Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.

But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.

All Your Doors are Open to US.

We're eagerly awaiting your detailed instructions on how we might do this.

Hey, you got all your facts wrong.

First, we still do have the US Constitution. It's kept at the National Archives. To quote from their web site: "The National Archives Building is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, with entrances on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. Please Note: The Rotunda entrance, which includes the Exhibit Hall, is on Constitution Avenue." You can go there and see it in its display case.

Second, it's not a piece of paper; it was written on parchment.

Next time, try to get your facts right. ;-)

(How much of it is in effect any more isn't clear. We do pretty much know that all those parts that limit what the government can do are, uh, "inoperative" at the moment. Yeah, that's the word. But it's still useful for social-control purposes, so we keep it around.)

So, not just the price of the building permit, then?

The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities; construction of roads and streetlights; construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....

In other words, there's a heck of a lot of new infrastructure capital costs associated with new expansion of a community--costs that wouldn't be incurred without the new construction. (The rest of your comment notes how precious a commodity water is, and how difficult it is to secure access to more of it.) Instead of loading those costs on to people already living in town, the municipalities put the costs on the developers, who in turn pass them on to the new home buyers.

If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....

Heh. That doesn't even mean you're safe. I recall a project back in the late 1980s, when I was part of a team hired by a big company (who shall remain unnamed so you'll suspect it was your company ;-). We'd had a few discussions with "top management" who'd hired us, about their problems with the DP department. Their computer folks effectively owned the data, and all access was mediated by the DP department. There was a lot of information that was there, but management couldn't get at it, because the DP folks feigned an inability to provide it.

One evening, a bunch of us decided to stay around after hours. We went to work on their big (IBM of course) mainframe, and in the morning, we demoed to management that we could read any file on their machine. Our demo included a few reports we'd printed out that got wide-eyed reactions. We'd given them access to all of their own data, and they were very happy with us. We stuck around and provided them with a lot more reports ("over the dead bodies" of some of the DP department ;-).

Some time later, we discussed in private the question of what we should tell the IBM folks about what we'd done. Our decision was essentially "Nah; they'll just block our current clients' access to their own data and give control back to the DP priesthood. And we have other customers who'll pay us to similarly break into their own data."

The fact that your own employees can't access their own data doesn't necessarily mean it's safe from outsiders.

(We never did discuss with them the implication that other outsiders might as easily access their data, if they happened to know the things we did. In the late 1980s, managers at corporate computer installations generally had no concept of a "network" other than as a way to connect remote terminals to the mainframe. There's no way we could have got them to understand the wider implications of the security holes we knew about and exploited for their benefit. It's not obvious that most of today's "management" class has such understanding, either. The current story pretty much demos the extent that understanding. ;-)

Yes. Also, yes.

With conventional, mechanically-linked, non-variable steering, if I twitch the wheel at 2 mph while creeping into a parking space, nothing happens. If I twitch the wheel the same amount on the highway at 60 mph, I lurch sickeningly across a couple of lanes of traffic.

A sensible system would allow me to make moderately-sized inputs at whatever speed I'm travelling, and convert those to appropriate adjustments of the wheels of the car: big deflections of my tires with lots of power assist when I'm parallel parking, tiny deflections when I'm changing lanes on the highway.

Indeed, and this is also an excellent example of where we can use the canonical /. automotive simile: There is a long tradition of government agencies (and some corporations) requiring that all purchased vehicles come with complete shop manuals. This is a direct parallel to requiring the source code for software. In both cases, such a requirement makes it possible for the purchasing organization to set up their own repair shop to fix the products when something fails. It also allows the purchaser to make their own mods to handle their special needs.

Many US states (and a good number of other countries) require that shop manuals be available for all vehicles sold in their jurisdiction, not just to the government. This is done to guarantee that independent auto shops can exist, and the vendor can't have a monopoly on repairs and spare parts. The same argument applies to software. With open source, you can hire local independent software contractors to debug (and/or extend) purchased software. Without this, both government agencies and private purchasers are at the mercy of the vendor when problems or special needs arise.

Of course, we can expect to hear from the usual corporate shills (paid or ideologically motivated ;-), pushing their usual misleading claims. But note that nobody much ever claims that open-source software is bug-free. The argument is that, when bugs are discovered, people not working for the vendor can study the code and fix the code. And they can also publicize bugs and fixes, unlike what happens all too often when dealing with secret, proprietary software. This also applies to both software and vehicles.

This is true. So...?

Absolutely correct.

I presume that you won't mind getting a copy of Meyer's Twilight instead of Stoker's Dracula. I mean, they're both vampire novels, so they're completely fungible, right?

(That's likely not true, but I'll roll with it for now.) The distinction is that emissions from ethanol burning are carbon neutral, whereas the emissions from fossil fuel burning are not. That is, each gram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning ethanol came from a gram of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by a growing plant. No matter how much ethanol you burn, you're only putting back the carbon dioxide that was pulled out of the air a few months earlier by a sugarcane or corn plant, rather than adding new carbon dioxide. In contrast, burning gasoline releases into the atmosphere carbon stores that had been sequestered for millions of years.

As an added bonus, ethanol is itself cleaner burning (and encourages cleaner burning of gasoline in blends), reducing emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulates (soot), especially in high-ethanol blends like E85.

That said, there is a caveat--there is an energy cost associated with the process of growing, harvesting, fermenting the crops used to produce ethanol. In many places, these processes still depend to some extent on fossil fuels--which can in turn offset some of the emissions benefits associated with producing carbon neutral ethanol fuels.

You snark, but yes. My computer's Disk has an Operating System, but I'm pretty sure I'm not actually using DOS.

Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.

But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.

It's not just common; it's the standard approach that's pretty much hard-wired into the entire GUI approach. And the designers are openly proud of the fact that they did it this way. And if you managed to memorize the location of something important in the menu tree, chances are that one of those "upgrades" that you clicked on has moved it to someplace else by now. If you don't like this, you can use the CLI approach, except that most "consumer" computer systems have done a good job of hiding that from their users. We're all too stupid to understand something without pretty pictures, y'know. ;-)