Re:Would this ever happen without the licence fee?
on
BBC Launches APIs
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· Score: 4, Informative
BBC America isn't the same as it's UK cousins. It's a fully commercial network, not funded by any license fee. They're run by BBC Worldwide, which is the commercial arm of the BBC, and have to purchase the rights to any and all programming they air, just like any other American network. They also have commercials, which makes for slightly strange programming blocks, IMO.
Ease of use is subjective, and the iPod has a number of features that are arguably not "easier to use than anything else." The iTunes interface for uploading music to the thing is well handled, to be sure, but the inability to use any other method is the major reason I won't use the darned thing: being able to simply drag and drop mp3s to an external hard drive is much easier, faster, and less time consuming for me and for, I suspect, many others.
This isn't a knock against iTunes, mind you. While I don't personally use it (too resource heavy for me), I do think it's a very capable piece of software. But it does strike me as a rather blatant example of vendor lock-in that I could personally do without, IMO, and the "ease of use" argument falls flat simply because one does not preclude the other.
PithHelmet, while it works pretty well, is not, technically speaking "free" (as in beer or speech), which was one of the requirements of the grandparent post.
Think about the fact that you need a separate project to run KDE under Ubuntu
You don't. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are completely compatible, and the only difference between the two releases is that one includes Gnome right out of the box, and the other includes KDE. Installing KDE under Ubuntu proper is just a matter of running apt-get install kubuntu-desktop (or even just apt-get install kde), and installing Gnome under Kubuntu is similarly trivial.
Which doesn't actually contradict any of what I said.:-)
Though, to be fair, your numbers are off considerably. For its first three seasons, Doctor Who hovered around 40 episodes per season. After 1970, this was reduced to 26 episodes per season, where it remained until 1985, when the episode count was halved, but the runtime was doubled (13 50 minute episodes as opposed to 26 25 minute episodes). For its final four seasons, the show did return to 25 minute format, while retaining the shorter seasons, but, even so, the average number of episodes per season was around 26 1/4. So the total you're looking for is 284 hours.
Plus, every ST series after had 45-minute episodes, so your average episode length is actually closer to 46 than 50. And it only ran for a combined total of 27 seasons (TOS was 3, TNG, DS9 and Voyager 7 each, and Enterprise is 4), leaving out the animated series and the movies. If you add those in, they add a season and a half (the animated series ran in a half-hour block, and its combined two seasons account for only 22 episodes). So your total there is 568.
Which, shockingly, is exactly double the Doctor Who figure (though my rounding probably threw the numbers very slightly). So, yeah, Star Trek is well ahead, but only because of its longer episode length, which I explicitly noted in the grandparent post.
Going simply by number of episodes, Doctor Who comes close: it ran 26 seasons originally, but its early seasons were over twice as long as your average contemporary U.S. TV season. On the other hand, it was a twenty-five minute show, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to Star Trek's traditional 45 minute (sans commercials) format. Still, the number of original Doctor Who novels well exceeds the number of original Star Trek novels (which is no mean feat, admittedly), it has an ongoing range of audio dramas, and the TV series was just revived by the BBC.
By far, the most common arrangement these days seems to be networks purchasing seasons of 13 episodes, with the so-called "back nine" (or some roughly similar number) option: if the show performs well, a further nine episodes are purchased, for a total of 22 episodes per season.
How so? I mean, Metroid Prime is a great game and all, but part of the reason folks were celebrating it when it was released was because it was so similar to previous Metroid games, and how the developers managed to transfer the basic gameplay of the series to 3D. Other than being transposed into the third dimension, it's not radically different from previous games.
To be sure, the shift to 3D is a pretty big change, but it's hardly unprecedented (and therefore not particularly "radical"): Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man X, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto and countless other series have made similar leaps.
Mario 64 is a better case, since it did make some significant changes to the traditional Mario formula, but, even then, I'm not sure it's "the most radically changed sequel" out there. Other than the shift to 3D, Super Mario Bros. 2 (the U.S. version) is probably just as much a departure, and several other series can probably claim similar radical changes (various installments in the Final Fantasy series have witnessed major overhauls, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a major departure for that series, etc.).
For my money, the "most radically changed sequel" I've ever played is Parasite Eve 2. But I have to admit that saying that is a bit misleading, because while it had very little in common with the original Parasite Eve, it cribbed mercilessly from other games in the survival horror genre, and ironically wound up being less "original," overall, than its predeccessor, even as it was a major departure from it.
Madison wanted it to say: the government may not make a state religion, while later revisions brought us to the wavy, and uncertain phrasing we have now.
While I still question your grammatical reading of the clause (it's technically correct, but its unusually awkward for the Bill of Rights, and therefore less sensible than various other readings), this, at the heart, is the crux of the problem. What Madison intended was quite different from what the other framers intended (the House apparently favoring a much less equivocal "Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience.")
If you want *real* seperation of church and state, then you need to go to France, where the free but conspicious expression of a student's religous beliefs was banned from school. Because it was deemed that any relgiously affiliated action, or dress at school was a violation of seperation of church and state.
That's hardly necessary. I am merely a proponent of Everson v. Board of Education: I have no problem what you, as an individual, choose to practice, nor do I ask for any protection from your right to practice it. I merely ask, even demand, that my government not intervene in matters of faith, and do whatever possible to avoid the appearance of impropriety in such matters. I feel that a nuanced understanding of what the founders believed and acted upon with regards to the intersection of the state and religion (such as Madison's opposition to a tax designed to support teachers of religion in Virginia) and the langauge of the Establishment Clause reflects my interpretation. I most certainly do not believe that one needs to infringe upon the second half of the Establishment Clause ("prohibiting the free exercise thereof") in order to enforce the former, as I tend to feel is the case with France.
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extends many of the same behavioral restrictions the Federal government operates under to state and local governments as well. Which means that if Congress can't pass a law concerning an "establishment of religion," then neither can the states.
And the Supreme Court is most emphatically not "forcing their views illegally," as the process of judicial review is not illegal, and even most people who dislike various decisions regarding the Establishment Clauses wouldn't question the legality of the concept. Morally questionable, maybe. Illegal, no.
The Supreme Court is obviously not infallable; unfortunately, the only "court" which could say they were wrong is themselves, and when they choose to be wrong they aren't going to say they are.
That's not quite true....
The thing is, for all the talk of "legislating from the bench," the Supreme Court simply cannot do that. Yes, their interpretations of law aren't really up for further debate (although apparently nobody ever told that to Andrew Jackson, but I digress...), but they have no direct power over the Constitution itself, per se. Which means that, in the case of a particularly egregious decision on the part of the court, the amendment process is still open. There's also impeachment, in even more extreme circumstances.
Yes, it's not an easy process, but then, why should it be? In practice, only extreme cases ever get to the Supreme Court, so they only ever get to practice judicial review in extreme situations, as opposed to, say, Congress, who can pretty much decide to vote on whatever issue they feel like whenever they want to. Eventually, you need to draw a line so that contentious issues don't keep getting shunted between branches of the government, and the Supreme Court happens to be where the buck (more or less) stops. As you say, it's not infallible, but it's not that easy to come up with a better solution.
And, despite complaints to the contrary, the words "under God" in a pledge of allegiance is not saying anything close to "this is the correct religion for YOU". If you object to the words, just don't say them. Problem solved. When you are actually forced to say them, you've got a complaint.
It's a bit of a nonissue, I'll admit, but the problem is that the idea of "God" is a religious issue, and that the Pledge is enshrined in federal law. Under established precedent, that law is probably in contradiction of the first part of the Establishment Clause (I believe it is, but there's certainly more room for debate than if it specifically invoked, say, Catholicism). But to say that a problem only arises if you're forced to speak the Pledge is silly: while the second part of the clause ("or prohibit the free exercise thereof"), the first part has nothing to do with any coercion of individuals on the government's part.
But, as I said, it's a bit of a nonissue, and I while I tend to agree with the decision made by the Ninth Circuit, but, politically speaking, I can't help but wish it hadn't come up, if only because it has drawn a lot of truly dangerous reactions out of the woodwork. In short, I prefer to save my ammunition for the big battles:-)
Sorry, that's not just wrong, that's stupidly wrong.
I would suggest you look up Marbury v. Madison.
Judicial review means, of course, that the judicial system (and specifically the Supreme Court) is responsible for judging the actions of other branches of the government through the lens of the Consitution. This is, of course, impossible to do without some degree of interpretation.
There are obviously some things which require fairly minimal interpretation. But even a seemingly self-evident proclamation requires a little bit of interpretation: theft is illegal, but the question is, precisely, constitutes theft? In dealing with the Constitution, the Supreme Court needs to interpret what they believe it means to the best of their ability, otherwise they can't really use it, and it becomes completely meaningless.
It is the responsibility of the legislative branch to construct law in such a way that it minimizes the level of interpretation the judicial branch needs to apply. "Legislating from the bench" is a ludicrous concept: the courts are just as bound by the Constitution as Congress is. Removing the Supreme Court's ability to evaluate the constitutionality of law effectively removes any constitutional check on the the power of Congress. As you say, if they don't like it, they can always begin the processes necessary to amend the Constitution.
Everson v. Board of Education is a perfect example of the sort of situations wherein the law needs to be interpreted to be made useful. The problem wasn't ignoring precedent: it was the lack of useful precedent. The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly bound states to the same standards of due process as the federal government. In light of this, the Establishment Clause was similarly extended. You might not like the result, but it's not a particularly egregious contortion of the law, and shows just how judicial review is necessary to work through the consequences of Constitutional law.
The only part of the decision that should ever come up for debate is the distinction made in Chief Justice Black's ruling between de facto and de jure acts of Congress (in other words, the difference between explicitly proclaiming a state religion and just passing laws to give a particular religious establishment all the perks that come with that title). And that is only an issue if you choose to assume that the founding fathers were idiots who were incapable of properly structuring a sentence ("establishment" is not a verb!).
Your definition of choice is refuted by Congress' ability to charter the construction of the (Episcopal) National Cathedral.
And your chosen definition runs counter to the accepted interpretation handed down by the Supreme Court. And since interpretation is their job....:-)
(That Congress has, on occassion, violated the letter and/or spirit of the Constitution is not in dispute. It only becomes an issue if argued before the courts. The National Cathedral charter was never legally challenged, and the Supreme Court can't intervene otherwise. So it's a nonstarter.)
I don't dispute that you have provided a valid definition: I merely question your certainty in asserting that it is the "correct" one. In the context of the clause itself, it's awkward, poorly constructed, and jars with the recorded thoughts of several (though certainly not all) founders. If nothing else, it's got Occam's Razor going against it:-)
Yeah, but the thing is that the reading I provided covers that just as well as the "state religion" reading (it just goes further), and has the added benefit of not having to assume the founding fathers were unable to structure a sentence properly....:-)
Make = verb; law = noun/object; respecting = participle, modifying law. Respect (v) according to the OED: "To treat or regard with deference, esteem, or honour; to feel or show respect for". Establishment: "the act of establishing"
Ah, but "establishment" (and far more commonly) means "institution" ("drinking establishment," etc.) While it can be either, the only logical way to parse the sentence is to to assume the latter: otherwise you have a grammatically awkward construction that does a piss poor job of addressing the issues facing the founding fathers.
Some quick Googling: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/project s/ftrials/c onlaw/estabinto.htm "At an absolute minimum, the Establishment Clause was intended to prohibit the federal government from declaring and financially supporting a national religion, such as existed in many other countries at the time of the nation's founding."
How does this contradict anything I've said? Yes, it definitely says that... at bare minimum. But, it also says a lot more than that. The idea of "separation of church and state" (which may not appear in the document itself, but was corroborated in the writings of various framers, like Jefferson and Adams) is designed to prevent both the de jure creation of state religion as well as the de facto equivalent (which, in this case, would be giving preferential treatment to a particular religious institution without ever going so far as to enshrine it as a "state religion").
The issue isn't "inventing" a new interpretation, exactly. The issue is clarifying a preexisting statement so that it can be enforced. And that is the job of the Supreme Court. It has been the job of the Supreme Court since the first days of the 19th century, and has been accepted as necessary for the operation of the government for almost as long.
You're right: precedent is all-important. And that precedent is set by the Supreme Court until explicitly overturned by law.
This is a disturbingly common reading of the phrase, and, understood in historical context, it's still wrong.
The grandparent post was right, though: etymology does help. As does grammar. The object of the sentence is not "religion": it's "establishment of religion." In this context, it most likely means organized religion as a whole. In other words, a passably acceptable paraphrase is "Congress can't make laws which deal with religion," not "Congress can't establish a state religion." You cannot parse the sentence that way (correctly, at least)! In any case, "establishment" is a noun, not a verb: I can't "establishment" a religion, and neither can Congress.
To be sure, yes, this means that Congress can't establish a state religion. But it means quite a bit more than that, when you actually sit down and start thinking through the repurcussions of it all. It means, in short, that any sort of preferential/discriminatory treatment of any religion on the part of Congress is disallowed. Which is how the Supreme Court has long interpreted it (that being a major part of their job, an' all...) and how the phrase was commonly understood until a bunch of people who really should know better decided to start flaunting the grammatical structure of English in service of misguided spiritual ideals (IMO).
Mod parent up. It's an important distinction, given how much of the scientific establishment relies on some degree of federal funding. Most of the organizations who would have the ability and desire to work with embryonic stem cells are prohibited by the EO.
To correct your correction, it was "Dragon Quest 8" that is in question. "Dragon Quest 7" did great sales, but it certainly wasn't released two months ago....
It's probably very difficult for Apple to change their system at this point: they could include HE-AAC/AACplus support in the iPod Shuffle, sure, but the users who aren't bringing their already ripped MP3/Vorbis/AAC/whatever collection to the table are going to be presumably purchasing files from the iTunes Music Store.
Now, if Apple decided to upgrade iTMS to provide AACplus files, then they'd be breaking compatibility with existing iPod models, which is probably not a wise idea, all things considered.
I'm not a big fan of AAC, mind you, but it most certainly is not DRM'd. It's a simple audio codec, not much different (in that regard) to MP3 or Vorbis.
Apple's music store uses a DRM'd MPEG-4 wrapper for their files, which are encoded using AAC. But that means nothing: a wrapper is quite a different thing than a codec. Look at XviD: it's a video codec which can be encapsulated in any number of wrappers (AVI, OGM, Matroska). Heck, you can even stuff an MP3 file into a wrapper and use it that way (Matroska audio files, for instance).
Because he's a big deal. Seriously. He's a superstar of comic book media, and Marvel gets a lot of mileage out of his name (he's still credited as emeritus publisher on all of their books, for instance). They honestly do not want Stan Lee annoyed with them, if only because it's kind of bad publicity.
Ah, minors generally cannot have sex with each other. As strange as it sounds, statutory rape laws deal not only with adult/minor sexual relations, but also minor/minor sexual relations. The idea of mutual rape is a little strange, to be sure, but that's the way it works.
Of course, statutory rape laws and ages of consent vary from state to state, but generally speaking and in most locations, sex involving a minor is illegal, regardless of the age of the other partner.
Bull. "Expert," in the context of this article, and the discussion it has raised, is very narrowly defined. The concept of "anti-elitism" (the existence of which I still think is a ludicrous idea) refers to recognized experts. Generally the sort of thing illustrated by an academic degree of some sort.
Being a "non-expert" emphatically does not mean "ignorant," in any case. There are plenty of history books and biographical works written by people who are not necessarily recognized experts in their field. There's even a handful of general interest science and technology books written by people whom proper scientists would never regard as experts. Some of these books may not be that great, but that's hardly true of all of them. Well-written amateur contributions can be just as valuable as expert contributions, in many cases.
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BBC America isn't the same as it's UK cousins. It's a fully commercial network, not funded by any license fee. They're run by BBC Worldwide, which is the commercial arm of the BBC, and have to purchase the rights to any and all programming they air, just like any other American network. They also have commercials, which makes for slightly strange programming blocks, IMO.
Ease of use is subjective, and the iPod has a number of features that are arguably not "easier to use than anything else." The iTunes interface for uploading music to the thing is well handled, to be sure, but the inability to use any other method is the major reason I won't use the darned thing: being able to simply drag and drop mp3s to an external hard drive is much easier, faster, and less time consuming for me and for, I suspect, many others.
This isn't a knock against iTunes, mind you. While I don't personally use it (too resource heavy for me), I do think it's a very capable piece of software. But it does strike me as a rather blatant example of vendor lock-in that I could personally do without, IMO, and the "ease of use" argument falls flat simply because one does not preclude the other.
PithHelmet, while it works pretty well, is not, technically speaking "free" (as in beer or speech), which was one of the requirements of the grandparent post.
You don't. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are completely compatible, and the only difference between the two releases is that one includes Gnome right out of the box, and the other includes KDE. Installing KDE under Ubuntu proper is just a matter of running apt-get install kubuntu-desktop (or even just apt-get install kde), and installing Gnome under Kubuntu is similarly trivial.
Which doesn't actually contradict any of what I said. :-)
Though, to be fair, your numbers are off considerably. For its first three seasons, Doctor Who hovered around 40 episodes per season. After 1970, this was reduced to 26 episodes per season, where it remained until 1985, when the episode count was halved, but the runtime was doubled (13 50 minute episodes as opposed to 26 25 minute episodes). For its final four seasons, the show did return to 25 minute format, while retaining the shorter seasons, but, even so, the average number of episodes per season was around 26 1/4. So the total you're looking for is 284 hours.
Plus, every ST series after had 45-minute episodes, so your average episode length is actually closer to 46 than 50. And it only ran for a combined total of 27 seasons (TOS was 3, TNG, DS9 and Voyager 7 each, and Enterprise is 4), leaving out the animated series and the movies. If you add those in, they add a season and a half (the animated series ran in a half-hour block, and its combined two seasons account for only 22 episodes). So your total there is 568.
Which, shockingly, is exactly double the Doctor Who figure (though my rounding probably threw the numbers very slightly). So, yeah, Star Trek is well ahead, but only because of its longer episode length, which I explicitly noted in the grandparent post.
Are you suggesting that OSDL should be responsible for what its employees do while not on the clock?
Going simply by number of episodes, Doctor Who comes close: it ran 26 seasons originally, but its early seasons were over twice as long as your average contemporary U.S. TV season. On the other hand, it was a twenty-five minute show, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to Star Trek's traditional 45 minute (sans commercials) format. Still, the number of original Doctor Who novels well exceeds the number of original Star Trek novels (which is no mean feat, admittedly), it has an ongoing range of audio dramas, and the TV series was just revived by the BBC.
By far, the most common arrangement these days seems to be networks purchasing seasons of 13 episodes, with the so-called "back nine" (or some roughly similar number) option: if the show performs well, a further nine episodes are purchased, for a total of 22 episodes per season.
How so? I mean, Metroid Prime is a great game and all, but part of the reason folks were celebrating it when it was released was because it was so similar to previous Metroid games, and how the developers managed to transfer the basic gameplay of the series to 3D. Other than being transposed into the third dimension, it's not radically different from previous games.
To be sure, the shift to 3D is a pretty big change, but it's hardly unprecedented (and therefore not particularly "radical"): Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man X, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto and countless other series have made similar leaps.
Mario 64 is a better case, since it did make some significant changes to the traditional Mario formula, but, even then, I'm not sure it's "the most radically changed sequel" out there. Other than the shift to 3D, Super Mario Bros. 2 (the U.S. version) is probably just as much a departure, and several other series can probably claim similar radical changes (various installments in the Final Fantasy series have witnessed major overhauls, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a major departure for that series, etc.).
For my money, the "most radically changed sequel" I've ever played is Parasite Eve 2. But I have to admit that saying that is a bit misleading, because while it had very little in common with the original Parasite Eve, it cribbed mercilessly from other games in the survival horror genre, and ironically wound up being less "original," overall, than its predeccessor, even as it was a major departure from it.
While I still question your grammatical reading of the clause (it's technically correct, but its unusually awkward for the Bill of Rights, and therefore less sensible than various other readings), this, at the heart, is the crux of the problem. What Madison intended was quite different from what the other framers intended (the House apparently favoring a much less equivocal "Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or
infringing the rights of conscience.")
That's hardly necessary. I am merely a proponent of Everson v. Board of Education: I have no problem what you, as an individual, choose to practice, nor do I ask for any protection from your right to practice it. I merely ask, even demand, that my government not intervene in matters of faith, and do whatever possible to avoid the appearance of impropriety in such matters. I feel that a nuanced understanding of what the founders believed and acted upon with regards to the intersection of the state and religion (such as Madison's opposition to a tax designed to support teachers of religion in Virginia) and the langauge of the Establishment Clause reflects my interpretation. I most certainly do not believe that one needs to infringe upon the second half of the Establishment Clause ("prohibiting the free exercise thereof") in order to enforce the former, as I tend to feel is the case with France.
Short answer: the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extends many of the same behavioral restrictions the Federal government operates under to state and local governments as well. Which means that if Congress can't pass a law concerning an "establishment of religion," then neither can the states.
And the Supreme Court is most emphatically not "forcing their views illegally," as the process of judicial review is not illegal, and even most people who dislike various decisions regarding the Establishment Clauses wouldn't question the legality of the concept. Morally questionable, maybe. Illegal, no.
The thing is, for all the talk of "legislating from the bench," the Supreme Court simply cannot do that. Yes, their interpretations of law aren't really up for further debate (although apparently nobody ever told that to Andrew Jackson, but I digress...), but they have no direct power over the Constitution itself, per se. Which means that, in the case of a particularly egregious decision on the part of the court, the amendment process is still open. There's also impeachment, in even more extreme circumstances.
Yes, it's not an easy process, but then, why should it be? In practice, only extreme cases ever get to the Supreme Court, so they only ever get to practice judicial review in extreme situations, as opposed to, say, Congress, who can pretty much decide to vote on whatever issue they feel like whenever they want to. Eventually, you need to draw a line so that contentious issues don't keep getting shunted between branches of the government, and the Supreme Court happens to be where the buck (more or less) stops. As you say, it's not infallible, but it's not that easy to come up with a better solution.
It's a bit of a nonissue, I'll admit, but the problem is that the idea of "God" is a religious issue, and that the Pledge is enshrined in federal law. Under established precedent, that law is probably in contradiction of the first part of the Establishment Clause (I believe it is, but there's certainly more room for debate than if it specifically invoked, say, Catholicism). But to say that a problem only arises if you're forced to speak the Pledge is silly: while the second part of the clause ("or prohibit the free exercise thereof"), the first part has nothing to do with any coercion of individuals on the government's part.
But, as I said, it's a bit of a nonissue, and I while I tend to agree with the decision made by the Ninth Circuit, but, politically speaking, I can't help but wish it hadn't come up, if only because it has drawn a lot of truly dangerous reactions out of the woodwork. In short, I prefer to save my ammunition for the big battles
Judicial review means, of course, that the judicial system (and specifically the Supreme Court) is responsible for judging the actions of other branches of the government through the lens of the Consitution. This is, of course, impossible to do without some degree of interpretation.
There are obviously some things which require fairly minimal interpretation. But even a seemingly self-evident proclamation requires a little bit of interpretation: theft is illegal, but the question is, precisely, constitutes theft? In dealing with the Constitution, the Supreme Court needs to interpret what they believe it means to the best of their ability, otherwise they can't really use it, and it becomes completely meaningless.
It is the responsibility of the legislative branch to construct law in such a way that it minimizes the level of interpretation the judicial branch needs to apply. "Legislating from the bench" is a ludicrous concept: the courts are just as bound by the Constitution as Congress is. Removing the Supreme Court's ability to evaluate the constitutionality of law effectively removes any constitutional check on the the power of Congress. As you say, if they don't like it, they can always begin the processes necessary to amend the Constitution.
Everson v. Board of Education is a perfect example of the sort of situations wherein the law needs to be interpreted to be made useful. The problem wasn't ignoring precedent: it was the lack of useful precedent. The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly bound states to the same standards of due process as the federal government. In light of this, the Establishment Clause was similarly extended. You might not like the result, but it's not a particularly egregious contortion of the law, and shows just how judicial review is necessary to work through the consequences of Constitutional law.
The only part of the decision that should ever come up for debate is the distinction made in Chief Justice Black's ruling between de facto and de jure acts of Congress (in other words, the difference between explicitly proclaiming a state religion and just passing laws to give a particular religious establishment all the perks that come with that title). And that is only an issue if you choose to assume that the founding fathers were idiots who were incapable of properly structuring a sentence ("establishment" is not a verb!).
And your chosen definition runs counter to the accepted interpretation handed down by the Supreme Court. And since interpretation is their job....
(That Congress has, on occassion, violated the letter and/or spirit of the Constitution is not in dispute. It only becomes an issue if argued before the courts. The National Cathedral charter was never legally challenged, and the Supreme Court can't intervene otherwise. So it's a nonstarter.)
I don't dispute that you have provided a valid definition: I merely question your certainty in asserting that it is the "correct" one. In the context of the clause itself, it's awkward, poorly constructed, and jars with the recorded thoughts of several (though certainly not all) founders. If nothing else, it's got Occam's Razor going against it
Yeah, but the thing is that the reading I provided covers that just as well as the "state religion" reading (it just goes further), and has the added benefit of not having to assume the founding fathers were unable to structure a sentence properly.... :-)
Ah, but "establishment" (and far more commonly) means "institution" ("drinking establishment," etc.) While it can be either, the only logical way to parse the sentence is to to assume the latter: otherwise you have a grammatically awkward construction that does a piss poor job of addressing the issues facing the founding fathers.
How does this contradict anything I've said? Yes, it definitely says that... at bare minimum . But, it also says a lot more than that. The idea of "separation of church and state" (which may not appear in the document itself, but was corroborated in the writings of various framers, like Jefferson and Adams) is designed to prevent both the de jure creation of state religion as well as the de facto equivalent (which, in this case, would be giving preferential treatment to a particular religious institution without ever going so far as to enshrine it as a "state religion").
The issue isn't "inventing" a new interpretation, exactly. The issue is clarifying a preexisting statement so that it can be enforced. And that is the job of the Supreme Court. It has been the job of the Supreme Court since the first days of the 19th century, and has been accepted as necessary for the operation of the government for almost as long.
You're right: precedent is all-important. And that precedent is set by the Supreme Court until explicitly overturned by law.
This is a disturbingly common reading of the phrase, and, understood in historical context, it's still wrong.
The grandparent post was right, though: etymology does help. As does grammar. The object of the sentence is not "religion": it's "establishment of religion." In this context, it most likely means organized religion as a whole. In other words, a passably acceptable paraphrase is "Congress can't make laws which deal with religion," not "Congress can't establish a state religion." You cannot parse the sentence that way (correctly, at least)! In any case, "establishment" is a noun, not a verb: I can't "establishment" a religion, and neither can Congress.
To be sure, yes, this means that Congress can't establish a state religion. But it means quite a bit more than that, when you actually sit down and start thinking through the repurcussions of it all. It means, in short, that any sort of preferential/discriminatory treatment of any religion on the part of Congress is disallowed. Which is how the Supreme Court has long interpreted it (that being a major part of their job, an' all...) and how the phrase was commonly understood until a bunch of people who really should know better decided to start flaunting the grammatical structure of English in service of misguided spiritual ideals (IMO).
Mod parent up. It's an important distinction, given how much of the scientific establishment relies on some degree of federal funding. Most of the organizations who would have the ability and desire to work with embryonic stem cells are prohibited by the EO.
To correct your correction, it was "Dragon Quest 8" that is in question. "Dragon Quest 7" did great sales, but it certainly wasn't released two months ago....
It's probably very difficult for Apple to change their system at this point: they could include HE-AAC/AACplus support in the iPod Shuffle, sure, but the users who aren't bringing their already ripped MP3/Vorbis/AAC/whatever collection to the table are going to be presumably purchasing files from the iTunes Music Store.
Now, if Apple decided to upgrade iTMS to provide AACplus files, then they'd be breaking compatibility with existing iPod models, which is probably not a wise idea, all things considered.
I'm not a big fan of AAC, mind you, but it most certainly is not DRM'd. It's a simple audio codec, not much different (in that regard) to MP3 or Vorbis.
Apple's music store uses a DRM'd MPEG-4 wrapper for their files, which are encoded using AAC. But that means nothing: a wrapper is quite a different thing than a codec. Look at XviD: it's a video codec which can be encapsulated in any number of wrappers (AVI, OGM, Matroska). Heck, you can even stuff an MP3 file into a wrapper and use it that way (Matroska audio files, for instance).
Because he's a big deal. Seriously. He's a superstar of comic book media, and Marvel gets a lot of mileage out of his name (he's still credited as emeritus publisher on all of their books, for instance). They honestly do not want Stan Lee annoyed with them, if only because it's kind of bad publicity.
Ah, minors generally cannot have sex with each other. As strange as it sounds, statutory rape laws deal not only with adult/minor sexual relations, but also minor/minor sexual relations. The idea of mutual rape is a little strange, to be sure, but that's the way it works.
Of course, statutory rape laws and ages of consent vary from state to state, but generally speaking and in most locations, sex involving a minor is illegal, regardless of the age of the other partner.
Bull. "Expert," in the context of this article, and the discussion it has raised, is very narrowly defined. The concept of "anti-elitism" (the existence of which I still think is a ludicrous idea) refers to recognized experts. Generally the sort of thing illustrated by an academic degree of some sort.
Being a "non-expert" emphatically does not mean "ignorant," in any case. There are plenty of history books and biographical works written by people who are not necessarily recognized experts in their field. There's even a handful of general interest science and technology books written by people whom proper scientists would never regard as experts. Some of these books may not be that great, but that's hardly true of all of them. Well-written amateur contributions can be just as valuable as expert contributions, in many cases.