It is generally possible to download without uploading. You'll just likely get a dribble of data when you do.

AGPL is a plague. GPL, I tolerate, though I have a strong preference towards v2. But AGPL has no redeeming qualities. The hypothetical world where someone creates a closed-source fork of a web service, convinces everyone to use it, and then holds their data hostage just isn't particularly plausible.

Meanwhile, AGPL precludes any interesting integrations, custom in-house authentication systems, using custom database backends, and all sorts of other stuff that potentially is useful to keep company-proprietary, but that has no impact whatsoever on the hypothetical freedoms that the AGPL is intended to protect.

It's a license that is so toxic that even companies that are strong proponents of open source with large open source offerings have outright bans on letting AGPLed code anywhere on the premises.

As far as I can tell, the main benefit of AGPL is for companies that create code and want to release it to the public as "free software", because by requiring contributor agreements, they can keep their own branch proprietary while forcing everyone else in the world to comply with the AGPL, thus ensuring that the only company that can create their own proprietary features is them.

It's definitely an interesting case, but it doesn't fit the original description. The GPL didn't prevent Linksys from strangling the free version of anything. No free WiFi routers ever existed, and Linksys did not destroy demand for the Linux kernel or the GNU C library.

Also, nothing in that case forced Linksys to open anything. They could have switched to a BSD kernel and C library, and they would have been in compliance. They chose to open it because they figured it was an easy way to make the case go away, and it could produce good will in the community. And it ended up being a minor windfall for Linksys.

I find that a lot of people in Europe really don't grasp just how big the US is, and how sparsely populated a lot of it is. By land area, Germany (population 84 million) is slightly smaller than Montana (population 1.15 million). Germany, France, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, and Austria combined have almost exactly the same land area as Alaska (population 737,000).

For their part, a lot of people in America don't grasp how tiny most European countries are, and how many people are crammed into that tiny space.

California has had 23 earthquakes in the past 24 hours. The strongest one so far this month was magnitude 5.6. The 1992 earthquake in Germany you're referring to was only magnitude 5.4, which to people in California would barely count as an earthquake at all.

No you don't. The strongest storm ever to hit Germany was Cyclone Xaver in 2013. Its strongest sustained winds were 81 mph, which is just barely strong enough to qualify it as a hurricane. Just in the last 10 years, the US has had four hurricanes whose sustained winds reached at least 150 mph, including Hurricane Michael in 2018 that reached 161 mph.

They made a political calculation to ask under oath about an affair that was nobody's business, hoping to catch him in a lie. I believe the word here is "entrapment". So the GP is right about when it started; he/she just incorrectly understood which party started it.

It was always the Republicans.

Nixon tried to start it back in the 1970s. He just found out the hard way that there were still too many Republicans with morals and ethics remaining in the party. So they spent the next four decades driving them out. What remains is the shell of the former Republican Party, surrounding a core of rot and disease. And that is why "President" Trump is still in office.

3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

You missed the word "regularly," which I helpfully highlighted so you would notice it. Not one every month.

Ok, I looked up the actual numbers. The US is right in the middle of the pack with 1.74 outage hours per year. That's similar to most countries in eastern Europe, not as good as most countries in western Europe.

Germany is not a typical case. It's number 145 out of 154 countries ranked with only 0.21 outage hours per year. Thailand is even better: 147 out of 154, with only 0.16 outage hours per year. If that's your standard for "normal", 90% of the countries on earth are doing badly.

It's not hard to see reasons for the difference. The US is much more sparsely populated than Germany. Tens of millions of people live in rural areas where power has to be transmitted hundreds of miles through largely uninhabited countryside. That also means a much higher ratio of power lines to people. It's regularly subject to natural events that are rare to unknown in Germany like hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, earthquakes, etc.

Suppose that at any time, one person in a thousand is experiencing a power outage. That seems like about the right number. It means an average of around eight hours without power each year.

The current population of the US is about 350 million. One in a thousand means 350,000 without power at any time.

This doesn't seem shocking to me.

Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

Well, this particular discussion is about a (not yet enacted) law concerning DST in the United States, and none of the states are in the topics except Hawaii, which does not use DST.

The sun does not reach its zenith at 12:00.

If you defined noon as the time of the sun reaching its zenith, days would no longer be the same length. Days in northern hemisphere winter would be slightly longer than 24 hours, and days in northern hemisphere summer would be shorter, due to the difference between sidereal time and solar time.

When the daylight hours are short in winter, you have to pick some time in which it's darkness. If it's light during the morning commute, it will be dark during the evening commute.

This depends on how far north you are, of course.

"Permanent Daylight Savings Time" is a misnomer.

What it actually is, is that the standard time in every location in the US is shifted one time zone to the west, and the clocks stay on standard time all year.

Unless I'm misreading the map, on the East coast, the EST time zone is pretty much centered on where it should be, with New York very slightly east and Washington DC very slightly west of center. The main problem with EST is that it extends west to the city limits of Chicago, while it should change to CST around Toledo.

If anything, most of the population in the US is slightly to the western edge of the time zones, not the east.