Seen in a Slashdot thread on Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet:
The Democratic and Republican parties are two sides of the same coin. Neither is there to help you. Both have a long history of trying to steal elections. Democrats claim to be liberal, and Republicans claim to be conservative, but both parties are actually populist. Both want to tell you what you can do in your home and what you can do in business, only in different ways (and honestly, it’s not uniform across the parties either.)
Very well said.
At least, I think it’s the right way:
“If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there’s too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it’s too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the “users”) could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with.”
Read the whole thing here. Despite all the nay-saying comments that follow, I think this is a superb idea, and clearly the right and just way to write laws.
Still another great sig seen on Slashdot:
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I hope you’ve been using the first two recently - I know I have.
A great sig, found once again on Slashdot:
Oh look, its my tax dollars at work coming to arrest me.
From a post on Slashdot:
Son… this is the honest truth about the universe:
The universe was created by an all-powerful all-knowing being who came down to us in the form of a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Your little friends might laugh at you when you tell them, but trust me… pretty much all us grown-ups actually believe this is true.
So true, so true…
Keithius | July 10, 2008
