I can't quote you because it wasn't you who said it. However, my original comment was a reply to someone who said:
It never works the other way (president writes a law and congress passes it).
And you came along to object to my example that proved him wrong. Anything else you try to inject is an example of ignoratio elenchi.
In any case, we have separation of powers for a reason, and yes, I do think it's a good idea to care about the process involved. Letting the Executive Branch write the legislation does take power away from the Legislative Branch, even if the current people in Congress (yes, in both parties) for the most part don't really care. If we really want a system where Congress doesn't matter, we should stop wasting taxpayers' money by paying their salaries and benefits.
You're parsing bits of a Wikipedia article to prove that only members of Congress wrote the thing? Ok, then let me fill in the next sentence that you replaced with an ellipsis: Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh and future Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff were the primary drafters of the Act.
Neither of those guys has ever been a member of Congress. It is not true that all legislation is written by members of Congress. QED.
The "riders" being referred to are unrelated provisions slapped on to popular bills by members of Congress, not Bush's "signing statements" which don't actually add anything new to the laws (they just state that he has no intention of following the laws he just signed).
Both should be made illegal, for different reasons. Unfortunately, outlawing riders might be hard to enforce (as it would require the courts to decide what exactly is "related" to a given bill), and outlawing signing statements would make no sense as it's not really reasonable to think they're legal in the first place. Do we really need a Constitutional amendment that says "See all that other stuff up there in Articles I and II? We meant that. Really. Stop it."?
It wasn't "basically the same thing", it was brand new legislation that Congress absolutely had no role whatsoever in drafting, contrary to OP's assertion that only Congress writes laws.
To be clear, I picked the Patriot Act as an example because it's been the most egregious example in recent times of Congress passing a law that none of them actually knew the full contents of, not because of its content. Any trampling of rights done during the Clinton administration should be denounced as well (although it's only fair to point out that after 1994 the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Clinton administration certainly didn't write their own legislation and get a rubber stamp from Congress without any scrutiny of what they were trying to pass).
"I have prior art. I saw a picture at a museum once and said 'Gee, that's interesting'."
In any event, anyone who's used Flickr knows that interestingness has nearly nothing to do with tagging and is almost entirely influenced by how many views, comments, and adding to Favorites (which, I suppose, could be considered "tagging" in some sense, even though it's completely separate from the list of tags) by other users. And not getting added to the interestingness blacklist by posting to certain Groups that the management sees as gaming the system.
Sure, if by "draft something at the president's request" you mean "take a bill written by Executive branch lawyers and pass it without actually reading it" like they did with the Patriot Act.
They're not patenting tagging, and there's no reason to think you can't use tags if the patent is accepted. The patent may be really stupid, but if we're going to get editorial comments, can they at least make sense?
Actually, the fact that we elect our leaders makes us a representative democracy. People in the UK elect their Members of Parliament, yet they are in no sense whatsoever a Republic.
And I'd be less obtuse and arrogant if you hadn't insisted that we're a "Represented Repubic".
As for Germany, you'd be hard pressed to call it a Republic only because of how you choose to define the term.
If I asked you to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are a represented repubic and not a comercialized feudal system, you couldn't. No one could.
Sure, but to be fair, that's because those things you're asking people to prove aren't actually things, and you have no idea what you're talking about. A good clue when you think that a "Republic" and "Democracy" are mutually exclusive things. When you say the US "is" a Republic to the exclusion of all else, you're claiming that the essence of the American form of government is that which makes us the same as China, Cuba, France, and Mexico and different than Canada, Sweden, and the UK. Sure we're a Republic, but that has very little to do with how our government works. In fact, all it means is that we don't have a king anymore.
All those novice users who are installing OS X on brand new hard drives instead of using the copy that Apple conveniently preinstalled on their computer sure are screwed, then. All 2 of them.
Personally I'd rather see the guy I supported lose in an election that was close but transparently fair than see him win in one that leaves doubts in people's minds as to whether there was fraud.
Sadly, a huge majority of the population prefers the option of fraud as long as their side wins. It may be good for your side in the short run, but it's bad for democracy.
It has nothing to do with it being a common error. Cocoa applications can use just about any Emacs editing key combination; it just so happens that Emacs has a transpose-character function mapped to CTRL-t.
Sadly, TextEdit still doesn't support M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead.
I can write a program that will completely destroy your Mac even if you delete every single shell you have installed. I don't think "the shell" means what you think it means.
Well, if you're foolish enough to give yourself privileges to your home directory, you deserve what you get. This is exactly why every file on my system is readable only by root.
That's a fancy abbreviation you're using there, considering you obviously have no idea what constitutes a valid proof.
The fact that the only people who have claimed that they were trying to implement Communism were authoritarian nutjobs hardly proves that Marx didn't have any useful ideas.
By the way, no country in the world has ever implemented Capitalism, either, which proves that Capitalism can't ever work. QED.
Ok, I must be having a failure of imagination here. What exactly do you imagine that we'd discover from such a meteorite that would be worth the effort it would take to A) actually locate anything at all on Venus' surface and B) build something that could survive on the surface long enough to either retrieve such a sample or do detailed analysis of it on the ground such that would could make this discovery?
Right. And the next time Viacom found some of their content on YouTube, they'd file an expensive lawsuit instead of sending a polite takedown request letter. Somehow I don't think Google/YouTube really wants to go out of their way to piss off content owners, however much their customers might wish they did.
The USA PATRIOT Act was primarily drafted by Viet D. Dinh and Michael Chertoff, neither of whom has ever been a Member of Congress (or a Democrat, as far as I know). Congress passes the laws, but the Executive Branch and lobbyists are the ones writing most of them.
Sure they do. They're just deluded enough to think that's what they're getting. When people accept that the government is spying on them to help keep them free, they don't go along because they want to be spied on. They do it because they're too dumb to see past the doubletalk.
If you'd asked Marx what would happen if a country in the condition of Russia in 1917 or post-War East Germany tried to establish a Communist state, he'd probably have been able to give you a pretty good idea.
As for Marx's kooky Hegelian metaphysics, I don't see what bearing that has on whether a capitalist will sell you the rope you're going to hang him with. A capitalist will sell you his own children to use as food, and when his wife protests he'll explain that he's got a fiduciary duty to his shareholders and has no choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't quote you because it wasn't you who said it. However, my original comment was a reply to someone who said:
It never works the other way (president writes a law and congress passes it).
And you came along to object to my example that proved him wrong. Anything else you try to inject is an example of ignoratio elenchi.
In any case, we have separation of powers for a reason, and yes, I do think it's a good idea to care about the process involved. Letting the Executive Branch write the legislation does take power away from the Legislative Branch, even if the current people in Congress (yes, in both parties) for the most part don't really care. If we really want a system where Congress doesn't matter, we should stop wasting taxpayers' money by paying their salaries and benefits.
You're parsing bits of a Wikipedia article to prove that only members of Congress wrote the thing? Ok, then let me fill in the next sentence that you replaced with an ellipsis:
Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh and future Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff were the primary drafters of the Act.
Neither of those guys has ever been a member of Congress. It is not true that all legislation is written by members of Congress. QED.
Think about it ... the slashdot crowd is technical and informed and "knows better"
You must be new here.
Of course, the conclusions are obvious: the plaintiff simply needed to submit a linux boot CD to the courts in order to satisfy their demand.
Unless he actually does use the setup you describe, no it wouldn't. And he could get some serious jail time for fabricating evidence.
The "riders" being referred to are unrelated provisions slapped on to popular bills by members of Congress, not Bush's "signing statements" which don't actually add anything new to the laws (they just state that he has no intention of following the laws he just signed).
Both should be made illegal, for different reasons. Unfortunately, outlawing riders might be hard to enforce (as it would require the courts to decide what exactly is "related" to a given bill), and outlawing signing statements would make no sense as it's not really reasonable to think they're legal in the first place. Do we really need a Constitutional amendment that says "See all that other stuff up there in Articles I and II? We meant that. Really. Stop it."?
It wasn't "basically the same thing", it was brand new legislation that Congress absolutely had no role whatsoever in drafting, contrary to OP's assertion that only Congress writes laws.
To be clear, I picked the Patriot Act as an example because it's been the most egregious example in recent times of Congress passing a law that none of them actually knew the full contents of, not because of its content. Any trampling of rights done during the Clinton administration should be denounced as well (although it's only fair to point out that after 1994 the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Clinton administration certainly didn't write their own legislation and get a rubber stamp from Congress without any scrutiny of what they were trying to pass).
"I have prior art. I saw a picture at a museum once and said 'Gee, that's interesting'."
In any event, anyone who's used Flickr knows that interestingness has nearly nothing to do with tagging and is almost entirely influenced by how many views, comments, and adding to Favorites (which, I suppose, could be considered "tagging" in some sense, even though it's completely separate from the list of tags) by other users. And not getting added to the interestingness blacklist by posting to certain Groups that the management sees as gaming the system.
Sure, if by "draft something at the president's request" you mean "take a bill written by Executive branch lawyers and pass it without actually reading it" like they did with the Patriot Act.
They're not patenting tagging, and there's no reason to think you can't use tags if the patent is accepted. The patent may be really stupid, but if we're going to get editorial comments, can they at least make sense?
Actually, the fact that we elect our leaders makes us a representative democracy. People in the UK elect their Members of Parliament, yet they are in no sense whatsoever a Republic.
And I'd be less obtuse and arrogant if you hadn't insisted that we're a "Represented Repubic".
As for Germany, you'd be hard pressed to call it a Republic only because of how you choose to define the term.
If I asked you to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are a represented repubic and not a comercialized feudal system, you couldn't. No one could.
Sure, but to be fair, that's because those things you're asking people to prove aren't actually things, and you have no idea what you're talking about. A good clue when you think that a "Republic" and "Democracy" are mutually exclusive things. When you say the US "is" a Republic to the exclusion of all else, you're claiming that the essence of the American form of government is that which makes us the same as China, Cuba, France, and Mexico and different than Canada, Sweden, and the UK. Sure we're a Republic, but that has very little to do with how our government works. In fact, all it means is that we don't have a king anymore.
All those novice users who are installing OS X on brand new hard drives instead of using the copy that Apple conveniently preinstalled on their computer sure are screwed, then. All 2 of them.
Apple started the charge, really, with the iTunes music store
Oh please. iTunes affects the copyright system about as much as Amazon selling CDs on the Internet does.
Personally I'd rather see the guy I supported lose in an election that was close but transparently fair than see him win in one that leaves doubts in people's minds as to whether there was fraud.
Sadly, a huge majority of the population prefers the option of fraud as long as their side wins. It may be good for your side in the short run, but it's bad for democracy.
It has nothing to do with it being a common error. Cocoa applications can use just about any Emacs editing key combination; it just so happens that Emacs has a transpose-character function mapped to CTRL-t.
Sadly, TextEdit still doesn't support M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead.
I can write a program that will completely destroy your Mac even if you delete every single shell you have installed. I don't think "the shell" means what you think it means.
Well, if you're foolish enough to give yourself privileges to your home directory, you deserve what you get. This is exactly why every file on my system is readable only by root.
They'd all go bankrupt after producing a bunch of crap no one actually wanted to watch or listen to. Any other questions?
QED.
That's a fancy abbreviation you're using there, considering you obviously have no idea what constitutes a valid proof.
The fact that the only people who have claimed that they were trying to implement Communism were authoritarian nutjobs hardly proves that Marx didn't have any useful ideas.
By the way, no country in the world has ever implemented Capitalism, either, which proves that Capitalism can't ever work. QED.
Ok, I must be having a failure of imagination here. What exactly do you imagine that we'd discover from such a meteorite that would be worth the effort it would take to A) actually locate anything at all on Venus' surface and B) build something that could survive on the surface long enough to either retrieve such a sample or do detailed analysis of it on the ground such that would could make this discovery?
Right. And the next time Viacom found some of their content on YouTube, they'd file an expensive lawsuit instead of sending a polite takedown request letter. Somehow I don't think Google/YouTube really wants to go out of their way to piss off content owners, however much their customers might wish they did.
Where did he say that his computer has a 4 inch screen?
The USA PATRIOT Act was primarily drafted by Viet D. Dinh and Michael Chertoff, neither of whom has ever been a Member of Congress (or a Democrat, as far as I know). Congress passes the laws, but the Executive Branch and lobbyists are the ones writing most of them.
People no longer really want freedom.
Sure they do. They're just deluded enough to think that's what they're getting. When people accept that the government is spying on them to help keep them free, they don't go along because they want to be spied on. They do it because they're too dumb to see past the doubletalk.
If you'd asked Marx what would happen if a country in the condition of Russia in 1917 or post-War East Germany tried to establish a Communist state, he'd probably have been able to give you a pretty good idea.
As for Marx's kooky Hegelian metaphysics, I don't see what bearing that has on whether a capitalist will sell you the rope you're going to hang him with. A capitalist will sell you his own children to use as food, and when his wife protests he'll explain that he's got a fiduciary duty to his shareholders and has no choice.