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A comment on The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad. Parent comment

Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by there on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @11:31PM (#495443)
i'd love to see how a piece of legislation gets written with something like this.
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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by tlb on Thursday February 26, 2009 @12:40AM (#495524)
"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making."

  -- Otto von Bismarck.
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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by cpach on Thursday February 26, 2009 @04:26PM (#496455)
That's a great quote. Seems like the original version is by John Godfrey Saxe though, and reads "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafir...

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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by Xichekolas on Thursday February 26, 2009 @09:06AM (#495843)
Even without the playback, if legislative documents were versioned and the revisions were public, we could at least watch the diffs and call people on the pork and poison pills they insert into bills.
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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by pg on Thursday February 26, 2009 @12:25AM (#495507)
That's actually a really good idea, even if all it showed you were successive drafts.
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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by laut on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @11:38PM (#495456)
The lobbyists will have to start to use etherpad then.
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Re:The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of ... by robotrout on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @11:54PM (#495476)
I was thinking git would be a great tool for legislation writing as well...
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