He developed a definition for free software, the concept of copyleft, a set of licences to implement copyleft, he travelled the world for decades building support for this, he wrote code for GCC and GNU Emacs and a lot of other software projects that enabled others to make the packages we use today, he inspired campaigns against software patents, against DRM, against bad copyright laws.

And he persevered despite decades of insults and other people trying to ensure no one heard of his work.

Not sure of the current status, but I remember in 2007 that Alexandre Oliva reverse engineered the software for filing taxes in Brazil:

https://www.linux.com/news/fsf...

Agreed on all counts. The issue with all the streaming services has been mentioned multiple times but it bears repeating: We have interest in maybe one movie every other month from any given studio, we are mostly into "indies", and cannot justify paying every damn streaming service monthly for such infrequently used content.

We are still in Columbus.

As far as I am concerned, the CCP screwed over their own people and the world by delaying action that could have limited the spread of the virus. I don't think it matters whether it was a lab leak or species jump, they tried to hide the fact that a new virus was spreading and they let it happen.

This is how authoritarian, unaccountable, concentrated-power works. In all places and for all time. Anyone seeking minority rule, or permanent power, promising to use their power "for good" is lying.

Corruption kills.

My father, a company controller (the enforcer of end-of-month and end-of-year financial reporting :-) ), swore by PICK. I was bragging to him once about 20 years ago about SQL being an excellent toolkit for data management. His response was a problem statement essentially requiring a recursive tree walk of a parts/component hierarchy.

I could not answer properly at the time. A few years later I learned about common table expressions....

I would never work in business (E.E. doing data acquisition/control), and even more would not have been interested in such a small niche system as PICK, but it did have its proponents.

Very much looking forward to seeing the video of Richard's 17 March speech and the Right To Repair keynote!

I guess they'll arrive here: https://media.libreplanet.org/...

I'm obfuscating nothing. Here's a brief to the European Commission with my name on it:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/...

Medical data is covered in the GDPR, cloud stuff is in the DMA, the Data Act, and hardware stuff in the Directive on Defective Product Liability. Those are all ongoing if you'd like to get involved.

There might be some things that aren't covered and maybe a CRA is necessary, but the current proposed text says you cannot publish or import software unless it follows the requirements of the CRA. So, people in the EU will be hesitant to publish software and software from outside the EU that didn't follow the CRA during the design phase will not be available to people in the EU.

Even security patches. If there software being used in the EU and it has a vulnerability, and if someone outside the EU produces a patch or an updated version of the software, then this fix will not be available to people in the EU if the author did not provide all the documentation required by the CRA! People in the EU will be stuck using known-vulnerable software because of the CRA!

The W3C has indeed done fantastic work. With the new status, will they be more involved in policy work?

The EU is working on a new regulation on standard-essential patents. The legislative procedure is advancing on the Cyber Resilience Act, which makes it difficult to publish software (and serving a webpage with javascript seems to fit into that). And there's the issue of DRM (which shouldn't have been given support in the W3C standards, but what's done is done, let's look for how to improve the situation).

If W3C will be more active in policy, I'll be looking forward to working with them!

Atmospheric CO2 would best be considered as an "investment", and we should have been measuring industrial processes by their return on that investment. Sometimes a product or result is worth a given expenditure, oftentimes not.

One serious problem with CO2 production is basically the same as many externalities: The failure to require those who induce these externalities and profit from them, to pay for them.

The Romans were nutball-level crazy about record keeping. I imagine that even without modern chemistry, their records of what worked better versus what did not would produce improvement in their processes over time.

Reading the comments in the Ars Technica erticle, someone mentioned "basalt rebar", so I googled it.

The basalt rebar manufacturer heats their mined basalt raw material to either a paste or fully liquid, then extrudes it to form reinforcing bar ("rebar").

They claim that the extrusion process causes formation of microscopic fibers (sizes measured in microns, I think) that give the resulting rebar its tensile strength. It's not steel so there's no problem with rust.

Remember, FSF isn't telling you to buy these things, it's just a guide for *if* you insist on buying tech. You can always get people socks or a jumper.

FSF's guide is also for people who put a lot of value on freedom. And I hope a lot of people do. But if you want to make a small effort, another interesting list is Mozilla's "Privacy Not Included":

https://foundation.mozilla.org...

Noon is equally between sun rise and sun set. That was the only definition prior to time keeping machines.

It's been the reference for timekeeping since, literally, the beginning of time.

Learn science, make a sun dial, visit Stonehenge, study history.