You seem to be arguing that the rule of law is not possible, and that consequently the rule of man is preferable. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point, as that's an debate too long for the scope of a slashdot discussion.
I base it on the actual title of the law: 'Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act'.or if you prefer the House version: 'Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act'. It seems it was made fairly clear what was to be regulated and why.
Is the title of a law legally binding? Or is it the content that's relevant? Does Megan's Law only apply to people named Megan?
Then there's the way the law keeps referring to corporate accounting and auditing procedures and the SEC and such while fish and wildlife is conspicuously left out of the rule making process.
I think you're confusing yourself with irrelevant parts of the law. There's also the way the law keeps referring to "tangible objects". Do you have any reason to believe that a fish is not a tangible object?
After SR1.0 got shut down, there were a bunch of forum posts from people who had been fronted large amounts of drugs to sell online. The drugs had been sent out, and then the resulting bitcoins got seized by the Feds. Now they owed very unpleasant people huge amounts of money that they didn't have.
Whether in the drug market or the stock market, trading on margin has its risks.
So you're saying that as long as it's done under the auspices of a media industry organization, good faith is assumed?
Anyone want to cofound Rightheaven with me? It'll be like Righthaven, but the algorithm used to flag content might suffer from a higher rate of false positives, somewhere on the order of 100%.
a law that was very clearly intended to apply to accounting and finance
Ah, originalism. What basis do you have for ascribing such intent? Are you basing this on published opinions of the legislators themselves, or merely a subjective belief? If the former, do you have citations? If the latter, is there a reason why others should share your belief?
I sympathize with textualism. The law is what it says it is. If it's written in a way where the text does not agree with the legislators' intent, the onus should be on the legislators to craft proper legislation. It's literally their sole fucking responsibility. If SOX is being used contrary to the intent of Congress, there is nothing stopping Congress from replacing it with legislation that does reflect their intent. By allowing the judiciary to effectively do the legislature's job for them, we're compromising our system of checks and balances.
I don't know what part of the US you live in (I personally live in one of the least Christian parts of the country), but it's very much a Christian nation. Furthermore, according to DoD statistics, roughly 70% of US Army servicemen are Christian.
This is just another classic case of the law being used as worded rather than "intended".
Why are you so confident that you have knowledge of the legislators' intent? Do you have any actual references regarding your claimed knowledge of intent, or is your knowledge more of a "gut feeling" (and therefore entirely subjective)? Furthermore, do you have an explanation for why they worded the legislation such that it would be at odds with their intent?
Based on the rest of your post, it is evident that you subscribe to a conservative view of judicial interpretation, one in which judicial activism is minimized. More specifically, textualism, or even strict constructionism. I also favor a conservative view, as I feel that allowing judicial activism necessarily weakens the rule of law and afford the judiciary more power than was intended when our system of checks and balances was crafted. I agree with you that our legislators are failing to do their duties (really their sole duty, drafting proper legislation), and believe that this is the reason why increasing levels of judicial activism are tolerated (and indeed claimed to be needed). Is it really asking too much of our legislature to keep our legal code meaningful and up-to-date so that we don't have to rely on the judiciary to generously "interpret" laws in order for them to serve our society?
Tangentially related case: the second amendment unambiguously states that the government can't stop people from owning nukes. We can all agree that that's not okay, so we allow the judiciary to "interpret" the text in a more pragmatic fashion, because that solves the problem of people being able to own nukes. However, the correct solution would have been for our legislature to amend the constitution to allow for such reasonable abridgement of the right to bear arms. There's the easy way, and there's the right way. We've been doing things the easy way for way too long, and it's finally coming around to bite us in the ass.
tl;dr: blame congress (as a whole, not in some retarded partisan fashion), for they suck ass.
Is it really true that there are no penalties and liabilities of any kind for the person that filed the fraudulent DMCA notice?
If that's the case, is there anything stopping us from creating and deploying tools that submit [fraudulent] DMCA notices for every single piece of content hosted on Youtube and similar sites, effectively crippling every part of the web hosts user-submitted content and provides an interface to submit DMCA claims? Wouldn't such blatant [legal] abuse of the DMCA be enough to attract attention to the calls for reform?
and the reason they developed in the first place - Islamic take over of CAR and terrorism. The very first sentence on the Wiki page in the History section: "The anti-balaka militias originally formed in the 1990s as village self-defense forces."
You appear to be blaming the existence of violent Christian groups in CAR on the violent Muslim group that preceeded them. In a sense, this isn't wrong, although I don't agree with it (for a reason that will soon be apparent).
Would you be surprised to hear that Islamic State rose to power in the wake of Western military incursions into Iraq? Would you then blame Christians for the existence of Islamic State?
If you're going to be applying this type of logic, please apply it consistently.
The "strict constructionists" on the court are favoring the idea that the law doesn't mean exactly what it says, but some they're-going-to-define-it-for-us subset of what it says?
Isn't that more like judicial activism, the polar opposite of strict constructionism?
The Pit Crew is singular, as there is one crew. The choir is singular, as there is one choir. The united states are plural, as there are many states. If it was "the union of states", then indeed it would be singular, as there is one union.
The United States of America "is" is [yet another] exception that exists in the English language. Grammatically, it makes no sense.
I'm excitedly awaiting the second installment of this story where our protagonist throws off the chains of employment, becomes an entrepreneur, and starts a successful boot-making company.
That's interesting. We've had electronic voting machines (NJ) for as long as I've been able to vote (2000). Write-ins are typed in (using a non-QWERTY keyboard), so I'd imagine that they are tallied electronically. Even if they're not tallied, I'd hope they're at least counted as "non Republican/Democrat" -- otherwise, how is that not fraud? Honestly, I don't know much about how voting works behind the scenes. Is there a way for me to learn more about how votes are actually counted?
It looks to me like reform is the agenda, just not the reform Liberals like Lessig wanted. People are sick of Democrats at this point.
Lessig is a professor, not a politician. I'm not sure why you'd classify him as a Democrat or why you think MAYDAY PAC is a partisan organization. Many of the candidates whose campaigns they were supporting were Republicans.
So, in Utah, a rich white male lost to a black female, guess which one liberals championed? So much for racist sexist Mormons , huh?
... That's like pointing to Obama and saying "so much for racist Americans". Perhaps you're reading too much into this?
Brief aside: I'm always saddened when people hear a reasonable discussion and decide to jump in and contribute by harping about liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans. Fuck the lot of you for as long as you remain unable to form an original thought in your angry little heads.
Furthermore, (if you're into other flavors of election reform) the candidates supported by Lessig's MAYDAY PAC didn't do too well either. Of the five "main" campaigns they targetted, only two of their supported candidates won. Of the "extra" three campaigns, all were lost. Of the additional five campaigns that were mentioned in MAYDAY's email communications (but not directly supported), only two were won. It really doesn't sound like reform is very high on most people's agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be arguing that the rule of law is not possible, and that consequently the rule of man is preferable. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point, as that's an debate too long for the scope of a slashdot discussion.
I base it on the actual title of the law: 'Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act' .or if you prefer the House version: 'Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act'. It seems it was made fairly clear what was to be regulated and why.
Is the title of a law legally binding? Or is it the content that's relevant? Does Megan's Law only apply to people named Megan?
Then there's the way the law keeps referring to corporate accounting and auditing procedures and the SEC and such while fish and wildlife is conspicuously left out of the rule making process.
I think you're confusing yourself with irrelevant parts of the law. There's also the way the law keeps referring to "tangible objects". Do you have any reason to believe that a fish is not a tangible object?
After SR1.0 got shut down, there were a bunch of forum posts from people who had been fronted large amounts of drugs to sell online. The drugs had been sent out, and then the resulting bitcoins got seized by the Feds. Now they owed very unpleasant people huge amounts of money that they didn't have.
Whether in the drug market or the stock market, trading on margin has its risks.
Awesome link. Sent me down quite the wikipedia rathole.
I would really like to live underground.... you would not have to worry about ... storms
Spoken like someone who has never had a basement in a flood-prone area.
Sand has a lot of uses but it's non-renewable. There's no way (yet) to manufacture it.
Can't you manufacture sand by repeatedly hitting a rock with a hard object?
Or did I just miss out on the patent of a lifetime by publishing my idea in an open forum?
Ah, no true Scotsman, eh? I mean some might argue that the Balaka folks only pay lip service to being Muslim...
It was a terrible joke about Uggs. I sincerely apologize.
So you're saying that as long as it's done under the auspices of a media industry organization, good faith is assumed?
Anyone want to cofound Rightheaven with me? It'll be like Righthaven, but the algorithm used to flag content might suffer from a higher rate of false positives, somewhere on the order of 100%.
a law that was very clearly intended to apply to accounting and finance
Ah, originalism. What basis do you have for ascribing such intent? Are you basing this on published opinions of the legislators themselves, or merely a subjective belief? If the former, do you have citations? If the latter, is there a reason why others should share your belief?
I sympathize with textualism. The law is what it says it is. If it's written in a way where the text does not agree with the legislators' intent, the onus should be on the legislators to craft proper legislation. It's literally their sole fucking responsibility. If SOX is being used contrary to the intent of Congress, there is nothing stopping Congress from replacing it with legislation that does reflect their intent. By allowing the judiciary to effectively do the legislature's job for them, we're compromising our system of checks and balances.
I was asking in a legal sense, not in a rhetorical sense.
I don't know what part of the US you live in (I personally live in one of the least Christian parts of the country), but it's very much a Christian nation. Furthermore, according to DoD statistics, roughly 70% of US Army servicemen are Christian.
This is just another classic case of the law being used as worded rather than "intended".
Why are you so confident that you have knowledge of the legislators' intent? Do you have any actual references regarding your claimed knowledge of intent, or is your knowledge more of a "gut feeling" (and therefore entirely subjective)? Furthermore, do you have an explanation for why they worded the legislation such that it would be at odds with their intent?
Based on the rest of your post, it is evident that you subscribe to a conservative view of judicial interpretation, one in which judicial activism is minimized. More specifically, textualism, or even strict constructionism. I also favor a conservative view, as I feel that allowing judicial activism necessarily weakens the rule of law and afford the judiciary more power than was intended when our system of checks and balances was crafted. I agree with you that our legislators are failing to do their duties (really their sole duty, drafting proper legislation), and believe that this is the reason why increasing levels of judicial activism are tolerated (and indeed claimed to be needed). Is it really asking too much of our legislature to keep our legal code meaningful and up-to-date so that we don't have to rely on the judiciary to generously "interpret" laws in order for them to serve our society?
Tangentially related case: the second amendment unambiguously states that the government can't stop people from owning nukes. We can all agree that that's not okay, so we allow the judiciary to "interpret" the text in a more pragmatic fashion, because that solves the problem of people being able to own nukes. However, the correct solution would have been for our legislature to amend the constitution to allow for such reasonable abridgement of the right to bear arms. There's the easy way, and there's the right way. We've been doing things the easy way for way too long, and it's finally coming around to bite us in the ass.
tl;dr: blame congress (as a whole, not in some retarded partisan fashion), for they suck ass.
Is it really true that there are no penalties and liabilities of any kind for the person that filed the fraudulent DMCA notice?
If that's the case, is there anything stopping us from creating and deploying tools that submit [fraudulent] DMCA notices for every single piece of content hosted on Youtube and similar sites, effectively crippling every part of the web hosts user-submitted content and provides an interface to submit DMCA claims? Wouldn't such blatant [legal] abuse of the DMCA be enough to attract attention to the calls for reform?
and the reason they developed in the first place - Islamic take over of CAR and terrorism. The very first sentence on the Wiki page in the History section: "The anti-balaka militias originally formed in the 1990s as village self-defense forces."
You appear to be blaming the existence of violent Christian groups in CAR on the violent Muslim group that preceeded them. In a sense, this isn't wrong, although I don't agree with it (for a reason that will soon be apparent).
Would you be surprised to hear that Islamic State rose to power in the wake of Western military incursions into Iraq? Would you then blame Christians for the existence of Islamic State?
If you're going to be applying this type of logic, please apply it consistently.
It's a matter of the prosecutors (and even more scarily the courts) completely subverting the law through overly literal interpretation.
Isn't that what we call "rule of law", as opposed to "rule of man"? Why do you find the rule of law scary?
The "strict constructionists" on the court are favoring the idea that the law doesn't mean exactly what it says, but some they're-going-to-define-it-for-us subset of what it says?
Isn't that more like judicial activism, the polar opposite of strict constructionism?
The Pit Crew is singular, as there is one crew. The choir is singular, as there is one choir. The united states are plural, as there are many states. If it was "the union of states", then indeed it would be singular, as there is one union.
The United States of America "is" is [yet another] exception that exists in the English language. Grammatically, it makes no sense.
I'm excitedly awaiting the second installment of this story where our protagonist throws off the chains of employment, becomes an entrepreneur, and starts a successful boot-making company.
That's interesting. We've had electronic voting machines (NJ) for as long as I've been able to vote (2000). Write-ins are typed in (using a non-QWERTY keyboard), so I'd imagine that they are tallied electronically. Even if they're not tallied, I'd hope they're at least counted as "non Republican/Democrat" -- otherwise, how is that not fraud? Honestly, I don't know much about how voting works behind the scenes. Is there a way for me to learn more about how votes are actually counted?
If there isn't a 3rd party running, that part of the ballot gets skipped.
Write-ins, man! Write that shit in! Don't let the Democrats and Republicans split 100% of the votes for any given office.
It looks to me like reform is the agenda, just not the reform Liberals like Lessig wanted. People are sick of Democrats at this point.
Lessig is a professor, not a politician. I'm not sure why you'd classify him as a Democrat or why you think MAYDAY PAC is a partisan organization. Many of the candidates whose campaigns they were supporting were Republicans.
So, in Utah, a rich white male lost to a black female, guess which one liberals championed? So much for racist sexist Mormons , huh?
... That's like pointing to Obama and saying "so much for racist Americans". Perhaps you're reading too much into this?
Brief aside: I'm always saddened when people hear a reasonable discussion and decide to jump in and contribute by harping about liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans. Fuck the lot of you for as long as you remain unable to form an original thought in your angry little heads.
I voted for one Libertarian, one Independent, and two Democrats.
While it's not a clear "fuck BOTH of them", it's better than an overwhelming majority of voters can muster up.
The first Democrat was running unopposed, and the other was opposed only by a Republican, and both were for minor local offices only.
I found myself in a similar situation, hence the write-ins.
I didn't use write-ins only because I didn't actually know of anyone worth writing in.
Mickey Mouse. Yoda. Yourself.
Too bad no one running supports any.
Indeed, none that I've seen either.
Furthermore, (if you're into other flavors of election reform) the candidates supported by Lessig's MAYDAY PAC didn't do too well either. Of the five "main" campaigns they targetted, only two of their supported candidates won. Of the "extra" three campaigns, all were lost. Of the additional five campaigns that were mentioned in MAYDAY's email communications (but not directly supported), only two were won. It really doesn't sound like reform is very high on most people's agenda.
It's fairly easy to google such things and find out for yourself...
GP's question was about the US legislative system, not the ease with which one might research it.