wolki

AIUI the embedding is itself not the issue. The issue is that you are leaking user data to a third party, and this needs to be handled with care, considering the degree of threat to the user data, your legitimate need to use a CDN, and any possible consent. If your CDN assures you that this data will only be used for legitimate purposes and conforming to GDPR, I think (but IANAL) that explicit user consent wouldn't be necessary, as site owners have a legitimate interest in using CDN services. After all, DDoS prevention is even explicitly listed as a legitimate interest, and fulfilling this legitimate interest is itself enough to allow processing of personal data, without further consent. With the Google fonts ruling, the issue seemed to be that there was no such agreement in place, Google is known for aggressively building user profiles, and the technical need for this was judged to be low, as fonts are rather small and the site could have operated with self-hosted fonts. This was considered to go beyond the scope of the legitimate interest - it's essentially selling user data to Google to save a little on bandwidth, and that would require consent.

(Then there is a separate issue with a human rights dispute between EU and US that makes things a bit more complicated)

There's nothing wrong with it, it can simply lead to confusion. When computers started, people called them 'thinking machines' and, say, multiplication was something that required some intelligent behavior on the part of the person doing it. There's nothing wrong with calling a calculator a thinking machine that implements intelligent behavior, but it helps if everyone is aware that at other times when people talk about 'thinking' and 'intelligent' they mean something quite different. This is not uncommon; when people use the word 'bank' they refer to very different things: river ones, park ones, central ones, rotations of flying objects etc. But everyone should be aware that getting better at building comfortable banks to sit on in the park is not the same as getting better at figuring out the optimal rate of interest or turning planes. It certainly might, but that is a separate argument and terminology can obscure that.

There's been two major attempts to leverage spatiality: spatial file managers (most controversially, 2.6-era GNOME) and zooming interfaces. None have such a checkout by default, but it would fit both quite naturally.

I don't have much experience with the zooming stuff, but I did use Nautilus heavily then (see also Siracusa's Mac-focused discussion here: https://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.htm). As soon as you got used to it, it was amazing -- accessing files felt natural in a way it just doesn't in other systems. It was both digital and leveraged our natural understanding that things are at particular places. It's no surprise people still miss it.

A few people, of course. A very large majority of people absolutely hated it, and it's widely considered a huge mistake now. Familiarity and habits win out, users hate changing paradigms and unlearning habits.

The "rule" doesn't exist in English either.

Most of the people complaining about the passive have either serious trouble identifying a passive at all, or can't construct an argument why it's bad to save their lives, as amply demonstrated by Geoffrey Pullum. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf Section 2 is a bit technical, but the rest is a great read.

??? This is the Council of the European Union, which is the relevant cabinet members from the national governments. You vote out your representative in, say, the Environment Council, in exactly the same way you vote out the national Minister of Environment (or equivalent) in your EU country, because it's literally the same person.

Confusingly, there's also the European Council. You vote out your representative in there by voting out your your head of government (president, premier, taoiseach etc.), because again, it's literally the same person.

And if you're talking about the commission, which seems to have little to do with this, you vote them out by voting in different heads of government (again) to nominate different commissioners/a different president, and/or different members of the European parliament to not confirm them.