I've found wget to be very useful in such situations.
But easily defeated by a government intent on locking out the people. Simple rate limiting can render screen scraping impractical. More importantly, why should citizens have to resort to such tactics? The law belongs to the people. Let the government put away its croniyism and be open and transparent as it should.
I don't know if Oregon's law is available via other channels, or if it's locked up by the state deliberately the way Georgia's is. If the latter, then Oregon needs to relinquish its restriction as well.
I downloaded your HTML extract and found one problem: it did not follow many of the links to subsidiary pages such as "Title Note" and "Article Note". For an example, see 15-10-26. which has the following Title Note:
CROSS REFERENCES. --Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, 35-6A-1 et seq. Establishment of county law libraries, 36-15-1 et seq. Court-martial jurisdiction, 38-2-370 et seq. Designation of courts which possess jurisdiction over traffic offenses, and procedure in such courts, 40-13-1 et seq. Indictment and punishment of judge of probate court for malpractice, partiality, conduct unbecoming office, and other offenses, 45-11-4.
LAW REVIEWS. --For article, "The Majority That Wasn't: Stare Decisis, Majority Rule, and the Mischief of Quorum Requirements," see 58 Emory L. J. 831 (2009).
RESEARCH REFERENCES
Am. Jur. Trials. --Judicial Technology in the Courts, 44 Am. Jur. Trials 1.
According to the US Supreme Court, these notes are part of the official code and thus not protected by copyright. Citizens are held accountable to the interpretations given in these notes, and Georgia has made them part of the "official" code, and thus they must be available to all citizens.
Can you update your code to extract these notes as well? Thanks!
Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.This principle was strongly set out by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall when they stated “the Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right.” Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834). The Supreme Court specifically extended that principle to state law, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, in Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888) , where it stated that “the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute."
Good work! I'll download it and check formatting, and host the file as well for public access.
Clearly, though, this is of far less utility than having the government host the file itself. Further, I just read that only the Annotated code is considered official for quotation in actual court cases. I'm trying to find out exactly what that means.
As with firearms, the problem isn't that we need more laws. We need enforcement of existing laws. LEOs inexplicably refuse to intervene when rogue droners recklessly operate the toy they carelessly use to endanger others.
The rules for hobbyists are not lax: line of sight and below 400', not over populated areas or structures. That pretty much means in a mile-square or smaller open field.
I don't know about the laws in Japan, but the U.S. now has enough in the way of FAA rules to prosecute illegal drone operators. But it isn't doing it. I've read many stories of idiots and their flying lawnmowers (and I say that as a drone builder myself) ignoring common sense safety measures by flying their drones in cities, over crowds, and even at (!) airports. Japan has the right idea in fining violators thousands of dollars, but why is law enforcement waiting for crashes -- in either country? Cite illegal drone operators on sight. I've personally reported several incidents to local law enforcement (while we were operating our drones safely in a safe area and below 400'). They did nothing.
Is a citizen's arrest feasible in these situations?
I just tried your link. It seems like you can only read the law a chapter at time, and there are 800+ chapters. And then it is only HTML text that can't be readily saved in formatted form, and with the law, formatting (e.g., indentation) is critical to interpretation. There doesn't appear to be a way to download a PDF of the entire law corpus. And there is no search function at all!
Ominously, there is a link that lets you purchase the 21-volume paper copy for $615.
I do not believe that access to the free law libraries is actually encoded in the laws as a right, at least not at the federal level. I certainly believe it is encoded in the spirit of the law...
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said, "if a law isn't public, it isn't a law."
An excellent way to help is to contribute to public.resource.org, the non-profit being sued by The State of Georgia: https://public.resource.org./ Click on the "$$ SUPPORT THE PUBLIC DOMAIN" link at the bottom of the page.
Public.Resource.Org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit and your contributions are tax-deductible as allowed by law.
There is an excellent video entitled "Show me the Manual!" that introduces the issue.
New laws in Georgia become effective on January 1st and July 1st. Occasionally an emergency statue goes into effect immediately upon passage. The 2015 laws thus began on January 1st 2015 and continued to be updated through the current year's regular legislative session, which ended on April 2. The 48-volume print edition typically is published after April and includes laws scheduled to become active on July 1st.
All law library online access to the Official Georgia Code is exclusively via the broken-backed Lexis system. Georgia is one of the worst offenders in the US where citizen access to the law is concerned. And Georgia legislators aim to keep it that way, which is why they are suing Carl Malamud. The State of Georgia claims copyright in the annotated Code, and that Carl Malamud, and Public.Resource.Org have violated that copyright. That is why they are suing him.
The government's specious argument is that parts of the annotations -- case summaries -- are the creative authorship of a third party, and thus the copyright to those summaries belong to those third parties. But the federal courts have already held that indexes, captions, section headings, change histories, cross-references and case citations are not copyrightable. The case summaries are really of little value, but the citations and indexes are critical to practical use of the Code. But Georgia, by official statute, bundles them all together as the Official Georgia Code Annotated and gives the public only paywall access.
So let The State of Georgia publish the full law as a completely downloadable file, with all section headings, captions, indexes, change histories, cross references and case law citations. If the public demands that they do it, they will be forced to. You're absolutely right that Georgia should not be an exception.
You are incorrect. On January 1st of every year in Georgia, including 2015, hundreds of new laws take effect. These make up the current year's code,mel@becknet.com which is then update again on July 1 with additional new laws. The library's have outdated codes, and a quick survey of several municipal libraries found none with code books newer than 2011, so libraries are not even updated annually. Ironically, the libraries I spoke with said only the lexis site has the current code. At least they knew their business. Unlike many commenters in this thread.
I'll say it again: Georgia's state government has conspired with Lexis to keep practical access to Georgia law out of the hands of the public. Their motive is clearly to force people to purchase the Lexis product. Practical access includes full electronic text in a single corpus, to permit anyone to search and index with their own tools, plus the annotations, which encompass essential indexes and case references in addition to abstracts. The government could easily publish the law directly as PDFs, complete with indexes and case references, excluding the useless analysis. But that would not serve political cronyism. The so-called creative copyrightable abstracts are a red herring the devious device to force copyright between the public access to the law.
The sad thing is, Georgia is lawmakers have sold the legal legacy that belongs to the people for a song to a single commercial entity. It's truly a travesty, and one that many other states have avoided. So why doesn't Georgia?
Also, the link you provided is not to current Georgia law, only past. 2015 is not included. The site disclaimer notes this. The only place to get free access to the current code is the lexis hobbled search.
I'm not sure if the laws are shown in full detail.
Gnupun,
They are not shown in full detail. That's my point. You can only view a tiny fragment of the Georgia code at a time. Just reading the law in sequence becomes a hugely tedious exercise, and this crippling is deliberately intended and sanctioned by the State of Georgia to force meaningful access through the lexis paid service.
They are a mix of all three things. I would argue that the "creative" analysis are rudimentary mechanical case summaries thrown in purely to claim copyright in the whole Annotated edition, which includes indexes and case references.. The latter, as you posit, are not copyrightable.
But more importantly, because the unannotated Georgia code is not available in whole to the public (only as tiny fragments you must dredge up one at a time from the hobbled lexis search site), the Annotated version -- which is sold by Lexis -- is the only truly practical edition. The State of Georgia has conspired with lexis to make it so. And in response to anyone claiming this is "the only way to do it", you need only look at the many other states that provide the entire law in PDF form.
Gnu pun, you are wrong. Georgia law is not open source. Show me a link where I can download the entire law. You can't, because the only "free" access to the law is deliberately hobbled so you can only view a tiny fragment at any one time.
Georgia law is constructively withheld from the public. It is available for free in only one form, the online lexis-nexus search at http://www.lexisnexis.com/hott.... This search page is deliberately contrived so that you can never view more than a small fragment of text at a time. There is no way to obtain PDFs, and the search engine itself is deliberately crippled to hobble searches unless you already know the phraseology of the law involved.
As an example, try to find the "stop and identify" law for Georgia using the lexis search. Unless you already know it's part of the "loitering" statute, you will have to page through hundreds of search results to find the relevant text.
At a minimum, the State of Georgia should be forced to provide full PDF downloads of the Georgia code. More importantly, though, the annotations themselves are effectively part of the law, as they are universally cited in case law (which is simlarly hobbled with RIDICULOUS copyright restrictions) which legally interprets the code and establishes its legal meaning.
So yes, the entire Georgia code, with annotations, needs to be made freely available to the public, as are annotated codes are in most states.
Security has been considered, but is not implemented at this stage.
"Success has been considered, put now is not possible because security was not implemented from the beginning."
If you haven't learned the lessons of HTML, Email, ecommerce, and myriad other platforms that failed to address security at the start, Elliot is doomed.
I counter that a computer does not acquire knowledge. It can only acquire information. Information refers to data that has been given some organization by way of relational connection. In computing terms it is data that has been processed, such as the face data processing you describe.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is the meaning derived from information. No AI today is able to derive meaning, and all AI researchers will admit this is the barrier that must be crossed to achieve intelligence. The movie quote processing that Google did in the instant case that spawned this post is a perfect example. Googl's software could not divine the meaning, or semantics, of the movie quotes it processed, because semantics require cognition to obtain. Similarly, with your program that detects faces, there is no cognition and no derivation of meaning, hence no knowledge. It's simple pattern matching.
If you survey AI research, you'll find all manner of references to attempts at "knowledge representation", or semantics. There are semantic networks, associative memories, object-oriented storage, etc. While ambitious, none of these investigations has yielded intelligence. They all end up as simple pre-defined relationship trees. At best, these can be termed a language for specifying relationships, but some actual biological intelligence must map the relationships themselves.
You may call this "pissing around with semantics", but it's semantics that no machine can deal with.
At the start of the this branch of the post, Tmosley said:
"They aren't programming a computer to do things, they are programming a computer to learn things (or at a more advanced level, are programming a computer to learn how to learn things)."
That's just one of the people who made the assertion that machines are learning. Go ask him what his definition is. I don't have to have one. Nobody engaged in science has to define terms for a hypothesis other than the hypothesizer.
Burden of proof (or onus probandi in Latin) is the obligation that somebody presenting a new or remarkable idea has to provide evidence to support it. In a scientific context evidence is experimental or empirical data (although in some branches, well thought out mathematics may suffice). Once some evidence has been presented, it is up to the opposing "side" to disprove the evidence presented or explain why it may not be adequate.
As I said earlier, I don't need to define learning. I'm not the one asserting that computers can learn. The person making the assertion has the burden of proof. You define learning and I'll critique your definition. That's how science works.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found wget to be very useful in such situations.
But easily defeated by a government intent on locking out the people. Simple rate limiting can render screen scraping impractical. More importantly, why should citizens have to resort to such tactics? The law belongs to the people. Let the government put away its croniyism and be open and transparent as it should.
I don't know if Oregon's law is available via other channels, or if it's locked up by the state deliberately the way Georgia's is. If the latter, then Oregon needs to relinquish its restriction as well.
I downloaded your HTML extract and found one problem: it did not follow many of the links to subsidiary pages such as "Title Note" and "Article Note". For an example, see 15-10-26. which has the following Title Note:
CROSS REFERENCES. --Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, 35-6A-1 et seq. Establishment of county law libraries, 36-15-1 et seq. Court-martial jurisdiction, 38-2-370 et seq. Designation of courts which possess jurisdiction over traffic offenses, and procedure in such courts, 40-13-1 et seq. Indictment and punishment of judge of probate court for malpractice, partiality, conduct unbecoming office, and other offenses, 45-11-4.
LAW REVIEWS. --For article, "The Majority That Wasn't: Stare Decisis, Majority Rule, and the Mischief of Quorum Requirements," see 58 Emory L. J. 831 (2009).
RESEARCH REFERENCES
Am. Jur. Trials. --Judicial Technology in the Courts, 44 Am. Jur. Trials 1.
According to the US Supreme Court, these notes are part of the official code and thus not protected by copyright. Citizens are held accountable to the interpretations given in these notes, and Georgia has made them part of the "official" code, and thus they must be available to all citizens.
Can you update your code to extract these notes as well? Thanks!
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.This principle was strongly set out by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall when they stated “the Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right.” Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834). The Supreme Court specifically extended that principle to state law, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, in Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888) , where it stated that “the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute."
Good work! I'll download it and check formatting, and host the file as well for public access.
Clearly, though, this is of far less utility than having the government host the file itself. Further, I just read that only the Annotated code is considered official for quotation in actual court cases. I'm trying to find out exactly what that means.
As with firearms, the problem isn't that we need more laws. We need enforcement of existing laws. LEOs inexplicably refuse to intervene when rogue droners recklessly operate the toy they carelessly use to endanger others.
The rules for hobbyists are not lax: line of sight and below 400', not over populated areas or structures. That pretty much means in a mile-square or smaller open field.
I don't know about the laws in Japan, but the U.S. now has enough in the way of FAA rules to prosecute illegal drone operators. But it isn't doing it. I've read many stories of idiots and their flying lawnmowers (and I say that as a drone builder myself) ignoring common sense safety measures by flying their drones in cities, over crowds, and even at (!) airports. Japan has the right idea in fining violators thousands of dollars, but why is law enforcement waiting for crashes -- in either country? Cite illegal drone operators on sight. I've personally reported several incidents to local law enforcement (while we were operating our drones safely in a safe area and below 400'). They did nothing.
Is a citizen's arrest feasible in these situations?
I just tried your link. It seems like you can only read the law a chapter at time, and there are 800+ chapters. And then it is only HTML text that can't be readily saved in formatted form, and with the law, formatting (e.g., indentation) is critical to interpretation. There doesn't appear to be a way to download a PDF of the entire law corpus. And there is no search function at all!
Ominously, there is a link that lets you purchase the 21-volume paper copy for $615.
I do not believe that access to the free law libraries is actually encoded in the laws as a right, at least not at the federal level. I certainly believe it is encoded in the spirit of the law ...
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said, "if a law isn't public, it isn't a law."
An excellent way to help is to contribute to public.resource.org, the non-profit being sued by The State of Georgia: https://public.resource.org./ Click on the "$$ SUPPORT THE PUBLIC DOMAIN" link at the bottom of the page.
Public.Resource.Org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit and your contributions are tax-deductible as allowed by law.
There is an excellent video entitled "Show me the Manual!" that introduces the issue.
http://www.lexisnexis.com/hott...
http://www.lexisnexis.com/hott...
LGill,
New laws in Georgia become effective on January 1st and July 1st. Occasionally an emergency statue goes into effect immediately upon passage. The 2015 laws thus began on January 1st 2015 and continued to be updated through the current year's regular legislative session, which ended on April 2. The 48-volume print edition typically is published after April and includes laws scheduled to become active on July 1st.
All law library online access to the Official Georgia Code is exclusively via the broken-backed Lexis system. Georgia is one of the worst offenders in the US where citizen access to the law is concerned. And Georgia legislators aim to keep it that way, which is why they are suing Carl Malamud. The State of Georgia claims copyright in the annotated Code, and that Carl Malamud, and Public.Resource.Org have violated that copyright. That is why they are suing him.
The government's specious argument is that parts of the annotations -- case summaries -- are the creative authorship of a third party, and thus the copyright to those summaries belong to those third parties. But the federal courts have already held that indexes, captions, section headings, change histories, cross-references and case citations are not copyrightable. The case summaries are really of little value, but the citations and indexes are critical to practical use of the Code. But Georgia, by official statute, bundles them all together as the Official Georgia Code Annotated and gives the public only paywall access.
So let The State of Georgia publish the full law as a completely downloadable file, with all section headings, captions, indexes, change histories, cross references and case law citations. If the public demands that they do it, they will be forced to. You're absolutely right that Georgia should not be an exception.
KGill,
You are incorrect. On January 1st of every year in Georgia, including 2015, hundreds of new laws take effect. These make up the current year's code,mel@becknet.com which is then update again on July 1 with additional new laws. The library's have outdated codes, and a quick survey of several municipal libraries found none with code books newer than 2011, so libraries are not even updated annually. Ironically, the libraries I spoke with said only the lexis site has the current code. At least they knew their business. Unlike many commenters in this thread.
I'll say it again: Georgia's state government has conspired with Lexis to keep practical access to Georgia law out of the hands of the public. Their motive is clearly to force people to purchase the Lexis product. Practical access includes full electronic text in a single corpus, to permit anyone to search and index with their own tools, plus the annotations, which encompass essential indexes and case references in addition to abstracts. The government could easily publish the law directly as PDFs, complete with indexes and case references, excluding the useless analysis. But that would not serve political cronyism. The so-called creative copyrightable abstracts are a red herring the devious device to force copyright between the public access to the law.
The sad thing is, Georgia is lawmakers have sold the legal legacy that belongs to the people for a song to a single commercial entity. It's truly a travesty, and one that many other states have avoided. So why doesn't Georgia?
Also, the link you provided is not to current Georgia law, only past. 2015 is not included. The site disclaimer notes this. The only place to get free access to the current code is the lexis hobbled search.
I'm not sure if the laws are shown in full detail.
Gnupun,
They are not shown in full detail. That's my point. You can only view a tiny fragment of the Georgia code at a time. Just reading the law in sequence becomes a hugely tedious exercise, and this crippling is deliberately intended and sanctioned by the State of Georgia to force meaningful access through the lexis paid service.
They are a mix of all three things. I would argue that the "creative" analysis are rudimentary mechanical case summaries thrown in purely to claim copyright in the whole Annotated edition, which includes indexes and case references.. The latter, as you posit, are not copyrightable.
But more importantly, because the unannotated Georgia code is not available in whole to the public (only as tiny fragments you must dredge up one at a time from the hobbled lexis search site), the Annotated version -- which is sold by Lexis -- is the only truly practical edition. The State of Georgia has conspired with lexis to make it so. And in response to anyone claiming this is "the only way to do it", you need only look at the many other states that provide the entire law in PDF form.
Gnu pun, you are wrong. Georgia law is not open source. Show me a link where I can download the entire law. You can't, because the only "free" access to the law is deliberately hobbled so you can only view a tiny fragment at any one time.
Georgia law is constructively withheld from the public. It is available for free in only one form, the online lexis-nexus search at http://www.lexisnexis.com/hott.... This search page is deliberately contrived so that you can never view more than a small fragment of text at a time. There is no way to obtain PDFs, and the search engine itself is deliberately crippled to hobble searches unless you already know the phraseology of the law involved.
As an example, try to find the "stop and identify" law for Georgia using the lexis search. Unless you already know it's part of the "loitering" statute, you will have to page through hundreds of search results to find the relevant text.
At a minimum, the State of Georgia should be forced to provide full PDF downloads of the Georgia code. More importantly, though, the annotations themselves are effectively part of the law, as they are universally cited in case law (which is simlarly hobbled with RIDICULOUS copyright restrictions) which legally interprets the code and establishes its legal meaning.
So yes, the entire Georgia code, with annotations, needs to be made freely available to the public, as are annotated codes are in most states.
Security has been considered, but is not implemented at this stage.
"Success has been considered, put now is not possible because security was not implemented from the beginning."
If you haven't learned the lessons of HTML, Email, ecommerce, and myriad other platforms that failed to address security at the start, Elliot is doomed.
I counter that a computer does not acquire knowledge. It can only acquire information. Information refers to data that has been given some organization by way of relational connection. In computing terms it is data that has been processed, such as the face data processing you describe.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is the meaning derived from information. No AI today is able to derive meaning, and all AI researchers will admit this is the barrier that must be crossed to achieve intelligence. The movie quote processing that Google did in the instant case that spawned this post is a perfect example. Googl's software could not divine the meaning, or semantics, of the movie quotes it processed, because semantics require cognition to obtain. Similarly, with your program that detects faces, there is no cognition and no derivation of meaning, hence no knowledge. It's simple pattern matching.
If you survey AI research, you'll find all manner of references to attempts at "knowledge representation", or semantics. There are semantic networks, associative memories, object-oriented storage, etc. While ambitious, none of these investigations has yielded intelligence. They all end up as simple pre-defined relationship trees. At best, these can be termed a language for specifying relationships, but some actual biological intelligence must map the relationships themselves.
You may call this "pissing around with semantics", but it's semantics that no machine can deal with.
At the start of the this branch of the post, Tmosley said:
"They aren't programming a computer to do things, they are programming a computer to learn things (or at a more advanced level, are programming a computer to learn how to learn things)."
That's just one of the people who made the assertion that machines are learning. Go ask him what his definition is. I don't have to have one. Nobody engaged in science has to define terms for a hypothesis other than the hypothesizer.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof
Burden of proof (or onus probandi in Latin) is the obligation that somebody presenting a new or remarkable idea has to provide evidence to support it. In a scientific context evidence is experimental or empirical data (although in some branches, well thought out mathematics may suffice). Once some evidence has been presented, it is up to the opposing "side" to disprove the evidence presented or explain why it may not be adequate.
You're saying the "it's not science" that the person making an assertion has the burden of proof? That's medieval.
As I said earlier, I don't need to define learning. I'm not the one asserting that computers can learn. The person making the assertion has the burden of proof. You define learning and I'll critique your definition. That's how science works.