Okay, but (as per the article) the allegedly-“top” court that made the ruling, the European Union’s General Court (EGC), is not the same as the court that the lawsuit would be appealed to, the European Court of Justice (ECJ). How can the EGC be the “top” court if the ECJ is above it?

Besides, the bottom line is that saying “the top court ruled on this” strongly implies that it’s a final decision, but that’s not the case here. Regardless of the details of which court does what, that’s misleading and therefore clickbait. Don’t write headlines telling me it’s hopeless when there’s actually hope!

Wait, how is this a “top court” if the decision is still appealable? Seems like a clickbait headline to me.

In general, you’re not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would’ve been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn’t been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would’ve also gone a long way.)

and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.

That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing <table> for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.

But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.

Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.

Or let all the commercial sites go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.

Ew. Speaking of technological illiteracy, the author is irresponsibly contributing to it by insinuating that subscription fee ad blockers are somehow inherently better than free ones, which is not only absolute bullshit but also pretty much anti-Free Software propaganda.

Not “probably,” “certainly!” It’s proven by research: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/more-than-half-of-motorists-view-cyclists-as-subhuman-cockroaches

Is that guy a blatantly lying piece of shit, or just a moron?

In factual reality, cyclists buy more stuff than motorists, not less!

See also:

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/for-store-owners-bike-lanes-boost-the-bottom-line

• https://cyclingindustry.news/why-cycling-is-good-for-everything-from-retail-sales-to-property-prices/

Phone: rings
Me: “better pause Youtube so that I can answer without noise in the background”
Youtube: plays ad with even louder audio
Me:

Which one of those do I pick if I actually want to be logged in and have Youtube keep track of my watch history, automatically synchronized between devices?

Last I checked, Sceptre TVs are price-competitive with other brands, if not even cheaper.

LOL, imagine thinking that TVs are actually subsidized and that the spyware isn’t just extra pure profit.

Your local county extension office and nearby universities with agricultural programs.

Example: https://extension.uga.edu/publications/series/detail.html/71/home-garden.html

Look, here’s how it actually works in practice:

• The politicians approve a budget for a project.
• The project is managed by the state/county/city DOT, with the project manager being a licensed Professional Engineer (PE).
• The design of the project is contracted out to a private engineering firm, where the engineer in charge of the design is a PE (and the people working under him who actually do most of the work are either also PEs, or are at least licensed Engineers In Training (EITs)).
• At least at the firm I worked at, the CEO of the company was also a PE.
• The construction is contracted out to a private construction firm, where the engineer in charge of construction is a PE.

Except for the 10,000-foot level budgeting, everyone with a position of authority over the project is a licensed PE. It’s PEs all the way up. The buck stops at the PEs.

The problem here is not that PEs are being bullied by someone else into not doing their jobs properly. PEs are not victims in this scenario, not even a little bit.

The problem here is that PEs don’t think they have an obligation to make streets that are safe for anyone but drivers, because the entire industry standards of practice are wrong.

Yet again: the way it’s supposed to work is that retaliating against the engineer would be pointless because every possible replacement would stand on principle just the same.

Again, that’s what licensing is supposed to solve. The politicians should not have the ability to say “okay if you won’t do [this unsafe thing] then I’ll just replace you with someone who will” because literally every licensed engineer should also refuse to do it.

Either the project gets built properly or it should not be built. It is every licensed engineer’s professional responsibility and legal obligation to ensure that is the case, regardless of political pressure.

Capitulating to pressure to build an unsafe design is literally criminal negligence and should be adjudicated as such.

The engineer is the “daddy boss!” Every. Single. Fucking. Time. It is literally the law!

Do engineers make these decisions though?

Yes.

The way that it works is that the plans for every construction project like this must be stamped by a licensed engineer, or else they cannot legally be built. Then, the construction itself must be supervised by another licensed engineer, to ensure that the as-built condition conforms to the plans or that changes are properly vetted for safety.

Under this fact pattern while engineers are responsible to protest, I would posit the ultimate discioson maker should be held criminally liable first then we can talk about engineers proffesional responsibilities.

That “fact pattern” is false. The ultimate decision maker, the person who should be held criminally liable, is the principal engineer who stamped the plans.

This is what licensing engineers is for!

Yes, it is exactly the traffic engineers at fault! They’re the ones who sign off on and take legal responsibility for the design! That’s the entire point of engineering being a licensed profession in the first place.

Let me make this very clear: every licensed engineer has an absolute moral and legal obligation to refuse to sign off on any unsafe design, no matter what some fucking politician wants. Period, end of. And designs that are not Complete Streets, with sidewalks and crosswalks, are inherently unsafe. Also period, end of.

Every pedestrian killed by the lack of a crosswalk should result in a traffic engineer permanently losing their license and being forced to change careers. It is only through that threat that they will begin to take pedestrian lives seriously!

The estate should sue the engineers for negligence in failing to install a proper crosswalk. Car-supremacist thinking is pervasive within the industry (I say as a former traffic engineer, BTW) and the only way to get some of them to change is to hit them in the P.E. license.

Political capital is a limited resource.