I read the terms and Conditions for Windows 10. It was clear that the person who wrote that had neither understanding of writing Terms and Conditions nor understanding of software. It was only later that I realized most laws are also written by people that neither know how to write laws nor understand the topic that law applies to.

But what good is it to know that breathing is illegal? (exhaling is illegal in the state of Tenessee since it disperses CO2 into the atmosphere)

Opinions (such as that the Earth is flat) can obviously be wrong. I thought I knew English, but apparently not. (I’m not a native speaker.) I always assumed that “opinion” meant the same as judgement (which is what I learned at school), but I just looked opinion up in the dictionary, and it can also mean belief or or view.

It’s been made very clear in the last decades that you (legally) don’t even own software that you pay for. You own a license to use the software. This is untrue. Legally speaking you “own” the software, but what you can do with the software is limited by both the copyright and the license. Often this license will say that the creator still owns the software, so by accepting the license, you no longer own the software. Today you often have to accept the license before you even download the software. So you are correct that the user doesn’t own the software, but that’s not the default. For example, FOSS licenses do not specify that the creator continues to own the software, therefore ownership is given to the user.

for all applications, not just FOSS ones, the people paying the fines would be the users, $2500 Nope. Since most licenses say that the developer is the owner, the fine would go to the developer. Also, the law says that the fine can go to the “maintainer” which, again, is the developer.

takes your advice I wasn’t giving advice. I’m saying that the decision is up to the court. But if you want legal advice (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer): Do not do anything of which the legality still has to be decided by a court.

That does not mean FOSS software is not affected I never said that. I said that FOSS software is affected differently if you take the law by the letter (which the courts don’t have to do).

That’s your opinion. It’s wrong.

Only facts can be right or wrong.

Anyway, I know there are applications that don’t have binaries, but most do. I am not a lawyer, but if I’m not mistaken, source code is under U.S. law protected by the first amendment while binaries are not.

Also, it doesn’t matter who owns the copyright. The laws specifies “a person that owns, maintains, or controls an application”.

I am not saying that the law is FOSS friendly. I am saying that the law does not cover all FOSS software despite it being the clear intend of the lawmakers to cover all software. In such cases it will have to be decided by courts (I believe courts still have this function for state laws), whether it also applies to FOSS software.

What I am saying is that the lawmakers clearly do not understand the topic they are trying to regulate.

Thanks. I didn’t know that.

The word ‘application’ means the binary. The source code is not the application.

According to (f), the user is officially the developer of a FOSS application:

• The user is the owner of the binary. (Although with copyright restrictions)
• The user often maintains the application by installing updates. (In FOSS applications updates are rarely forced)
• The user controls the application, as FOSS gives users control.

In some cases (such as the Arch User Repository or the Gentoo distribution), the developer does not even give the user an application but merely source code. The user creates the application.

I have been using Nix for a year now, and I am not looking back.

All regular package managers have a problem: Sometimes a system won’t work if a specific combination of packages is installed. To prevent this, package managers block those combinations. However, how does the package manager know which combination would break the system? It is tested beforehand, and a list of illegal combinations is maintained. However, this comes with a problem: How do you test every combination of packages? If a package manager tracks just 1000 packages, there are 2^1000 possible combinations to evaluate. This means that when a package manager becomes more popular, and more packages get added, relatively fewer combinations get tested, therefore increasing the chance someone breaks his system by installing a unique combination of packages, that wasn’t evaluated and apparently breaks the system. In other words: Package managers have a flaw that causes your system to break if the package manager becomes too popular. The common solution is to create a new package manager from scratch that does exactly the same thing as the old one, but isn’t popular yet, and therefore works. However, since it works, it becomes more popular, causing it to no longer work.

Nix is different. It is designed from the bottom up that every combination of packages is possible. It is impossible that one package breaks another. This creates some other advantages as well: there is no evaluation to see whether packages break other packages, allowing maintainers to add more packages to the repository. The result: even though it is not even close to the most used package manager, it is the one with the most packages in its repository.

Yes, there are problems. The biggest is that there is no easy mode yet. But that can be implemented later. For now I see Nix (or something similar like Guix) to be the future of package managers.

I’m not too good with java, but it should be something like this:

public static int convertRomanNumeral(string n){Map.of("M","DD","CD","CCCC","D","CCCCC","C","LL","XL","XXXX","L","XXXXX","X","VV","IV","IIII","V","IIIII");.forEach((k,v)->{n=n.replace(k,v);});return n.length();}

Since Roman numerals have an upper bound, the time complexity is always O(1).

If you’re using lighter cheaper materials No, I’m using the same materials. sloped roofs are simply a stronger geometry, allowing roofs to be cheaper and lighter by using less material.

No, for the same amount of occupiable space the shorter flat roof blocks less light than a standard 10:12 or 12:12 roof Incorrect. While the highest point of a sloped roof is higher than the highest point of a flat roof, the lowest point is lower. This means that for medium high sun angles sloped roofs provide won’t block the sunlight, while flat roofs do, and for low sun angles it is the other way around. However, there is not much sunlight anyway at low angles.

The greater surface area of a pitched roof means this is absolutely not true. The hypotenuse is always longer than either leg. That’s a basic math fail. The highest volume-to-surface-area-ratio is achieved in a spherical design, A slope roof that has a less than 45 degree angle is closer to a sphere.

Do you have any real disadvantages of sloped roofs?

It’s besically android without the Google parts.

I just bought the Fairphone 6 with /e/os. I am pleasantly surprised with how many apps work just fine.

I have a similar thing with flat roofs. They are terrible. When you are 5 years old, you already learn to draw houses with a pointy roof. The pointy roof has been invented about a 100 times in history, as people were looking for the best shape. The wave shaped roof tile with 2 waves per tile has been invented about 3 times in history as people were looking for the best shape. The advantages of a pointy roof over a flat roof:

• Rain flows off. Yes, you can give a flat roof a small inclination, but rain will not flow as well, and if your roof tilts a small bit during the decades, it can become horizontal again.
• Snow falls off, reducing the chance that the roof collapses under the weight of heavy snow.
• It is lighter and cheaper, as you can use thinner materials. This is because pointy is a stronger shape than flat.
• It gives more interior space.
• It allows more sunlight to reach the street.
• It has a smaller area-to-vloume-ratio through with heat can escape.
• Solar panels get a higher efficiency.
• It allows the roof to be made out of wavy roof tiles which provide the following advantages:
• Roofs designed with wavy roof tiles can be constructed when it rains.
• When a tile breaks, you can easily replace it, without having to cut it loose from the tiles next to it.
• Roof tiles do not fracture upon an uneven heat distribution. Meanwhile, the advantages of flat roofs are:
• If you design an apartment building, you can copy and paste the interior. (Thus less work for the architect.)
• A horizontal line is one segment less to draw compared to two diagonals. (Thus less work for the architect.)
• If a city has the same height restrictions for flat roofed buildings as for pointy roofed buildings, and the architect is too lazy to go to the city council to explain to them that that doesn’t make sense, the architect can design a building with more volume by making the roof flat. In other words: the only reason any architect would design a building with a flat roof is because they are either lazy or they have no idea what they are doing.