I mean, at the USA average price of electricity of $0.13 per kWh, then for a halving of 70 Watts, it’s about 11 cents per day, or $40 per year. But at the California average price of $0.35, then the savings is 29 cents per day, or $107 per year.

That’s not small money, especially if it’s free to make these gains by ripping out unneeded functionality. But the point is taken that it’ll be hard to find savings from older hardware, which simply didn’t prioritize energy efficiency.

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.

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.

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.

The larger town next to mine has monthly tours of their wastewater and water processing plants. Although they’re scheduled to be amenable for K-12 student field trips, they also see adults who wish to understand how their tax dollars are being expensed for the public good.

For other municipal services, you might also reach out to the director of that department, since as public servants, they can also schedule special tours of the facilities for members of the public. It can’t hurt to ask.