There’s a limited amount of space for books in schools and public libraries, so they have to make some decisions what to have in them and what not.
Also I think this is mostly being done by state governments, not the US (federal) government.
Most of these bans are not about banning those books in general, they are about not making them available in schools or public libraries. The government can decide what to promote in its own institutions. People can still get those books from elsewhere: they can buy them online or in physical bookstores.
Most domain and web hosting plans expire when no one pays to renew them.
One thing you could do is put your work under a free license. That would allow people to copy it which should make sure that your work will be preserved by others.
In the vast majority of countries, everything written down is automatically copyrighted by default and if you want to release it into the public domain or under a free license you have to make it explicit.
I am too young for that, but I do remember discovering the concept of wikis and finding it amazing that websites could now be written by their audience.
A fairly dead concept by now, nowadays the entire rest of the Internet is more interesting than wikis.
We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.
Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying “users” to “generate content” and not even disclose this.
The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it’s just like, yeah it exists, so what.
I think you’re supposed to ask questions here that people elsewhere might think are stupid questions. The idea is that in this community, there are no stupid questions.
Messages that people post on Stack Exchange sites are literally licensed CC-BY-SA, the whole point of which is to enable them to be shared and used by anyone for any purpose. One of the purposes of such a license is to make sure knowledge is preserved by allowing everyone to make and share copies.
What now? Why do you think the premise is true?
Suggested reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
12! is a really high number tho
The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in “the right category” would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone’s attention is obviously limited.
No I don’t know how to fix this.
I used to not understand it either. Now I understand that for normal people, it is an RSS reader where you just get notified when the sources you follow have something to say. For celebrities and organizations it is an advertising platform where they can remind their followers of their existence and tell them what they are doing.
Taking freely licensed photos in the summer. Open source software development in the winter.
Money can buy happiness if it is so much money that you don’t ever have to work to earn money again. Lower than that, difficult; if I won (say) 20000 euros I wouldn’t really know what to do with them because I would still have to work.
This is why I also mentioned “a source we chose”. On GNU/Linux package managers and F-Droid I can add additional package sources which can be managed by the developer.
Point is, it shouldn’t be a thing that Apple or Google or anyone has this kind of power.
App stores were a mistake. We used to get software from its developer or from a source we chose. Now that we expect there to be a central app store, it can be used for censorship.
Instant coffee
The Internet has never been as large and diverse as it is now. In the 2000s Wikipedia was often the only place where you could find generally useful information about the world on the Internet, now everything in it plus many other things can be found on many other websites competing for algorithmic attention.
The real thing about today’s Internet is that on it, censorship happens not by having too little information, but too much, much of which will never be shown to very many people because of the algorithms of search engines or social media recommendation systems. I don’t do a lot of “social media” and always find it weird to hear about personalities there who apparently have thousands or millions of followers but whom I have never heard of before.
Something something great men are almost always bad men
In languages that distinguish definiteness (e.g. English) usually if you’re talking about a “kind of thing”, you can use either the definite or indefinite form and make sense. Only if you’re talking about a specific thing does the distinction matter: “a mirror” = a mirror I’m now introducing and you don’t know about yet, “the mirror” = the mirror we talked about before and you already know about; but either form can mean “mirrors in general”. There are slight stylistic differences what’s preferred in what contexts depending on the language, but in German too you can say “in den Spiegel schauen”.