Well, Microsoft pioneered with that earlier. Win98, or was it 95b, merged the filesystem Explorer with Internet Explorer and came up with ActiveDesktop.
This is true and goes further: There is no understanding of "the Web." For folks who "went online" and "surfed on the Internet" in the 90ies the whole thing with Internet addresses and the way a browser works are normal. For people gaining their experience on a phone the app icon on the home screen is the starting point to the individual offering.
Companies however exploit that and instead of just putting the icon on the home screen provide an app which allows more tracking, preventing ad blockers, avoiding the user from browsing elsewhere.
For me apps are limiting (tabbed browsing, ad blocker, ... are essential for anything serious), but others don't have that experience.
> It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.
They managed for water and wastewater, which are a lot more complex than fiber.
That may "answer" a specific question. And all llms can do as they include manpages in training data (and any Agentic thing can search) however the value in reading documentation is that one can find different angles by learning about different options, which allow tontackle problems from a different perspective. The answer to a question is constrained by assumptions which are part of the question.
Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
There is a shift in society on what can be said and what they keep private. Back then you would pull stings in background, now you can bribe thenUS president in public.
Also: Back in the days™ statements where edited by marketing people and others before publication. Now people blast out stuff on their own via "social media"
Yes, they are different: People who care about others are less likely to become ultra rich. You become ultra rich by mostly caring about your cut and your profits.
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
The EU has about 450 million citizens, which of course limits my direct vote. Downside of a democracy (EU is a complicated democracy, but still) is that a majority probably has other priorities than me.
However there are many ways to impact policy makers. From individual contact to impact on the public debate. Even a small post here may lead to people considering their vote or contacting a local or EU parliamentarian, which in sum pushes the needle. In the end they are receptive, as they need the votes by the people.
It's long and tedious and not all things go anywhere, but then again: I am just one in 450 millionand for most of those priority is to have a Job which pays the rent and food and thus I have to break it down to be relevant for them.
The actual answer as to how much you influence policy is: none at all.
The European commission proposes laws. European commissioners are proposed through existing EU institutions. They are not voted in.
You vote for MEPs, who discuss laws, pass them, perhaps amending them. They do not propose them.
And by the way, this is not democracy, it is 'representative democracy' - you vote for one person to represent you and 100,000s of others for all the decisions an MEP makes over their 5 year term. They are not bound in any way to stick to their campaign promises.
Anyway, you might be happy or not about the laws these unelected bodies pass - I'm glad you seem happy about it. You might or might not see Europe as a triumph for its subjects. But there is no need to kid yourself or others that you have any impact over policy.
The European commission are appointed by the Council of the EU which is composed by elected individual member countries' heads of government. Commissioners also need to be individually approved by the European Parliament which is directly elected.
Representative democracy is democracy. Basically all nation level democratic governments are representative democracies.
EU has citizens initiatives. Citizens can propose changes to the law and the parliament has to discuss it.
Stop Killing Games movement actually got a foothold.
EU as every healthy democracy has also non-elected experts (just like judiciary side) in its organs who can create law proposals. That's how we got USB-C and GDPR.
It isn't really easy to do. A client may send tons of data over the connection, probably data which is calculated by the client as the client's buffer empties. If the server clears the buffers all the time to check for a cancellation it may have quite bad consequences.
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