'cause guess what the effort you can muster to build each reproduction is limited; you will do something else if it doesn't pay off, or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different.
Except that its not. Neither digital media or digital bandwidth is free of marginal cost. The marginal cost may be extremely small, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists. "Digital methods of production" are fundamentally no different than the printing press: they reduce, but do not eliminate, the marginal costs of reproducing information.
This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
The basic realities of economics are unchanged when fixed and marginal costs remain positive and non-zero, even when either or both may become very small. "Digital methods of production" do a lot to reduce (but not eliminate) the marginal costs involved in producing certain kinds of information-related goods, and do nothing to the fixed costs. They don't invalidate any general principles of economics. The situations are not nearly as "radically different" an Moglen or you would like to believe.
This is fundamentally different, in that there is a single car in your example, but an unlimited number of identical copies of any information.
Well, its certainly different than Moglen's false premise; its not different than the reality of digital distribution, though; there is still a nonzero cost to making and distributing copies of information. "Digital methods", like the printing press, reduce the marginal cost, they don't, any more than did the printing press, change the fact that it exists.
"the transformation to digital methods of production and distribution therefore poses to the twenty-first century a fundamental moral problem. If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?"
Moglen
"Digital methods of production" may make marginal costs increasingly close to zero, but they don't make them actually zero. So they really don't raise that issue. Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy. But how do you find anyone willing to pay that huge cost so that everyone else gets the good free? For some products, this works, because someone wealthy really wants the good and is willing to pay even if everyone else gets it for free (and perhaps that person's interests are served by having more people using it.) OSS software whose development is largely sponsored by one or more businesses that are also major users of the software approximately follows this model.
If they don't get compensated for their work, there is no incentive to create new things. If you don't allow them to charge for distribution of their work, they are not getting compensated.
Most copyrighted works make most of their money in the first handful years. A 15 year copyright would enable virtually every artist and author to make just as much money as they make under a 95 year copyright.
Do you actually think people don't make money from works in the public domain?
I think that people who profit of sales of copies of artistic works stand to make more money, individually and in aggregate, off of (a smaller but exclusive pool, for each producer) works which are exclusive to the producer than off the same works in the public domain. Certainly, there are some works (a very small percentage) that can be marginally profitable for producers when in the public domain, and, of course, useful works that are in the public domain and which there is work in supporting or developing add-ons for (e.g., computer software) may enable people to make money.
You've just condemned all good musicians to be one hit wonders - they'll all have 'accidents' as soon as there is one positive cash flow peice of work to avoid paying them any royalties.
Why? Then the label couldn't make any money of them either, as without the copyright, the work would be in the public domain. Unless you are suggesting that people that want to get away with filesharing the one hit will kill the artist to make it legal, which seems a bit unlikely.
Well the question here would be applicable to Clinton's health care proposal, which would require that everyone have health insurance.
Yes, Clinton's program has individual purchase mandates. The Constitutionality of those is unrelated to any power Congress has to mandate personal armament for all members of the (universal) militia.
In fact, Obama's proposal requires the same as well, but he's treating the ends of the equation somewhat differently.
As I understand it, Obama's does not, and that's a principal criticism of it from the Clinton camp, but that's increasingly off-topic here.
That does go back to my original point, which is, the idea of a standing Army as we have it today is rather unconstitutional, isn't it?
No, nothing in the Constitution prohibits a standing army. Congress has the Constitutional power to raise one, and the only Constitutional limit is that appropriations for the army can't be for longer than two years at a time.
I mean, if we conclude that the founding fathers envisioned an armed citizenry, "the militia" as not being an army, in order to have 2nd amendment rights, then, we also have to conclude that we can't really have a standing army.
No, we don't. It is certainly the case that the the founding fathers distrusted standing armies, and that they put into the Constitutions provisions which were designed to reduce the need for them (various militia related provisions) and provisions designed to reduce the chance of them being self-perpetuating without review (the limit on duration of appropriations) and provisions designed to prevent the military from becoming detached from civilian control (the commander-in-chief provision attaching supreme command to the elected President, provisions expressly granting Congress the power to govern the military.) But they did not prohibit them in the Constitution, we can have them, Constitutionally, subject to all those constraints placed on them.
I only bring this up because in Jefferson's letters to Madison and vice versa, an excellent volume, both men felt the idea of a permanent army was a risk to the republic.
I think both Jefferson and Madison expressed the idea, too, that a permanent Constitution without the active buy-in of successive generations was a risk to the Republic, as well; what particular founders would prefer occur and what the Constitution actually requires and prohibits are not always perfect matches.
The 5000-square-foot house will appear normal from the outside but will house gadgets like lights and thermostats that automatically adjust when someone enters the room and countertops that can identify food placed on it and suggest recipes.
So, technology that's been around for decades but not popular in homes, and technology that is a solution looking for a problem (if I've chosen to buy food, bring it home, and set it one the counter [or take it out of the fridge and set it on the counter] chances are I already had a use in mind—countertops that suggest recipes for food placed on them seem about as useful as as a closet that suggest where I might want to go based on the clothes I take out.)
For $15 million, I'm not impressed.
Re:Good reporting there, submitter
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When they jumped to a Unix base with OS X, Linux had been well established. They choose a BSD base because of the license.
No, they chose NeXTStep as the base because of its features, which is why they bought NeXT. From what I understand, the decision wasn't made to "jump to Unix" separately from choosing NeXT, they were looking for a new OS, and considered continuing an internal (non-Unix-based) project to replace MacOS, or purchasing an existing OS and adapting it: there was no separate decision for Unix, then a decision on a license, than a search for an available Unix system that had the right license.
Apple chose a license that allowed them to take open code, alter, redistribute, and not share the source.
Arguably, NeXT chose that, for perhaps that reason, when they chose Mach. But the seriously-considered contenders for MacOS X were, as I understand, an internal (proprietary) Apple OS, and an Apple purchase of NeXT, and Apple purchasing some other proprietary OS or OS maker.
- A criminal law that categorically forbids something that is universal and unavoidable.
Well, a hypothetical example would be, say, a law that made it criminal to breathe. In the real world, criminal laws don't reach quite that extreme, but may approach it, usually for the purpose of allowing prosecutors to prosecute an easy-to-prove charge when the goal is to prevent some other activity. An example from the town I grew up in is a city ordinance making it illegal for minors to possess paint, marker pens, chalk, or any of a wide variety of other things that could be used as marking instruments on any public right-of-way. The stated purpose, of course, was to attack graffiti, and the police chief (who was also the city manager), when lobbying the city council for the law, claimed that it would never be used for any other purpose. Naturally, though, nothing in the law included anything about intent, purpose, or use.
- A civil law that creates a private cause of action.
Anything that allows a private person to file a lawsuit.
- A law that is unclear as to what it prohibits.
That's tough to do meaningfully and concisely off the top of my head; usually, the kind of ambiguity that exists results in using one or more terms or combination of terms that have different clear definitions in different contexts, in a context where it is unclear which definition applies.
- A law which give express discretion to the trial judge.
Laws which provide for a range of remedies, such as a range of criminal sentences, without specific conditions controlling where in the range a remedy falls would be one example of express discretion.
- A law which limit the ability of a certain decisions to be appealed, either through express limits on which appeals may be heard or by posing procedural hurdles in terms of standards of review or prerequisites for review.
An example of such a hurdle (a fairly low one) is the bond requirement for appeal in the small claims cases at issue in this thread. A more significant hurdle is found in the Military Commissions Act.
You know, if you have a better theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, have away at it.
In what way does the Bible present a "better" theory of any or all of these things.
I'm particularly interested in everyone's Creation story with a really good "before everything existed..." part.
Why? The Bible doesn't have one of these. The concept is, in fact, logically inconsistent. You can't have a story of what events occurred before there were any entities to participate in those events.
Physics as we express it is so lacking in this area.
Physics certainly provides an explanation which is more firmly grounded, and which goes back closer to the origin of every entity it invokes. The Bible simply posits a very complex entity (God) with no explanation of its origin.
You argue that the Congress has the power to mandate that every citizen has a gun, but, then if that were the case, would universe health care actually be constitutional?
Not for the same reason. Whether any particular mechanism of acheiving universal healthcare is Constitutional is a completely different question than the one at issue here.
Can the Federal Government mandate that every citizen actually purchase something?
Neither "universal healthcare" nor "every citizen has a gun" require Congress to "mandate that every citizen actually purchase something", except insofar as general taxes (which Congress clearly has the Constitutional power to levy) could be said to require people to purchase whatever it is that Congress spends the money on (yes, either of them could, Constitutional questions aside, be acheived through individual purchase mandates, but neither requires individual purchase mandates.)
Yes, the government can regulate commerce, but does it have the right to impose it?
On the matter of "every citizen has a gun", Congress' power isn't the Commerce power, but the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia".
Still there is quite a bit of the religion of Christianity that doesn't make sense, or it is obvious that parts have been left out of the "official" Bible.
So? The Bible itself doesn't claim to be encyclopedic, nor (outside of certain strains of Protestantism) does Christianity generally claim that the Bible is the sole basis Christian belief.
For example to learn more about Christ's mother you'd need to go to the Qur'an
Well, to learn more about what Muslims think about Christ's mother, you could go there; that may or may not correspond to what any particular subset of Christianity believes on any given point (and on some it directly contradicts core doctrines of Christianity.) It is true that a lot of common Christian beliefs have origins in extra-biblical tradition, both on doctrinal points and on "history" of religious figures that is often tangential, at best, to religious doctrine. But so what? That's not really a problem of any kind when it isn't about doctrine, or for many major Christian groups (which openly hold out Tradition as a basis for belief alongside Scripture) when it is about doctrine.
According to Lyotard, post-modernism can be defined as "incredulity towards metanarratives". Where metanarratives are attempts to order and explain knowledge and experience. Simple enough, I suppose. Unless you happen to notice that that definition of post-modernism is itself a metanarrative, albeit an entirely negative metanarrative.
You seem to be confusing skepticism with rejection: to be skeptical of a class of things is not to reject everything in that class out of hand, rather, it is to question, probe, and test their support. So the contradiction you are trying to suggest is nothing of the kind. Indeed, it seems to be an example of exactly what post-modernism is in large part a reaction against in the reaction to metanarratives in general--taking a metanarrative (in this case, "metanarratives are often misleading and should be critically examined rather than trusted") that is originally useful at least within soem domain, and letting it ossify into something absurd ("metanarratives are to be rejected out of hand")--as applied to post-modernism itself.
Why shouldn't religions get their tax exempt status? the only reason they do is because of the first amendment.
Religions don't get tax-exempt status because of the first amendment, which does not prohibit levying taxes on religious organizations. They get their tax exempt status, like other nonprofits, because they are organizations that aren't operated for the profit of any stockholder, owner, etc.; as such, they are simply a means for people to come together to use their already-taxed income for common purposes other than profit. At least, that's the theory, and there is quite a lot in the law and regulation applicable to non-profits designed to assure that it mostly works that way.
Before the Reformation and Gutenberg, getting a copy of the Holy Bible meant going to your local Catholic church, where the priests were more than happy to interpret it for you.
Well, before Gutenberg, copies of the Bible were outrageously expensive to produce, which was a factor here. (That the most common copies were in Latin, and the few non-Latin copies were mostly translations of various copies from the Latin Vulgate and of increased distance from the sources was another barrier.)
Badly, I suspect.
Well, likely "badly" from the point of view of a non-Catholic Christian (although many of the early leaders of the Protestant churches had been Catholic clergy, so maybe not).
To this day, IIRC, your Catholic priest would prefer you ask him what it means.
If you recall correctly? So you used to know the personal preferences of Catholic priests but aren't certain you remember them right? My experience is that Catholic Churches tend to both conduct Bible studies and to give out Bibles in, e.g., Confirmation classes, which is rather strange behavior if you don't want people to read the Bible.
It says a lot about Scientology - and actors - that so many actors buy into Scientology.
I've heard that the CoS makes direct overtures to celebrities as a form of advertising, possibly including material inducements. Like much about the CoS, this is plausible but hard to sort out the truth.
If I'm a judge (or anyone with power of decision) and find a law (or rule) that forbids something everybody does, I'll do everything in my hand to keep that law alive, as it gives me power.
A law that categorically forbids something that is universal and unavoidable gives power to whoever has the decision to prosecute the offense (the public prosecutor if it is a criminal law, or a civil law that creates a public cause of action; whoever can afford to prosecute it on their own if it is a civil law that creates a private cause of action.)
A law that is unclear as to what it prohibits gives power to the judicial system (though not necessary the trial judge, as decisions under such a law are most likely to be appealed and the results are hard to predict.)
What empowers a trial judge are laws: 1) Which give express discretion to the trial judge, or 2) Which limit the ability of a certain decisions to be appealed, either through express limits on which appeals may be heard or by posing procedural hurdles in terms of standards of review or prerequisites for review.
As a historical note though, the idea of the 2nd amendment was in fact, to give the people the right to rebel against the government, and to eliminate the need and expense of a standing army.
It would be more accurate to say thay idea of the second amendment was, in part, as a guarantee against the states being oppressed by the federal government in the same way that the colonies had been by the British crown by guaranteeing the states the capacity (not the right, which the founders generally considered, obviously, to exist naturally but never codified anywhere in the Constitution) to resist encroachment by the federal government.
and to eliminate the need and expense of a standing army.
Congress power to regulate, train, and equip the militia (understood, at that time, to be universal) in Article I was designed for that purpose; a right expressly outside of Congress' ability to regulate and direct didn't add anything to that in terms of reducing the need for a standing federal army.
The FF's didn't trust the idea of a professional military at all, or really, anything that could be abused by the Federal Power, so that's why historically, America hasn't had a large military (until WWII).
Well, at least not a large peactime military, until arguably after WWII, though alternatively one could view the entire post-WWII period (not just from the size of the military, but from powers assumed by the executive and other aspects of government behavior) as a permanent state of war even in those moments where the US was not actively engaging a particular external enemy.
So, if you are a peacenik liberal type, you couldn't really argue against the historical nature of the 2nd amendment - it is intended to be that every citizen should have a gun.
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
I would have thought that it would be pretty easy to algorithmically decide what is legal in a lot of cases
Sure, most legal questions are easy -- even, contra TFRant, under the status quo system -- there is a reason that most disputes don't become formal legal disputes, and most of those that do are settled before going to trial. Cases that go to trial are not representative of the cases to which the law applies.
You wonder why medical care costs so much? Part of it is because you have people like John Edwards who make a killing off of suing hospitals using piss-poor science and badly drafted civil laws, and then his ass is protected by the other trial lawyers who serve in the North Carolina state legislature, and who will fight tooth and nail to prevent tort reform from killing off much of their livelihood (suing every doctor who happens to be at the scene of an unfortunate birth defect, not one who is actually guilty of malpractice as conclusively proven).
This is a nice speculation. The problem is that actual studies of medical costs find no relation in different jurisdictions between the rate of increase in medical costs and malpractice awards, and even no relation between the rates increases in medical costs and whether or not jurisdiction has established award limits through some form of "tort reform". The fact is, malpractice awards aren't a substantial driver of the increases in healthcare costs. But they are what the politicians who are backed by the pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare giants like to point to, to direct the blame away from their own sponsors.
(Also, how you would only sue people after they are conclusively proven liable is beyond me; people are proven liable, or not, through a process which commences with a lawsuit.)
Why do laws need to be constantly changed and updated in the first place?
Because the context to which laws are applied changes, and because the social value judgements on which laws are inevitably based change, and because a growing divergence between social preferences and law is a recipe for disaster.
To correct the "law bloat" we face would require a whole new body of government whose job is solely to revoke old laws who should no longer apply.
No, we'd just need popular pressure on the lawmaking bodies to acheive that: they can already repeal old laws the same way they create new ones. The reason they don't is the people don't demand it. If the people did, not doing it would not be a viable political options. The thing is, people like the idea of "less laws" in the abstract, but that doesn't carry over into specifics.
It's more like this: your app should *never* query the DTD.
That depends what your app is. If your app is designed to do something with arbitrary SGML data and runs into something that happens to be HTML, querying the DTD makes some sense, as for any other specific kind of document it might be fed, though even in that case, it should only have to pick it up once (barring limitations on caching), not once for each HTML document it hits.
If your app is designed to work with HTML specifically, it should never query the HTML DTD(s). If it is, for some reason, built on a generic SGML engine and needs the DTD as part of the input to that, it should have a local copy (if it handles more than one version of HTML, it should have all of the DTDs needed.)
If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them
Guess what? That's usually not the purpose of laws. Many laws (including, for instance, the U.S. Constitution itself) are expressly written so with ambiguities that will be resolved in application. One theoretical reason for this is that application in the light of concrete facts will be better consider that abstract consideration; a practical reason for it is that otherwise, often, disputes over edge cases would prevent a solution which is agreed on in general outline from being adopted; Madison himself, IIRC, referred to both in relation to Constitutional provisions needing the resolution of future generations in specific instances, through the Courts and otherwise.
Laws have been struck down as being "void for vagueness" on the theory that people ought to be able to read them and know what they mean.
Most of your complaints here are about civil law and civil procedure, but "void for vagueness" is, as the definition you link points out, a specific application of Constitutional protections that applies in the domain of criminal law.
For some reason we seem to have just accepted the alternative as the status quo, where laws are passed that express a general sentiment ("no spam with a 'misleading' subject line") but nobody thinks that you could put two people in different rooms and expect them to agree on how the law would apply in most cases.
Yes, and when you manage to understand the reason, you'll at least have a chance of being able to make an intelligent case about whether or not its a good reason and whether other concerns override it.
Meanwhile, anybody bringing a case now has to look up not just the law, but reference the lower court rulings that support their side, while their opponent of course references the other rulings.
Court rulings applying a statute are part of the law. Case law is law. In fact, its most of what the study of law focuses on.
And even if a case does finally get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which issues a ruling binding on all lower courts, future researchers still can't find out the state of "the law" by looking up the statute; they have to look up the statute and read the Supreme Court ruling which states how the statute should be read (which may still be ambiguous as applied to their current situation).
Yes, surprisingly enough, determining the state of the law requires referencing all of the applicable law, not just one particular piece of it.
I wonder if the reason this is so widely tolerated is because people have absorbed the notion that making and interpreting laws has to be hard, like brain surgery. But brain surgery is hard because the brain is naturally complex and not man-made.
And law is complex because the nuances of human interactions and the wide range of factors that play into whether society views a particular act as desirable or undesirable (and, if the latter, a particular consequence as warranted or unwarranted) are complex.
Lawyers also have to learn a lot of complex procedures, but not as complex as brain surgery;
You don't seem to understand what lawyers do very well, and without both a firm grasp of that and a firm grasp of brain surgery, you don't seem qualified to make that assessment.
the major difficulty in a court case is guessing how the judge may interpret an ambiguous law (which is not "difficult" so much as a matter of being lucky)
See, here's what you don't understand. Its not a matter of passively guessing how the judge is going to apply the law to the facts in isolation, where the attorney acts as some kind of detached prognosticator. What a lawyer does is, having researched the applicab
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Except that its not. Neither digital media or digital bandwidth is free of marginal cost. The marginal cost may be extremely small, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists. "Digital methods of production" are fundamentally no different than the printing press: they reduce, but do not eliminate, the marginal costs of reproducing information.
The basic realities of economics are unchanged when fixed and marginal costs remain positive and non-zero, even when either or both may become very small. "Digital methods of production" do a lot to reduce (but not eliminate) the marginal costs involved in producing certain kinds of information-related goods, and do nothing to the fixed costs. They don't invalidate any general principles of economics. The situations are not nearly as "radically different" an Moglen or you would like to believe.
Well, its certainly different than Moglen's false premise; its not different than the reality of digital distribution, though; there is still a nonzero cost to making and distributing copies of information. "Digital methods", like the printing press, reduce the marginal cost, they don't, any more than did the printing press, change the fact that it exists.
"Digital methods of production" may make marginal costs increasingly close to zero, but they don't make them actually zero. So they really don't raise that issue. Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy. But how do you find anyone willing to pay that huge cost so that everyone else gets the good free? For some products, this works, because someone wealthy really wants the good and is willing to pay even if everyone else gets it for free (and perhaps that person's interests are served by having more people using it.) OSS software whose development is largely sponsored by one or more businesses that are also major users of the software approximately follows this model.
Most copyrighted works make most of their money in the first handful years. A 15 year copyright would enable virtually every artist and author to make just as much money as they make under a 95 year copyright.
I think that people who profit of sales of copies of artistic works stand to make more money, individually and in aggregate, off of (a smaller but exclusive pool, for each producer) works which are exclusive to the producer than off the same works in the public domain. Certainly, there are some works (a very small percentage) that can be marginally profitable for producers when in the public domain, and, of course, useful works that are in the public domain and which there is work in supporting or developing add-ons for (e.g., computer software) may enable people to make money.
Why? Then the label couldn't make any money of them either, as without the copyright, the work would be in the public domain. Unless you are suggesting that people that want to get away with filesharing the one hit will kill the artist to make it legal, which seems a bit unlikely.
Yes, Clinton's program has individual purchase mandates. The Constitutionality of those is unrelated to any power Congress has to mandate personal armament for all members of the (universal) militia.
As I understand it, Obama's does not, and that's a principal criticism of it from the Clinton camp, but that's increasingly off-topic here.
No, nothing in the Constitution prohibits a standing army. Congress has the Constitutional power to raise one, and the only Constitutional limit is that appropriations for the army can't be for longer than two years at a time.
No, we don't. It is certainly the case that the the founding fathers distrusted standing armies, and that they put into the Constitutions provisions which were designed to reduce the need for them (various militia related provisions) and provisions designed to reduce the chance of them being self-perpetuating without review (the limit on duration of appropriations) and provisions designed to prevent the military from becoming detached from civilian control (the commander-in-chief provision attaching supreme command to the elected President, provisions expressly granting Congress the power to govern the military.) But they did not prohibit them in the Constitution, we can have them, Constitutionally, subject to all those constraints placed on them.
I think both Jefferson and Madison expressed the idea, too, that a permanent Constitution without the active buy-in of successive generations was a risk to the Republic, as well; what particular founders would prefer occur and what the Constitution actually requires and prohibits are not always perfect matches.
So, technology that's been around for decades but not popular in homes, and technology that is a solution looking for a problem (if I've chosen to buy food, bring it home, and set it one the counter [or take it out of the fridge and set it on the counter] chances are I already had a use in mind—countertops that suggest recipes for food placed on them seem about as useful as as a closet that suggest where I might want to go based on the clothes I take out.)
For $15 million, I'm not impressed.
No, they chose NeXTStep as the base because of its features, which is why they bought NeXT. From what I understand, the decision wasn't made to "jump to Unix" separately from choosing NeXT, they were looking for a new OS, and considered continuing an internal (non-Unix-based) project to replace MacOS, or purchasing an existing OS and adapting it: there was no separate decision for Unix, then a decision on a license, than a search for an available Unix system that had the right license.
Arguably, NeXT chose that, for perhaps that reason, when they chose Mach. But the seriously-considered contenders for MacOS X were, as I understand, an internal (proprietary) Apple OS, and an Apple purchase of NeXT, and Apple purchasing some other proprietary OS or OS maker.
Well, a hypothetical example would be, say, a law that made it criminal to breathe. In the real world, criminal laws don't reach quite that extreme, but may approach it, usually for the purpose of allowing prosecutors to prosecute an easy-to-prove charge when the goal is to prevent some other activity. An example from the town I grew up in is a city ordinance making it illegal for minors to possess paint, marker pens, chalk, or any of a wide variety of other things that could be used as marking instruments on any public right-of-way. The stated purpose, of course, was to attack graffiti, and the police chief (who was also the city manager), when lobbying the city council for the law, claimed that it would never be used for any other purpose. Naturally, though, nothing in the law included anything about intent, purpose, or use.
Anything that allows a private person to file a lawsuit.
That's tough to do meaningfully and concisely off the top of my head; usually, the kind of ambiguity that exists results in using one or more terms or combination of terms that have different clear definitions in different contexts, in a context where it is unclear which definition applies.
Laws which provide for a range of remedies, such as a range of criminal sentences, without specific conditions controlling where in the range a remedy falls would be one example of express discretion.
An example of such a hurdle (a fairly low one) is the bond requirement for appeal in the small claims cases at issue in this thread. A more significant hurdle is found in the Military Commissions Act.
In what way does the Bible present a "better" theory of any or all of these things.
Why? The Bible doesn't have one of these. The concept is, in fact, logically inconsistent. You can't have a story of what events occurred before there were any entities to participate in those events.
Physics certainly provides an explanation which is more firmly grounded, and which goes back closer to the origin of every entity it invokes. The Bible simply posits a very complex entity (God) with no explanation of its origin.
Not for the same reason. Whether any particular mechanism of acheiving universal healthcare is Constitutional is a completely different question than the one at issue here.
Neither "universal healthcare" nor "every citizen has a gun" require Congress to "mandate that every citizen actually purchase something", except insofar as general taxes (which Congress clearly has the Constitutional power to levy) could be said to require people to purchase whatever it is that Congress spends the money on (yes, either of them could, Constitutional questions aside, be acheived through individual purchase mandates, but neither requires individual purchase mandates.)
On the matter of "every citizen has a gun", Congress' power isn't the Commerce power, but the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia".
So? The Bible itself doesn't claim to be encyclopedic, nor (outside of certain strains of Protestantism) does Christianity generally claim that the Bible is the sole basis Christian belief.
Well, to learn more about what Muslims think about Christ's mother, you could go there; that may or may not correspond to what any particular subset of Christianity believes on any given point (and on some it directly contradicts core doctrines of Christianity.) It is true that a lot of common Christian beliefs have origins in extra-biblical tradition, both on doctrinal points and on "history" of religious figures that is often tangential, at best, to religious doctrine. But so what? That's not really a problem of any kind when it isn't about doctrine, or for many major Christian groups (which openly hold out Tradition as a basis for belief alongside Scripture) when it is about doctrine.
You seem to be confusing skepticism with rejection: to be skeptical of a class of things is not to reject everything in that class out of hand, rather, it is to question, probe, and test their support. So the contradiction you are trying to suggest is nothing of the kind. Indeed, it seems to be an example of exactly what post-modernism is in large part a reaction against in the reaction to metanarratives in general--taking a metanarrative (in this case, "metanarratives are often misleading and should be critically examined rather than trusted") that is originally useful at least within soem domain, and letting it ossify into something absurd ("metanarratives are to be rejected out of hand")--as applied to post-modernism itself.
Religions don't get tax-exempt status because of the first amendment, which does not prohibit levying taxes on religious organizations. They get their tax exempt status, like other nonprofits, because they are organizations that aren't operated for the profit of any stockholder, owner, etc.; as such, they are simply a means for people to come together to use their already-taxed income for common purposes other than profit. At least, that's the theory, and there is quite a lot in the law and regulation applicable to non-profits designed to assure that it mostly works that way.
Well, before Gutenberg, copies of the Bible were outrageously expensive to produce, which was a factor here. (That the most common copies were in Latin, and the few non-Latin copies were mostly translations of various copies from the Latin Vulgate and of increased distance from the sources was another barrier.)
Well, likely "badly" from the point of view of a non-Catholic Christian (although many of the early leaders of the Protestant churches had been Catholic clergy, so maybe not).
If you recall correctly? So you used to know the personal preferences of Catholic priests but aren't certain you remember them right? My experience is that Catholic Churches tend to both conduct Bible studies and to give out Bibles in, e.g., Confirmation classes, which is rather strange behavior if you don't want people to read the Bible.
I've heard that the CoS makes direct overtures to celebrities as a form of advertising, possibly including material inducements. Like much about the CoS, this is plausible but hard to sort out the truth.
A law that categorically forbids something that is universal and unavoidable gives power to whoever has the decision to prosecute the offense (the public prosecutor if it is a criminal law, or a civil law that creates a public cause of action; whoever can afford to prosecute it on their own if it is a civil law that creates a private cause of action.)
A law that is unclear as to what it prohibits gives power to the judicial system (though not necessary the trial judge, as decisions under such a law are most likely to be appealed and the results are hard to predict.)
What empowers a trial judge are laws:
1) Which give express discretion to the trial judge, or
2) Which limit the ability of a certain decisions to be appealed, either through express limits on which appeals may be heard or by posing procedural hurdles in terms of standards of review or prerequisites for review.
It would be more accurate to say thay idea of the second amendment was, in part, as a guarantee against the states being oppressed by the federal government in the same way that the colonies had been by the British crown by guaranteeing the states the capacity (not the right, which the founders generally considered, obviously, to exist naturally but never codified anywhere in the Constitution) to resist encroachment by the federal government.
Congress power to regulate, train, and equip the militia (understood, at that time, to be universal) in Article I was designed for that purpose; a right expressly outside of Congress' ability to regulate and direct didn't add anything to that in terms of reducing the need for a standing federal army.
Well, at least not a large peactime military, until arguably after WWII, though alternatively one could view the entire post-WWII period (not just from the size of the military, but from powers assumed by the executive and other aspects of government behavior) as a permanent state of war even in those moments where the US was not actively engaging a particular external enemy.
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
Sure, most legal questions are easy -- even, contra TFRant, under the status quo system -- there is a reason that most disputes don't become formal legal disputes, and most of those that do are settled before going to trial. Cases that go to trial are not representative of the cases to which the law applies.
This is a nice speculation. The problem is that actual studies of medical costs find no relation in different jurisdictions between the rate of increase in medical costs and malpractice awards, and even no relation between the rates increases in medical costs and whether or not jurisdiction has established award limits through some form of "tort reform". The fact is, malpractice awards aren't a substantial driver of the increases in healthcare costs. But they are what the politicians who are backed by the pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare giants like to point to, to direct the blame away from their own sponsors.
(Also, how you would only sue people after they are conclusively proven liable is beyond me; people are proven liable, or not, through a process which commences with a lawsuit.)
Budget items are laws (or parts of laws), and to get a new budget item passed takes exactly whatever is necessary to get a new law passed.
Because the context to which laws are applied changes, and because the social value judgements on which laws are inevitably based change, and because a growing divergence between social preferences and law is a recipe for disaster.
No, we'd just need popular pressure on the lawmaking bodies to acheive that: they can already repeal old laws the same way they create new ones. The reason they don't is the people don't demand it. If the people did, not doing it would not be a viable political options. The thing is, people like the idea of "less laws" in the abstract, but that doesn't carry over into specifics.
That depends what your app is. If your app is designed to do something with arbitrary SGML data and runs into something that happens to be HTML, querying the DTD makes some sense, as for any other specific kind of document it might be fed, though even in that case, it should only have to pick it up once (barring limitations on caching), not once for each HTML document it hits.
If your app is designed to work with HTML specifically, it should never query the HTML DTD(s). If it is, for some reason, built on a generic SGML engine and needs the DTD as part of the input to that, it should have a local copy (if it handles more than one version of HTML, it should have all of the DTDs needed.)
Guess what? That's usually not the purpose of laws. Many laws (including, for instance, the U.S. Constitution itself) are expressly written so with ambiguities that will be resolved in application. One theoretical reason for this is that application in the light of concrete facts will be better consider that abstract consideration; a practical reason for it is that otherwise, often, disputes over edge cases would prevent a solution which is agreed on in general outline from being adopted; Madison himself, IIRC, referred to both in relation to Constitutional provisions needing the resolution of future generations in specific instances, through the Courts and otherwise.
Most of your complaints here are about civil law and civil procedure, but "void for vagueness" is, as the definition you link points out, a specific application of Constitutional protections that applies in the domain of criminal law.
Yes, and when you manage to understand the reason, you'll at least have a chance of being able to make an intelligent case about whether or not its a good reason and whether other concerns override it.
Court rulings applying a statute are part of the law. Case law is law. In fact, its most of what the study of law focuses on.
Yes, surprisingly enough, determining the state of the law requires referencing all of the applicable law, not just one particular piece of it.
And law is complex because the nuances of human interactions and the wide range of factors that play into whether society views a particular act as desirable or undesirable (and, if the latter, a particular consequence as warranted or unwarranted) are complex.
You don't seem to understand what lawyers do very well, and without both a firm grasp of that and a firm grasp of brain surgery, you don't seem qualified to make that assessment.
See, here's what you don't understand. Its not a matter of passively guessing how the judge is going to apply the law to the facts in isolation, where the attorney acts as some kind of detached prognosticator. What a lawyer does is, having researched the applicab