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"We can X yet technology has been unable to even Y" is one of the most famously repeatedly defeated positions in history. People have had to run marathons to keep those goal posts out of reach.


> A permit isn't about seeking permission

Then they need to be renamed.


In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; therefore, I don’t need permission, which is discretionary.

Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.


The inherent tension has always been "How much of an asshole does my freedom to protest allow me to be?"

Because protesting has always been about, to some degree, inconveniencing others to achieve your political aims.


>In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;

Playing devil's advocate here: what if it wasn't mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What if the CRF didn't exist to start with?

(my point being that when things are very bad, certain things need to be done regardless of what a formal law states, you cannot let tyranny call the shots)


A permit is literally about seeking permission to do something from an authority - the absence of which, makes the activity illegal.


It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.


[flagged]


Who knew it was this easy? Thank you, citizen.


Unironically is it that hard? I managed to not impregnate anyone until I met my wife in my 30s. Likewise for her. Likewise for many of my friends. Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. You apply basic biology knowledge and protection and if all else fails there are multiple ways to “fix” the issue before it gets to the point where a baby is born.


> Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles.

Bingo^, especially the “in my circles.” The catch of course is that people have little to zero control over which circles they’re born and raised into, thus creating a vicious cycle.

Good job avoiding a bad outcome, but in the same way it was easy for you due to the circles you arrived on earth in, it’s hard for others due to the circles they arrived on earth in.

This is all true even with high degree of agency. Taking two people with the same degree of agency, one born into or closer to certain norms will have an easier time than one born outside of or further away from those norms.


Enjoying that 30,000ft high horse?


Man, im in SD, health education here is dire, like there's one line about prevention in a massive slideshow, and nothing else. And assuming that teens just wont is simply delusional.


I am not saying they won’t. I am saying they carry responsibility for their actions and are free not to engage in dangerous activities, especially if they result in damages to another human. There are gazillion ways to engage in sexual activity that do not require genitals to touch each other, and you are not a victim of your animalistic desires. You are in control and as such responsible. This is a fact and not an interpretation. Regardless of whether humans find creative ways to avoid responsibility and prefer to make themselves small, eg by inventing concepts such as Gods and fate.

Yes, accidents happen. You are quite likely to eventually get hit by a car if you decide to cross the highway on foot every day for recreational purposes. Fate, bad luck, or choice?


Sounds like we need to shorten the work week


> the ability to organize things freely in space

This is the key. It's not enough for digital tools to just put things in folders or tag them. It's the links themselves that need elevation. People need to add metadata to links, they need to apply rules specifying what links to crawl and how to arrange them in space, they need to specify how content should be displayed in islands of connected content. Then they need to be able to arrange islands on a 2d, 2.5d, or 3d canvas.

We have information input and retrieval solved. For some reason it's taking a real long time for people to get to spread out.


This is the core principle of LimanDoc.com I am building, a canvas that holds files and diagrams, but most importantly an inner board (a folder) that you can see through.


> I think this falls squarely in the realm of bureaucratic administrators who have nothing better to do than assert their power and maintain the illusion of a connection between talent (great chess players) and the trivial signaling games of the upper class (the style of pants one is wearing).

I concur except about the bureaucratic administrators. I think they do this because the upper class will replace them if they don't do the work of asserting the upper class's power.


All the people rushing to their desk jobs were dressed perfectly. They had to play a part.

The billionaire they were working for wore stuff that was expensive, old and hence comfortable. He didn't have to play to anyone.

He did dress up to meet the president though, he had to play a part.

The president has to dress well all the time, he is always playing a part, in front of the whole world.

Wear your part. Or don't, if you don't want any part in all of this (which seems to be Magnus's motivation, or lack of it).


The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.

The upper class doesn’t need dress code. They know they are the upper class. Dress codes are for petit bourgeois and the upper middle class who try to pretend but everyone knows they are actually middle class.


The upper class, however, seems to care about making other people follow a dress code. Think uniforms for a chauffeur, the long-standing rules around wearing white at Wimbledon, etc.


The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.


At a 10 year length of copyright.


Cool. Now work through the implications for open source licenses.


That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.


If that were the case, we wouldn't need GPL, we would just call it public domain. So why didn't we do that?


I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses).

Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit?

Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see:

  $ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100'
      242 MIT
      277 LGPL
      348 GPL
      381 BSD
However, looking at https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on..., I see:

  |  1 | MIT          | 44.69% |
  |  2 | Other        | 15.68% |
  |  3 | GPLv2        | 12.96% |
  |  4 | Apache       | 11.19% |
  |  5 | GPLv3        |  8.88% |
  |  6 | BSD 3-clause |  4.53% |
  |  7 | Unlicense    |  1.87% |
  |  8 | BSD 2-clause |  1.70% |
  |  9 | LGPLv3       |  1.30% |
  | 10 | AGPLv3       |  1.05% |


The broader point being that every one of those licenses is just that -- a license. The terms of the license apply because the material is copyrighted.

And it's one place where you can directly specify your intent. In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.

Varying durations for different types of media should be discussed as part of copyright reform. But simple statements like "10 years" reveal that people haven't thought things through.


Or maybe they have thought things through and they just don’t agree with your conclusion.

For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.

1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.


> In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.

Look, I'm no lawyer, but my broader point is that something like that might not make much if any difference to most. It doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the MIT license and public domain. The MIT just requires attribution and propagation of the license text.

If you add up the MIT licensed projects with others that have similar licenses, you might get to a 51%, at least according to the GitHub stats. I would think most of these people just picked a license by what other people picked. They don't really, really care to put the particular restrictions they did.

I'm not saying that 10 years is a good number, or that licenses are bad. I'm just saying that your pick of FOSS might be a poor example to argue about the need for long copyright terms.

The only ones among the FOSS community that likely care to have long copyright terms are those that pick GPL-type licenses, which have more substantial restrictions to ensure the freedoms of end-users.


Linux, Blender, and WordPress immediately spring to mind as software that would be in a very different place if their codebases reverted to public domain at the 10th year of their existence.


In what particular way do you think they'd be different if they'd gone into the public domain at 10 years?


The Linux kernel has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Having all the code in it that's >= 10yo become public domain would only mean you'd be able to run an ancient kernel on old hardware without worrying about the GPL license terms.


How many are still running kermels from 10 years ago. even for mainline stuff with insignificant changes such that it is out of copyright (an interesting legal question itself), there is enough that is significant in new kernels


It's not about running a 10 year old Kernel, it's about a trillion dollar corporation owning a source snapshot, throwing 5,000 engineers at it, and not contributing anything back.

It also effectively turns GPL3 to GPL2 on a rolling 10 year basis.

People freaked about Tivo 20 years ago. Now imagine what kind of chaos Nvidia and Oracle could cause starting from even Ubuntu 14 or a 3.18 Kernel.


The continued success of tye various bsd proves your fears are way over stated.


I'm surprised at people falling back into the BSD, MIT and GPL banter from 15 years ago.

Stop promoting your faves, stop generalizing about the motivations behind your non-faves, and to paraphrase John Lennon: imagine no licensing.

Now think a little deeper how that would change the motivations of developers, massive corporations, and VCs. Especially those that have given little but lip service to the whole movement.


There is a fairly major difference between a copyright of 100+ years, 10 years and 0 years. Right now we have 100+ years and thus we need GPL as a counter force.

If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.

A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.

At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.


In the very early history of computing, it was still belived that copyright did not apply to computer programs. What large companies, like IBM, did was to require all customers to first sign a contract where the customer was forbidden, among many other things, to spread or copy the software.


Excellent post and thank you for taking the time to participate in the thought experiment.


Because copyright doesn't expire on human timescales and it's legal to use cryptographic methods to prevent compatible hardware/software, so things wouldn't be on an even playing field.

If you had to submit source code to the copyright office to be granted a copyright, and it expired after ~10 years (at which point the source is published), and anticompetitive, anticonsumer hardware locking methods were illegal, you'd be looking at a reasonable trade again, and copyleft would be essentially redundant.


To make 10 year copyright work with software, we would probably need to force companies to release the source code when the copyright expires. That way we keep an even playing field. Otherwise I think everything related to open source code would work out fine.


That effectively gives the copyright holder an exclusive ten year head start on a derivative work, because only they have the source to build on. It has to be open from day one for anything to work. And if you blow away copyright and therefore GPL, obviously the incentives change dramatically.


I'm not really worried about someone building on GPL in secret while waiting for the license to expire. They're still stuck ten years behind mainline. It's a pretty even playing field, and I don't think any side gets blown out.

If proprietary code had to be released read-only a year or two in advance of becoming public domain you'd have basically the same effect, but I would not expect the effect to be very big.


Why can't the boys have female role models?


I don't know. Why are we told that representation is important and we must have diversity along every axis throughout media?

Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.


Then I guess it's a good thing men are still well (overly?) represented among world leaders, CEOs, etc. -- I'm not sure how anyone can claim there are no male role models in a world with 100% male US presidents (for instance).


"good" male role models. I wouldn't call elon musk, donald trump, nor Andrew tates good examples to follow.


Not just "look like them" and "share their culture". They have deep biological similarities, not some superficial traits.


It's not impossible, but boys with only female role models do not develop their masculinity, which is important for self-control considering males can be physically dangerous. I believe there is a link between criminal behavior (which is mostly men) and single mothers. It's really more than a correlation, and perhaps one of the leading causes of criminality.


Single parent households are more likely to be poor, and are likely to have less time available to care for children. Those are both things strongly associated with higher chances of the children becoming criminal. Why do you think that is not sufficient to explain things?


you think malcomx had a male role model around to provide masculinity? or about 765,432 other examples I can provide.

on one hand you are saying boys with female role models do not develop their masculinity and on the other you are saying there is a link between criminal behaviour and single mothers? this criminal behaviour is coming from their feminine side?


No, it's not a contradiction. The criminal behavior arises from males not being able to control themselves and using force to get what they want. Fathers put boys in their place and they learn to respect authority. Mothers are there to cuddle and pamper their children and this is horrible for boys and their development as dangerous grown males.


Why a father can't cuddle and pumper their boys?


This reads like a parody of 1950s child rearing.


Look up the stats on criminals and single mothers.


amazing, right??!


what makes you think that women don't know how to put men in their place?


Poor results, I just wouldn't phrase it like who you responded to or as "putting men in their place", especially given the context was about boys and not men. Putting "men" in their place as an adult woman can sometimes be physically dangerous. And it's not clear to me how effective it would be at that point of their (the mans) development.

It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever. You could easily ascribe a tendency like that to the higher likelihood for single mothers to also be more stressed or less well off and with less time to invest in doing much more than trying to placate the child in the quickest way possible. Plenty of mothers that don't pamper and fathers that do, so that claim needs a citation I would think.


> It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever.

The word they were looking for is "coddle".


They don't understand what it means to be physically dangerous.


Preferring a bear over a man?


You can, but ultimately there are male issues that are much easier to confide with males on. Especially about women. It's no different from why women need some female role models.


Good question... I did. But maybe I'm just lucky


Who was your female role model? can you expand?


It's not misinterpreted. Misinterpretation is an accident that happens when a good faith message can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways, and the listener's choice is not the speaker's choice. A good faith message is one where the speaker deliberately removes all likely ambiguity they can foresee.

When a bad faith message is "misinterpreted", it's because the speaker was not interested in communicating successfully in the first place.

There exist two things:

1. A name which amuses the developers by honoring an uninteresting bit of historical trivia.

2. A name which contributes to the project's health and success by attracting new users.

One of these things must be selected as more important than the other.

As far as whether GIMP, in and of itself, succeeds or fails, pretty much no one cares. If GIMP vanished, and the practical value lost to the world was big enough, some new project would spring up to take its place. Maybe Krita would expand its scope. The Blender team sure has bank to play with. Whatever.

But what lots of people do care about is the success of open source in general. When software is expensive and closed, fewer people get to use it, and the fewest of them are screwed if what they need is too niche. When software is free and open, more people get to use it, niches become less niche, and niches that remain niche can be filled by anyone with enough DIY motivation. And because all of the benefits of open source rely on a large user community, attracting users is very important, both to individual projects and the whole community.

And right now, the solution the open source community has to offer the world is an embarrassment. This is bad. The GIMP project is selfishly pissing in the water supply the entire open source community is trying to build. No one is going to take that trivially.


I was thinking exactly the same. You can write

    if (cond) { cons }
on one line and get more readable code admittedly a few chars longer.


Don't even need the curly braces. I do

    if (cond) doSomething();
all the time.


if (heathen) dontUseCurlies();


    if (dontUseCurlies):
      goto fail
      goto fail


go to jail


Code patterns are social! What is strange to one is normal to another.

The kind of pattern used here with the `||` might seem weird to some JavaScript developers, but it's pretty normal in shell scripts, and it's pretty normal in Ruby with `unless`!


`||` is conventional in bash, but definitely not in JS. `x || value` is closer to conventional JS, but using it for control flow is certainly not common and a stylistic choice, for sure.


>The kind of pattern used here with the `||` might seem weird to some JavaScript developers, but it's pretty normal in shell scripts

Shell scripts are NOT known for being easy to read. They're full of obscure and sometimes frankly bizarre, arcane syntax that newcomers would have no idea about. Quick, what does "$#" mean? An experienced bash programmer would know, but no one else would. Shell scripts were never meant to be easy to read; they're just an extension of the shell syntax, and of course vary a lot from shell to shell (e.g. bash vs zsh vs ksh etc.).


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