Because there’s no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel…

which is however not a fork, either hard or soft, of anything

When western governments don’t give a fuck about human rights anymore, they have no standing to criticize China over it.

I would expand this idea further… since all governments occasionally violate human rights, they shouldn’t be very much in the business of calling out human rights violations by other governments. That should mainly be the role of citizens or private organizations, not governments.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was thinking of geizhals.at which is usually where I go first when I need to buy anything online. Sometimes Amazon is the cheapest option, and then I buy from Amazon, but many times something else is!

Amazon’s monopoly has made it so hard to find alternative online stores to buy a lot of stuff

Where in the world do you live? Don’t you have price comparison websites with a lot of different online stores? We do for my country.

I think most children aren’t very interested in most art that isn’t made specifically for children.

Science meanwhile, there are a lot of ways to make that interesting to many children, with interactive elements and such.

More generally I think this https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship is a good way to think about things like this.

It does.

Well, ok, if all OP wanted to know is what a copyright license is:

By default, copyright law in most countries prohibits anyone except the author or other copyright holder from distributing creative works, including software, even in modified form. There are a few exceptions to this, but this is the general rule.

A license is a document that the copyright holder agreed to that grants someone permission to do so anyway.

In the context of open source, such a license needs to meet certain conditions to be considered open source. Among other things it needs to allow anyone (not just specific licensees) to distribute the software for any purpose, even in modified form.

The community is called “no stupid questions”, not “completely unclear questions”. I genuinely have no idea what you want to know. 🤨