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The entire US Code is now online in XML

uscodebeta.house.gov

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181–190 of 244 posts

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#181

Post by jacques_chester »

BWStearns wrote: post #68
tbatterii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it looks like the sunlight foundation has done some nice work in this area, but as far as I can tell these are all bills that have made it to vote. http://www.opencongress.org/bill/all Whereas, I would like to see the drafts and how they progress behind closed doors with all the lobbying influence.

I think its quite understandable that they have the deliberations in private. Imagine if your customers saw every minute of your office's day. What irks me is that although bills are available, they are available in such a way that it is a fulltime job to even look for things of interest. With better machine-searchable formats, you could set up alerts for potentially interesting sub-components of legislation that is…

Amendments should be moved in the open by individual members.

Australian Parliaments do it, so clearly it's not a great impediment to lawmaking.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#182

Post by ilaksh »

This reminds me of a recent discussion where someone mentioned tools over process. (http://rc3.org/2013/07/29/seven-signs-of-dysfunctional-engin...)

I would say that the 'law' is just subjective manual process, and we desperately need more tools for every-day judgement and decision making.

For example, if there were a computer system that logged all corporate financial transactions including income, then we could automatically tax large corporations, rather than waiting for them to report income through loopholes.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#183

Post by thwarted »

mpyne wrote: post #172
thwarted wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This preference isn't even black and white. One quote that sticks in my mind is this one from P.J. O'Rourke in Parliament of Whores, concerning Ken Starr's written position on a flag-desecration law: Congress had "acted narrowly." (That is, the law is very specific, and you can't be arrested for having a smart look on your face near the flag or anything like that—which is good because being specific is the essence of…

> The law should be written as "it's a crime to kill someone" (although, that may be too specific, and a more appropriate wording may be "it's a crime to rob someone of their life and livelihood") Either of your examples would involve me still technically breaking the law if I kill someone while trying to save myself from being murdered by that person, even if I do eventually receive a lenient sentence.

Either of your examples would involve me still technically breaking the law if I kill someone while trying to save myself from being murdered by that person, even if I do eventually receive a lenient sentence.

Of course. It's hard to deny that you killed someone if you killed them in self-defense. And that's why there is value is having law be interpreted on a case-by-case basis. The judiciary could determine, because it was self-defense per your examples, that you didn't "technically break the law" because the law as worded is weak. This is the iterative nature of developing laws. If too many people were found to not be breaking the law as written after review, then the laws, and the wording thereof, should be updated to account for that by being more explicit and producing less grey area.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#184

Post by jval »

OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

I can't believe that comments like this get upvoted by the same people who decry the practice of viewing programmers as monkeys or typists.

Good luck starting your own country with a legal system that doesn't require interpretation, or heaven forbid, lawyers.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#185

Post by mpyne »

mpyne wrote: post #106
drv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encoding looks like valid UTF-8, at least for the first few pages that I glanced at. I did notice the section references look a little strange in vim, e.g. "act Aug. 10, 1956, ch. 1041, § 1" near the top; it consists of c2 a7 (section sign), which looks fine, followed by e2 80 af (narrow no-break space), which shows up as a box in vim.

OK, maybe it's just a font thing here on Windows (wouldn't surprise me one bit). I'll try again when I get home tonight.

For posterity's sake, it does work fine here on a system with actual Unicode fonts. So I was wrong to blame the file itself.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#186

Post by minor_nitwit »

krapp wrote: post #177
minor_nitwit wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal. Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to…

With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago. Half the people whose valuables are in that safe find it perfectly adequate and would insist that any attempt to change the locks is just a blatant attempt to grab their money.

Do those 50% believe the system is working as intended and is not being exploited by special interests? I don't think any republican or democrat agrees with that.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#188

Post by krapp »

minor_nitwit wrote: post #186
krapp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago. Half the people whose valuables are in that safe find it perfectly adequate and would insist that any attempt to change the locks is just a blatant attempt to grab their money.

Do those 50% believe the system is working as intended and is not being exploited by special interests? I don't think any republican or democrat agrees with that.

Sure. But special interests are only a problem when they're not dumping money into your district or your next election -- when they are they become a 'vital national interest'.

My point is, both sides have a say. If you get ten mathematicians in a room, they don't have to reach a compromise between ten different self-serving definitions of pi. The law is never going to be like that.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#190

Post by muricuh »

gsnedders wrote: post #162
vog wrote: post #139

I find it amusing that here in Germany, we have that for years: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed. In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the law…

Likewise in the UK: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/ XML, HTML, RDF/XML for everything, as well as browsable online (often with original source PDFs of the printed laws), with both online and RDF/XML representations showing all alterations to the law (with date, cross-reference to the Act that made the amendment, etc.). The website is one of the big success stories of RDF, IMO, as it is all based arou…

Oh yeah?! OH YEAH?!!!
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