3 ms·

A little OT, but if you read the PDF of the bill [1], you can see that the way in which they go about updating laws is the equivalent of a hand maintained, text

by elteto 14y ago

A little OT, but if you read the PDF of the bill [1], you can see that the way in which they go about updating laws is the equivalent of a hand maintained, text based version control system. Every object (text lines) is uniquely identifiable by page and line number (a hash), and modifications are in the form of additions or strike outs to these lines (deltas). If you get the original bill and follow through all the subsequent modifications you could even build a version control tree! Neat. [1] http://www.lofgren.house.gov/images/stories/pdf/aarons%20law%20revised%20draft%20013013.pdf http://www.lofgren.house.gov/images/stories/pdf/aarons%20law...

mpyne 14y ago
This has actually been criticized before because it's prone to being mis-applied at times. E.g. there have been times when new legislation was first added to U.S. Code not as a new section, but as a bunch of deletions/additions that make it very hard to tell what the end result is supposed to look like. However if you find that neat you may also find it neat how they end up placing these bills passed into law into the legal code. It's done manually just as you say, but the ones doing the work sometimes notice issues which they footnote (e.g. I've seen a lot of "foo was probably meant instead of bar" footnotes).
- elteto 14y ago
  > This has actually been criticized before because it's prone to being mis-applied at times. >E.g. there have been times when new legislation was first added to U.S. Code not as a new section, but as a bunch of deletions/additions that make it very hard to tell what the end result is supposed to look like. Ha! Typical, at some point politics had to show it's ugly head :) I thought that eventually some sort of consolidation took place (a release, if you will) and then subsequent modifications were based off of that one.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Yes, occasionally a group of existing law will be assembled together and approved as a block (this is how the U.S. Code is formed), and then they can tweak with USC from there directly. Other times they pass the law and it just kind of floats out there, in the "Statutes-at-Large" until some poor legislative assistant decides to/gets told to go consolidate the groups back into appropriate titles of USC (which requires another bill in Congress). Even when you're making a law which is basically just a diff to the U.S. Code though, the various interactions of each of the changes can be difficult to discern the real meaning of. But on the other hand it's nice to be able to simply fix the broken part of a law without having to do a full rewrite.

by elteto 14y ago

mpyne 14y ago

This has actually been criticized before because it's prone to being mis-applied at times. E.g. there have been times when new legislation was first added to U.S. Code not as a new section, but as a bunch of deletions/additions that make it very hard to tell what the end result is supposed to look like. However if you find that neat you may also find it neat how they end up placing these bills passed into law into the legal code. It's done manually just as you say, but the ones doing the work sometimes notice issues which they footnote (e.g. I've seen a lot of "foo was probably meant instead of bar" footnotes).

elteto 14y ago
> This has actually been criticized before because it's prone to being mis-applied at times. >E.g. there have been times when new legislation was first added to U.S. Code not as a new section, but as a bunch of deletions/additions that make it very hard to tell what the end result is supposed to look like. Ha! Typical, at some point politics had to show it's ugly head :) I thought that eventually some sort of consolidation took place (a release, if you will) and then subsequent modifications were based off of that one.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Yes, occasionally a group of existing law will be assembled together and approved as a block (this is how the U.S. Code is formed), and then they can tweak with USC from there directly. Other times they pass the law and it just kind of floats out there, in the "Statutes-at-Large" until some poor legislative assistant decides to/gets told to go consolidate the groups back into appropriate titles of USC (which requires another bill in Congress). Even when you're making a law which is basically just a diff to the U.S. Code though, the various interactions of each of the changes can be difficult to discern the real meaning of. But on the other hand it's nice to be able to simply fix the broken part of a law without having to do a full rewrite.