I certainly hope so. I hope eventually federated discussion groups become the default way for the general public to communicate about any topic that interests them.
But with how governments around the world are going after the Internet, especially the parts of it that aren’t profitable… I just hope some good parts of it survive at all. :(
The question is confusing, what exactly do you mean by “directly from online”? Just click a button in a web browser and it will install the entire distro? If so, pretty sure the answer is no; if you imagine something else, please clarify.
so we finally solved https://xkcd.com/949/ I guess?
The etymology is that a “datum” (the plural of which is data) is something that is “given”.
So data is information that has been given.
In computers, data (information) is stored in bits (zeroes and ones). Eight bits are a byte, a billion bytes are a gigabyte, so the plan you describe allows you to download (or transmit overall?) 2*8*1000000000 = 16000000000 ones or zeroes that are used to encode data for computers (which they will decode into text, images, videos, whatever).
It’s the same for me honestly. Reading fiction isn’t enjoyable for me most of the time, though reading nonfiction (ie learning about the world) absolutely is.
I remember this being somewhat different in my childhood, and my hypothesis is that the fact we got somewhat uninteresting fiction reading assignments in school killed my interest in it.
It’s not screens vs books because I have tried reading fiction on my phone or tablet too, no difference.
Pretty sure that compared to NetBSD, Linux still runs on relatively few architectures. 😝
It is a computer. Computer is a very general term.
Maybe not in English? Plenty of people are named Groß in the German speaking world.
News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.
Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.
I do use it, but you are quite right I don’t tend to mention it unless asked.
I fail to see the relevance because both AI companies and other Internet users certainly sometimes (arguably) infringe copyrights held by rich people and sometimes those held by poor people.
People don’t like that generative AI is based on stolen content.
Long before AI, people on the Internet were fairly likely to dislike copyright and correctly insist that copying is not theft.
How the times have changed.
Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk
Yes. If vendors in those states want to then preinstall Linux on a device they would have to find a compliant distro…
Doesn’t matter much. At least those of us who aren’t engaged in the business of selling computers are unaffected.
Considering SteamOS includes Valve’s proprietary bits for the Steam client, this likely still applies to Valve and any hardware shipping with SteamOS
Where is the line? Most Linux distros have some nonfree software too, does it apply to them?
IMHO the correct legal and constitutional analysis ought to be: distributing software, in either source or binary form, is free speech protected under the US constitution as well as state constitutions. Therefore the government cannot pass laws requiring that operating systems, in general, implement certain features, doesn’t matter which.
What the government can do is engage in product regulation. It can require that operating systems preinstalled on devices sold in their jurisdiction have certain features. The correct thing to do wouldn’t have been to distinguish FOSS from nonfree operating systems, but operating systems preinstalled on devices from those distributed on the Internet which the user needs to install. That would have covered Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, which is obviously what the legislators were thinking of.
IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.
2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.
It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.
In many cases it’s both.
Most western legal systems work in this way: there are two separate domains of law: criminal law and civil law. Explained in a very simplified way:
Criminal law is about people having done wrong things to society as a whole. Prosecuting crimes is the job of the state (prosecutor) and not (usually) of the victim. People who do things that are defined as crimes may be imprisoned, or they may be fined (forced to pay money to the state). There are also crimes that do not directly have victims, but you can still be fined or imprisoned for committing them. Most offenses against traffic law are like that, e.g. who is the victim of someone driving too fast…?
Civil law is about how people treat each other. More specifically, tort law is about people doing wrong things to each other. If a person has harmed another person (even if it wasn’t a criminal offense, which may have higher standards of proof or intention), the victim can sue the offender in a civil court in order to collect damages. But that requires the victim taking action; neither you nor the state can usually take civil action against someone who didn’t harm you, only someone else.
In some legal systems it’s possible that those things can be combined to some extent, for example someone convicted of a crime may also be ordered to pay damages to the victim at the same time. In others they are completely separate.
When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)
If things could change once, they can change again.
It will send out a message to relevant servers that it should be deleted. There is no guarantee that they will comply with that message. If your post has been copied to hundreds or thousands of other servers, there is no guarantee that they will all receive or understand that message. Some may even be actively malicious, for example because they are controlled by exactly the people you want to hide from!
I remember once deleting a comment (on this account) a few seconds after posting it. After that, I kept getting upvotes for it! I found out that that was happening because one very popular instance had for some reason not deleted the comment, so its users had no idea that it was supposed to be gone.
Everything on the public Internet is. Anyone can set up a bot that just scrapes and archives everything on the Internet that it can find; and governments certainly have the resources to do so!
Potentially.
Posting things on the public Internet, especially under one’s real name, inherently comes with that risk. Always has.