@allan I was more thinking of activity on the beach itself, not the water, but you're probably right.

@ink_slinger even then, the river valley is one big park system and the beach is attached to it. Whatever duty of care the city has to users of the beach has probably always been there by virtue of its accessibility from the park.

Making the beach official clarifies what that duty of care is, and probably lessens the city's liability if anything.

IANAL but if I learned anything from engineering law it's that liability doesn't work the way you or I think it does.

@ink_slinger because IANAL I will only charge you 1/2 price for this legal consultation.

@allan YANAL and that was not legal advice, but you'll still collect a consulting fee. Sounds like the business model of all those DIY legal form sites.

@ink_slinger I sometimes wonder how much of what companies do is based on some random consultants misinterpretation of the law because they are not actually lawyers.

I read somewhere that a lot of waivers you have to sign (or for e.g. on the back of lift tickets) are actually legally meaningless. People just wrote them so the sounded lawyerly without actually talking to a lawyer about what liability can be waived and what cannot.

@ink_slinger also: I wonder how many of our followers were just scrolling through their tl and screeched to a halt, sweat beading on their brow "what ANAL??" only to discover we're talking about boring legal stuff

(all the homoeroticism is between the lines)

@allan All online legal talk is actually coded hookup talk.

IANAL = Into anal?

YANAL = Yes anal.

IAMAL = I am a leather-daddy.

@allan @ink_slinger I'll admit it took me a beat to figure it out. Haha.

But I haven't had coffee yet over here.

@allan That's my understanding, as well. From what I've heard, those forms are mostly meaningless BUT they're designed to fend off lawsuits by making people think they've already waived their rights.

From my limited and possibly inaccurate understanding, you can't waive negligence. But if people think they've waived their right to sue...

@ink_slinger yeah, I think that's true.

If it scares people off from suing then I guess it's worth whatever that consultant and their thesaurus charged.

@allan @ink_slinger Oh, I think a lot of them know the deals aren't binding, but if people THINK they are binding most of them won't exercise their rights which is almost as good

@Canageek @allan I just said essentially the same thing. You can waive some rights, so some clauses in those forms *might* be legally-binding. But I'm pretty sure you can't waive negligence. But, yeah, if people believe they've signed away their rights they're less likely to sue.

@allan @ink_slinger I understood this also caused things like the open-source remake of flash project to take a lot longer as they thought that only people who had never installed Flash Player were able to work on the project

@Canageek @ink_slinger so... nobody?

You would have to have been born and raised an free software purist to avoid flash, especially back in the day.

@allan @Canageek Yeah, I don't know the history of that project, but that sounds like a really weird interpretation of the legalese: "You can only work on this project if you've never even sneezed in the direction of the thing we're emulating."

@ink_slinger @Canageek I've heard crazy stories of maintaining IP clean rooms for reverse engineering, to ensure that there's no possible claim for IP violations. I think this is part of the plot of the 1st season of halt and catch fire.

What must really frustrate internet companies is that the law differs around the world. A EULA that's enforceable in the US may not be in Canada but who's going to hire the army of lawyers needed to sort all that out?

@Canageek @ink_slinger or you could go open source/copyleft and not give a F, which has always been my solution

@allan @ink_slinger But that leaves you with problem.

There still isn't a good PowerPoint replacement. (I have made slideshows in LaTeX. I have learned you really don't want to do that.)

As you said, Flash was pretty mandatory at certain points in time.

@Canageek @allan @ink_slinger LO Impress works. It might not be Good, but is usable

@MightyPork @allan @Canageek Yeah, Impress is fine for most people. PowerPoint is more feature-rich, but most people either don't use the advanced features or use them too liberally and end up with a really crappy presentation.

@allan @MightyPork @ink_slinger It must have gotten a lot better since I last tried it (which was a long time ago, back before Libre office switched off), but that still means you have to expert to PDF and use that, or bring your own laptop. Which means no hand-held clickers if you use pdf. (Do they with with Impress?)

@Canageek @MightyPork @allan You can export as a .ppt with LibreOffice, though there's always a chance that'll mess up the formatting. I'm not sure if the odt format works with clickers or not; I've never tried.

@Canageek @ink_slinger @MightyPork I've had some success with saving to the open document formats and opening in PowerPoint. Sometimes the fonts get all screwey, but I find that if you just maintain a general contempt for your audience and the visual display of information then it's fine.

@allan @MightyPork @Canageek That's the other thing. MS Office does support the open document formats, albeit not always correctly.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan See, this is the one area where I'd say ANY formatting error is a total failure. It has to be 100% compatible. I've seen too many presentations where a slight placement error between Mac and Windows office means you have have two text boxes overlapping and I can't tell what is going on. Or the font is messed up and your math formula doesn't work.

@Canageek @allan @MightyPork I'd argue this is a Microsoft problem, though, not an open source problem. If MS is going to support open formats (which is good), they should support them properly.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan True, but I'd rather see more effort going into reverse engineering what MS does and making LibreOffice work with that (and documenting it), then having perfect display of an arbitrary format.

On the other hand, even MS can't get its formats to work right, since Mac office pptx and windows pptx are not compatible.

@Canageek @allan @MightyPork I'd argue is the Microsoft format that's arbitrary, not the open format. But, obviously, since Microsoft has market dominance they unfortunately get to set the norms.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan It is arbitrary but it is actually documented as an open standard due to the whole some countries moving to open standards thing.

However, the spec they submitted was insanely convoluted, which I suspect is why support still isn't perfect. I kinda think they just dumped their internal documentation (possibly obfuscated, but the fact Mac and Windows versions don't implement it the same indicates it probably didn't need to be...) out there.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan So if you implemented it exactly as Powerpoint (Windows) does it, or even a subset of that that powerpoint will read properly, you could probably find a way to issue that as a new open spec.

Implement as in Open Spec blah blah, but only using sections blah through blah, and with the following changes.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan Also I'd argue all formats are arbitrary. As long as they are documented and open (which in this case both are, technically), it really doesn't matter as long as I can open them.

@ink_slinger @MightyPork @allan I'd argue that LO being able to open MS formats perfectly actually is more important then using a better open format, since more documents are in office, and one day we'll want to open them and who knows if you'll be able to get word 2010 working in 2032

@Canageek @ink_slinger I think chemistry is another good example where crazy licensing meets ubiquity, iirc gaussian had a restrictive license that effectively banned some chemists from using it because of their research area.

I remember it being a thing when I was in chemistry, but since I have no cause to use gaussian anymore I haven't kept up with the deets.

Even if parts aren't enforceable who's going to take the chance and battle it out in court?

@Canageek @allan Having said that, I can totally imagine people thinking that if they're trying to read licensing agreements -- which are often written in deliberately confusing language -- without a lawyer on the team.

@allan @ink_slinger there were lines in the flash Eula that I believe either prohibited reverse-engineering or prohibited on the creation of flash clones and yes that made it really hard to find people who could work on the project. And it wasn't they couldn't have used flash it was they could never have installed Flash and US clicked through the EULA.

@ink_slinger quite frankly I'm amazed the contractor isn't being publicly flayed by Alberta Environment. An accidental sandbar is a whimsical place to set up your lawn chair sure, but altering the flow of a navigable waterway in a way that was unanticipated and for which the environmental consequences were not evaluated is not cool.

Maybe in this case it turned out ok, but that's just happenstance, it's a pretty reckless way to treat the river.