In Canada "lack of intent" is not a defense against defamation. The possible defenses are:

• Truth: does not apply as the statement in question is agreed to be false.

• Fair comment: does not apply as the statement is clearly not presented as opinion but fact.

• Privilege: does not apply as this defense mainly covers public proceedings and this is not one.

• Responsible communication: this applies if the matter is considered of public interest, but it requires the defendant having exercised responsible diligence, which is in question in this case.

• Innocent dissemination: this also applies if the defendant didn't know of the defamatory nature of the information they disseminated and took prompt action to remove it, but requires the defendant not having been negligent when they did the dissemination, which is in question in this case.

TL;DR: IMHO in Canada a defamation case against Google would be pretty solid.

The EU has the EU framework for investment screening and individual State Members also typically have their own national mechanism to review and potentially block acquisitions in some circumstances.

I realized I might have been unclear in my post: with "go with Exoscale" I don't mean merely selecting them as provider, I mean in the context of investing state money into them to let them build up their infrastructure.

That's probably what is at least in part going to happen, but it's not as easy as it seems.

China has no issue in pouring whatever state aid they want to whatever company they want and have a much greater motivation to not rely on US infrastructure due to the hostility between the countries. The EU or EU State Members on the other side cannot just decide to e.g. "go with Exoscale" or whatever domestic provider because state aid in the EU is pretty strictly regulated: other companies would have the opportunity to sue such decision as Governments are not supposed to "pick winners", at least in normal circumstances.

What would need to happen first is for the EU to designate hyperscalers as a strategic industry, thus allowing an exception to the "state aid" regulations. I think there is broad consensus that the reliance on US infrastructure is an issue, but until recent times not that it's something that needs to be addressed urgently due to the relatively friendly relationship between US and EU and the existence of alternative measures that can mitigate and control risk.

In more recent times that "friendly relationship" seem to have gone south, so it's perfectly possible the EU will accelerate towards a strategy of independence in the future including putting into practice a coordinated EU-level strategic industry designation and investments in domestic providers.

Depends. The case in the OP is copyright infringement for commercial use, which is typically considered more serious than personal use. Copyright infringement for personal use is usually a civil matter, whereas copyright infringement for commercial use can be criminal.

Furthermore, in some jurisdictions downloading movies and music for personal use is actually completely legal.

Good things can still be abused and still need some form of regulation to not degenerate from their original goodness due to exploitation.

Immigration should be supported if local workers cannot or are unwilling to provide what is required at a reasonable wage, not to lower wages by importing cheap labor where local workers at the appropriate wage would be available.

The issue is that even "domestic" goods typically have parts sourced through imports, so you will pay a hidden "tariff tax" on most products anyway.

They main difference is transparency: with those taxes is far more easy to figure out exactly how much money goes into them out of your pockets. With tariffs you don't really know actually. There is a reason Trump threatened retaliation against Amazon when it was even only suggested they might make the tariff portion of the consumer price transparent to the consumer.

A sales tax would be unable to finance the government unless ridiculous cuts to the government's budget are made. DOGE tried that and failed miserably, so I don't see it happening any time soon.

The issue is that a high enough sales tax would drive tax evasion and require significant expenses in controls and enforcement. If you want such a high tax the only realistic option would be to switch to VAT, which has a built-in cross-check mechanism making evasion easier to control. It is otherwise functionally equivalent to a sales tax of equal magnitude, but due to the cross-checks it can be made much higher effectively as the EU and other VAT countries demonstrate.

That kind of "domestic industry" based on manufacturing is either going 2 ways: driven with super-cheap labor, or driven by automation. The former is not suitable for a first-world country like the US, whereas the latter is where things are going to go more likely, with more advanced manufacturers already having basically fully automated manufacturing facilities in operation.

Manufacturing as large employment sector in first world country has been on the way of the dodo for quite some time by now and I doubt there will be any other destination in the future, regardless of what happens with tariffs.

If you are talking SDR content 200 nits is about right. A peak brightness in the thousands is only relevant for HDR content, where that kind of brightness will only appear for a very small amount of time in a very small portion of the screen. The overall brightness can still be quite low even with those peaks and HDR content is typically expected to be viewed in a dark room.

Viewing in a dark room is typically how HDR content is supposed to be viewed, that's why viewing it in a lit room makes it appear so dim. The peak brightness can be very high but only happens in a very small portion of the screen and for a short time.

SDR content is not going to reach anywhere near peak brightness so all these thousands of nits being advertised are irrelevant in that context.

The actual text in the Apple Developer Program License Agreement:

TL;DR: If you owe Apple money due to any agreement, Apple may deduct what you owe them from the money Apple would otherwise award you under the ADPLA.

Whether Apple can just "make up the number" without a court decision is probably dependent on jurisdiction. Whether they can just deduct the amount owed under an agreement to pay a debt from another agreement through a license agreement clause is also likely dependent on jurisdiction.

That's likely the "Founding Era" use of the terms. In modern terms it would read "That's not how things are supposed to work in a representative democracy (which we are) let alone a direct democracy (which we aren't)."

Said that, in the representative democracy system (read: Founding Era "republic"), elected representatives are by design independent during their term in office and only answer to the people at the time of election. This makes representatives effectively unaccountable during their term and only accountable at election time.

Depends on what your project is about. If you are doing a learning project there are good reasons to learn Java-based solutions, regardless of how better or worse other solutions are.

Java is a very mature language with a lot of career opportunities especially in large enterprises. If you get involved in the backend stack of a financial company there is a very good chance you will work with Java. If you are starting a project to learn something that might help you in your career and have a feeling your career might go in that direction, Java might be a good choice.

Note that using "plain" Java is almost never what you do: you typically use third-party libraries and often whole enterprise frameworks. Spring Boot is very popular in the industry and more recently Quarkus is gaining traction. Working with these frameworks is going to be very different than using "plain" Java as they introduce their own way of doing things, e.g. Spring Boot is very declarative in nature.

Even if you don't want to use those frameworks you are typically going to handle a lot of stuff through third-party libraries, e.g. Apache Commons is often used to simplify code dealing with IO, String operations etc... Very widespread in use as using "plain" Java to accomplish the same can feel too low level.

TL;DR: Java can be very relevant depending on career choice/opportunities, especially in some industries and using some particular frameworks and libraries.

Because cresting more money also has negative consequences, obviously.

They can, but why would they? The Federal Reserve makes money out of the swap line in forms of interest at effectively zero cost and zero risk (the recipient is a reputable National Bank which is not going to default any time soon). Why would the want to "forgive" it? It's basically more financial stability in the short term and actual making them money in the long term.

I stand corrected, but from the same article:

So back to the question "would Switzerland have survived without the swap line": yes they would.