You can connect cities in the Midwest with conventional high-speed rail for a fraction of both the construction and maintenance costs. There is no value-add for Hyperloop. There is no operating Hyperloop anywhere in the world for a reason. It's a dumb idea.

This wouldn't ever be true any more than it's true now that rental car companies are on the hook for cars in their fleet with defects caused by the manufacturer.

Open Source is about source visibility; Free Software is about source USE. They are very different things.

How much closed-source free software is out there? Visibility has been a necessary condition for use.

Open Source exists to serve developers. Free Software exists to serve users. Some developers understand that they are also users.

I'm not so sure about your intended audience for open-source. My impression of OS is that it's just a different label for what is a superset of FS, i.e., software that's gratis, but with licenses other than GPL; but who they serve is pretty much the same.

I really have no idea how you drew that erroneous conclusion. As I said, I develop open-source. I know it's been useful to others. Some of my code has been used at CERN. I was even paid once to dual-license code for Qualcomm. So I know it's useful.

The idea of paying open-source developers comes up every few years. I don't get it. The whole point of open-source is that anybody is free to download the source code, build it, and use it gratis. Why should anybody have to pay for it? I develop open-source and I don't expect to get paid for it. If you really want to get paid, make it closed-source, keep it open-source, but dual license it (one license for commercial use), or simply don't work on open-source.

Then there was this article wherein Perens wrote:

.. Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. .. [I]f they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source ..

Since when was open source supposed to serve the common person? AFAIK, it was to serve developers who could study it, possibly make changes, and incorporate it into their own open source projects. Common people simply don't care, and never will care, about how software works, just that it works. Perens then replied. (You can read his post and my follow-ups. My last comment (to which there is no reply) is here.) At some point, Perens just stops responding. The comments that were posted by Perens and others seemed orthogonal to open-source.

And apparently you're among those people who don't understand the First Amendment. Here it is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It doesn't say anything about "government issues" nor anything about the intended recipient. It's about speech on any subject to anyone. Courts have also held it's not only literal speech.

I bought a 2022 Kona EV. (One needs to specify EV since Hyundai also makes a Kona ICE.) I've been very happy with it. I don't remember now why I preferred it to the Ioniq. Unfortunately for me, the 2023 Kona EV added the vehicle to load feature, so I missed it by 1 year. That would have been nice to have.

A human reading anything is not considered making a copy under copyright law. If said human were to write it down verbatim, then and only then is it copyright infringement.

Granted, but that doesn't change the OP's point. It also doesn't mean we should do nothing.

The "commercial gain" trope just makes the reasoning more understandable to most people, but it's actually irrelevant. If somebody copied the news and reproduced it on his own site for free (consider an independently wealthy individual who doesn't need to make any money), it would still be just as illegal due to copyright infringement.

A copyright holder has unfettered discretion as to what constitutes an authorized copy. If they want to consider copying news for AI training unauthorized, that's their right. If you don't like their terms, you're free not to use their content. The free market will decide their fate.

Entry barriers to printing and publishing dead-tree books still seem pretty high, and anything that lowers them is probably going to gain traction in the short term. In the long term though, this could whore the book publishing market even further. OTOH, it might democratize the market.

If it's anything like blogging sites democratizing online publishing, most of it will be crap, at least that's my experience with programming blogs. Maybe only 1-2% of programming blogs on a site like Medium are anything above badly written, badly formatted, and often just plain wrong or sorely incomplete pablum. Not all high barriers to entry are bad things. They often help ensure that what's published is worth publishing.

Not enitely. Classic languages like C, C++, Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, etc., apparently have gotten along just fine without foundations. At most, classic languages have an ISO committee that focus only on the language and not silly things like logos, trademarks, or codes of conduct. Programming languages don't need logos.

Right now "programming" (such as it is) only still exists as a profession because as programmers we're the only folks who can really sanity check the AI's output.

Just like calculators have eliminated mathematicians?

I would put the area code I live in in the allow list. However, my phone number's area code != the area code where I live. Most of the junk calls are from seemingly random area codes.