I believe Kiva, at least, does allow you to get your money back once the loan is repaid:
4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds. --How Kiva Works
The lender doesn't get any of the interest from the loan, just the original principle. Other micro-loan organizations may work differently, of course.
1) I would debate that the community can actually destroy an F/OSS project, since anyone who wishes to can take the most recent codebase and start a fork. Control by the community would imply that the community as a whole decides how the project is improved or adapted, but in practice anyone has that ability. The main project branch is just a loose confederation of individuals with similar interests.
As far as cooperation for mutual benefit, it is a tenet of any social animal.
You conveniently left out the bit about "individual property owners". Communism is also predicated on (apparently spontaneous) cooperation, but does not recognize individual property ownership, or even self-ownership. It's easy to expect cooperation when the individual members of the group don't have any other choice.
2) One could just as easily say that communism is just an economic model. In practice both communism and capitalism imply certain forms of social organization. Just as it is possible to live in a commune without a society-wide implementation of communism it is possible to operate by capitalistic principles in a non-capitalistic society. In a way you're right, though: capitalism is a purely economic system. That is to say, members of a fully capitalistic society interact only on an economic (voluntary) level, not a political one (via aggression).
3) What I meant was that each participant in a F/OSS project is contributing voluntarily, according to that member's own individual interests. No one can tell any other member what to do. If there's a conflict over the direction of the project one side or the other can start a fork and continue separately. Under communism each individual submits to the will of the group; individuals who disagree with the group's decision are not permitted to split off and start their own societies.
That depends on how the file is split up. If the pieces represent contiguous segments of the file, sure, you could probable decode at least some of them independently. What if each piece consists of every 100th bit, though? Good luck getting anything useful out of that... after you break the encryption, of course.
Voting like that doesn't scale; you'll just end up creating a society of interfering busybodies with no concept of minority rights. To have a sane system you need to introduce the concept of standing, such that people only get a vote on those actions which can be objectively shown to affect them. At that point it makes sense for the vote to become an outright veto, and -- congratulations! -- you've re-invented the anarcho-capitalist (libertarian) position.
1) F/OSS supporters don't (generally) claim that all property should be communally owned. The concept of ownership -- communal or otherwise -- doesn't even apply to things which lack scarcity, such as code. To the extent that some people claim it does apply ("IP") it isn't "owned" by the community, but rather by the individual contributors. Cooporation between individual property owners for mutual benefit is a tenet of capitalism, not communism.
2) The idea that all individuals have equal rights under the law, though by no means universal, is not unique to communism. Capitalism, for example, endorses the same principle. Furthermore, there are different "classes" within F/OSS; administrators, maintainers, users, etc. The level of access to the project repositories, and the level of influence over the project's goals, varies according between these "classes".
3) Communism involves collective self-government: the "collective will" of the group governs each individual member's actions. F/OSS projects, by contrast, exist in a state of literal anarchy (no rulers) consistent with individual sovereignty, self-ownership, individual rights, and private property. There is no comparison between the two; they exist on opposite ends of the spectrum.
A license is one form of credentials. It is no more inherently trustworthy than a certificate issued by any other organization. It is also possible to be qualified to perform the surgery without possessing a license, or any other form of certification. Furthermore the patient, or its legal representative, may not care about formal credentials; mandatory licensing interferes with their rights in this regard.
Does that hold true even if that kid were you?
Yes, of course it does. I also hold the view that guardianship does not extend to overruling the express wishes of the one being guarded (being more like an agent-principle relationship than ownership), which serves to temper that position somewhat.
I don't have a problem with the government (or any other trusted organization, e.g. a university or professional organization) issuing papers for the purpose of establishing credentials per se. The issue is when those papers become mandatory, rather than simply a means to establish credentials. Protection from fraud may be the excuse for licensing, but the regulations go far beyond that worthy goal.
I know you were attempting to be sarcastic, but I wouldn't have any problem with that provided you didn't commit fraud by claiming medical credentials you don't have. If the kid's legal guardians want you to do the surgery despite your lack of formal approval by the state I see no reason to interfere.
Medical regulations, including licensing, are no more beneficial than any other kind of regulation.
If you know who sent the notices then you could trivially be certain to revoke only the copyrights of the individual or group that actually sent them. There'd be no need to worry about people posting fake notices for other groups.
It doesn't matter whether the punishment is a fine or copyright revocation; either way you need to know who you're actually dealing with.
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract?... If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Sure. Why not? I don't see any reason the other party shouldn't expect me to keep my word. Even if you assume the body itself is inalienable the effect is the same.
When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
So don't own a phone. It's not that difficult.
Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to?
As you say, it's want, not a need. If you want someone to provide you with cell service on their network, then you have to agree to their terms. Once you've agreed to the terms and used the service you're obligated to pay for it, as agreed. Hospital service is no different, although I would dispute the concept of "implied consent" -- if they treat you without explicit consent in advance they're relying entirely on your presumed goodwill (or endorsing aggression...).
The thing is, they entered into a plan with perfectly reasonable rates and then used it to a far greater extent than it was designed for. It's not like there was some hidden clause they never would've agreed to it they'd seen it. If they'd bothered to look up the rates -- clearly posted on AT&T's web site, as noted by a previous commenter -- they probably would have used it a lot less, but there's nothing obviously unconscionable about the terms themselves.
You're perfectly free not to enter into a contract with any cell provider. There is no inherent right to have cell service on whatever contractual terms you wish. That all cell providers have similar terms (which isn't even true -- see TracFone, for example) is no different from all cell providers requiring monetary payment. It doesn't automatically make them a cartel, even presuming that there was anything wrong with being a member of a cartel in the first place.
These people could very well be facing financial ruin.
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
It may seem clear enough at first glance, but unless you're a lawyer (I'm not) how can you possibly know whether any of those terms mean what you would expect based on ordinary, conversational English? Which of those phrases are "terms of art" with specific meaning in a legal context? How does this text relate to the vast library of prior case law? Which of its clauses are even enforceable in your particular jurisdiction? These aren't questions the average person could answer.
Without a background in legalese one can only assume that such documents are encoded in some strange foreign dialect that only appears vaguely comprehensible to the unwary.
As I understand it, the term "U.S. Government" refers to the government of the United States as a whole, i.e. the Federal government. We don't really have codes that apply to the state and federal governments as a whole, because they are conceptually separate. The states derive their authority from their own citizens via their individual state constitutions, not from the federal government. Certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution are understood to apply to the states due to the 14th(?) amendment, but in most other respects the two operate independently.
There is a much more detailed treatment of U.S. Government copyright issues on Wikipedia. In particular:
A work of the United States government, as defined by United States copyright law, is "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. government as part of that person's official duties." The term only applies to the work of the federal government, not state or local governments.
Obviously, this being the Internet, you should assume that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Sure. Load simpler web pages, or sacrifice performance (caching). Standards-compliance probably carries its own memory cost as well. Really, though, what difference does it make how much memory Firefox is using, so long as it doesn't exceed the available free space? Firefox seems to scale its memory use according to the amount of space you actually have. I've run it on memory-limited systems (VMs, actually -- 128MB total RAM) without any trouble, so it's not like it always requires 300MB. It just makes use of the resources that happen to be available.
It all comes down to a trade-off between performance and memory usage. Most people care a lot about speed, and have tons of memory they're not using for anything else, so...
Re:Didn't measure memory correctly
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
Would it be possible that the memory usage that was measured for IE8 was flawed in the same way?
Likely true, but the results would still tend to favor the browser that launched the fewest processes. For example, if 20 Chrome processes were to require 1 MB of private space each plus 30 MB of shared space (50 MB total), and 10 IE processes required 2 MB each plus 30 MB shared (again, 50 MB total), the working sets would appear to give IE an advantage (31MB*20 > 32MB*10) even though they're using the same amount of memory.
In the late 18th century, 'science' would mean knowledge, or learning. Grammar and rhetoric would qualify as sciences, for example.
Actually, that's how I would use the term "science" myself, which is why I didn't bother to expound upon it. I wouldn't count most of the popular "art forms" (entertainment) as either "knowledge" or "learning", however, particularly as there exist far superior ways to communicate and preserve historical facts -- not that most entertainment is factual in nature to begin with.
So are you saying that general works of art were implied by the term "science", or the term "useful arts"? What about the ending -- you're somehow reading in exclusive rights for things which are neither "writings" nor "discoveries". I could see including political thought -- the field is known as political science, after all -- but not paintings, sculpture, works of fiction, etc.
Scientific reasoning was considered one form of artistic expression, along with other forms of art in the 18th Century....
Perhaps so, but to make your point you would have to prove the opposite: that those other forms of art were considered aspects of science. Or, alternately, that such art forms fit the definition of the "useful arts", which seriously stretches the meaning of the term "useful".
I think it is you (and many others, of course) who are reading a lot into this passage which was never written there. If it was meant to include other items there should have been an amendment to that effect. Until such an amendment passes only those things which were understood to be included by all the signatories, plus at least a majority of those they represented, could possibly warrant Constitutional protection.
Reinterpretation of this sort would never hold up in the context of a civil contract; it's even worse in the context of a document which purports to constrain the powers of a government. Of course, seeing as how everyone who actually agreed to it is long since deceased, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the Constitution actually grants any legitimate authority whatsoever at this point...
The only way a law could be copyrighted is if they were works of art (poems or some such)...
Actually they'd have to be works of science, not works of art:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The phrase "useful Arts" refers to discovered production techniques (think "artisan") and is the basis for patents. Copyrights (for "Writings") were intended to promote scientific progress. Nothing in the Constitution justifies patents or copyrights over "works of art" in the modern sense.
So far as copyrighted laws are concerned--ignorance should be a perfect defense if the government itself restricts their distribution. It's no different than enforcing an unpublished law, which in turn is no different than just making up a "law" on the spot.
Common law is concerned with resolving disputes, with the goal of preventing vigilantism and a consequential escalation of force. It has nothing to do with morality; you can't sue someone (and win) just because you think their actions were immoral. You have to have standing to sue, meaning that the other party (a) violated your rights and (b) caused you harm. Whether these conditions are met is a matter of objective reason, not "societal norms". On the contrary, it is the civil (legislative) law which is subjective and arbitrary, fluctuating in response to whatever happens to be popular at the time.
Can anyone come up with a really good definition of a "scripting language"?
I think it comes down to (a) being able to run the program without explicitly compilation, and (b) little or no mandatory boilerplate code.
Java: Explicit compilation to.class file. Requires class declaration and entry-point method for the simplest programs. Conclusion: not a scripting language.
Ruby/Perl/Python/JavaScript: Implicit compilation, or interpreted. No boilerplate code. Conclusion: scripting languages.
Bash: Interpreted. No boilerplate code. Conclusion: scripting language.
C: Generally requires explicit compilation. Requires explicit entry-point routine. Conclusion: not a scripting language.
TCC can be used to run pseudo-C code as a "script", but one could create a wrapper for any language that compiles to a temporary file and then runs the result. I think the typical use case is a better indicator.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Kiva, at least, does allow you to get your money back once the loan is repaid:
4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds. --How Kiva Works
The lender doesn't get any of the interest from the loan, just the original principle. Other micro-loan organizations may work differently, of course.
1) I would debate that the community can actually destroy an F/OSS project, since anyone who wishes to can take the most recent codebase and start a fork. Control by the community would imply that the community as a whole decides how the project is improved or adapted, but in practice anyone has that ability. The main project branch is just a loose confederation of individuals with similar interests.
As far as cooperation for mutual benefit, it is a tenet of any social animal.
You conveniently left out the bit about "individual property owners". Communism is also predicated on (apparently spontaneous) cooperation, but does not recognize individual property ownership, or even self-ownership. It's easy to expect cooperation when the individual members of the group don't have any other choice.
2) One could just as easily say that communism is just an economic model. In practice both communism and capitalism imply certain forms of social organization. Just as it is possible to live in a commune without a society-wide implementation of communism it is possible to operate by capitalistic principles in a non-capitalistic society. In a way you're right, though: capitalism is a purely economic system. That is to say, members of a fully capitalistic society interact only on an economic (voluntary) level, not a political one (via aggression).
3) What I meant was that each participant in a F/OSS project is contributing voluntarily, according to that member's own individual interests. No one can tell any other member what to do. If there's a conflict over the direction of the project one side or the other can start a fork and continue separately. Under communism each individual submits to the will of the group; individuals who disagree with the group's decision are not permitted to split off and start their own societies.
That depends on how the file is split up. If the pieces represent contiguous segments of the file, sure, you could probable decode at least some of them independently. What if each piece consists of every 100th bit, though? Good luck getting anything useful out of that... after you break the encryption, of course.
Voting like that doesn't scale; you'll just end up creating a society of interfering busybodies with no concept of minority rights. To have a sane system you need to introduce the concept of standing, such that people only get a vote on those actions which can be objectively shown to affect them. At that point it makes sense for the vote to become an outright veto, and -- congratulations! -- you've re-invented the anarcho-capitalist (libertarian) position.
1) F/OSS supporters don't (generally) claim that all property should be communally owned. The concept of ownership -- communal or otherwise -- doesn't even apply to things which lack scarcity, such as code. To the extent that some people claim it does apply ("IP") it isn't "owned" by the community, but rather by the individual contributors. Cooporation between individual property owners for mutual benefit is a tenet of capitalism, not communism.
2) The idea that all individuals have equal rights under the law, though by no means universal, is not unique to communism. Capitalism, for example, endorses the same principle. Furthermore, there are different "classes" within F/OSS; administrators, maintainers, users, etc. The level of access to the project repositories, and the level of influence over the project's goals, varies according between these "classes".
3) Communism involves collective self-government: the "collective will" of the group governs each individual member's actions. F/OSS projects, by contrast, exist in a state of literal anarchy (no rulers) consistent with individual sovereignty, self-ownership, individual rights, and private property. There is no comparison between the two; they exist on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Licenses are creditionals [sic].
A license is one form of credentials. It is no more inherently trustworthy than a certificate issued by any other organization. It is also possible to be qualified to perform the surgery without possessing a license, or any other form of certification. Furthermore the patient, or its legal representative, may not care about formal credentials; mandatory licensing interferes with their rights in this regard.
Does that hold true even if that kid were you?
Yes, of course it does. I also hold the view that guardianship does not extend to overruling the express wishes of the one being guarded (being more like an agent-principle relationship than ownership), which serves to temper that position somewhat.
I don't have a problem with the government (or any other trusted organization, e.g. a university or professional organization) issuing papers for the purpose of establishing credentials per se. The issue is when those papers become mandatory, rather than simply a means to establish credentials. Protection from fraud may be the excuse for licensing, but the regulations go far beyond that worthy goal.
I know you were attempting to be sarcastic, but I wouldn't have any problem with that provided you didn't commit fraud by claiming medical credentials you don't have. If the kid's legal guardians want you to do the surgery despite your lack of formal approval by the state I see no reason to interfere.
Medical regulations, including licensing, are no more beneficial than any other kind of regulation.
If you know who sent the notices then you could trivially be certain to revoke only the copyrights of the individual or group that actually sent them. There'd be no need to worry about people posting fake notices for other groups.
It doesn't matter whether the punishment is a fine or copyright revocation; either way you need to know who you're actually dealing with.
That's what the Firehose is for. Mod away to your heart's content.
decode_string = "01001001 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 01101100 01100011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101111 01110000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01110010 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01101100 01101111 01110010 01100100 01110011"
bytes = decode_string.scan(/[01]+/).map { |bits| bits.to_i(2) }
puts bytes.pack('C*')
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract? ... If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Sure. Why not? I don't see any reason the other party shouldn't expect me to keep my word. Even if you assume the body itself is inalienable the effect is the same.
When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
So don't own a phone. It's not that difficult.
Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to?
As you say, it's want, not a need. If you want someone to provide you with cell service on their network, then you have to agree to their terms. Once you've agreed to the terms and used the service you're obligated to pay for it, as agreed. Hospital service is no different, although I would dispute the concept of "implied consent" -- if they treat you without explicit consent in advance they're relying entirely on your presumed goodwill (or endorsing aggression...).
It isn't like you have any choice - every company does it.
The thing is, they entered into a plan with perfectly reasonable rates and then used it to a far greater extent than it was designed for. It's not like there was some hidden clause they never would've agreed to it they'd seen it. If they'd bothered to look up the rates -- clearly posted on AT&T's web site, as noted by a previous commenter -- they probably would have used it a lot less, but there's nothing obviously unconscionable about the terms themselves.
You're perfectly free not to enter into a contract with any cell provider. There is no inherent right to have cell service on whatever contractual terms you wish. That all cell providers have similar terms (which isn't even true -- see TracFone, for example) is no different from all cell providers requiring monetary payment. It doesn't automatically make them a cartel, even presuming that there was anything wrong with being a member of a cartel in the first place.
These people could very well be facing financial ruin.
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
It may seem clear enough at first glance, but unless you're a lawyer (I'm not) how can you possibly know whether any of those terms mean what you would expect based on ordinary, conversational English? Which of those phrases are "terms of art" with specific meaning in a legal context? How does this text relate to the vast library of prior case law? Which of its clauses are even enforceable in your particular jurisdiction? These aren't questions the average person could answer.
Without a background in legalese one can only assume that such documents are encoded in some strange foreign dialect that only appears vaguely comprehensible to the unwary.
As I understand it, the term "U.S. Government" refers to the government of the United States as a whole, i.e. the Federal government. We don't really have codes that apply to the state and federal governments as a whole, because they are conceptually separate. The states derive their authority from their own citizens via their individual state constitutions, not from the federal government. Certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution are understood to apply to the states due to the 14th(?) amendment, but in most other respects the two operate independently.
There is a much more detailed treatment of U.S. Government copyright issues on Wikipedia. In particular:
A work of the United States government, as defined by United States copyright law, is "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. government as part of that person's official duties." The term only applies to the work of the federal government, not state or local governments.
Obviously, this being the Internet, you should assume that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Is there a way of decreasing this footprint?
Sure. Load simpler web pages, or sacrifice performance (caching). Standards-compliance probably carries its own memory cost as well. Really, though, what difference does it make how much memory Firefox is using, so long as it doesn't exceed the available free space? Firefox seems to scale its memory use according to the amount of space you actually have. I've run it on memory-limited systems (VMs, actually -- 128MB total RAM) without any trouble, so it's not like it always requires 300MB. It just makes use of the resources that happen to be available.
It all comes down to a trade-off between performance and memory usage. Most people care a lot about speed, and have tons of memory they're not using for anything else, so...
Would it be possible that the memory usage that was measured for IE8 was flawed in the same way?
Likely true, but the results would still tend to favor the browser that launched the fewest processes. For example, if 20 Chrome processes were to require 1 MB of private space each plus 30 MB of shared space (50 MB total), and 10 IE processes required 2 MB each plus 30 MB shared (again, 50 MB total), the working sets would appear to give IE an advantage (31MB*20 > 32MB*10) even though they're using the same amount of memory.
In the late 18th century, 'science' would mean knowledge, or learning. Grammar and rhetoric would qualify as sciences, for example.
Actually, that's how I would use the term "science" myself, which is why I didn't bother to expound upon it. I wouldn't count most of the popular "art forms" (entertainment) as either "knowledge" or "learning", however, particularly as there exist far superior ways to communicate and preserve historical facts -- not that most entertainment is factual in nature to begin with.
So are you saying that general works of art were implied by the term "science", or the term "useful arts"? What about the ending -- you're somehow reading in exclusive rights for things which are neither "writings" nor "discoveries". I could see including political thought -- the field is known as political science, after all -- but not paintings, sculpture, works of fiction, etc.
Scientific reasoning was considered one form of artistic expression, along with other forms of art in the 18th Century....
Perhaps so, but to make your point you would have to prove the opposite: that those other forms of art were considered aspects of science. Or, alternately, that such art forms fit the definition of the "useful arts", which seriously stretches the meaning of the term "useful".
I think it is you (and many others, of course) who are reading a lot into this passage which was never written there. If it was meant to include other items there should have been an amendment to that effect. Until such an amendment passes only those things which were understood to be included by all the signatories, plus at least a majority of those they represented, could possibly warrant Constitutional protection.
Reinterpretation of this sort would never hold up in the context of a civil contract; it's even worse in the context of a document which purports to constrain the powers of a government. Of course, seeing as how everyone who actually agreed to it is long since deceased, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the Constitution actually grants any legitimate authority whatsoever at this point...
This law is a work of the California state government, not the U.S. Government, so that section doesn't automatically apply.
The only way a law could be copyrighted is if they were works of art (poems or some such) ...
Actually they'd have to be works of science, not works of art:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The phrase "useful Arts" refers to discovered production techniques (think "artisan") and is the basis for patents. Copyrights (for "Writings") were intended to promote scientific progress. Nothing in the Constitution justifies patents or copyrights over "works of art" in the modern sense.
So far as copyrighted laws are concerned--ignorance should be a perfect defense if the government itself restricts their distribution. It's no different than enforcing an unpublished law, which in turn is no different than just making up a "law" on the spot.
Common law is concerned with resolving disputes, with the goal of preventing vigilantism and a consequential escalation of force. It has nothing to do with morality; you can't sue someone (and win) just because you think their actions were immoral. You have to have standing to sue, meaning that the other party (a) violated your rights and (b) caused you harm. Whether these conditions are met is a matter of objective reason, not "societal norms". On the contrary, it is the civil (legislative) law which is subjective and arbitrary, fluctuating in response to whatever happens to be popular at the time.
Can anyone come up with a really good definition of a "scripting language"?
I think it comes down to (a) being able to run the program without explicitly compilation, and (b) little or no mandatory boilerplate code.
Java: Explicit compilation to .class file. Requires class declaration and entry-point method for the simplest programs. Conclusion: not a scripting language.
Ruby/Perl/Python/JavaScript: Implicit compilation, or interpreted. No boilerplate code. Conclusion: scripting languages.
Bash: Interpreted. No boilerplate code. Conclusion: scripting language.
C: Generally requires explicit compilation. Requires explicit entry-point routine. Conclusion: not a scripting language.
TCC can be used to run pseudo-C code as a "script", but one could create a wrapper for any language that compiles to a temporary file and then runs the result. I think the typical use case is a better indicator.