schnurrito

Considering SteamOS includes Valve's proprietary bits for the Steam client, this likely still applies to Valve and any hardware shipping with SteamOS

Where is the line? Most Linux distros have some nonfree software too, does it apply to them?

IMHO the correct legal and constitutional analysis ought to be: distributing software, in either source or binary form, is free speech protected under the US constitution as well as state constitutions. Therefore the government cannot pass laws requiring that operating systems, in general, implement certain features, doesn't matter which.

What the government can do is engage in product regulation. It can require that operating systems preinstalled on devices sold in their jurisdiction have certain features. The correct thing to do wouldn't have been to distinguish FOSS from nonfree operating systems, but operating systems preinstalled on devices from those distributed on the Internet which the user needs to install. That would have covered Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, which is obviously what the legislators were thinking of.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you'll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.

It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.

Well, 14 years before 2025 (i.e. 2011) was when the economy was recovering from the financial crisis, wasn't it? So there's a kernel of truth to that belief.

That…seems kind of clickbaity.

The headline is literally false, not just clickbaity.

I usually start with DDG, but it just doesn't have anywhere near as much of the WWW in its index as Google does, so I very often don't find what I'm looking for and switch back to Google.

If someone has a suggestion for something better than either of them, do tell.

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.

When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)

If things could change once, they can change again.

No, that's not self-evident at all. I think for most if not all federal offices created by the US constitution, the US constitution specifically lists qualifications (e.g. being at least a certain age, having been a citizen for some period of time). Not so for federal judges.

I was thinking of geizhals.at which is usually where I go first when I need to buy anything online. Sometimes Amazon is the cheapest option, and then I buy from Amazon, but many times something else is!

Amazon’s monopoly has made it so hard to find alternative online stores to buy a lot of stuff

Where in the world do you live? Don't you have price comparison websites with a lot of different online stores? We do for my country.

On the terminal yes.

On GUIs I generally use an IDE or VSCodium with vim keybindings.

I think most children aren't very interested in most art that isn't made specifically for children.

Science meanwhile, there are a lot of ways to make that interesting to many children, with interactive elements and such.

The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban.

so, the same as what Utah did? Or am I misunderstanding this?

Should not laws prohibit things that harm other people? How do prediction markets harm anyone?

More generally I think this https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship is a good way to think about things like this.

I see. Not familiar with any good interface for that.

No, I thought that was a separate question precisely because I don't see a connection between merge requests and mailing lists.

I don't currently use mailing lists but when I did, I found Thunderbird very usable. Just set up a filter to move each list's messages to a separate folder.