Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | tga_d's commentslogin

I've never heard anyone in the internet freedom or open source communities speak ill of him, and something tells me a 14 year old was not getting involved in writing the RSS spec to steal clout for financial gain.

There is an open source version of Android released by Google (AOSP), but it's mostly permissively licensed (pretty much everything except the kernel), and the versions of Android that ship with nearly all devices (even Pixel devices) have modifications that are not open source. It's not just the app store, it's the actual services exposed as APIs. Thus, projects like Lineage and Graphene not being subject, but Google and Samsung still are.

The reason Steam OS is a gray area is the question of what constitutes "the OS". For Android, you can't run apps without the components in question, so it's pretty cut and dry. Steam OS, you can technically use it without Steam: switch it to desktop mode, disable Steam, and run it as just an Arch variant; you can even launch games installed via Steam if you really want. But in practice nobody does that, because you would just use another distro if that was your goal. So, is Steam part of "the OS", since it's the main thing you see when you boot by default, and probably the reason you use that distro? Or is it just a prominently featured application?

edit to add: Here's a graphic depicting the general shape of Android. Pretty much everything except the kernel can have closed source modifications (and even the kernel will typically have proprietary drivers and firmware blobs): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/AOSP_And...


On the other hand, this law doesn't require "age verification" beyond requiring users to supply their date of birth, and the Steam application already does this before displaying content only deemed appropriate for those over a certain age.

So the only thing that really changes in the Steam case is the timing of the question, and possibly how and where the (unverified) answer is recorded.


> In general the countries with the highest levels of nationalization also have the most problems with shortages.

Do you have any citations for this? I've heard this rhetoric before, but every time I look into it, searching around for studies on google scholar or the web, I can only find studies and reports indicating that health outcomes trend better in countries with more universal coverage. There are think pieces with anecdata of course, but no actual peer reviewed publications I can find.


One way to begin is look for studies on wait times or procedures of a given type per capita.


Like this one: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...

> Among patients undergoing cancer surgery, waiting times to initiation of first-course therapy have steadily increased since 2012, particularly at high-volume academic centers and among patients referred for definitive care. With continued consolidation and expansion of health systems, system-level strategies are urgently needed to monitor and mitigate delays in the delivery of surgical care for cancer.

> Delays were more pronounced at academic compared with community hospitals and among patients referred for care. Predictors of longer waiting time included Medicaid insurance (5 of 6 cancers), lowest-quartile income (6 of 6 cancers), Black race (5 of 6 cancers), increased travel distance (4 of 6 cancers), care in the West region (6 of 6 cancers), and treatment at academic institutions (6 of 6 cancers). Receipt of robotic operations was linked with longer waiting times for nonbreast malignancies (5 of 5 cancers).


How does that compare to other countries? Also seems like government insurance was the worst risk factor.

Why would I want to trade my top tier private insurance for that?


Those studies have all, to my knowledge of them, shown no system mode that is better or worse than any other. The USA for many categories of care has often in those studies had worse wait times compared to nations with fully nationalized healthcare.

Heck when I went to college in Ohio's capital, the recommendation on how to get psychiatry or therapy as a new patient was to call the suicide helpline and claim that you were suicidal. That would get you a new patient appointment within 72 hours versus over 3 months on average for patients looking to get into care through normal channels.


Interesting you weren't able to find any examples. Here are some quick ones for CT scans in US Canada and UK.

The US maintains the highest hardware capacity of the three nations with roughly 43 scanners per million people and performs around 245 to 290 scans per 1,000 residents per year. non-emergency wait times are 1 to 7 days. The UK has 10 scanners per million people and ~100 scans per 1,000 residents, using centralized triage to keep non-emergency wait times between 1 and 6 weeks for NHS targets. Canada does 160 scans per 1,000 residents and 14 to 15 scanners per million, with wait times of 5 to 9 weeks.

When you consider that the US population is not fully covered by insurance, the number of scans is even higher


Okay, but that again seems to just be a few selected data points, rather than an actual trend, backed by peer reviewed study? Japan, Australia, and Iceland all have CT units per capita that exceed the US (~ 112, 70, and 50 /MM respectively), and all of three have universal care, two are full on single payer.


You seem to have misunderstood an is/ought distinction. You may hold the (fairly extreme, as far as copyright goes) position that surveillance footage should be subject to copyright, but it's well established that it's not. Who owns the camera is irrelevant. At least in the US; I'm not aware of any jurisdictions that hold otherwise. This is why Wikipedia articles on world events in the past few decades are full of stills from surveillance cameras: it's one of the few sources of imagery of an event that are unambiguously legal to include, because unlike a photo or intentionally made video of something specific, it's not a creative work. It's also pretty firmly established that human authorship is required for something to be subject to copyright, and having an idea that lead to some particular expression is itself not sufficient; see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

(Not a lawyer, just a Wikipedia editor.)


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

This is a great case to study, but no determination of copyright was made. The only actual lawsuit was filed by PETA arguing that the monkey should have copyright, which led to a settlement with the human photographer and nothing else because obviously that's not possible.

For various reasons (mostly $$$) the guy never actually got a judgement. I think the chances are good that he could have prevailed in court; there is significant creative input to setting up cameras and triggers in a way to convince a wild monkey to take a selfie. It's not like he just left his camera sitting somewhere on accident and came back to find a photo in it.

I'm also not a lawyer, but I did do a lot of work in copyright for a company you've heard about.


I appreciate your informed take. I follow the reasoning but I am amazed it works this way. I found some articles that supported what you said, and also said there's a follow-on industry that figured out how to alter and edit videos just enough for a revised video to have creative contribution and make it copyrightable.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/02/24/can-you-license-video-yo...


Do you have a source for raw surveillance footage not being subject to copyright? I'd not heard of this, and a web search didn't turn up anything.


I'm the person who originally said "how can that be true about surveillance video?". I found a good writeup on it, https://www.techdirt.com/2020/02/24/can-you-license-video-yo...

The tldr is you really can't copyright raw surveillance video, but you can apparently lightly edit to turn it into a creative work that is copyrightable.


Thanks for the link but:

> The tldr is you really can't copyright raw surveillance video, but you can apparently lightly edit to turn it into a creative work that is copyrightable.

The article doesn't say that, it doesn't speak to CCTV surveillance footage. It discusses rare cases like cameras falling from aircraft, or animals pressing the button to take a photo.

I can see your line of reasoning about there being zero creative input in the video's creation, but if surveillance footage isn't subject to copyright, I'd expect there to be plenty written about it.


The people up thread who replied to my original message give some other references for why this is the case. I agree with you that it is very surprising that it works this way, that this is considered a settled legal decision.

From the techdirt piece, seen above:

"To license out copyright, there must be creative contribution. This can arise from cutting/editing the video in a creative manner. Since there is no other prevailing copyright, the editing then makes you sole copyright owner entitled to all proceeds.

You may feel inclined to call bullshit on this, but it’s actually the ongoing revenue model for "revised" editions of Beethoven, Bach and older."


> The people up thread who replied to my original message give some other references for why this is the case

I'm afraid I'm not seeing it. Which comments specifically? Please link directly, rather than describing them.

> From the techdirt piece, seen above: [...]

My question was specifically about surveillance footage. The law doesn't work on perfect logical consistency, we can't infer an ironclad answer where there's no explicit law or legal precedent.

Another web search turned up a reddit discussion [0] which says that in the case of US law it's unclear, but that under UK law it explicitly is subject to copyright, under a special non-creative films category.

This Quora thread (sorry, couldn't find better sources) supports this. [1]

> You may feel inclined to call bullshit on this, but it’s actually the ongoing revenue model for "revised" editions of Beethoven, Bach and older."

Sure, I'm aware of that, but it's not the same question.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/COPYRIGHT/comments/1j7y8i0/cctv_foo...

[1] https://www.quora.com/Can-one-claim-copyright-on-CCTV-footag...


> Heck, are we at the point where we shouldn't even do that and everything should be done in a vm container?

This is the premise of Qubes OS. It's gotten decently usable, I'd estimate about as good as Linux a decade ago. https://www.qubes-os.org/


+1 for qubes. with some effort you can get a really nice stack with segmented git, disposable coding agents, package cachers, firewalls, and network visibility.


Strava doesn't have complete coverage, especially on newer trails, but more importantly: doing the trace via Street Complete attaches it to an OSM note with an optional (but encouraged) photo. This additional context makes it a lot more useful for editors than an ordinary trace, which can just as easily be an actual trail, a desire path, or someone deciding to improvise a shortcut through some brush. Even if the note just contains the word "trail", that helps us (though more detail is greatly appreciated, of course).


I don't see how that was implied? Just because someone is part of the "club" doesn't mean many other "members" can't be skeptical of their role.

In fact, it doesn't even seem difficult to simultaneously acknowledge and commend the valuable role they play, while also expressing concern over the influence they wield and how it might contrast with desires and goals of the wider community.


They are the wider community. Programmers working on behalf of corporate actors write open source code in the commons because their organizations have discovered competing on some parts of the stack isn't as viable as collaborating on parts of the stack.

I won't pretend to speak to specific numbers, but a huge amount of work and maintenance is from these programmers, or funded via the corporate actors which employ these programmers. Those actors are either on this list, or don't have a problem with this list.

What remains are the handful of truly independent contributors, which are a minority in terms of LoC (though they often have an outsized impact), and the peanut gallery.

Open source wasn't always this way, it would be a different discussion 30 years ago when independents were the only guys in town, but it is now.


I'm sorry, your response does not adress the real world concern about the powe that for-profit entities wield over the entire software industry. So I am going to assume you just want to focus on part of the problem.


I am not sure you'd be right if you see what people use vs what other companies use.


These are two separate incidents, please read the article. While the latest one is certainly arguable and I suspect most people would understand why someone would want to take it seriously (even if they themself would not), the earlier "Free Palestine" one seems absurd to label a threat, and I would be very curious how someone would justify it as such.


Setting aside the fact that there are multiple very old, very large religions that are nearly or actually vegan (e.g., Jainism), or that people raised vegan can't easily digest meat or animal products, why on earth do you feel that you or a hospital worker are qualified to determine the beliefs making up someone's identity, when you know absolutely nothing about them?


It took Western government institutions hundreds of years of violent conflict to embrace religious tolerance. I don't recall any major intense violent conflict being fought over dietary preferences.


Most of the input devices that Apple sells on their website don't have multitouch, including 0 keyboards and only one of the mice. Many of the photos on the site for each of their non-iMac desktops include full setups that don't have a magic mouse or separate touch pad. The Mac mini and Mac Studio don't come with any input devices, and don't say anywhere that multitouch is recommended (closest is some language clearly marketing it as an up-sell on the Studio, "Take your creativity to the next level [with extra purchase]").


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: