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Source Control For Bills In Congress?
grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"
Wasn't this in the last episode of "24"?
They're using their grammar skills there.
... maybe the US Congress should read the bill before they pass it into law.
They want it to be this way by design.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Except: should they use bk or git?
Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?
You mentioned getting email notifications about changes to the repository. You work with the code every day (or nearly every day). You see, these representatives in congress often times vote on bills which they have not even themselves read. They get the executive summary.
That is like the difference between you reading the code for a newly modified parser class and getting one of your underlings to brief you about the changes. You might spend an hour or more reading source code for a whole new class, and only two minutes getting briefed on it. You have to get them actually read the bills first.
Maybe we should require that all bills be read aloud in their entirety in an open session of congress?
Yeah, that's a really good idea. But all those emails might clog up the internet tubes, and be delayed several days...
Its all done with paper.
Maybe if some of the politicians passing laws about technology were a bit more tech savvy we wouldn't see any of this. Corruption by camouflage. I bet that even though the changes weren't supposed to be in there. They won't be amended. That would just be silly.
Make Congress Read the Bills. If they have to sit through a reading, maybe they'll cut down on the length and complexity of the laws. Here, apparently nobody knew what they were passing into law.
This problem should really take care of itself. Just get a staffer to SQL-inject* the necessary clause as a rider for some boring budget stuff that no one will read all the way through, wait for Dubya to sign it, and then pop out and shout p0wned! Then they'll have to build that foolproof system, and we'll be all set.
*SQL = Staffer Quill Language
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...I'm more concerned about their system of bug tracking.
I once had a conversation with a lawyer friend, who explained that there are portions of the law that refer to laws that have been repealed. I tried to explain to him that in computing this is directly analogous to de-referencing a pointer to memory that's been free()'d. We all know what this does in a program. In law, it perhaps there is a default judgement in cases like this. He was just a law student at the time, and IANAL, so maybe some real lawyers could explain how this situation is handled now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That would make "earmarks" and "pork" very difficult to insert in bills without leaving evidence of who did it. Congress would never allow such things to be audited.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Great, then it comes time to merge the HR branch of the bill with the Senate branch. Some overworked staffer sits there clicking 'accept' to all changes without looking at them, then they pass the bill and wait for it to crash to find the inconsistencies.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Courtney Love describes how all recording contracts became "Work for Hire" by a similar process:
l ove/index.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/
people shouldn't vote for these fools.
Oops, seem to have made some bad mistakes voting in some idiots in the last election? No problems just type "cvs update -D 2000-01-01 congress" and get back the congress you had back then.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There is another way to look at controlling legislation, IMHO much more important than mere source control:
A group called DownSizeDC.org is promoting a bill that would force every legislator who votes for a bill to sign a declaration that have either read the entire text of the bill, or had it read to them. The "Read the Bills Act" would also require that every piece of legislation be posted on the Net in its final form for a full 7 days before any vote could occur, giving the rest of us time to read and react...
There used to be requirements in US House and Senate for reading of the bills, but they both routinely waive that requirement. If it were required, the number and complexitiy of bills actually presented would go down dramatically.
We can't Congress to be transparent in the process of who votes for bill revisions such as earmarks or some other types of amendments AFAIK. Try getting those initial steps worked out first (right), then talk about pushing meaningful revision control.
For them, I'm guessing this idea ranks right up there with allowing more CSPAN cameras, databases on attendance (+other metrics), term limits, etc. If we get a bill addressing this topic, I'm sure it's title will match the concept far more than the content.
Another class idea that will be promptly ignored by the cretins more interested in personal power than public service.
If we could pass laws/amendments to "sunset" EVERY existing law, then our esteemed representatives could spend their time deciding what laws are important enough to renew, rather than making up new malarkey.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Yeah! Wouldn't want anyone to overdose!
"Working as intended."
Sadly, this is a bit alarmist.
Bills are already drafted using XML assigned numbers. Any amenment to a bill has its own number, bills which are "engrossed" or passed have a different number. They know exactly what they are voting for.
http://xml.house.gov/
A bill that increases accountability in congress has an XP Box's chance in a Cracker's convention.
If all Congressional documents were stored in a Subversion repository, Homeland Security would positively short-circuit trying to follow up on all of the suspicious emails from young DC residents saying things like "Hey, are you sure the latest pages are committed to Subversion yet?" and "Something just bombed in my sandbox, I'm going to have to nuke everything in sight and do an update!"
As many others have pointed out, the problem is that not enough people actually read the legislation they're voting on. The actual drafting of the bill is in committee or even in secret.
If we shouldn't have any method of auditing votes for who we put into office, why should we have a method for auditing the revisions made to the bills the people we vote into office author?
As if we can expect people who think global warming and evolution are "completely lacking any evidence" and who believe the internet is a series of tubes to actually understand what version tracking is, anyway!
Going off on the same tangent, here's an example of a fragile base class. The Virginia legislature shortened (rather than completely eliminate, as in your malloc() dangling reference example) a list of businesses subject to some exemptions, not realizing that that same list was also used by another law saying which businesses had to be closed on Sundays.
I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge.
Don't forget Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - you don't have to necessarily have access to the source code. Access to compilers/pre-compilers/scripts/make files/etc may be enough.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
The irony of slashdot telling people to RTFB is black hole massive.
We have learned a bit about project management and system design since America was founded. What is the legislative process but a large project to design a complex system? We certainly have to be careful while doing so, but we should certainly use this experience in informing the workings of our government.
Do note that there is already a certain amount of this going on. Consider the various versions posted on Thomas. It would be interesting to see this further refined.
When I'm in congress, I'll take a look at it.
Source control is a good start. But I'd also like to see a more rigorous engineering discipline applied to creating laws. Things like clearly defining the problem, finding the simplest solution that solves that problem, and then testing any changes before releasing them to the world. (MMORPGs might make good test beds for suggested laws. Twilight clauses ought to be used far more often.) And refactoring. Right now, our laws are a series of patches upon patches. ("Law cruft"?)
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Maybe if we just didn't elect corrupt morons and elected people who actually give a damn about freedom and this country.
The current method of producing bills is often like a set of diffs. It says shit like "change USC blah blah to blah blah at line X, word Y." If there were a standard method behind the madness, the common man could simply pass the USC (United States Code) and the bill through a merge engine, and then see the changes as they'd finally look.
End result? Probably a revolution because the intentions of most Congresscritters, which are profoundly treasonous to the traditions of liberty and patriotism, would be exposed to the public.
Yeah - it's already required by law for public trading companies - it'scalled Sarbanes-Oxley. Maybe you've heard of it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Add a clause in an omnibus bill that essentially prohibits any new omnibus bills. Then when a congressman sponsors an omnibus bill, they get slammed and the bill dies like people did during the French Revolution.
Each bill should be introduced, debated on, and amended. When no more amendments or riders are added, the bill should be placed off the table for one week. During this week, the final text of the bill should be published online, giving the public time to review it and question it. After a week, the bill should be re-debated and voted on. This would have an added benefit of making Congress debate a lot more and pass fewer and better laws. Sometimes the solution is just one more level of indirection.
("Law cruft"?)
In Microsoft terms, "legal bloat".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No that would be of the people for the people we cant and dont and never will have that.
Fall in a well and die. Non-technical content is interesting too.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Such things already exist. I know someone who works for a company that makes version control software for documents. Their biggest customers are law firms. Nobody in a fortune 500 company wants some new hire paralegal modifying a clause in a billion dollar contract that it took months to negotiate. Congress people know the system could be made more fool proof but that would remove one more venue of plausible deniability they can use with their constituents. In Washinton crap just doesn't naturally roll down hill, it's designed to do so. Just as "Scooter"...
Congressmen do not read the bills for the simple fact that most of the major bills, tax, spending, etc., are not finalized (i.e., have major changes being made) utill the last minute. They often admit that they don't know what's in the bill being voted on.
They 'know' that cuts in any pet spending program cannot be made because we cannot 'afford to pay for the cuts'.
They hypocritically claim to know that we cannot afford to cut anything and yet admit that they vote for legislation that they do not know how much is being spent and what items it is spent on in bills.
The third Congressional sham is that they claim that reducing the rate of growth of spending on a particular program is a cut. A cut is an actual reduction in spending year over year. This is due to the 'baseline-budgeting' where spending on each program is automatically increased by 4% a year without congressional action.
These are reasons why you should not believe the parroted lines from each party.
Congress should be judged based on the actual bills they pass and not on the CNN Crossfire type of sound-bites.
Where did you get that preposterous idea? It's the thin end of the wedge!
That's one of the most brilliant ideas I've heard in years.
However, to be successful, it requires that legislators actually *care* what they are voting on. Realistically, they must have something like source control already. Voters have to send them the message that ignorance is no excuse. It's not technology that's holding them back.
Voting on a bill without reading it, if it can be proved, should result in expulsion. If you sign a contract on behalf of your employer without reading it, you would almost certainly be fired on the spot. If you work at a bank but "didn't read" the part about the amount of money, chances are you would go to jail.
cvs annotate bad_bill.txt
Criminals ignore laws.
Democracy simply doesn't work
In other news, the following people are gay!
This space for rent
There something people say about sausages and laws...
congressmen rarely read bills, they get "cliff's notes" style summeries instead.
I can't wait to use this:
$ svn blame PATRIOT
... and then there were none
Has I understand it, it should be simple enough to just have somebody just slip this new Mandatory Read law in.
Anyone here at Slashdot know someone on the inside?
Letter To Iran
This is like checking in code for someone else without reading it. Version-control software won't do a damn thing if the people using it are dumbasses. Same thing with Congress.
And there's just about no process or procedure you can require that will magically make dumbasses not do dumb things. Smart teams review code, no matter what software they use. If members of Congress are sloppy and other members don't check on them, we'll get more responsiveness voting for less sloppy candidates than in trying to make them jump through more procedural hoops.
Every line of legal text is really a line of code, executed by the legal system. So of course it should be version-controlled, like any other complicated, group-created artifact. Bugs in the code are called "loopholes". Ambiguities in the phrasing are race conditions. We should treat law as the complicated set of (poorly-defined) rules that it is.
In the case of the sneaky legislative changes, the changes between point A and point B in the legislative process got lost.
Just using source-control isn't enough to prevent such loss.
If someone creates a private copy and merges in several changes, then submits the combined changes as a single check-in, you no longer know who the REAL responsible parties are for each of the changes. This isn't always a bad thing, PROVIDED you've got the multi-patch checking sufficiently documented AND the person who actually checks it in has authority and is able to take responsibility for every changed line. A Congressman has the equivalent of this authority. A staffer probably doesn't.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Almost all bills are put through and, at the end, someone puts something unrelated into it. For example, why is daylight's savings time 3 weeks early? Ta-da! No one checks.
However, if the executive power was increased via law, it would be invalidated by the courts. So relax, even conservatives know limits.
Remember, separation of powers is in the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land.
MEF
This is certainly a good idea. It puts responsibility for ideas with those that creates them. Which is probably the reason why this will never be implemented i.e. plausible deniability goes right out the window (at least if the records are made public).
But, I think that there is another much more practical problem with this. Do we honestly think that people that think the internet is a series of tubes will be able to handle something like CVS?
The most powerful members of Congress sneak things into bills. The best place to do it is in conference committee when House and Senate members are ironing out differences. With the internet it is harder to get away with. The Library of Congress web site publishes bills in their various forms but often the delay is enough that it can be too late to get caught. When Congress and the President are from different parties this type of thing can be kept under control. From 2001 to 2006 this wasn't the case so all kinds of things like the above item could be put into a bill.
The basic problem here is not source control... Its the sheer volume of text. If a congressman did nothing but read bills that had reached their final form before a vote there still wouldn't be enough hours in the day. And of course, he can't do that; he has to craft bills, participate in committees, interact with citizens and actually spend some time asleep at night too.
The solution would be to limit congress to something like one typewritten page per day for anything that spends money or has a binding effect. Also have a 24-hour cooling period between when the last amendment was voted on and when the finished bill can be voted on. Go home for the weekend and on monday you can do complicated bills that take 3 pages. And if a problem is more complex than a few pages then you give the federal bureaucrats their direction in a few pages and then let them do their jobs without micromanaging everything.
The bureaucracy could use a similar rule limiting the length of regulatory texts. Did you know that nobody in the federal government actually follows the hiring rules? That's because the texts which contains the rules are so long that virtually none of the hiring managers have ever read them completely. Instead they get a high-level overview in a workshop and nobody ever actually looks at the rules except when there is a lawsuit.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Silly me, I expect lawmakers to read bills before they vote on them, not take people's word for it.
99% of "sneaky" measures could be avoided by.. what - reading them? Do we really need an open source type system to get lawmakers to do their jobs?
The legal system on an index card, volume 1:
1) Don't be a twit.
Sincerely,
Congress
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well, that would be a start, but I still don't think that it obviates the sort of version-control system that the GP is talking about.
... maybe it's because they're pushing half-baked, half-assed stuff out the door to the "users" (citizens)?
Just think: if you were working on a big software or documentation project, would you want your QA process to involve nothing but some guy standing up and reading the source code out loud? No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
There's a reason that change management is a big issue, in addition to peer review and transparency. In fact, they compliment each other. When you can produce a list of what each person has changed, you have a basis for what you want to concentrate your reviewing efforts on.
Now, change-management isn't a cureall -- anyone in software knows that just because something hasn't changed, doesn't mean it's not buggy. You could change something that causes something that hasn't been changed to break, or you could just discover a bug later; either of those things are possible with laws as well as software. Unless you also have some way of tracking dependencies within the bills (cross references, etc.), it might be possible to "break" the law (make it internally inconsistent) with a minor change somewhere else. So that would still require full readings.
Still, it's ridiculous that there isn't something in place right now, to prevent some staffer from just sneaking language into a bill that's a surefire pass, without anyone noticing until it gets printed up in the Congressional Record.
On the whole, maybe Congress needs to hire some QA people? I mean, it's obvious they have a "client satisfaction" (voters) issue, and that the "deliverables" (laws) really suck
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Congressmen, as many others here have noted, don't read the bills they vote for. One more sentence isn't going to be read anyway. It's not the text of the bill that being voted on anyway, it's the PR quality of the thirty second soundbite that's being voted on.
So instead of CVS for congress, we need software that ensures that the bills are actually being read. My idea, which is far too sensible to ever be made into law, is to have speech software recite upon the floor of the House or Senate, the text of the bills before they can be voted upon. Even if the congresscritters slept through the recitals, it would at least have the benefit of slowing down the rate these inane bills are being passed.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, it does seem to come out online, and in plaintext format, too.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html
There seems to be a way on that site, although I don't really want to try it myself, to sign up to receive the daily Table of Contents via email. That's about as close to `tail -f` as you can get to it, I think.
The other problem is that I'm not sure the Federal Register carries much that would help you track particular bills as they make their way through the Belly of the Beast -- for that, you'd need to be looking at the Congressional Record, which seems to be online here:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/
It seems to also have daily updates. However -- there's a catch: the Record doesn't contain verbatim texts of everything that goes on in the Debates in Congress, even though it would be technically possible (bordering on trivial) for them to do this, if they wanted to. Instead, it's more of a heavily-edited Minutes, where various people can go in and edit what they said ex post facto (although WP claims they now print these edits in a different typeface). But even it doesn't, I don't think anyway, give you copies of draft legislation as it goes through Committee, or if it was voted on but never read on the floor; I think it would just contain the record of the vote itself.
But there's certainly the infrastructure there. All that you would need to do, would be to specify that the Congressional Record would need to contain more information -- like all the floor speeches, draft legislation, and text of bills regardless of whether they were read on the floor or not -- and then make sure that the output was in some type of standardized, machine-parsable format, with a lot of metadata. Plain text would be fine as long as you did the metadata consistently.
Then, the GPO could just expose the raw records, and let other people do the work of producing fancy frontends to manipulate the data and track particular pieces of legislation across the lifecycle.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
First, we're talking about 109th Congress, H.R. 3199, section 502, "INTERIM APPOINTMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS." Version control is in Thomas, run by the Library of Congress. (Unfortunately, you can't link to Thomas documents effectively; it's a front end to a non-Web system and the URLs are temporary.)
So where did that go in? The versions passed by the House and Senate are quite different, and this bill was rewritten in conference committee. This language isn't in either the House or the Senate version. We go to the Bill Summary and Status File, and look under "Amendments". This is the change log for the bill. Nothing about this is in there.
This change was added in the House-Senate conference committee, which is how stuff like this usually sneaks in.
The only reference to this change is in the conference committee's report, at House Congressional Record page H1130. The text is:
Section 502. Interim appointment of United States Attorneys
Section 502 is a new section and addresses an inconsistency in the appointment process of United States Attorneys.
That's where it went in. But there's no indication of who put it there. The members of the conference committee were appointed by the Speaker of the House, and they were:
One of those members of Congress is responsible.
Why would the government want to change the system? It's working exactly as they want it to.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
All of these suggestions, well intentioned as they are, are the political equivalent of Dilbert making suggestions to his PHB.
Government, like its successor corporate management, does not operate for the benefit of the governed. That much should be obvious just from the name.
And we long ago shifted from being a start-up country focused on customer satisfaction and innovation to an entrenched monopoly focused on management bonuses and defense of market share.
"How many Senators does it take to screw up a law bill?" "100." "100?!!" "Yeah, it's in the Constitution."
"You said that windows 98 would be more reliable than windows 95!"
"It is, infact it's 10000 times more reliab..."
BLAM!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I totally agree. However there's one ever so slight problem with this. If you've actually ever looked at any official Congress documents, then you'll realize that they're as far removed from 'plain text', as the niagara falls are from the little brook behind your house.
It seems impossible for legislatures (and that doesn't only go for lawmakers) to write in sensible language.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Some of us find politics interesting. Just because you don't like it is no reason to be a complete jackass about it, especially when Slashdot has a built in way to never see political headlines again.
Some politician or radical wants to advance criticism of a law so they stick their tounge in their cheek and throw in the suggestion we use source-code-control to manage congressional bills just to get their opinion into Slashdot. Then some very smart people see through this but like an idiot, you tell them to "fall in a well and die" because it is interesting?
Take a look at govtrack.us, which parses the Congressional Record into a nice RSS feed by issue, bill, or congressperson. It'd still be nice if Congress provided such a service themselves.
You talk like paralyzing government would be a bad thing. No one's wallet is safe while Congress is in session. And besides, I think some bills Congress passes can honestly be considered threats to national security....
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Want to make them slow down and read the bills?
Get your congress critter to sponsor the Read The Bills Act: http://www.downsizedc.org/read_the_laws.shtml
Just think: if you were working on a big software or documentation project, would you want your QA process to involve nothing but some guy standing up and reading the source code out loud? No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
Reading source code out loud is a whole different beast, and, in my opinion, not a good analogy. In source code, you have variables, case-sensitivity, quotes matter, etc. Reading the English language aloud is quite different.
There is a similar services for the policies and ToS from the Internet :
http://www.goodiff.org/
Concerning all the legal publication, that's a lot of stuff... and the major issue
is to clearly separate notable changes from structure document changes. Legal documents
are structured in different ways and using different way. The major issue is to
provide a constant changes approach... to ease the work of the final reader.
Most bills are already written on as patches, with the authors indentified.
Rethinking email
This was only to clarify the statement in the article submission. I have no desire to turn this into a stacked court thread. I'm sure many of us wish Sandra Day were still with us but that's another story.
Not to be an ass, but have you ever read a law in its original form?
I'd hardly call it english. Legalise really is its own form of code.
I think the GP's point stands, it'd be useful to have some sort of independent QA organization that would validate a bill against its intent.
Of course, then again, I think Pork should be illegal as well. Putting a $100 million into a defense spending bill for Senator Tube's state to build a bridge to an island of 50 people should get someone hung.
I have read law as a matter of fact. I will agree with you, that calling it English is a stretch, as far as interpreting goes, but I still stand by my argument that reading codified law would not be the same as reading source code.
For example this excerpt from Fair use act of 2007:
"The court shall remit statutory damages for secondary infringement, except in a case in which the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that the act or acts..."
Now consider this snippet of code:
while (sgets(buf2, 256, sec_ptr))
And the way I would see it translated into English:
while open parenthesis sgets open parenthesis buf2 comma 256 comma sec underscore ptr close parenthesis close parenthesis
To me, I'd rather have law read out to me, and I am more involved in coding than I am law. As for pork, I am with you 100%. I think bills should be written specifically on a 1:1 ratio. One Problem, one bill.
Not only that, but the memory (stare decisis) and application logic (judicial interpretation) have gotten completely corrupted. We need to do a clean reboot - you can't expect even the best program (law) to run on a crashed system.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Or maybe we shouldn't invest so much power in governments that create laws so complex that nobody can read and understand them prior to voting on their passage? You know--power, money => government == whiskey, car keys => 12 year old boys
I've been arguing this since the UK government published it's report that justified the decision they then took to go to war in Iraq. A later inquiry said it couldn't find who had made what changes and what was the cause of each change.
I just thought in safety critical software best practice requires that level of knowledge and it exists in the tools used and not many more things can be considered safety critical than a war involving lots and lots of weaponry in use.
In conclusion all output of government that is used to justify policy and legislation should be covered that way.
Content sourcing would be a great improvement for government as it could potentially eliminate billions of wasted dollars from pork, resolve conflicting regulations before they happen, and greatly improve inter agency communication.
Now all we need someone to do is sneak a line into a bill mandating the use of such a system while nobody's looking!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
This sounds like an excellent idea, but I'm sure Diebold would want to get in on the action, making a proprietary system with no change tracking ability.
" I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. "
BWAHAhahaha... man I love the amount of hubaris that exists in out industry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Government, like its successor corporate management, does not operate for the benefit of the governed.
/. ?
That is not true. Stop being a dick. It does operate for the benefit of the governed, maybe you should get involved instead of whine on
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The end of Big Government used more than a campaign slogan. This problem occures because the government has it's hands in way to many things. Our Federal government is bloated to an all time high thanks to FDR, the feds should only worry about military/national security (this would include highways), international trade, and disputes between the states. Not pandering to companies for campaign money or minorities/unions for votes with the promise of tax breaks or other incentives.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
This is a great idea, but it would be more like wikipedia. Since it is the government, you would have lots of people loking at it specigically to use it to gain advantage in some manner. Many more people would be doing that rather then looking for what is 'best'.
Then, of course, on mans pork is another mans job.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Source control doesn't go far enough, IMO. They need a continuous integration system. When a bill is checked in, the system should notify the interested parties, perform checks for things like grammar, etc., post the changes to a public website, generate RSS feeds, etc. I think this touches on a bigger idea. Imagine if law were written in such a way that both people and computers could understand it. For example, a murder law would have a set of inputs (Was act in self defense? Was act premeditated?), rules for handling the input, and return a verdict and sentencing guideline (Guilty- recommended sentence 10-20 years). Such a system would still require the Judicial System to debate the inputs, and could still leave room for human intervention, but would result in a fairer system.
Poorly-documented patches at that. The ones I've looked at didn't say what the patch was meant to change, except a vague description in the bill's header. Bills should include context from the area they're modifying, instead of just where to insert it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The only countries with oppressive regimes that are doing well are sitting on large quantities of oil.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I find your ideas amusing, all the more so because you have no idea what you are talking about, Mr. Anonymous Troll. Which 'honorable' countries are you referring to?
Spain? Raped and plundered the new world, lost some wars, was never a big player again.
France? Revolted against its 'Honorable Feudal systems'- because they were stupid. Revolted agaisnt most of its other systems too. "The French are revolting" has been true at almost every point in History.
Britain? Got involved in world conquest, but probably one of the most honorable governments, because they had a system of checks and balances.
Germany? WWII demonstrated the honor of the Germans.
Japan? Japan's war crimes- the mass rapes and slaughter- all occured under a feudal system.
Italy? Not only do they have no honor, they needed the Germans to bail them out.
Russia? Communism is arguably a step up from their feudal system- which should tell you how bad feudal systems are.
You probably read to many fanatasy novels as a kid talking about the glory of knighthood and chivalry. Read some real history and you'll find that the feudal system was typically a nightmare for the average person, and certainly did nothing to discourage warfare or strife.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
Actually, I've long suspected that the Necronomicon was written in Perl. Any substantial recitation of a non trivial Perl application should open a gateway to another dimension, or at open a portal to another time. I highly suggest that you replace one of your arms with a chainsaw, before attempting reading it. That always seems to come in handy.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This is the point of having a painfully slow congressional process. Anyone who has ever watched the House debate something on the floor via c-span (or committees online) knows that the time taken to decide anything (*especially to decide that something is worthy of a decision) is outrageous. And that is exactly what the framers had in mind when they established the rules for engaging in Congressional debates.
Source code control tools are only useful if the people submitting changes don't make a lot of inconsequential changes.
Every now and then, I'll see a delta for a 100 line file that's 97 lines long, because somebody went on a variable renaming frenzy.
If a staffer wants to sneak something in to a bill, they can do a lot to obfuscate their changes.
>I think the GP's point stands, it'd be useful to have some sort of independent QA organization that would validate a bill against its intent.
In theory I think that the President is supposed to fulfill that job.
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
Some years ago there was a quote from a retired civil servant who had been involved in drafting some of Johnson's Great Society legislation. He gleefully explained how he'd slipped in language that enabled cash payments to, inter alia, unsupervised teenage single mothers and some other things. Those provisions have had an incredibly destructive effect in minority communities. The individual responsible should have been hanged. If some sort of CM system was required for legislation this sort of thing would, as others have pointed out, be next to impossible. Earmarks would have fingerprints on them and pork barrel appropriations greatly reduced by the spotlight that would be shone on them. For those reason its never going to happen.
Congress isn't quite as unsavvy as you might think, but there is significant room for improvement:
1 49:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.Res.
They have made a half decent start, but I think what is lacking is a publicly visible way to see the bill and all the bill changes while the proposal is in committee and also a way to track who made what changes. Also I have noticed that thomas seems to cut off after a certain number of lines... not sure if they have fixed that yet.
If anyone is interested in donating their time to put together a system to do what this thread is proposing, free and open source, I've been giving this some thought. It wouldn't necessarily be just applicable to Congress, I think good software would be flexible enough to apply just as well to your local city council or your state legislature as it would be to congress.
I'd prefer to make it java based: struts 2, jpa, spring, hibernate Mysql/Oracle as that is what I have been working with most recently. But if you are a php, python or ruby on rails person, then maybe a few different versions might eventually be worth putting together to give people options.
So, far I would see the system as role based wiki like, with an option to simply upload a text file to overwrite the previous version, each version would have a threaded possibly moderated discussion associated with each change (unlike the current wikipedia free for all "discussion"), with possibly a way to have weighted voting for comments like slashdot and a way to have weighted voting for specific versions of the law. A system that could just as easily scale to be used by a congressional committee internally, or your local city council or opened to the public to solicit feedback.
email me at poreilly@openlaws.org if you are interested in doing a thankless job for no money. well, hopefully not thankless.
It would be next to impossible to make the US congress utilize this scheme. Why not try something more local first, like a PTA/PTO, school board, city council, or the executive management at a small company? Demonstrate its effectiveness at increasing communication, removing ambiguity, and preventing slight-of-hand modifications that fit an individuals or small groups own agenda. Then wait for a hundred years while the technique propagates to other PTAs/PTOs/school boards/city councils/state governments/etc because it just works so damn well. Then, maybe, the US congress will implement such a technique.
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
The bridge to nowhere was in a transportation appropriations bill, not in a defense bill.
And who do you propose we put in charge of deciding which spending items are "pork" and which are legitimate needs? I, for one, don't think the midwest should have any Interstate highways paid for with federal money, because I have no intention of driving on them. Maybe we should have some sort of elected body that makes these decisions. We could call it "Congress" or something.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I noticed that no one so far has mentioned part of the reason our laws are as complicated as they are is because every citizen in small or large is trying to find their way around them. Like to speed? Try to get around that law? Like to do kinky things with children? Try to find their way around them. The other is obvious. We all have trouble coming to a consensus. Just look at this forum for examples. Reflected in our laws. The quickest way to give everyone relief is to dissolve civilization. Just say it was a good try but it didn't work out, and each go our seperate ways. Amazing the number of problems that'll solve. Big government? Big business? Not anymore. Illegal copyright violations, rude gestures while driving? Not anymore. If we can't live together like proper people, then we should live apart.
I believe the proper response to Spector is:
"Ignorance of the law is no defense."
Grepya quoth: Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. Me and Ken Thompson pwnz0red your source control system twenty years ago, and we can slip in all the code we want without anybody being notified at all!
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or in modern terms, who validates your compiler?
We support democracy in other nations, because we know that anarchy works best here in the USA.
... citizens when it would just reduce the recruiting pool for our military.
... anyplace. The anarchist-aristocracy provide enough of what is needed to maintain our status-quo [PTL].
... GO get a life and job.
The federal government institutions are just diplomatic camouflage (dip-camo) for fools and other countries.
The religious anarchrist, corporatist anarhist, and plutocrat/dogma anarfascist all strongly support a kinder, gentler, freer anarchist nation and society. Why pay for poorly educated, fed, sheltered
There are many wealthy North and South American anarchist families that praise god regularly for the family welfare provided by government institution providing a job (as representative, senator, president) and prestige (publicly presentable dip-camo) for their marginal producers in their families.
Is it any wounder that theft of $1B has a smaller prison sentence then armed-robbery for $50. Serial killers get death sentences, mass murders get a slap on the back and glowing approval from family friends.
SO, lets not make a mountain out of a molehill, just try to put it all in perspective of your pitiful blight in life. I mean, tough shit, if you think things should be better the homeless in America, Europe, China, Russia, India, Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Saud-Land
Dang, just another bunch of clueless winnie whiners with nothing to do and to much time and money
PS - This is not troll/Flamebait, it is sick/dark-humor [!HAVEFUN!].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Yeah, it's a lot like BASIC. It's full of GOTO statements... "In addition to Title X, Paragraph Y, Line Z, we add the provision to protect W in Title Z, Paragraph Y, Line V."
Government generally works for the benefit of the governed in the same way Frank Perdue works for the benefit of the chickens. This has been true since the days of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.
And I've been involved for a very long time, though of course that's independent of the truth of my assertion.
In the future, some kind of factual rebuttal to the statements might work better than simple emotional projection, assuming your intent is to further the discussion rather than just make unconscious statements about yourself in the form of personal slurs.
True. But, is that office capable of it? Even given a good president who is committed to QA, could they keep up with it? So many bills get pushed with all sorts of unrelated items tagged onto them. It would be like having one debugger combing through all the Windows source code.
In Theory, the Supreme court should catch those that get by the President. But, by the time it gets to them, bad laws have been in the system for years.
Somebody else said it here, there should be a 1:1 ratio of problem to bills. None of this tacking on stuff. There should be designated times where smaller bills are considered and voted on so that tacking on doesn't become their only route to being passed. Small bill fridays anyone?
I'd also love to see a form of government where laws are engineered and maintained much the same way code is. All bills tested for bugs, put in beta stages, peer reviewed...
And let's train congressmen to do their jobs. Sure, popular vote them in. But, train them afterwards on how to write good bills. And we need a feedback mechanism for those that don't. Something independent of popular vote. If Senator Al gets an F in bill writing, I think this constituents would put that into consideration when re-electing him.
Star Pirates
The interstate highways were built so that the army would have a good road to drive on in times of emergency. The fact that you can drive from state to state on them is only incidental, I'm sure.
Historically, there is a direct correlation between how oppressive and how efficient a government is.
So Zimbabwe's government is less oppressive than Sweden's, because it's less efficient? You must start with a sweeping conclusion and then ignore all facts when espousing it. I'm well familiar with Will Roger's remark that "thank God we don't get all the government we pay for", uttered about 100 years ago, and the sentiments behind it. But history shows that we need government. Good government. Even bad government is better than none, according to the Somalis, who recently found that oppressive Islamic government was better than anarchy. It oppressed rape and murder too, you see.
The only way forward is to improve government. Forget eliminating it, unless you really like gang warfare. Efficient governments may or may not be oppressive, but absent government people are always oppressive.
Yeah, that's a good point. Like I read this site because it's interesting or something! Hah!
You can go fall in the same well with the other guy and have sex with him while you both die. Unless you're the same guy, in which case that still applies.
I need to look up my representatives and give them a call so that I can directly ask them how often they vote on bills, and if they read every bill they vote on.
If the desired manifestation of the law, justice, is the be lifted high by the rope of legislation it requires that each thread/representative bear their share of the burden. Instead, what we have is a number of threads unaccountable to each other and to themselves who may assume someone will read the whole thing but don't honestly know that anyone is. So we have a myriad of threads all of which may or may not actually be holding up the difficult weight of justice. What guarantee de we then have the justice is upheld?
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
There are discussions right now about the best ways to update the outdated Congressional IT policies, including the best way to make legislative records more accessible to the public via XML, APIs, etc. The Open House Project is drafting a report that they will be submitting to Congress. The project, incidentally, is supported by the Sunlight Foundation, Speaker Pelosi, and several other groups. There is also a mailing list and wiki for the project.
while open parenthesis sgets open parenthesis buf2 comma 256 comma sec underscore ptr close parenthesis close parenthesis That's not a translation. For an example of a translation, here's an excerpt from the DeCSS code, formatted as a haiku. It's not particularly good haiku; I don't like the way phrases so often span multiple lines, but it does have the correct number of syllables. Still, notice the way a for loop is explained. It's not just reading punctuation aloud.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Seriously. Their job is to consider bills and make decisions. We don't just pay them to vote on bills. If all we wanted was 535 people who voted on bills with no clue what's in them, we could take 535 homeless people off the streets of DC and pay them a fraction of the amount to do it. At least that would be putting some unemployed people to work. The idea of a "Congress" that makes those decisions for us in an intelligent way is fabulous. I just don't think we have that at the moment.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
But, I guess that'd be too much to ask...
until Fanatical Fascists.
If there is a requirement (or at least a custom) that laws be written in an easy-to-understand fashion, at least we'll know what we're doing is either legal or not.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
If "we" want better elected officials, wouldn't it be great if every 2 or 6 years we had a chance to change them?
The problem is that "we" apparently want more of the same.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
You forgot to mention those two : - "Don't worry, everything is gonna be fine." - "I don't have time to explain right now, just trust me, and I'll explain latter."
No sig for now.
Do you think that part of the problem might be a set of rules that cause essentially every player in the game to behave the same way? The rules that Congress plays by to write and pass laws practically guarantee that type of outcome. Replacing the players and tossing new ones into the same game with the same rules and goals won't change anything, regardless of how great the newly elected members are.
The way to make a difference is to support people who actually try to change the rules. People who support something along the lines of the Read the Bills Act have my vote. People who fight against those changes don't have my vote. We simply need to make noise to encourage the scrapping of a system that can turn even those with the best intentions into the people we're complaining about.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
This is an interesting problem and after thinking about it for some time I've come up with a solution I think will work.
Kill all of the Bush family, put stakes in their hearts and bury them at crossroads. Burn down all their businesses and spread salt on their farms. Ditto for the Cheney family. You'd probably want to do the same for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz too just to be safe.
Wait, what was the question again?
(note for the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Police, Secret Service and President Bush: this is a joke)
meh
Just think: if you were working on a big software or documentation project, would you want your QA process to involve nothing but some guy standing up and reading the source code out loud? No way -- everyone would be asleep or bored to tears (well, unless it was Perl, then they'd probably be waiting for his face to just fall off).
There would also be the danger that a gate to hell would open and demons would come pouring out.
meh
In fact, there is some CS research in creating domain-specific languages (DSLs) for contracts that can test for correctness and ambiguities:
* Smart Contracts
* Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering
cpeterso
I have to ask. Congress is obviously not particularly technically inclined (tubes, anyone?), so to them, electronic document == MS Word.
If we could force them to use text files, this would be much easier. Diff, etc, even graphical 3-way diffs have been written, but all assume you're dealing with text. They could basically learn the systems we've been using for decades, and we could easily show riders as "patches". Might even be nice to have a Benevolent Dictator who could reject those patches out of hand, but then, it's not as easy to fork a government as it is a kernel...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The idea of reading bills is currently being championed by this group:
http://www.downsizedc.org/read_the_laws.shtml
Start pressuring your Congress-critters on it today
The South did it once. They seceded. Remember, the Civil War (war between the states) was fought because the South was paying 87% of the federal taxes, not over slavery. This is something they no longer teach in classrooms, but it does work its way in if you live in the South - because they still remember.
SECEDE.
Thats brillent!
While I don't think that this would stop any log-rolling, at these it would give constitutants more ideas about how good/crappy their representative has been. Combine that with a lock of 24-48 hours on any bill, and you'd make congress alot more transparent.
I like it alot!
Ben
I think it's more productive/useful to have a more systematic "version control system" on the high level congress bills (the policy) rather then trying to track the nitty-gritty details of what each department/federal agency does. (the mechinisms) Then it's more possible to track intent.
If one of the FAs violates the intent, it would easier to catch them as well as holding the policy makers more accountable.
Cheers
Ben
Yeah, thats a good idea. And kiss $50 billion away for hurican relief.
Jeez, Haven't you noticed that the recent trend is towards larger national systems, not smaller? Think of the EU, LatinAmerica, the arab league, the african union, china, etc... The US was just the first superstate, now the rest are being formed too.
Good luck with the seceding...
Ben
The problem is that Alaskans love the bridge to nowhere. So they vote Teddie back in to office to rape the rest of the country yet again. Any everyone else's politicos are busy doing the same thing; stealing tax money to give to their constituents, who love them for it. And the net result is a multi-trillion dollar government that accomplishes basically nothing except squandering enormous amounts of wealth.
"...yet Congress members aren't held accountable for reading the material they discuss each day"
Hmm... sort of like how most people on Slashdot post all kinds of stuff but never RTFA. =)
What we need is indeed a form of source control, but perhaps not so much for the text os the laws. The big, fundamental problem here is not that a law was changed, altough that is a very serious thing - but at the bottom of it all is the way that the country is ruled by powerful minorities that have not been elected. If the US had a true democracy, most politicians would always feel that they represented their voters and that had to work sincerely for the people. This is what happens in other countries.
I think two issues are central to the problem in America: Lobbying and party funding. In many countries there are tight restrictions on those two; much of what is considered lobbying or contributing to a party would be seen as corruption in Europe. Lobbying is why interest groups with a narrow focus, but a lot of money to spend have so much power: the oil industry, the arms industry, the rabid curs on the religious fringe, if you'll excuse my French. The way election campaigns are funded means that the voters don't get a chance to make a truly informed choice, which is why it makes no difference whether you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans; they are all in the pockets of big money, because otherwise they won't ever be heard in the big shouting match. Cut out those two factors and suddenly the electorate will have a chance of actually making an informed decicion, which is what democracy is all about.
On top of that it would be a lot better if proportional representation was introduced. It would lead to many more parties being represented; some would say that this is a bad thing, since government would be less able to act, but I think this is actually a GOOD THING. In the normal state of affairs there is actually loads of time to make decisions on government level, and a slightly indecisive government, that always has to go and negotiate deals before they do anything major would never have attacked Iraq; they would have to cultivate some restraint and learn some useful skills in cooperation and negotiation. As a result the US would not now be quite as despised in the world.
To those who fear what would happen in an emergency if the government doesn't have the power to act - this is what a state of emergency is for. But in peacetime when there is no great threat to the nation, what you want is a government that actually represents the people as a whole, who works for the people and who spends enough time on making decisions, so they get it right.