> This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.
When the DMCA was a bill, people were saying that the anti-circumvention provision was going to be used to monopolize playback devices. They were ignored, it was passed, and now it's being used to monopolize not just playback devices but also phones.
Here's the test for "can you rely on the government here": Have they repealed it yet? The answer is still no, so how can you expect them to do something about it when they're still actively making it worse?
Now try to imagine the world where the Free Software Foundation never existed, Berkeley never released the source code to BSD and Netscape was bought by Oracle instead of being forked into Firefox. As if the code doesn't matter.
Yes. It's a political problem and a very old one. That's why we also already have solutions for it, antitrust laws and other regulations to ensure competition and fairness in the market, to keep it free. Governments just have to keep funding and enabling these institutions.
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.
I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.
> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.
Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.
>Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.
Interesting theory, I would have assumed the exact opposite. People who want to drive fast and take risks will select manual driving because they'll find the autonomous cars too boring.
It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
Anime was probably my first introduction to "Heroes can both sacrifice and still lose. "Winning" may not be worth it but may be the only option."
I'm trying to think of the earliest "Western Literature" that you get introduced to that has the darker side of humanity and not coming up with anything until you hit 11th or 12th grade while I bumped into anime at something like 7th grade.
Hmmm, perhaps something by O'Henry or Roald Dahl would qualify. I hit them in 7th grade and liked them very much, too.
> Anime was probably my first introduction to "Heroes can both sacrifice and still lose. "Winning" may not be worth it but may be the only option."
One punch man, season 1. So chill, both pays homage to and is an amusing pisstake on the dragonballz kinda idea of heroes, training and "leveling up your power".
And then there is a double episode, around 7 or 8, that is a beautiful essay on "what defines a hero". For me, this was chefs kiss good and defined the series for me.
"Source Available" means that it can become "Source Unavailable" overnight.
See the "Our Machinery" fiasco.
Yes, Open Source isn't a complete defense against this (especially when there are copyright assignments). However, it sure makes it both a lot harder to pull off and a lot less useful to even try.
"Open Source" can also become "Source Available" overnight. See Redis, Terraform, etc. In the same vein, "Open Source" can also become "Closed Source" overnight.
In neither case does the change apply retroactively. It only applies to new contributions after the license change.
Well technically Redis had a fork before it became source available known as valkey which is still in bsd license
Terraform was forked to create opentofu if I remember correctly
I think the most recent example is kind of minio for this type of thing no?
Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source since it seems that you haven't named any and I am curious how they can do that. There must be some legal laws protecting it.
If a project switches from an open-source to a closed-source license, then from the outside, it just looks like the project was abandoned. The final commit that was published under the open-source license will always be open source. It's the future commits that are now closed source.
So no, I don't have any specific examples of that happening.
In the case of both Redis and Terraform, the forks were announced after the license change, not before. Indeed, the forks were motivated by the license change. The community didn't get a warning "hey, we're about to change the license, fork it while you still can!". It just changed.
That's what I mean when I say the license change does not apply retroactively. The commit of Terraform that existed before the license change is still open-source. I could create a fork branching off that commit today if I wanted to.
> Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source...
The most prominent one is Solaris. It was open one day, and closed the next. Memo didn't say we're close-sourcing it, but moving to a cathedral (final release as open source only) model, but they never released the sources ever after.
Oracle lost all of the core developers over it.
This where Illumos took over.
> There must be some legal laws protecting it.
For permissively licensed code? Nope. Nothing. Even if you don't transfer the copyright, nothing stops someone from forking it and building on it closed source. That someone would be the company opening it or someone else.
In the olden days, when the internet was not that capable to allow collaborative software development, losing developers was a real threat. Now it's not. Developers are dime a dozen. You can close the source, hire some people and continue working on it.
However, this is Open Source model working as intended. Freedom to the developers! If a developer wants to work on a closed source fork, it's completely permitted, baked into the system.
This is why GPL (esp. v3), while viral, is superior. You can't change the license if there's a copyright holder other than you. You can't just fork and close the source. It's limiting to keep the freedom. A working (and arguably necessary) compromise.
In this instance, it's a community college in California. Most of community colleges don't have any dorms but they have generally really large parking lots that are completely empty outside of class hours.
Any homeless person who can get themselves together enough to actually enroll and attend classes deserves every ounce of help that the state can muster. The ability to be a student is a really strong signal and sorting function.
Side note: the community colleges in California are gem. They tend to be as close to free as they can be made and even if you have an advanced degree the classes are way cheaper than the Universities. And often the instructors are the same people who would be teaching you at the big University only in a much smaller class.
All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
Unless you are anally retentive about cleaning it, ultrasonic humidifiers vaporize microbes into the air. There have been loads of studies about this.
The only real way to avoid this is to use the humidifiers that are boiling the water.
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