Politics is always biased. That’s the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.

Exactly. All censorship could be a violation of 1A. The bar is high on this one. The government has to jump through difficult hoops to legally suppress most speech. The courts have long since ruled against the “but they have other channels” argument that you propose.

As for the latter point, again you miss the legal argument. The government is targeting a company, and not conduct. That could easily be a Due Process violation.

Of course we don’t know. The courts will rule. But what you wrote ignores basic legal precedent.

1A protects us against censorship, and this law is precisely that. If I have TikTok and I use it to communicate, the government is censoring my speech by taking it down. There is a lot of case law on when the government can legally censor speech, and I’m not going to repeat it here, but the government’s lawyers have a massive hill to climb on this one. Maybe they can succeed, maybe not.

There’s other precedent about “making a specific business illegal”. Essentially, legislatures can make conduct illegal, but courts don’t like it when they make businesses illegal, because it’s a violation of due process. But this is complicated and detail-specific.

Anyway, there’s a lot of great information online about these two legal arguments. I encourage you to look it up.

Um, actually that’s one perk of federation. It’s much harder to take down networks that are run on dozens or hundreds of servers across the globe… In other words, we already solved this problem, at least in large part.

I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.

I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.

Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

I think we should be careful. It’s certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that’s terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.

I don’t recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.

The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we’re actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.

Most people have always been OK with working reasonable jobs for good pay, though. Work is not the problem. Unchecked greed is.

Nothing. The law is unconstitutional.

He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.

Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.

Flatpak is one extra step. If apt or rpm already has what you want, which is true for many new users, why would we push them towards scary click thru action?

Isn’t this why we’d expect new users to use a built-in package manager? Because it avoids this exact problem?

Pushing someone new to Linux to use Flatpak? Shame on you.

All of those questions are entirely unreasonable, because they’re all manipulative.

Many years ago my old boss gave me an interview before I got a promotion and he asked me if I was still going to be working for the company in 20 years. And I lied and said that I thought I probably would. But why did he ask me? I believe he was trying to pressure me into saying that I would be there, knowing that I have integrity, knowing that if I said it then I might be less likely to quit.

Except that he didn’t have any integrity, and he had on other occasions promised employees that they would get promotions and then delivered them nothing, or even let them go when the contract ran out.

And that’s normal. Every medium to large sized company in the world has bosses like this.

Anyway, so if you’re in a situation where they make you lie, then you lie, and then you ask them to improve the quality of the workplace. You just said that you’re planning to stay there for many years into the future, so now you’re wondering what concrete steps the bosses are going to do keep your wonderful co-workers happy enough to stick around and build that bright future together with you, bearing in mind that the best way to retain employees is to pay them more.

Maybe you’re making an apples to oranges comparison. But anyway, nobody I know thinks Apple has good intentions with regard to their data.

Depends when and where. Avoid summer or winter vacation. If you’re doing Kyoto, visit temples very early in the day to avoid crowds. Or perhaps find slightly less famous places.

Sure, and if there were discussions of reducing all tourists, that would be great. But it’s just racism. Meh.

And you did not write it, not before, and not now. So it’s hard to give more insightful feedback than what everyone here already wrote.

That’s not a great way to get good information from the community.

How many hours did you practice? What did you practice? These are fundamental questions for any new instrumental hobby.

If you are doing everything solo, it’s easy to have misplaced expectations or a bad practice menu, or even worse, no solid practice menu at all. Screwing around is cool once you have a basic level of proficiency.

But also, it’s OK to try it and later realize that you don’t like it.