Some costs shouldnt be cut.

Maybe dont store your (our) data in the cloud - run your own servers, you know, like how you used to do before you outsourced to cut costs.

Clearly you've never had to pull out onto a busy fast highway from a standstill.

Talking over the start and end of a track prevented the 20th century version of ripping a track by recording the full uninterrupted version of the radio then maybe giving away/selling copies and not buying the record in a shop. Obviously a lot of us would record it anyway and didn't give a stuff about a bit of noise on the start and end but many people did.

Android is a bit more than a UI. It has all the under the hood plumbing and drivers to connect to the baseband chip to make calls, data, sms etc.

The UK government doing IT precurement hasn't exactly turned out grand in the past either.

I live in europe too and we as a family would be screwed without our car. PT and taxis are NOT a replacement for the frequency and places we visit. In fact if we used taxis we'd have paid out the same price as a 2nd hand car within a year.

Make sure your contracts are a fixed price and the vendor has to suck up any overrun costs. Oddly these sorts of projects generally tend to come in on time and budget.

A personal car isn't "hassle" any more than owning your own home is hassle compared to renting. Rental cars are zero use if you have kids or pets, commute to work by car or need to go on long trips fairly often.

And? A minority use case isn't going to make car ownership redundant plus in most european cities there's decent public transport.

"Probably the person who thinks that always had a personal driver"

And definately isn't a parent of young kids and neither does he own a pet. The amount of stuff you often need to take - not to mention child seats - and the mess they can make in a car means some taxis won't transport the former and most won't do the latter.

... its just a taxi with the driver sitting elsewhere. How is that going to make car ownership redundant exactly?

The sort of people who keep making this stupid type of claim must be people who've never owned a car and know just how damn useful it is to literally go out the door and get into it, no booking, no waiting, no "we'll be with you in 30 mins", no "sorry we can't wait for you", no "sorry, that destination wasn't on your booking list".

"is leading to a worse experience for Apple PROFITS in the EU"

He won't be in office forever. Its just a matter of waiting.

Carbon sequestration currently doesn't even get close to dealing with the CO2 we release on a daily basis. The chances of it sequestering all that AND start pulling excess out of the air too in any forseable time frame is for the birds I'm afraid.

No, I don't know what the solution is but I'm afraid its not that, however it would be possible to seed small shallow parts of the ocean close to the shore with carbonates to reduce the acidity and preserve the life there though it would need to be done where ocean currents don't move the water away too fast so the seeding needs to be re-done.