They probably missed the parts about "only" and "tasks" because they're not there.

Marbury v. Madison found that the power is there, but it's not in the text. (And as a practical matter, a judge that takes an oath to defend a constitution must necessarily have the ability to determine if a law he's asked to apply complies with that constitution; issuing an order applying an unconstitutional law would both violate the oath and be beyond his authority derived from the constitution . . .)

Furthermore, in US practice, all courts, state and federal, make such reviews. The USC is simply the final, not sole, arbiter for the federal constitution.

And this is all irrelevant anyway: federal income taxation is authorized by the US Constitution itself, not a statute (it's implemented by statute under that authority), while the federal constitution has nothing to do with state income taxation . . .

hawk, esq.

You conveniently ignore the fact that in those years, that infrastructure was owned and/or maintained by communities, not by multinational corporations with a fanatical profit-maximizing agenda.

That is in one sentence what's wrong with our western society. Maximise profit at all costs, dodge responsibilities to the world around you, and then justify it all as being the proper way to do things.

The crux of the problem is the assumption that your responsibilities to society begin and end with the laws, interpreted to your advantage as much as possible.

Grants to existing scholars, scientists and researchers in their fields who are making actual scientific progress, instead of making their lives more difficult by founding some hot shot idea you found interesting.

Someone as allegedly smart as Gates, who spent all his life in a company whose success is first and foremost based on marketing and manipulation of perception could be expected to understand that if you read, hear or watch someone telling his great idea and you're fascinated with it afterwards, you can be sure that you have seen a good sales man, but you have no clue whether or not you've seen a good idea.

But to understand possible causal connections, timing is most helpful.

If you come across a theory that event A caused event B (via some intermediate links), but you know that event A happened in 1676 while event B happened in 1669, you don't have to scrutinize the causal links.

Likewise, if two wars between the same countries were fought 30 or 40 years apart, you know that it was the next generation fighting and that the cause must have been important enough to span that transition of power to the heir.

The mayor of my city and the parliament of my country I can elect and their doings are at least partially subject to public scrutiny. Moreover, their primary interest is staying in power, which means at least partially pleasing me.

The CEO of Big Bad Corporation I cannot elect nor scrutinize. His primary interest is $$$, which means if he can earn a buck by fucking me over, he's almost legally required to do so.

For all the faults in our current political system, I'd rather have the former have the guns. And I'd rather have the government control corporations instead of the other way around. In fact, much of what's fucked up with our politics is that corporations have too much influence on politics.

FTFY.

I had a great history teacher, who taught us about the difference between cause and occasion, about webs of alliances and interdependences and how they create unintended consequences, and who made us understand why names and dates are important (to figure out the proper order of things and the connections between the people responsible).

If your teacher sucked, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

And if you want to refresh, find "Crash Course World History" on YouTube.

Best summary, ever. The primary problem with american culture today is this attitude of "money makes right", which is simply a modern version of "might makes right". There is a deep-rooted, often unconscious, assumption that because someone was successful (in business), he is smarter or more correct than someone who is not so bright and public. This ignores the fundamental truth that skillsets do not always overlap, and that celebrities main skill is very often self-marketing.

Just like Athens won the Persian War, not Sparta as "300" wants us to believe, in real life the tale of the lone hero, or the bright, misunderstood inventor, is usually just that: A tale.

And history is full of rich people giving money to total bullshit ideas.

C is for grown-ups. It is solidly based in the same core assumption as the Unix commandline: That the user knows what he's doing and the system shouldn't try to know better.

if (a = b) is crazy useful and I'm most happy that PHP retains this convention. I use it all the time because it does the same but is much more readable than

a = fopen("filename.ext");
if (a) {
...
}

sizeof tells you what you ask it, and if you ask it about a pointer (strings are pointers in C), then it will tell you about the pointer because it assumes that is what you want to know and if you'd wanted to know the length of the string, you would've asked for the length of the string via the strlen() function, for example.

String termination as well is an example of doing only what is needed, revealing how close C still is to assembler. Not doing nonsense like manipulating counters that may never be needed is one of the reasons C is fast.

You program in Cobol and talk about mess? This ranks high in the top list of crazy things I've heard on /.

The really funny thing is that we, and especially NASA know how to write good software. It is just rarely done because ... no, it's not really that more expensive or slower, at least not as much as you'd think. It's just a lot less sexy.

This is the fantastic reductio ad absurdum approach I take when neocon relatives talk about war being good for the economy. I say, well, if that's the case, lets just leave out the killing, and build munitions and planes and then destroy them.

I believe that there's a paragraph in Orwell's 1984 specifically about this.

Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:
                Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
                Macbeth by Shakespeare
                Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
                Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
                To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
                The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
                Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
                Hamlet by Shakespeare
                The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
                Lord of the Flies by William Golding

And each of these books has been banned in some district or another every year. Harry Potter, etc.

"Banned Books Week" is the last week of September in the US. Many libraries at least put up a couple of signs calling attention to it.

We've largely solved the issue with things like magnet links and decentralized databases.

The issue we still haven't solved is in our mind: We believe everyone needs to have "tech literacy", completely forgetting that every invention in history became successful only after someone made it easy to use for people without learning all the mechanical details about it. When only car mechanics could drive a car, the total number of cars in the world was less than that in your local shopping malls parking lot today. Is that change because cars became more easy to use, or because more people became car mechanics? Take a guess.

This a thousand times. Watching the videos, I can't shake the feeling about how inefficient these things are and how much more efficient a delivery truck is. Sparsely populated countryside is really the only place where delivery drones make any sense at all.

Which is why Googles system (lowering the parcel on a rope, the drone never comes even near ground) is superior to Amazons (land-and-release) system.

In general, though, I do agree with you.