Couldn’t read beyond the paywall halfway down, but the economics make sense: if an OEM manufacturer has mastered their craft for producing a commodity (ie bicycle parts), the growth opportunity is to develop a brand, since that’s where the value-add is. Ideally, this goes hand-in-hand with quality assurance, parts and service availability, and dealer networks.

It’s a tall order, and unlike consumer electronics which can be easily warehoused and distributed (see Amazon), bicycles of every type (beyond the bike-shaped objects sold as toys from big-box stores) need regular upkeep. And that cannot feasibly be centralized: a brand must exist in each country or region that it establishes itself in. In the present tariff-ridden environment, this is even more difficult.

That said, if a Chinese bike manufacturer can attain a similar status as Anker for electronics, then this should be a net-positive for everyday bike riders. I use Anker as an example because they neither had the ability nor inclination to go all-in on proprietary standards (see Apple). Rather, Anker’s product line are high-quality versions of commodity electronics, including USB C phone and laptop chargers. But they also push the envelope with Gallium Nitride (GaN), which itself is still somewhat of a premium feature.

So I’m hoping Chinese bicycle manufacturers still keep true to established bicycle standards – eg normal ETRTO sizing for tires, compatible chains and chainrings, etc – since that also allows consumers to buy these components piece-meal. But if they can bring cost-effective innovations into the space, that too would be welcomed.

if you do go to an establishment that pays based on the assumption of tips

In the USA, there are only 7 US States (and Guam) which mandate that the minimum wage be paid prior to consideration of tips. All other states permit some fraction of tips to be considered as part of minimum wage, with some states limiting the employer contribution to as low as $2.13/hr.

This is indeed an absurd situation outside of those seven states, but it also means that it’s nigh impossible to avoid establishments that rely on tips to supplement wages, in the other 43 states.

With this background, I can understand why the earlier commenter views tipping as exploitative, for both the consumer and the staff. The result of either choice – boycotting places that pay less than minimum wage, or not tipping at those places – doesn’t change the fact that the staff are being underpaid, which is the root exploitative practice.

you’re just joining in the exploitation

I think reasonable people can disagree on this point, on whether not tipping constitutes a secondary exploitation. Firstly, this framing places blame on individuals when the whole situation is a systemic machine of abuse. It is no different than the nebulous idea of personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, when large polluters have the actual levers to make real change. Secondly – and this is an economic policy argument which I personally don’t subscribe to – it can be argued that prolonged employment while underpaid is better than no employment at all, based on the premise that the employer would close down if a boycott was successful.

But like I said, the initial exploitation is root. Everything else is collateral. Systemic abuse is fixed by systemic overhaul.

My understanding – IANAL – of the central thrust of the AGPL is that if there is software that runs somewhere else and serves the result to a user, then that is considered a “distribution” of the software and thus requires the source to be made available to said users, if they want a copy. If you run an unmodified copy of that software, you satisfy your obligation simply by linking to where the unmodified source can be found.

So for your title question, I don’t think the dividing line is whether your software is directly/indirectly interacting with existing AGPL software, but rather the question is whether your software affects the service provided to the user.

Starting with your first scenario, I presume that you mean a server-side NodeJS script, and that would modify the results returned to the user. Thus, I would think this is indeed a distribution and the AGPL’s provisions would require your NodeJS script being made available to the user.

For your second scenario, I’m not entirely sure if you mean a server-side or client-side theme or overlay. If you modify a CSS file that is served to the user, I would think that’s a distribution. But if you’re writing a browser extension that overrides the default CSS file from the server, then no distribution of the server software has been made, I think. If you edit a JavaScript file that is part of the Mastodon package, I suspect that is a distribution, because that file is loaded to the user in order to use the service. But I’m not entirely certain on this.

In the third scenario, a scraper would be consuming the result returned by an unmodified AGPL software package, so there is no obligation to offer the source code for your scraper.

The fourth scenario is also a “use” of unmodified AGPL software, and so you have no obligation to offer your custom script to your users.

With no other info, I think the only advice available is that you should consult a lawyer for their advice. We neither know your legal jurisdiction, nor the timeline between “trying to get an abusive TTI investigated” and “I got a VPO against me”.

The details in-between matter, but ultimately, if you’re subject to any type of restraining order, that will be controlling for whatever actions it prohibits you from doing. And the only way to lift that is to seek a lawyer’s help to challenge it in court.

What is a VPO? What is TTI?

OP could make up a new story based on mythology and it’s not in the public domain.

I believe this is generally true. But as I read your comment, I started to think about what scenarios it wouldn’t be true for. So now I’ve lost 20 productive minutes of my evening. But to salvage its value, I’ll share what I’ve brainstormed.

If OP devises a universe following up from Greek mythology – as an example – and then affixes that story into writing, then OP’s copyright will come into existence automatically.

If OP instead hires a stenographer to write down his verbal dictation, and the stenographer later formats the text alongside a copyeditor that OP also hires, then OP still has a valid copyright, over both the raw, stenographic manuscript, plus the final, completed work. The stenographer and copyeditor would not share in the copyright, because it is a work-product that they are handling, rather than a creation of their own effort. Alternatively, their hiring contract waives all claims to the story’s copyright.

If OP instead writes his own manuscript using an open-source word processor like LibreOffice Writer, and then sends the PDF to FedEx Kinko’s to print as a perfect-bound book suitable for light coffee-table reading, neither the printer operator at the shop nor FedEx Kinko’s would share in the copyright, because although they are rendering the work into a more tangible form than an .odt or .pdf file, this is a mechanical function and not one of creativity, which is what intellectual property protects.

Finally, if OP stands at that one weird triangle in NYC and basically improvises the entire story aloud without any note cards or preparation, within full view and earshot of the public sidewalk, and it so happens that three Columbia University students – still disappointed by their school’s capitulation – decide to hear what this strange man on the corner is spouting, and begin writing down OP’s words verbatim, then it may be the case that neither the students nor OP have a valid copyright over the story or its characters.

What can happen is that although OP’s story is a creative expression, it wasn’t rendered by OP into a tangible or concrete form. And what the students did was the mechanical operation of taking dictation, so their scholarly efforts also don’t imbue any creative effort that copyright laws could protect, apart from maybe the exact sequence of grammatical symbols and guesses on how certain character names might be spelled.

In essence, a public creative process may end up depositing the meat of the story into the public domain, save only for the actual rendition on paper which merely records it. This is no different than republications of older public domain novels, where the only valid copyright is upon the copyediting done to clean up some old words and make it palatable for a modern audience.

IANAL, but I’m beginning to see why the job of IP lawyer might pay so much.

A Nintendo Wii would also work, as exemplified by this blog running on a NetBSD Wii.

But in all seriousness, the original comment has a point: using a mobile phone as a server is possible but also wastes a lot of the included hardware, like the cellular baseband, the touchscreen, and the voice and Bluetooth capabilities. Selling the phones and using the proceeds to purchase a used NUC or an SFF PC would give you more avenues to expand, in addition to just being plain easier to set up, since it would have USB ports, to name a few luxuries.

I understand the question to be: “why does cultural folklore, passed from person-to-person through the ages, fall into the public domain, in modern conception of intellectual property?”

If that is the question, then the answer is multi-fold: firstly, since folklore predates any organized notion of private rights to certain renditions of an idea (aka intellectual property), they are grandfathered in.

But supposing that making an exception for folklore or mythology isn’t palatable, the practical issue is: who would own said intellectual property for a particular myth? Property – in the Anglo-American sense – must have an owner. Even public property like parks and highways has an owner: the state. Without an owner, assigning intellectual property rights for myths is a pointless exercise.

And finally, remember that intellectual property does not cover ideas per-se, but their rendition in some tangible or concrete form. A book, a movie, an MP3 file, etc. If it’s solely an idea without a creation to go with it – or for patents, the plausibility of producing such a creation – then intellectual property rights cannot attach.

CVTs on automobiles were definitely released before all the issues were fully resolved, no question there. Though I think for fixed machinery and personal mobility, CVTs have substantial benefits, if they are properly engineered for the task. The major drawbacks being efficiency and packaging.

Supposing maybe Bafang develops on this present idea and makes an integrated CVT hub motor, an ideal implementation would have the torque sensor adjusting the ratios to keep the human at a constant effort.

Would it result in the pedals having nearly zero relationship to the actual effort of moving the bike, being essentially spin class but in public? Almost certainly. CVTs automobiles aren’t exactly considered fun to drive. But bikes for transportation is a key segment, and some people just want a bike for points A to B.

It even runs without any electrical power from the e-bike, since the shifting is performed inertially instead of using an input loop based on a speed sensor.

Oh man, I have some mixed feelings about this. The first few iterations of automatic transmissions for automobiles (circa 1970s I think?) also used mechanical means for shifting, somewhat similar to centrifugal governors. While they did remove the need to manually shift, my understanding is that they were also not exactly predictable. And since automatic transmissions wouldn’t be very useful in performance cars, they would have found use in mid-tier cars with mid-tier performance. So a mis-shift would leave the driver poorly configured if, say, they’re trying to accelerate to merge onto a highway.

For 250 W ebikes limited to 25 kph (15 MPH), this might be less of an issue, but I hope that Bafang can skip over that part of automotive history and that it Just Works™ for typical human pedaling cadences.

In that regard, the calculus should be simpler because the “dynamic range” of pedaling cadences is only some 50-200 RPM, or 4x between slowest and faster. Whereas for automobile engine speeds, the range can be 700-7000 RPM, or 10x between slowest and fastest. And even if Bafang sets the gear ratios consistently too high or too low, the sprocket ratios of the chain/belt can be used to tune that linearly. So bike manufacturers should have a number of parameters they can tweak, for either leisure- or commuter-oriented product lines.

I vaguely recall what was effectively a delay-line implemented using terrahertz-modulated lasers aimed at the retro reflector on the moon from Earth’s surface. The data storage capacity was something in either the hundreds of GBs or low TBs. But I can’t find the reference.

I wish to advocate in the name of DIY minimalism. That is to say, it’s true that none of us – Linus Torvalds is not in the room, right? – can hope to churn out anything approaching a full-blown filesystem on the order of ext4 or NTFS if we worked our entire lives. But if those filesystems were the end-all-be-all of innovation in those spaces, the richness and intrigue of computer science would have died out long ago, relegated to only the pinnacle of engineers and no one else.

But I feel like that can’t quite be the case, because all engineering is about achieving careful balances. And as fine as ext4 is, it must be said that it’s anything but minimal. It’s full-featured, which also implies that it might have more than what any one person requires. If OP wants to write a very compact filesystem designed for 8-bit microprocessors, I can’t badger them with ext4’s existence, because that’s not going to be usable on an 8 bit machine.

Much like how Python includes a really tiny HTTP server, and we can all agree that it’s orders of magnitude less sophisticated than nginx, such implementations can have their time in the sun. And I think a tiny, absurdly minimal, almost code-golf of a filesystem, might have a place in this world, if OP really wants to undertake that effort.

Computer science, I wish to believe, still has doors awaiting exploration.

Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in the USA are made to track both potential tax evasion and money laundering. This is where the $10k cash “limit” comes from, but SARs can/should be filed for higher amount that create suspicion.

Someone depositing a check for multiple times their lifetime transactions total would absolutely create suspicion on themselves, especially if it was a personal check. But if it were a business check from “ABC Mortgage Escrow”, that’s probably legit but a bank clerk is well within their rights to flag it. Flagging just means the money laundering team would investigate the source, determine that it doesn’t have other red flags, and quietly move on.

Lots of good answers, especially using FUSE for experimentation. One thing I’ll add is that if you just didn’t want to use any filesystem at all … you don’t have to!

At least in the Unix realm, a disk drive is just a bunch of contiguous blocks, and you can put whatever you want in them. Of course, Unix itself famously needs a filesystem for itself, but if you want to just store all your giant binary blobs – cryptocurrency block chain? – directly onto a drive without the pesky overhead or conveniences of a filesystem, that’s doable.

It’s not generally a useful idea to treat a disk drive as though it’s a tape drive, but it does work. And going further into that analogy, you can use “tar” to collect multiple files and fit them onto the drive, since a tarball preserves file metadata and the borders between files, but not much else. This is the original use of tar – “tape archive” – for storing Unix files onto tape, because the thought of using tape as working storage with a filesystem was – and still is – a terrible idea. And that’s basically the original impetus for a filesystem: it’s better than linear access media.

Banks can and do get into hot water if they’re found to have handled – inadvertently or not – funds which ends up with banned entities, like DPRK or terrorist groups, or are the product of fraud AND that they ignored reasonable suspicions.

The classic example is the so-called “703 account” of fraudster Bernie Madoff, held at JP Morgan Chase bank. Although a humble checking account, it saw huge money inflows and outflows, with one reference showing a single withdrawal of $1.3 billion. For their wilful disregard of the obvious red flags, the bank was fined $461 million of their own money, separate from the seizure of the account to pay the victims.

And perfectly normal people have had their accounts “closed due to fraud”, meaning the bank got suspicious and decided to unilaterally close the account, just in case. They do give the balance back to the owners, since it’s to avoid an ongoing fraud. It’s still annoying though, but banks won’t carry more liability than they’re comfortable with, at least when the regulators still bared their teeth from time to time.

IANAL either, but I’m vaguely familiar that this realm of USA law is known as “choice of law” provisions and the applicability of “click wrap” contracts, and it’s a thorny issue in the digital age. Essentially, the problem is whether Meta can be made reasonably aware that a ToS exists for a given web server. Unlike a “NO TRESPASSING” sign posted on a gate, or a sticker on the packaging of a physical copy of Microsoft Word 97 that says “opening this package constitutes agreement to the EULA, at this URL…”, it can be argued that unless the ToS is made so blitheringly obvious to a web scraper, it might not pass muster.

To be clear, this isn’t a problem for normal web users, because the ToS link will very easily appear at the bottom of the page, when rendered in a standard web browser. The issue is whether scrapers – including AI scrapers but also bot-crawlers and even plain ol Curl – would see the notice of the ToS. There is no convention – either de facto or in law – about where or what format a ToS has to be. And it would be problematic to say that all scrapers need to thoroughly search a website for a “legal.txt”, because such a file might be somewhere non-obvious and because it exacerbates the whole “scrap servers until they collapse” issue.

So already, getting a ToS to bind Meta – or any other high-volume scraper – is an upward battle. Hence why I suggested a remedy rooted in common law, premised on the idea that actively causing expenses for the server owner is actionable, even without a ToS.

That said, I do want to point out one other detail about choice-of-law: normally if a contract specifies the venue for disputes, that will be honored. Example: the courts of Santa Clara County in California. But supposing the instance owner lives in Montreal and specifies the venue as the Court of Quebec, and if the issue with binding Meta to the ToS was solved, then there’s the challenge of actually targeting Meta. As a USA domiciled corporation, they’re not automatically within the jurisdiction that the Quebec courts can reach. If there’s a Canadian subsidiary, that might be a valid target. But if not, the Quebec courts wouldn’t be able to compel Meta’s lawyers to even show up, let alone rule in favor of the instance owner. And then there’s the whole aspect of getting an American court to ratify a judgement issued by an overseas court. It’s doable, but it’s so much harder than specifying a venue within the USA.

But again, that’s problematic if the instance isn’t located within the USA, because then the owner must travel to the USA for their court dates. And I can’t really recommend that anyone travel to the USA except for only the most critical or dire of situations.

I defer to any material or mechanical engineers, but it’s honestly amazing how hardy the humble bicycle chain is, for all that’s it’s usually – and unusually – put through. It’s basically some thin metal plates linked together by tiny roller bearings every few centimeters. Everything about it says it should explode into dozens of pieces under even light loading of human power

And yet it doesn’t. Well, not until a few thousand peak Watts slams into it.

My personal theory is that bicycle components on ebikes begin to lose a substantial chunk of service life not simply because of the higher power demands, but because of the instantaneous force. Whereas a human generates force at two peaks when turning the cranks one whole revolution, a mid-drive motor generates and sustains torque – and thus chain force – with no pauses while accelerating. That’s rough for the entire drivetrain, and maybe even parts of the frame. Though I’m of the opinion that the non-moving parts of a bicycle have so much excess strength that it’s usually a non-issue.

I’d actually be more concerned about rear wheel construction, since standard-laced spoked wheels are incredible except for: 1) axial loading (aka pushing the wheel sideways), and 2) sudden and heavy torque, which threatens the trailing spokes. Over time, the fatigue to the spokes could manifest in a wheel failure.

Briefly setting aside the logical absurdity of separated bike lanes somehow only being beneficial to drug dealers and children and not anyone else, I find it farcical that the property on the right-side of the headline photo simultaneously has: 1) a message reading “no cycle lane”, and 2) an advertisement that the property is available for rent.

Hmm, I wonder if maybe the property market would improve if more people could conveniently get to this location. If only there was something the local council could do which would promote an affordable, non-polluting, flexible, and high-volume means of transportation that strengthens the community and makes people more likely to visit and spend time on this street.

Nope, can’t think of a solution, no sir.

Eccles pointed to state data showing 10 traffic-related deaths and 213 serious injuries from 2021 through 2024 in the area being considered for e-scooter restrictions — about two-thirds of which happened to people in cars, according to the Texas Department of Transportation’s Crash Record Information System.

Once again, proponents of a ban seek to place the burden not on the majority cause of these collisions – automobiles – but on those who dare to achieve their mobility independence, who simply want affordable, flexible urban mobility in spite of the physical risks as well as municipalities that won’t build appropriate infrastructure.

As of Monday afternoon, Glyderz’s petition against an outright e-scooter ban had garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Good on them! Hopefully someone takes this petition to the Houston City Council, not as though it’s legally binding but as a tour-de-force of grassroot objections to what the City is doing. Even better is if even 1% of those signatories testified before the City Council about their objections during public comment. Even the most belligerent council cannot ignore 1.5 hours of constant negative comments on the same topic.

From my limited experience with PoE switches, how much power being drawn in relation to how much the switch can supply has a notable impact on efficiency. Specifically, when only one or two ports on a 48-port switch are delivering PoE, the increased AC power drawn from the wall is disproportionately high. Hence, any setup where you’re using more of the PoE switch’s potential power tends to increase overall efficiency.

My guess is that it has to do with efficiency curves that are only reasonable when heavily loaded for enterprise customers. In any case, if either of those two candidate switches meet your needs today and with some breathing room, both should be fine. I would tend to lean towards Netgear before TP-Link though, out of personal preference.