Uproar? true, some polls have shown widespread opposition to the current bill, but in many (most?) cases the polls don't distinguish the reason for the disapproval. one may oppose the bill because it goes to far, or because it doesn't go far enough. for example here is a poll (admitedly rather old at this point) showing 57% of Americans in favor of a public option.

I don't really disagree with you, but I think you're over-simplifying things. All newspapers, even the big ones, have been flailing about trying to remain "relevant".

But, as folks up-thread have mentioned, newspapers still sometimes do good local work. Consider the series by the L.A. Times a few months ago on the abuses at MLK Hospital. Brutal stuff, and I'm sure it took weeks of hard work to put together.

Is it necessary that the L.A. Times itself do such reporting? Of course not. But, and here's the kicker, while I read the articles and thought they were excellent pieces which should (and did) lead to some sort of action, I paid nothing at all to read the story. I probably would, in theory anyway, pay for good local journalism, but at this point I wouldn't know who to pay. I can't say that it'd be a terrible thing if all current media companies vanished, but what's to replace them?

Yes, that's from a very important and still widely followed tax case, decided in 1935. But then there's also this:

From its inception, the economic substance doctrine has been used to prevent taxpayers from subverting the legislative purpose of the tax code by engaging in transactions that are fictitious or lack economic reality simply to reap a tax benefit. Transactions are considered to have economic substance when imbued with tax-independent considerations, and not shaped solely by tax-avoidance features.

That's from a 2007 opinion of the Court of Federal Claims. So while it's true that you can arrange your affairs to minimize your taxes, you can't engage in pure fictions or shams. The difference is hard to tell, and certainly the insane and embarrassing complexity of the tax code has something to do with it.

This is only half the story. In the same way that you have no "right" to play the game the way you want, the casino has no "right" to even operate in the first place. Witness the number of states (fewer now, of course) where gambling is entirely illegal.

The fact is that casinos operate in a highly regulated environment. They cannot even offer games to customers without getting approval from a government body. The government could, if it wanted to, prevent the casino from booting card counters.

So why don't they? Because, as someone mentioned above, this is all a make-believe "problem". Far far more people think they can count cards than actually can, and it's just not worth it for the casino to trouble with the few who may, possibly, be getting a slight advantage over them. Better for them to let that one guy win a bit, tell all his buddies about his success, and then take their money, and probably his too!

does it

• auto-detect character encodings?
• correctly expand internal entity declarations?
• report namespaces correctly?
• correctly handle xml:space?
• default attribute values from a DTD?
• handle parameter entities?
• handle external parsed entities?
• correctly reject characters outside the legal range?

(some of these are cheating a bit on my part -- namespaces are not strictly part of XML 1.0)

In general, I agree with you that it's possible to write a fully-compliant parser in a few days. It is far more complicated than most people seem to think, though, and fully compliant XML is not isomorphic to s-expressions.

You people don't know what the fuck you're talking about. XML parsing is not easy. What is easy is writing a parser for a half-assed subset of whatever parts of XML you feel like you need.

you avoided his point, which was not that the universe will end but that it began.

"the age of X" generally means not "how long until X dies or ceases to exist", but "how long since X was born or came into existence".

The apparent directionality of entropy over time might imply (in a general, imprecise way) that entropy had a minimum value at some point, that this point was the "beginning of the universe", and (so it's said) that a beginning with no antecedent implies some sort of creative force, i.e. god.

Ignoring the sementics, what exactly is the difference?

It's impossible to give a simple answer, since there are a whole range of different things generally called "regulations". About the only common factor is that regulations are not issued by Congress, but by some sort of "executive" body like the FCC, USDA, DOT, etc.

So, in the strictest and least interesting sense regulations are not laws by definition, since they are not passed by the one body capable of passing laws, the Congress. Many regulations are more like "serious recommendations", in the sense that it's the executive's statement of the sort of behavior that they find acceptable, given the current state of the law. If you happened to disagree with the executive's interpretation, you could go to court and show (a somewhat uphill battle. but not impossible) that the agency had exceeded its authority, or had not followed the right procedure in adopting the regulation, or whatever. You are not bound to follow the regulations, but if you don't you may have a long and expensive fight on your hands. Still, agencies do loose these battles sometimes.

Sometimes, though, Congress will say something like "The IRS will now make rules relating to deductions for home expenses," and the IRS will go ahead and make those rules. These are still regulations, but because Congress has straight out said that it wants the IRS to make rules of that sort, they are almost like laws. I.e. there's very little chance (although still some chance) that a court would step in and invalidate the regulation.

I see you study and raise you 63% of doctors support a mixed public/private option.

so which is it?

What about Berman v. Parker, 1954? That involved a condemnation for the redevelopment of a "blighted" part of town, and SCOTUS had no problem with it. Same with Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 1984, where the intended result was to take property away from one owner and give it to another. Or rather, the intent was to break up a landholding oligarchy, and that was perfectly OK with the Supreme Court.

No, you may not like Kelo but it certainly wasn't new law.

The IRS works. The American tax code is a bloated mess, but that's Congress' fault, not the IRS's. Considering what they're up against, the IRS works miracles.

Wickard was the high water mark of Commerce Clause expansion. Since then (it's been over 60 years, you know) SCOTUS has backed way off, and has given the 10th Amendment its teeth back. See e.g. U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), which called Wickard "perhaps the most far reaching example of Commerce Clause authority over intrastate activity".

MS may not be able to write off donations to schools. When Singer (the sewing machine company) tried this, the IRS denied the deduction, saying that Singer wasn't motivated by charity but by the hope that the students learning on their machines would be more likely to buy Singer machines in the future. The case went as far as the Court of Federal Claims, which agreed with the IRS: no deduction.