Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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!"
The irony of slashdot telling people to RTFB is black hole massive.
Wasn't this in the last episode of "24"?
No, no no, you're thinking of the one where Jack yelled into his cellphone "Chloe, There's NO TIME!", got shot and died, was brought back to life, saved the President, yelled "DAMMIT!", confonted the bad guy (a different high ranking government official bad guy than last week), pulled out his gun, pistol-whipped the high ranking government official and threatened to kill him with "TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW NOW!"
DAMMIT! You just gave away the entire next season!
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
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."
Yes, thankfully laws are more like a high-level scripting language, interpreted inside a sandbox which can heuristically decide how to handle situations where the program logic produces exceptions; we call that sandbox the Court system. In fact the heuristics employ a learning algorithm called stare decisis . Because of stare decisis, the heuristics should become better and better over time, but some rogue hacker keeps hotpatching the system code, causing new exceptions; we call that hacker Congress.
Shall I go on? See our system code also interfaces with a legacy system called common law...
Oh this hypocrisy. We are on slashdot after all, or did you RTFA?
Shouldn't be too difficult to have a staffer slip that into a bill.
If this came to pass, I would foresee a huge market for Congressional Cliffs Notes.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
That's brilliant!
Add release dates. We're not running US Gov't 'Cunning Congress' until Jan 12, 2008. For the moment, we're running 'Artful Assembly'.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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