"This would, I'd be willing to bet, STILL be claimed to "disproportionately affect people of color".
It probably would. If its like any number of other government services... its only available 9 to 4 monday to friday; no weekends, no holidays.
And the registration process will prefer ID like a passport & drivers license & Credit card. So rich folks will breeze through.
Poor folks will have a much harder time getting there, will need time off work, etc, etc. And then someone who lives with their brother's family will be trying to register with an library card and an expired student card...
It may not directly be targeting people of color. But it hits them a lot harder anyway. So 'disproportionally affect' is still a valid criticism.
"So statistically speaking, if you have 100 people with the exact same First, Middle and Last Name born in the same year, on average 4-5 people per common name pair across the US will share the same birthday."
If you read the article, they don't even look at middle names. So John Arthur Adams is a match for John Willy Adams, and both are matches for John Randall Adams Jr.
The algorithm crosscheck uses is around 99% wrong for good reasons.
We don't know what criteria uses to put people in its database -- that makes it vague. Sure name and birthdate are mentioned, but its not exactly defined in depth how those are used.
For example, if you thought John Wesley Washington and John Arthur Washington were two different names, according to crosscheck, you'd be wrong. It doesn't count middle names or intitials. Additionally stuff like John Smith Sr., John Smith Jr., and John Smith III, are all considered name matches too.
As for dispproportionately targeting people of color. The article mentions that 95% of people with the last name "Kim" are asian, and 95% of the people with the last name Washington are black. However, 95%+ of people with the last name Feldman or Hagen are white. Nevertheless, they do make a reference to actually analyzing census data; and the claim that people of color are statistically more likely to share a name than white people is certainly plausible. I'd need to see a study to know more.
Additionally, its a republican project, funded by republicans and sold to republicans... odds are if it was turning away more republican voters than democratic voters they would have shut it down by now. Or tweaked their criteria so as not to both with the Feldman's and Hagen's of the world, and just focus on the Washington's and the Kim's...
Unless you go by voter turnout; which gives you an idea how many people are deciding the fate:
Canada (1995) at 93.5%, UK brexit at 72%, Catalan at 43.3%
"Canada, unlike the UK, never said they'd recognize a "Yes" victory."
Why should they? Canada is not a direct democracy and never has pretended to be one; and the use of referendums is often used as a poll to gauge sentiment rather than a direct legislative tool. Plus the use of a local referendum to determine a nation's boundaries is not simple. What about how the rest of Canada feels about it? They may own property in quebec, have businesses and investments in quebec, or have family in quebec - and they are all seriously impacted as well. And quebec leaving affects all of Canada not just quebec. Does the rest of Canada not get any representation at all in determining the fate of their own country? Unilateral secession is complicated.
My friends used to jokingly suggest we hold a referendum in the rest of Canada to draw a border around the most separatist parts of quebec out of the country, and just kick those regions out.
"Spanish thugs showed up at polling stations to beat the shit out of independence-minded Catalan citizens"
Either way, we agree the 'remain' crowd stayed home and didn't have their vote counted; so 90% for separation isn't terribly accurate.
" It says a lot that so many Catalans voted in spite of Spanish oppression and the risk of personal injury."
Does it? They didn't know things were going to get that out of hand when they went out to vote. I'd say the whole world was pretty shocked at how it went down.
Am I really being brave if I go downtown and a riot breaks out and I'm downtown when it happens? I'm more trapped by unexpected circumstances than anything else.
I just tried this now in the calculator that comes with windows 10. (im on build 1707 "creators update" not the fall one.) I pressed the following keys:
3 + 3 * 3 =
It displayed 12.
As for the old calc.exe app, it behaved the same as the old physical ones that didn't queue up operations, and executed each operation immediately. So it pretty much did what i expected it to do too.
I mean, honestly, I don't use windows built in calculators much myself; i don't need the big friendly touch buttons on my desktop; that's not a UI i need or want, and its waste of space; and they're functionality relatively weak.
I use SpeQ as my quick desktop calculator these days. I'm curious what other people are using.
In the Catalonian case over 90% of voters voted to leave,
To be fair, it was widely reported that people who did not want to leave boycotted the vote because they thought it was an illegal and illegitimate stunt. The Canadian referendums carried a lot more political legitimacy.
You really think developers don't understand the licensing they chose
In a lot of cases: yes.
It has nothing to do with my preference; lots of people, including developers don't really know the ins and outs of the GPL or BSD or the LGPL or GPLv3 vs v2, or AGPL, or MPL... why should anyone expect otherwise?
Beyond the very basics, this is a specialty for lawyers not developers. Why do you think the average developer knows this stuff inside out?
Thanks for circling back to the very beginning of the discussion.
Most people don't know licensing. They choose the GPL or the BSD in many cases because they do *want* it to be 'free', and they don't really understand the difference. Then some twit comes along and sasy 'go BSD' its maximally free -- the GPL has restrictions.... so they follow that advice.
And then when they find someone put a nice bow on their 'free code' and is selling it for big money, they often say... this isn't what i intended at all. I wanted it to be free; I wanted other people to take it and extend it... I didn't release it so that big companies could put a bow on it and then try to sell it back to me with strict licensing terms.
"You can't exactly cry 'unfair' if people do what's allowed, but not what you expected."
Quite so. This is why its important to be very clear exactly what each license allows and doesn't allow. So that your expectations are *met*.
You are absolutely right that lots of authors are fine with their code being BSD... and that's fine if that's what THEY want. I've released BSD code myself, usually smaller library type stuff where I don't care who uses it for what purpose, or for sample/demo type stuff.
My preference for GPL is more for bigger projects, where the tendancy for another entity to just try and 'squat and monetize it' becomes more of an issue.
And big projects funded by public universities/public research grants/ etc a GPL license makes more sense. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to just help themselves to that and then sell it.
Some people would say it's reasonably fair that the downstream developer only got the same rights to the BSD code that the first developer got. Just because someone gave another person a gift doesn't entitle you to a gift from the receiver.
Except that *I* might be the original developer, or the guy who paid the original developer. And all you did was take my 'gift' put on some wrapping paper and a bow, and then sell it back to me with all the rights I gave you stripped away.
The code I gave you had these rights attached, and the extended code you sent back me no longer has them. To say... they weren't 'stripped', just 'declined to be granted' is pointless sophistry.
Its legal and within the license, and its moral in the sense that I gave you permission to do this in the original license, but its still a dick move IMO, and its morally dubious within most moral frameworks... in the sense that it wasn't strictly 'wrong'... but there's not a lot of good arguments for how it is 'right'?
Later on, a downstream developer cannot be "stripped" of rights he never had.
Is this the maximal freedom the BSD enables? Where a developer doesn't have to worry about losing any rights, because he never got them in the first place!
He does however have recourse to use the original version.
iOS is based on BSD. How much value is there in the 'recourse' to the 'original version'? Or a checkpoint firewall? Or a juniper device?
No rights to lose, because you don't have any to start with.
Except that the downstream developer has few freedoms. Sure they can modify the code and if that is all you care about then yes, it is a nice freedom
That's already one more freedom than the downstream developer who received "upstream its BSD but not anymore code"
But that developer has no freedom in choosing how they can redistribute the product of their work: that is decided for them by the GPL.
The downstream developer receiving relicensed BSD code has no right to modify OR redistribute. Yeah the GPL puts some restrictions their redistribution... to PRESERVE the right of redistribution further down the line.
The guy with re-licensed code based on BSD has no rights at all. The guy upstream stripped him of all his rights. He can't modify it, he can't fix it, and he can't redistribute it.
If software was developed using public funding and released under a BSD license, you have the right to use that software however you like.
Right up until someone else takes it, extends it a bit, changes the license, and I'm stuck using it. Its still 95%+ the publically funded software... with 0% of the rights.
Assuming you developed all the code yourself from scratch then it has nothing to do with the BSD and GPL debate. Go nuts. It really has nothing to with the conversation though.
On the other hand if you developed it based on GPL then you are likely in violation of the license if you aren't making the source available.
If you developed it based on BSD code then you are within your rights...but your claim of 'building your own business and all the money generating assets in it' was pretty much bullshit.
Some developers simply will not license their software under the GPL.
And?
Using other licenses is therefore an excellent solution because it is the only way the software will be released at all.
What do I care if they release it or not?
Are you objecting to their right to release their own software under whatever license they see fit? I see no legal, ethical, or moral grounds to do so.
If they write it from scratch themselves they can do whatever they like. I didn't contribute to it. I didn't fund it. As long as I don't have to use it, they can do whatever they want.
but switched over to be more in favour of the BSD/ISC/MIT licences because they are maximally free.
I take exception to that. The BSD and GPL are equally free, but they split on whom gets that freedom; one gives an extra freedom to the immediate developer to change the licensing, one gives extra freedom to the downstream developer by propagating all the freedoms onto to them.
Most people using BSD 'derived' code have none of the freedoms BSD offers. How exactly do you argue with a straight face that this is the better outcome?
More and more, academics are releasing their code under the BSD/ISC licences because they realise that because they are receiving public money to fund their code and research, by dint of this, they must release the results of that money to the public in a maximally free way,
That amounts to the public paying for all the bakeries ingredients, and then the bakery sells bread back to the public. Yes, that's a pretty ideal system for the baker; not such a good deal for the public though. Why are they funding the baker's ingredients exactly?
If it were the GPL the baker would also have to share how the bread is made, and people wouldn't have to depend on him if they wanted to make their own bread. (This, according to you is the 'less free' option.)
Small wonder the baker prefers the BSD.
Some code needs to be proprietary--life is about pragmatism sometimes, not always about ideology.
IF you ever bother to ask yourself why, and really dig deep, you'll have a tough time coming up with a satisfactory answer.
Note that I don't contend the pragmatic arguments aren't real, just that they are deeply unsatisfying on a philosophical level. They point to difficult to solve problems with society itself, and rather than solve these difficult problems, the pragmatist just accepts them as unsolved and proceeds to go for lunch. That's not much of a solution.
A more interesting thought than people can be fooled into thinking that pineapple is art... is the thought that if you contemplate a pineapple as art, it might make you think, to see the pineapple in a new way,... and how is that not art?
What, after all, is art, except something to make you think or to see something in a new way?
Miner scripts will just dial it back to 50% CPU usage or whatever threshold chrome sets.
A typical webpage shouldn't need even 0.1% after loading. And during loading the majority of the cpu usage should be profiled to the browser itself (rendering the html/css/downloading elements etc) not the javascript. More than 1 - 2 seconds of high javascript cpu usage on a typical site is not necessary. Even the continuous async updates, analytics tracking etc is all really low level... like a couple percent of the cpu every 100 milliseconds or something.
Even Media playback is pretty low on modern systems; and that should be something can be separated from the javascript.
I don't think you realize how 'light' most code really is. When you've got a site where the *javascript* is using a significant percentage of the cpu for more than a few seconds, its probably got some braindead busy loop or something that should properly be categorized as a bug.
I remember complaining to GoG a while back that leaving firefox open on my mac during one of their 'sales events' was using up 50% of the cpu on my macbook. It was an event where a sale would popup and a certain amount of time or until X copies were sold or something... and it had a progressbar that dropped down to zero.
Profiling it showed that instead of updating the progressbar a reasonable number of times... like 10 times per second. It was updating it continually, so it was doing it like 10,000-20,000 times per second... which was just ridiculous. Oddly, it behaved fine in chrome and safari; so the bug wasn't straight up lazy coding, it was just a bug in some browser specific bit. I didn't dig deeper.
I recall seeing another site that changed the color of a bit of text based on something; and it did this in real time. Instead of getting a reference to the DOM element and just updating it, it brute force searched the entire DOM everytime for the element that needed updating, updated it. And then 200ms later... did it all again. There's a lot of shit code out there. It was about 1000 times less efficient than it should have been, and even that didn't really move the needle in terms of CPU usage.
Circling back to my point, other than a few things like javascript games, most sites shouldn't be spending a lot of time running javascript. Those that do are probably defective and deserve to get classed as malware; it'll help motivate them to fix their code.
Slashdot Mirror
"This would, I'd be willing to bet, STILL be claimed to "disproportionately affect people of color".
It probably would. If its like any number of other government services... its only available 9 to 4 monday to friday; no weekends, no holidays.
And the registration process will prefer ID like a passport & drivers license & Credit card. So rich folks will breeze through.
Poor folks will have a much harder time getting there, will need time off work, etc, etc. And then someone who lives with their brother's family will be trying to register with an library card and an expired student card...
It may not directly be targeting people of color. But it hits them a lot harder anyway. So 'disproportionally affect' is still a valid criticism.
"So statistically speaking, if you have 100 people with the exact same First, Middle and Last Name born in the same year, on average 4-5 people per common name pair across the US will share the same birthday."
If you read the article, they don't even look at middle names. So John Arthur Adams is a match for John Willy Adams, and both are matches for John Randall Adams Jr.
The algorithm crosscheck uses is around 99% wrong for good reasons.
I'll answer your 2nd question first:
We don't know what criteria uses to put people in its database -- that makes it vague. Sure name and birthdate are mentioned, but its not exactly defined in depth how those are used.
For example, if you thought John Wesley Washington and John Arthur Washington were two different names, according to crosscheck, you'd be wrong. It doesn't count middle names or intitials.
Additionally stuff like John Smith Sr., John Smith Jr., and John Smith III, are all considered name matches too.
As for dispproportionately targeting people of color. The article mentions that 95% of people with the last name "Kim" are asian, and 95% of the people with the last name Washington are black.
However, 95%+ of people with the last name Feldman or Hagen are white. Nevertheless, they do make a reference to actually analyzing census data; and the claim that people of color are statistically more likely to share a name than white people is certainly plausible. I'd need to see a study to know more.
Additionally, its a republican project, funded by republicans and sold to republicans... odds are if it was turning away more republican voters than democratic voters they would have shut it down by now. Or tweaked their criteria so as not to both with the Feldman's and Hagen's of the world, and just focus on the Washington's and the Kim's...
Or a Bennet Haselton
So what? They may have family and property in another country.
And you don't see any difference between what 'another country' does vs what your OWN country, where you are citizen, does?
Bilateral secession.
Is where both sides agree to do it; and ideally where there is a framework inadvance for how to do it. The EU has that and Britain invoked it.
"Except that 3 + 3 * 3 does, in fact, equal 12."
Precisely. The post i responded to said it wouldn't return 12, but it does.
"UK > Canada > Spain."
Unless you go by voter turnout; which gives you an idea how many people are deciding the fate:
Canada (1995) at 93.5%, UK brexit at 72%, Catalan at 43.3%
"Canada, unlike the UK, never said they'd recognize a "Yes" victory."
Why should they? Canada is not a direct democracy and never has pretended to be one; and the use of referendums is often used as a poll to gauge sentiment rather than a direct legislative tool. Plus the use of a local referendum to determine a nation's boundaries is not simple. What about how the rest of Canada feels about it? They may own property in quebec, have businesses and investments in quebec, or have family in quebec - and they are all seriously impacted as well. And quebec leaving affects all of Canada not just quebec. Does the rest of Canada not get any representation at all in determining the fate of their own country? Unilateral secession is complicated.
My friends used to jokingly suggest we hold a referendum in the rest of Canada to draw a border around the most separatist parts of quebec out of the country, and just kick those regions out.
"Spanish thugs showed up at polling stations to beat the shit out of independence-minded Catalan citizens"
Either way, we agree the 'remain' crowd stayed home and didn't have their vote counted; so 90% for separation isn't terribly accurate.
" It says a lot that so many Catalans voted in spite of Spanish oppression and the risk of personal injury."
Does it? They didn't know things were going to get that out of hand when they went out to vote. I'd say the whole world was pretty shocked at how it went down.
Am I really being brave if I go downtown and a riot breaks out and I'm downtown when it happens? I'm more trapped by unexpected circumstances than anything else.
I just tried this now in the calculator that comes with windows 10. (im on build 1707 "creators update" not the fall one.) I pressed the following keys:
3 + 3 * 3 =
It displayed 12.
As for the old calc.exe app, it behaved the same as the old physical ones that didn't queue up operations, and executed each operation immediately. So it pretty much did what i expected it to do too.
I mean, honestly, I don't use windows built in calculators much myself; i don't need the big friendly touch buttons on my desktop; that's not a UI i need or want, and its waste of space; and they're functionality relatively weak.
I use SpeQ as my quick desktop calculator these days. I'm curious what other people are using.
In the Catalonian case over 90% of voters voted to leave,
To be fair, it was widely reported that people who did not want to leave boycotted the vote because they thought it was an illegal and illegitimate stunt. The Canadian referendums carried a lot more political legitimacy.
Yes.
You really think developers don't understand the licensing they chose
In a lot of cases: yes.
It has nothing to do with my preference; lots of people, including developers don't really know the ins and outs of the GPL or BSD or the LGPL or GPLv3 vs v2, or AGPL, or MPL... why should anyone expect otherwise?
Beyond the very basics, this is a specialty for lawyers not developers. Why do you think the average developer knows this stuff inside out?
Thanks for circling back to the very beginning of the discussion.
Most people don't know licensing. They choose the GPL or the BSD in many cases because they do *want* it to be 'free', and they don't really understand the difference. Then some twit comes along and sasy 'go BSD' its maximally free -- the GPL has restrictions.... so they follow that advice.
And then when they find someone put a nice bow on their 'free code' and is selling it for big money, they often say ... this isn't what i intended at all. I wanted it to be free; I wanted other people to take it and extend it... I didn't release it so that big companies could put a bow on it and then try to sell it back to me with strict licensing terms.
"You can't exactly cry 'unfair' if people do what's allowed, but not what you expected."
Quite so. This is why its important to be very clear exactly what each license allows and doesn't allow. So that your expectations are *met*.
You are absolutely right that lots of authors are fine with their code being BSD... and that's fine if that's what THEY want. I've released BSD code myself, usually smaller library type stuff where I don't care who uses it for what purpose, or for sample/demo type stuff.
My preference for GPL is more for bigger projects, where the tendancy for another entity to just try and 'squat and monetize it' becomes more of an issue.
And big projects funded by public universities/public research grants/ etc a GPL license makes more sense. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to just help themselves to that and then sell it.
Some people would say it's reasonably fair that the downstream developer only got the same rights to the BSD code that the first developer got. Just because someone gave another person a gift doesn't entitle you to a gift from the receiver.
Except that *I* might be the original developer, or the guy who paid the original developer. And all you did was take my 'gift' put on some wrapping paper and a bow, and then sell it back to me with all the rights I gave you stripped away.
The code I gave you had these rights attached, and the extended code you sent back me no longer has them. To say... they weren't 'stripped', just 'declined to be granted' is pointless sophistry.
Its legal and within the license, and its moral in the sense that I gave you permission to do this in the original license, but its still a dick move IMO, and its morally dubious within most moral frameworks... in the sense that it wasn't strictly 'wrong'... but there's not a lot of good arguments for how it is 'right'?
"So how does this work?"
I would guess it uses UAC elevation to grant permission to the app to the protected folder.
Later on, a downstream developer cannot be "stripped" of rights he never had.
Is this the maximal freedom the BSD enables? Where a developer doesn't have to worry about losing any rights, because he never got them in the first place!
He does however have recourse to use the original version.
iOS is based on BSD. How much value is there in the 'recourse' to the 'original version'? Or a checkpoint firewall? Or a juniper device?
No rights to lose, because you don't have any to start with.
Except that the downstream developer has few freedoms. Sure they can modify the code and if that is all you care about then yes, it is a nice freedom
That's already one more freedom than the downstream developer who received "upstream its BSD but not anymore code"
But that developer has no freedom in choosing how they can redistribute the product of their work: that is decided for them by the GPL.
The downstream developer receiving relicensed BSD code has no right to modify OR redistribute. Yeah the GPL puts some restrictions their redistribution... to PRESERVE the right of redistribution further down the line.
The guy with re-licensed code based on BSD has no rights at all. The guy upstream stripped him of all his rights. He can't modify it, he can't fix it, and he can't redistribute it.
If software was developed using public funding and released under a BSD license, you have the right to use that software however you like.
Right up until someone else takes it, extends it a bit, changes the license, and I'm stuck using it. Its still 95%+ the publically funded software... with 0% of the rights.
Assuming you developed all the code yourself from scratch then it has nothing to do with the BSD and GPL debate. Go nuts. It really has nothing to with the conversation though.
On the other hand if you developed it based on GPL then you are likely in violation of the license if you aren't making the source available.
If you developed it based on BSD code then you are within your rights...but your claim of 'building your own business and all the money generating assets in it' was pretty much bullshit.
Some developers simply will not license their software under the GPL.
And?
Using other licenses is therefore an excellent solution because it is the only way the software will be released at all.
What do I care if they release it or not?
Are you objecting to their right to release their own software under whatever license they see fit? I see no legal, ethical, or moral grounds to do so.
If they write it from scratch themselves they can do whatever they like. I didn't contribute to it. I didn't fund it. As long as I don't have to use it, they can do whatever they want.
but switched over to be more in favour of the BSD/ISC/MIT licences because they are maximally free.
I take exception to that. The BSD and GPL are equally free, but they split on whom gets that freedom; one gives an extra freedom to the immediate developer to change the licensing, one gives extra freedom to the downstream developer by propagating all the freedoms onto to them.
Most people using BSD 'derived' code have none of the freedoms BSD offers. How exactly do you argue with a straight face that this is the better outcome?
More and more, academics are releasing their code under the BSD/ISC licences because they realise that because they are receiving public money to fund their code and research, by dint of this, they must release the results of that money to the public in a maximally free way,
That amounts to the public paying for all the bakeries ingredients, and then the bakery sells bread back to the public. Yes, that's a pretty ideal system for the baker; not such a good deal for the public though. Why are they funding the baker's ingredients exactly?
If it were the GPL the baker would also have to share how the bread is made, and people wouldn't have to depend on him if they wanted to make their own bread. (This, according to you is the 'less free' option.)
Small wonder the baker prefers the BSD.
Some code needs to be proprietary--life is about pragmatism sometimes, not always about ideology.
IF you ever bother to ask yourself why, and really dig deep, you'll have a tough time coming up with a satisfactory answer.
Note that I don't contend the pragmatic arguments aren't real, just that they are deeply unsatisfying on a philosophical level. They point to difficult to solve problems with society itself, and rather than solve these difficult problems, the pragmatist just accepts them as unsolved and proceeds to go for lunch. That's not much of a solution.
A more interesting thought than people can be fooled into thinking that pineapple is art ... is the thought that if you contemplate a pineapple as art, it might make you think, to see the pineapple in a new way,... and how is that not art?
What, after all, is art, except something to make you think or to see something in a new way?
Given that's more than half of the giant Twit's own net worth he should be knocking on twitters door any day now to demand a cut...
Fair enough.
However, piratebay had it sent to pin your CPU at 100%.
Miner scripts will just dial it back to 50% CPU usage or whatever threshold chrome sets.
A typical webpage shouldn't need even 0.1% after loading. And during loading the majority of the cpu usage should be profiled to the browser itself (rendering the html/css/downloading elements etc) not the javascript. More than 1 - 2 seconds of high javascript cpu usage on a typical site is not necessary. Even the continuous async updates, analytics tracking etc is all really low level... like a couple percent of the cpu every 100 milliseconds or something.
Even Media playback is pretty low on modern systems; and that should be something can be separated from the javascript.
I don't think you realize how 'light' most code really is. When you've got a site where the *javascript* is using a significant percentage of the cpu for more than a few seconds, its probably got some braindead busy loop or something that should properly be categorized as a bug.
I remember complaining to GoG a while back that leaving firefox open on my mac during one of their 'sales events' was using up 50% of the cpu on my macbook. It was an event where a sale would popup and a certain amount of time or until X copies were sold or something... and it had a progressbar that dropped down to zero.
Profiling it showed that instead of updating the progressbar a reasonable number of times... like 10 times per second. It was updating it continually, so it was doing it like 10,000-20,000 times per second... which was just ridiculous. Oddly, it behaved fine in chrome and safari; so the bug wasn't straight up lazy coding, it was just a bug in some browser specific bit. I didn't dig deeper.
I recall seeing another site that changed the color of a bit of text based on something; and it did this in real time. Instead of getting a reference to the DOM element and just updating it, it brute force searched the entire DOM everytime for the element that needed updating, updated it. And then 200ms later... did it all again. There's a lot of shit code out there. It was about 1000 times less efficient than it should have been, and even that didn't really move the needle in terms of CPU usage.
Circling back to my point, other than a few things like javascript games, most sites shouldn't be spending a lot of time running javascript. Those that do are probably defective and deserve to get classed as malware; it'll help motivate them to fix their code.