liscovich

Original WSJ article: "Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-chi...

If you don't have WSJ subscription, paste the title into FB's search bar, and open the link via search results to bypass the paywall.

Looker (http://www.looker.com), Periscope (http://www.periscope.io), Mode Analytics (http://www.modeanalytics.com), and Chart.io (http://www.chart.io) should probably be even more worried than Tableau.

Here is the cached version of the article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CHoIZZi...

This is quite surprising to me. I know that Pete Hunt -- one of the authors of ReactJS -- and one of the main proponents of using it in conjunction with Flux, gave a talk at Meteor Devshop 11 earlier this year (http://youtu.be/Lqcs6hPOcFw?t=48m7s), and didn't say a word about the problems associated with two-way data binding. To me that would seem to be the elephant in the room. Is that because he treats Meteor as a framework for prototyping and smaller scale apps?

I wonder if the criticism that the Flux team at Facebook has directed at two-way data binding is also applicable to Meteor. Jing Chen is her intro of Flux (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYkdrAPrdcw&list=PLb0IAmt7-G...) says that two-way data binding creates a major challenge for scaling applications because views can trigger changes in data, and data changes can trigger cascading changes in views, which makes it very difficult to predict the behavior of the app as a whole. Wouldn't Meteor face the same challenges?

In other words, if you believe that the Flux design pattern (which involves a central dispatcher as the only entity capable of updating the data) is sound, shouldn't you stay away from Meteor's model when building large applications? Or am I missing something?

Do you know of any examples of actual legal documents written in Lisp, or some other formal language?

True, but what would it look like in the future? Would you just fork a repo?

There is very little outright corruption in Congress. Special interests exert most of the influence through campaign contributions that are publicly disclosed. Larry Lessig has a great book on this: http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Corrupts-Congress---eboo.... And here is the link to his TED talk on the same topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

An alternative XML version of the US Code from Cornell Law School: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wiki/lexcraft/united_states_code_...

This is only the codified portion of the federal law. So called "Statues at Large" that are passed by Congress but not codified into USC are not included. Plus this does not include the federal common law based on the rulings of federal courts.

We might have to wait even longer for all the common law based on the court rulings to be published in the same format. Not to mention the "secret common law" based on the FISA court rulings.

If you were to start a new country, what would the legislative process look like there? For example, how should new "startup nations" like BlueSeed (http://blueseed.co) inspired by Seasteading Institute go about passing and storing laws? Should they have some sort of open github repo to which anyone can make pull requests? How do you see the congress of the future?

Does anyone know what software is used by the hill staffers when drafting new bills? How do they make sure that the laws do not contradict each other?

Hopefully, as a result, the disturbing statements like the ones below will become obsolete:

James Duane, Regent Law School professor, defense attorney:

"Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.” http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc?t=5m18s

Supreme Court Justice Breyer:

"the complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation." http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-93.ZD.html

According to Wikipedia:

"When sections are repealed, their text is deleted and replaced by a note summarizing what used to be there." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code#Treatment_o...

It would also be fascinating to see the visualizations of this evolution. And perhaps by matching it with the voting data from congress, one could track the footprint of each congressman.

As the schema guide explains, in 1999 they picked XML based on the study from 1996:

"Following a 1999 feasibility study on XML/SGML, the Committee on House Administration adopted XML as a data standard for the exchange of legislative documents" http://uscodebeta.house.gov/download/resources/USLM-User-Gui...

It took the US Govt 17 years to release 200,000 pages of the US code in XML.