Web Excursions 2022-05-12
From Copy to Reference
Plenty of legal drafters see that we should really be incorporating more standard language by reference, instead of copy-pasting and short-order cooking.
there’s an obvious theory of change: Shift from copying to referencing by doing both for a while.
A huge advantage of incorporating standard language by reference is reviewing once and recognizing many times later, in new contexts.
Level 1: Copy in Text, Reference in Comment
I copied this language verbatim from AAA’s online ClauseBuilder tool at clausebuilder.org. I chose “Commercial” and “Arbitration”.
redline.commonform.org is a free, handy site for comparing two bits of copy-and-pasted text.
Level 2: Copy in Text, Reference in Text
Incorporate here the AAA ClauseBuilder standard commercial arbitration clause from clausebuilder.org. Quoting just for convenience, with any conflicts resolved in favor of the standard:
Level 3: Reference in Text, Copy in Comment
Incorporate here the AAA ClauseBuilder standard commercial arbitration clause from clausebuilder.org.
And in case we think it might speed up review or avoid a confused reaction, we add a comment:
To save you the trip to ClauseBuilder: The truly paranoid counterparty will ignore this comment as not to be trusted.
The problem with doing this—and the reason we don’t see arbitration clauses handled this way in practice, and shouldn’t—isn’t with our method.
It’s a problem with AAA. More specifically, with clausebuilder.org.
Copying creates a full record we can lay rest in our client’s contract filing system.
we know we can dig the language up later.
The problem is time and its ravages; the solution is archives and archivists.
The World Wide Web has a public archive, archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine.
There are also more specialized services like perma.cc for legal and academic writers.
We can use both, and more, to preserve legal terms for long-term reference.
All these pages start with links that point to dated snapshots of their content, complete with terms, archived by neutral third parties.
To further predictability, each of these documents is also numbered.
Once a version is published, by strict policy, no change is ever made to its content.
Level 4: Just Reference in Text
There is a need to seriously evolve legal drafting, efficiency-wise and substance-wise.
More shared language, developed collaborative and incorporated prodigiously, will help.
Understanding the Bin, Sbin, Usr/Bin , Usr/Sbin Split
On Tuesday 30 November 2010 15:58:00 David Collier wrote:
I see that busybox spreads it's links over these 4 directories.
Is there a simple rule which decides which directory each link lives in.....
For instance I see kill is in /bin and killall in /usr/bin.... I don't have a grip on what might be the logic for that.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969
around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage.
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem)
they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived
(which is why the mount was called /usr).
They
replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and
wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space
When they got a third disk, they
mounted it on /home and
relocated all the user directories to there
so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES
they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up enough
to be able to mount the second disk on /usr,
so don't put things like the mount command /usr/bin
or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing the system up."
The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this,
a 1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades
by bureaucrats who never question why they're doing things.
It stopped making any sense before Linux was ever invented, for multiple reasons
Early system bringup is the provice of initrd and initramfs, which deals with the "this file is needed before that file" issues.
We've already got a temporary system that boots the main system.
shared libraries (introduced by the Berkeley guys) prevent you from independently upgrading the /lib and /usr/bin parts.
They two partitions have to match or they won't work.
Cheap retail hard drives passed the 100 megabyte mark around 1990,
and partition resizing software showed up somewhere around there
partition magic 3.0 shipped in 1997
Of course once the split existed, some people made other rules to justify it.
Root was for the OS stuff you got from upstream and /usr was for your site- local files.
Then / was for the stuff you got from AT&T and /usr was for the stuff that your distro like IBM AIX or Dec Ultrix or SGI Irix added to it,
and /usr/local was for your specific installation's files.
Then somebody decided /usr/local wasn't a good place to install new packages, so let's add /opt
given 30 years to fester, this split made some interesting distro-specific rules show up and go away again,
such as "/tmp is cleared between reboots but /usr/tmp isn't".
all this predated tmpfs.
Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation
(which consumed the Free Standards Group in its' ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily
document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand why it was there in the first place.