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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • 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.













  • 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.









  • 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.





  • Yes, of course I’m talking about spoken language. Of course if English were written in kanji we would need fewer characters to express the same information, but it wouldn’t change the spoken language at all.

    (I remember learning the following graphical user interface design rule: switch your application to Spanish or Portuguese to check whether UI messages still fit in the boxes you’ve put them in. Spanish and Portuguese are the common languages that need the most characters per unit of information.)