The other point to note is that in my experience (in Rochester, NY), upstate New York actually knows how to handle snow. The roads are clear and safe to drive 99% of the time, with plows deployed the moment snow starts sticking. Contrast with, say, D.C. or Seattle (both of which I've experienced) which regularly run out of salt, fail to plow many streets for up to a week, etc. And of course, the drivers in D.C. and Seattle don't know how to deal with snow/ice: at the first flake, ancient reptilian instincts cause them to drive straight into trees, jersey barriers, other cars, etc.
So yes, there's more snow, but it's not an additional inconvenience, as long as you don't mind the cold in the first place.
No it, doesn't confirm the elections were a farce. But there is quite a lot of statistical evidence, and even the government admits to some apparent overvoting. Yes, it could all be coincidence (the statistical evidence allows for a less than 1% chance the chance the election results weren't made up), and it is possible that in between 50 and 170 districts, people voted outside their voting districts and therefore produced greater than 100% turnout, but it's extremely suspect all the same.
Except he didn't. They were both mediocre, and they went to different schools. Gore had clearly better SATs, but neither of them had clearly better grades in college. Source: http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
When I was working at MS, it took me awhile to figure out some of the code. I kept seeing:
#ifdef OS_WINCE
and wondered "Why would the OS wince?" It took a few weeks before I realized that those parts of the code were there to replace system functions that didn't exist on Win CE (to be fair, I never actually worked with that code, so my ignorance was irrelevant).
To point 1: Whimsy without direction isn't really relevant; being random, it wouldn't affect much.
To point 2: While fads can lead to people doing stupid things, they're usually transient decisions and (expected) transient consequences. Having a baby is neither; with the exception of the truly vapid, choosing a child's gender for a fad would be rightly identified as silly by the vast majority of the country. Until we have some evidence that a fad is skewing the sex ratio, no harm, no foul. And as long as it is noticed and dealt with quickly, all it would lead to is a slightly greater age range between partners.
Names are a decent counter-argument, but in fairness, names have minimal long term consequence, particularly since a nickname can be chosen at whim.
If there were "waves" of alternating gendered children, it wouldn't be as bad as you point make it out to be. In practice, the male in most married couples is a bit older (sometimes a lot older). I suspect part of this is due to men reaching full maturity slightly later, though I'm sure there are other reasons. Since very few shallow trends outlast a few years, and most relationships already show an age gap, no serious effects would be likely by adulthood. The only significant effects would be seen in grade school class makeup, where the results are unpredictable, but by no means catastrophic.
You are intentionally misreading my argument. I wasn't saying we should allow sex selection to prevent infanticide. I never mentioned infanticide, nor even referenced it. I therefore ignore the rest of your rant against a straw man.
My question to you is this: How is sex selection *intrinsically* immoral? You claim it would be associated with trends, and we shouldn't allow that. You also claim it would be inherently skewed. I claim there are perfectly valid, if admittedly somewhat shallow, reasons to choose gender that would not skew the percentages. For example, what if you wanted to have both boys and girls? You plan to have three children. You roll the dice, and the first two come up boys. Is it immoral to choose a girl for your third child? Even if every single person on the planet followed did it, the gender ratios would remain intact (since it would be self-balancing by definition).
Another perfectly plausible reason would be to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases. A number of genetic diseases are Y or X linked, and if the father carries them, it may make sense to choose the gender that would not pass them on. Given the prevalence of genetic disease is relatively low, it's not going to affect the world's gender ratio substantially.
My thinking is no more whimsical than yours, possibly less so. I (along with a fairly large number of people in the Western world) don't really care about the gender of my child. I'd like to have a boy and a girl, but other than that the ratio doesn't matter. Sex selection has been (effectively legally) available in one form or another in the U.S. for decades, but I'm not seeing armies of disaffected men who can't find brides. Yet somehow if we don't criminalize it now, Oprah will tell everyone she prefers girls and suddenly we'll have 3 girls to every boy. I'm not seeing that somehow, but it's a central thesis for your argument banning sex selection in countries where there is no problem.
Your argument against sex selection is directly applicable to hundreds of other arguments, and in none of them is the answer as clear cut as you make it out to be. Abortion is done for bad reasons, but many people feel it should be unrestricted to allow those with good reasons to have the option. Most illegal drugs have a number of good uses, and the "bad" use is far more prevalent, but many people believe they should be legal anyway, despite the societal problems they engender.
My point is that your view is rather narrow. I don't know for sure if sex selection is a good thing or a bad thing. I think in the absence of provable harm (as is the case in the U.S.), we have no business banning it by fiat. In places where it is causing problems, banning it may be necessary, but if you don't remove the underlying causes, it's going to happen anyway (and no, I don't mean infanticide, I mean abortion, assuming you draw a distinction).
There's a strong argument to be made for a lack of free will, with the universe being deterministic (possibly with a side of quantum uncertainty). Doesn't mean we let serial killers go, or give Nobel prizes to the sub-literate.
As it happens, there does appear to be a genetic basis for intelligence, but while it's strongly correlated, the effect is small. I seem to recall a study showing that if every "intelligence gene" we've found to date is set to the "optimal" setting, it only seems to correlate to a 2 point increase in IQ. A relatively small effect, compared to the influence of your home environment.
Of course, your argument is still bizarre. If we accept sexuality as genetic, then intelligence could be too. Which takes the form: "If X is caused by A, then Y could be caused by A". Well, "The tides are caused by the moon, therefore sexuality (and intelligence) could be affected by the moon." Technically true, but completely beside the point.
I think you approach it the wrong way. Outlawing the practice obviously hasn't worked; hell, China outlawed physicians even revealing the gender of the child and yet "mysteriously" the birth ratio is at 117:100 boys:girls (world average is 102-106:100). You argue that outlawing abortion in general doesn't work because there is a need for it. As I noted before, there is a need for sex selection at present in some countries, so by your own argument, it wouldn't work. If people in China knew they wouldn't starve in their old age no matter what happens, they'd be less inclined to insist upon boys. That's a concrete change the government could make to reduce the practice. Promoting "two family" marriages, instead of the girl leaving her birth family, would be another.
I think that if a perfect world existed, and the advantages to one gender over another were removed, along with all superstitions supporting it, there wouldn't be anything wrong with a particular couple choosing the gender of their child. After all, if there were no benefits either way, odds are some other family would choose the opposite way, and society's needs would be met. So sure, discourage the practice, but try and remove the bias that engenders it in the first place.
law and morality must be made on a valid coherent argument as to why the activity should be tolerated.
I would argue that both should be based on why an activity should not be tolerated. Simply because it fails to provide a benefit does not mean it should be illegal.
but there is no moral argument that can be made for sex selection. go ahead, try to make one where the activity can be viewed as necesary or acceptable according to any sense of humane interest
In many of the countries which practice it, it's not just superstition, it's self-interest. Without a social safety net for the elderly, they rely on their children to support them in their old age. Except that centuries of tradition dictate that when girls marry, they join the groom's family (there are vestiges of this in much of Western marriage practices, though they've been mitigated with time). So if you have a girl, you spend the money to raise her and reap no benefit, while a boy pays you back in your old age. You can't fix sex selection without fixing the underlying motivations. Remove the incentives for sex selection, and the rate of selection will drop. If the natural level is low, it doesn't require legal remedy.
If that's the principal objection, these people have bigger problems on their hands. Fertility clinics create and discard enormous numbers of embryos every year; even if everyone was screening for a particular Mendelian trait would, at worst, increase the number of discard embryos by a factor of four. And that assumes parents are selecting traits they themselves do not have (e.g. they both have a recessive gene that they want expressed in their child).
Stronger objections include the societal ramifications of this sort of selection: If blonds succeed more in life, then we are limiting a factor of success to those with:
The necessary genes (non-Caucasians need not apply)
The money to have the selection done
Sex selection is worse; in cultures that prize a particular gender, the ratios get out of whack (see China). And no, it's not just the one child policy fueling this practice.
There is also the icky eugenics factor. It's not entirely rational, but we went through a period where "scientists" claimed to find a basis for every positive characteristic in eye color, hair color, skin color, etc. While this is not necessarily the same, there's an instinctive "ick" factor associated with choosing "better" genes like that.
How does that have anything to do with the GP's post? He wasn't arguing one way or another on the basis of sexuality, he was giving a hypothetical. Last I checked, homosexuals are not asking for government handouts, at least, not more than the complement population.
Calling it "aborting" is intentionally inflammatory. The genes for eye color (probably hair color too, though I'm not sure of it) are known well enough to allow the embryos to be screened well before implantation. Granted, if you believe in life literally beginning at conception, then this is a problem, but then, so is every fertility clinic (since many embryos are discarded anyway).
There are other ethical concerns, but it has little to do with what is done with the rejected embryos.
Windows should ship with a built-in, suspicious network activity detecting component that disables the network if it flags a problem? And people complain when they get erroneous WGA warnings! Imagine the response when anyone running a P2P program, or a UPnP-type software, or security scanning software gets shut down. All of these are legitimate examples of software that is supposed to look for other computers in ways similar to Conficker's searches. Of course, the first action of a smart worm would be to disable that little check, then go about its business, so it would only catch the irretrievably dumb virus writers and legitimate users with "suspicious" programs. Brilliant!
And just in case you weren't paying attention, you couldn't ship this functionality in an update, because the problem users aren't installing them!
UPS, or backup generator, or some other equivalent system that gives just enough power for a clean shut down. I've seen blades with built-in UPS (possibly not even a battery, just a capacitor) that exists solely to sync to disk in the event of a power loss.
Using the lottery as an example isn't all that bad an idea. Except it's not everyone on Earth playing. Earth just buys one ticket every few million years, and you need to win the mega jackpot to get anything. And humanity hasn't been around to check the numbers very long. We could win that lottery, but I wouldn't bet on it.
If you read the article, the problem isn't Microsoft failing to offer patches and fixes, it's the failure of users to install them. Conficker was detected in the wild *after* the patch to remove the vulnerability became available, but people didn't install it. I suspect a few of the monthly malware removal updates deal with it as well (though I don't know for certain). What do you want MS to do, deploy goon squads to forcibly patch people's computers?
You joke, but one of the most fun exams I ever took came immediately after I finished my "Foods and Wines of the World" class, and had just drunk about 4-6 ounces of desert wines (20-25% alcohol by volume). I tanked the exam, but I had such fun doing it.
I found a source. See the middle of the first column on page 25 (the first page is page 23) here.
It's indirect; the original source appears to be a textbook, and I doubt I'll find a free online copy suitable to post.
To be fair, calculus is not a huge part of proper Computer Science. Yes, there's a lot of math. Discrete math and number theory, some graph theory, some linear algebra, etc. I was a CS major/Math minor, focusing in cryptography and networking (with a side of AI & CS Theory), so I did a *lot* of math, but I think in the entire time I was there I only used calculus a small handful of times. The few times I used it, the problems were so simple they could be easily solved by the calculus illiterate in a minute or two if they had a guide to the symbols and a graphing calculator w/manual.
I agree completely. I don't use IE myself, but the EC's position that MS should not only not bundle their own browser, but instead bundle *competing* browsers is inane. I'm not a gung-ho laissez-faire capitalist, but forcing companies to promote competing products is over the line.
Of course, not bundling a browser is problematic as well. The technologically illiterate, and even the semi-skilled could not figure out how to download a browser without having a browser to start with. All I'd like to see is the option to uninstall cleanly, not a mandatory release of a browser-less (read: near useless) OS.
One significant advantage to civil law is the comparative simplicity. Yes, the laws tend to be more extensive, but they are theoretically less ambiguous, easier to reference, etc. The sheer volume of training and research required to be a lawyer in a common law system means that talented people are taken from productive work to apply the law, and the costs are commensurately higher without the long term benefits they might create in a research, engineering or even artistic discipline. By contrast, lawyers in a civil law system, while still requiring a certain minimum ability, need not be the best and brightest the country has to offer, and constitute a lower "overhead" cost to maintain the legal system.
...those [U.S. Supreme Court] cases set precedent for future interactions with that law.
Which is actually a significant difference from the French model of civil law. French civil law lacks the concept of precedent, at least in theory, while English common law (from which the U.S. system draws) embraces it. For example, the concept of a corporation as a "person" is a product of centuries(?) old common law, despite no legislation dictating it. In France, that result would have to be explicitly legislated.
Slashdot Mirror
The other point to note is that in my experience (in Rochester, NY), upstate New York actually knows how to handle snow. The roads are clear and safe to drive 99% of the time, with plows deployed the moment snow starts sticking. Contrast with, say, D.C. or Seattle (both of which I've experienced) which regularly run out of salt, fail to plow many streets for up to a week, etc. And of course, the drivers in D.C. and Seattle don't know how to deal with snow/ice: at the first flake, ancient reptilian instincts cause them to drive straight into trees, jersey barriers, other cars, etc.
So yes, there's more snow, but it's not an additional inconvenience, as long as you don't mind the cold in the first place.
This man already knows the answer. (It's only 1 minute 22 seconds, so watch it)
No it, doesn't confirm the elections were a farce. But there is quite a lot of statistical evidence, and even the government admits to some apparent overvoting. Yes, it could all be coincidence (the statistical evidence allows for a less than 1% chance the chance the election results weren't made up), and it is possible that in between 50 and 170 districts, people voted outside their voting districts and therefore produced greater than 100% turnout, but it's extremely suspect all the same.
Except he didn't. They were both mediocre, and they went to different schools. Gore had clearly better SATs, but neither of them had clearly better grades in college. Source: http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
When I was working at MS, it took me awhile to figure out some of the code. I kept seeing:
#ifdef OS_WINCE
and wondered "Why would the OS wince?" It took a few weeks before I realized that those parts of the code were there to replace system functions that didn't exist on Win CE (to be fair, I never actually worked with that code, so my ignorance was irrelevant).
They're making "that big a profit" by charging you separately for the phone and laptop data plan.
To point 1: Whimsy without direction isn't really relevant; being random, it wouldn't affect much.
To point 2: While fads can lead to people doing stupid things, they're usually transient decisions and (expected) transient consequences. Having a baby is neither; with the exception of the truly vapid, choosing a child's gender for a fad would be rightly identified as silly by the vast majority of the country. Until we have some evidence that a fad is skewing the sex ratio, no harm, no foul. And as long as it is noticed and dealt with quickly, all it would lead to is a slightly greater age range between partners.
Names are a decent counter-argument, but in fairness, names have minimal long term consequence, particularly since a nickname can be chosen at whim.
If there were "waves" of alternating gendered children, it wouldn't be as bad as you point make it out to be. In practice, the male in most married couples is a bit older (sometimes a lot older). I suspect part of this is due to men reaching full maturity slightly later, though I'm sure there are other reasons. Since very few shallow trends outlast a few years, and most relationships already show an age gap, no serious effects would be likely by adulthood. The only significant effects would be seen in grade school class makeup, where the results are unpredictable, but by no means catastrophic.
You are intentionally misreading my argument. I wasn't saying we should allow sex selection to prevent infanticide. I never mentioned infanticide, nor even referenced it. I therefore ignore the rest of your rant against a straw man.
My question to you is this: How is sex selection *intrinsically* immoral? You claim it would be associated with trends, and we shouldn't allow that. You also claim it would be inherently skewed. I claim there are perfectly valid, if admittedly somewhat shallow, reasons to choose gender that would not skew the percentages. For example, what if you wanted to have both boys and girls? You plan to have three children. You roll the dice, and the first two come up boys. Is it immoral to choose a girl for your third child? Even if every single person on the planet followed did it, the gender ratios would remain intact (since it would be self-balancing by definition).
Another perfectly plausible reason would be to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases. A number of genetic diseases are Y or X linked, and if the father carries them, it may make sense to choose the gender that would not pass them on. Given the prevalence of genetic disease is relatively low, it's not going to affect the world's gender ratio substantially.
My thinking is no more whimsical than yours, possibly less so. I (along with a fairly large number of people in the Western world) don't really care about the gender of my child. I'd like to have a boy and a girl, but other than that the ratio doesn't matter. Sex selection has been (effectively legally) available in one form or another in the U.S. for decades, but I'm not seeing armies of disaffected men who can't find brides. Yet somehow if we don't criminalize it now, Oprah will tell everyone she prefers girls and suddenly we'll have 3 girls to every boy. I'm not seeing that somehow, but it's a central thesis for your argument banning sex selection in countries where there is no problem.
Your argument against sex selection is directly applicable to hundreds of other arguments, and in none of them is the answer as clear cut as you make it out to be. Abortion is done for bad reasons, but many people feel it should be unrestricted to allow those with good reasons to have the option. Most illegal drugs have a number of good uses, and the "bad" use is far more prevalent, but many people believe they should be legal anyway, despite the societal problems they engender.
My point is that your view is rather narrow. I don't know for sure if sex selection is a good thing or a bad thing. I think in the absence of provable harm (as is the case in the U.S.), we have no business banning it by fiat. In places where it is causing problems, banning it may be necessary, but if you don't remove the underlying causes, it's going to happen anyway (and no, I don't mean infanticide, I mean abortion, assuming you draw a distinction).
There's a strong argument to be made for a lack of free will, with the universe being deterministic (possibly with a side of quantum uncertainty). Doesn't mean we let serial killers go, or give Nobel prizes to the sub-literate.
As it happens, there does appear to be a genetic basis for intelligence, but while it's strongly correlated, the effect is small. I seem to recall a study showing that if every "intelligence gene" we've found to date is set to the "optimal" setting, it only seems to correlate to a 2 point increase in IQ. A relatively small effect, compared to the influence of your home environment.
Of course, your argument is still bizarre. If we accept sexuality as genetic, then intelligence could be too. Which takes the form: "If X is caused by A, then Y could be caused by A". Well, "The tides are caused by the moon, therefore sexuality (and intelligence) could be affected by the moon." Technically true, but completely beside the point.
I think you approach it the wrong way. Outlawing the practice obviously hasn't worked; hell, China outlawed physicians even revealing the gender of the child and yet "mysteriously" the birth ratio is at 117:100 boys:girls (world average is 102-106:100). You argue that outlawing abortion in general doesn't work because there is a need for it. As I noted before, there is a need for sex selection at present in some countries, so by your own argument, it wouldn't work. If people in China knew they wouldn't starve in their old age no matter what happens, they'd be less inclined to insist upon boys. That's a concrete change the government could make to reduce the practice. Promoting "two family" marriages, instead of the girl leaving her birth family, would be another.
I think that if a perfect world existed, and the advantages to one gender over another were removed, along with all superstitions supporting it, there wouldn't be anything wrong with a particular couple choosing the gender of their child. After all, if there were no benefits either way, odds are some other family would choose the opposite way, and society's needs would be met. So sure, discourage the practice, but try and remove the bias that engenders it in the first place.
law and morality must be made on a valid coherent argument as to why the activity should be tolerated.
I would argue that both should be based on why an activity should not be tolerated. Simply because it fails to provide a benefit does not mean it should be illegal.
but there is no moral argument that can be made for sex selection. go ahead, try to make one where the activity can be viewed as necesary or acceptable according to any sense of humane interest
In many of the countries which practice it, it's not just superstition, it's self-interest. Without a social safety net for the elderly, they rely on their children to support them in their old age. Except that centuries of tradition dictate that when girls marry, they join the groom's family (there are vestiges of this in much of Western marriage practices, though they've been mitigated with time). So if you have a girl, you spend the money to raise her and reap no benefit, while a boy pays you back in your old age. You can't fix sex selection without fixing the underlying motivations. Remove the incentives for sex selection, and the rate of selection will drop. If the natural level is low, it doesn't require legal remedy.
If that's the principal objection, these people have bigger problems on their hands. Fertility clinics create and discard enormous numbers of embryos every year; even if everyone was screening for a particular Mendelian trait would, at worst, increase the number of discard embryos by a factor of four. And that assumes parents are selecting traits they themselves do not have (e.g. they both have a recessive gene that they want expressed in their child).
Stronger objections include the societal ramifications of this sort of selection: If blonds succeed more in life, then we are limiting a factor of success to those with:
Sex selection is worse; in cultures that prize a particular gender, the ratios get out of whack (see China). And no, it's not just the one child policy fueling this practice.
There is also the icky eugenics factor. It's not entirely rational, but we went through a period where "scientists" claimed to find a basis for every positive characteristic in eye color, hair color, skin color, etc. While this is not necessarily the same, there's an instinctive "ick" factor associated with choosing "better" genes like that.
How does that have anything to do with the GP's post? He wasn't arguing one way or another on the basis of sexuality, he was giving a hypothetical. Last I checked, homosexuals are not asking for government handouts, at least, not more than the complement population.
Calling it "aborting" is intentionally inflammatory. The genes for eye color (probably hair color too, though I'm not sure of it) are known well enough to allow the embryos to be screened well before implantation. Granted, if you believe in life literally beginning at conception, then this is a problem, but then, so is every fertility clinic (since many embryos are discarded anyway).
There are other ethical concerns, but it has little to do with what is done with the rejected embryos.
Wow. Talk about unfair flamebait mods...
Windows should ship with a built-in, suspicious network activity detecting component that disables the network if it flags a problem? And people complain when they get erroneous WGA warnings! Imagine the response when anyone running a P2P program, or a UPnP-type software, or security scanning software gets shut down. All of these are legitimate examples of software that is supposed to look for other computers in ways similar to Conficker's searches. Of course, the first action of a smart worm would be to disable that little check, then go about its business, so it would only catch the irretrievably dumb virus writers and legitimate users with "suspicious" programs. Brilliant!
And just in case you weren't paying attention, you couldn't ship this functionality in an update, because the problem users aren't installing them!
UPS, or backup generator, or some other equivalent system that gives just enough power for a clean shut down. I've seen blades with built-in UPS (possibly not even a battery, just a capacitor) that exists solely to sync to disk in the event of a power loss.
Using the lottery as an example isn't all that bad an idea. Except it's not everyone on Earth playing. Earth just buys one ticket every few million years, and you need to win the mega jackpot to get anything. And humanity hasn't been around to check the numbers very long. We could win that lottery, but I wouldn't bet on it.
If you read the article, the problem isn't Microsoft failing to offer patches and fixes, it's the failure of users to install them. Conficker was detected in the wild *after* the patch to remove the vulnerability became available, but people didn't install it. I suspect a few of the monthly malware removal updates deal with it as well (though I don't know for certain). What do you want MS to do, deploy goon squads to forcibly patch people's computers?
You joke, but one of the most fun exams I ever took came immediately after I finished my "Foods and Wines of the World" class, and had just drunk about 4-6 ounces of desert wines (20-25% alcohol by volume). I tanked the exam, but I had such fun doing it.
I found a source. See the middle of the first column on page 25 (the first page is page 23) here. It's indirect; the original source appears to be a textbook, and I doubt I'll find a free online copy suitable to post.
To be fair, calculus is not a huge part of proper Computer Science. Yes, there's a lot of math. Discrete math and number theory, some graph theory, some linear algebra, etc. I was a CS major /Math minor, focusing in cryptography and networking (with a side of AI & CS Theory), so I did a *lot* of math, but I think in the entire time I was there I only used calculus a small handful of times. The few times I used it, the problems were so simple they could be easily solved by the calculus illiterate in a minute or two if they had a guide to the symbols and a graphing calculator w/manual.
I agree completely. I don't use IE myself, but the EC's position that MS should not only not bundle their own browser, but instead bundle *competing* browsers is inane. I'm not a gung-ho laissez-faire capitalist, but forcing companies to promote competing products is over the line.
Of course, not bundling a browser is problematic as well. The technologically illiterate, and even the semi-skilled could not figure out how to download a browser without having a browser to start with. All I'd like to see is the option to uninstall cleanly, not a mandatory release of a browser-less (read: near useless) OS.
Exactly.
I don't really know which system I prefer. The French system evaluating laws without a court challenge is, in my opinion, better than the U.S. approach of requiring a court challenge, since a court challenge requires a lot of effort by a single person for marginal personal benefit. "Squeaky wheel gets the grease" is not a cliché I like to see when it comes to the law. On the other hand, there are some cases where the ability of justices to effectively dictate freedoms and rights without worrying about the next election allow for progress that might otherwise not accomplished by the legislature in a reasonable period of time. Many of the decisions of the Warren Court not only predated legislation, but may have pushed Congress into action it might otherwise have avoided.
One significant advantage to civil law is the comparative simplicity. Yes, the laws tend to be more extensive, but they are theoretically less ambiguous, easier to reference, etc. The sheer volume of training and research required to be a lawyer in a common law system means that talented people are taken from productive work to apply the law, and the costs are commensurately higher without the long term benefits they might create in a research, engineering or even artistic discipline. By contrast, lawyers in a civil law system, while still requiring a certain minimum ability, need not be the best and brightest the country has to offer, and constitute a lower "overhead" cost to maintain the legal system.
...those [U.S. Supreme Court] cases set precedent for future interactions with that law.
Which is actually a significant difference from the French model of civil law. French civil law lacks the concept of precedent, at least in theory, while English common law (from which the U.S. system draws) embraces it. For example, the concept of a corporation as a "person" is a product of centuries(?) old common law, despite no legislation dictating it. In France, that result would have to be explicitly legislated.