Whether over months or years, they have certainly gotten worse. It is a race to the bottom or to 1 micrometer above the legal red line if one should ever be established.
What makes it seem probable that it is patent-encumbered? Is there something specific I can read about or is it just the track record of previous standards (starting with arithmetic encoding in the first JPEG)?
Hertz, becquerel, et al. are algebraically defined as s^(-1) yet intended to be used for different kinds of quantities. The SI brochure also allows replacing radian by 1, which brings angular velocity into the fight. Further reading: https://doi.org/10.1088/0026-1394/52/1/40
Being careful to distinguish 'fundamental laws' from just 'quantities that we defined', information theory and queueing theory have some good examples of proven laws.
ISO 80000 Part 13 gives some symbols within the scope of communication technology (its scope is more narrow than its title would suggest). The standard itself is copyrighted but the quantity symbols are listed on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000#Part_13:_Informa...
The "two wrongs" hostname is apt. Hertz is for periodic phenomena; becquerel is for radioactive decay. The SI brochure discourages the use of counting units such as 'request'. The number of requests is regarded as just a number, or at best a quantity that is referred to the unit one. The applicable SI unit therefore is just the reciprocal second, s^(-1).
In practice, counting units are used everywhere (e.g., in MB/s, the byte is a counting unit), but I am relaying what the SI brochure actually says on this question.
Well, there are two pieces. The first piece is establishing that 'the groups' were doing something wrong. The second piece is the usual struggle about the responsibility of big tech to police and moderate what goes on in the fora that they own and generate their income from. Attention is skewed toward the second question because big tech has the deep pockets, but both questions involve nontrivial moral issues.
They wrote "the term has always referred to those empowered politically by massive wealth" but a more precise term for that is plutocrat. I always understood oligarchy as rule by any small group.
If someone votes a personal prejudice or vested interest, any mandatory rationale provided would be pretextual. It would be great if downvotes were all well-motivated and accompanied by constructive critique, but it just ain't so. C.f. the Reviewer #2 problem in peer review.
Forks are not inherently good or bad but can seriously muck up an ecosystem if they are not well-justified. Mucking up the Linux ecosystem would be BAD.