Come to think of it, it would be amusing if the British government confiscated the private pension payments of Americans living in the UK. I mean, those are blatant IRA contributions - and as such obviously terrorist in nature...
True, Empire Strikes Back, Batman Returns, and the Wrath of Kahn all sucked.
Why not? Since when has a certain terror group (which doesn't even call itself ISIS) have a monopoly on that sequence of letters? Just for reference, I know of at least one school called the Isis Middle School, and it's in Oxford, England (or was, apparently it closed a few years ago, but not due to any terror ties...)
Blocking funds because those four letters appear in the description is utterly absurd.
They're still here, and a sizable number of Youtube channels are podcasts in all but the name. I don't understand the popularity either given the number of cases I've tried to listen to the latter, with the first minute being occupied with nothing but "Uh, so, uh, welcome to, uh, another episode of the, uh..."