cdellin
"He [the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;"
I think that your claim that the only role of the Senate is that it "must be notified in the event the President has made a sole-executive agreement" is a misrepresentation. In fact, the Senate must vote to approve every potential treaty before it becomes valid.
My primary problem with the NSA is that they (a) use their position of power to install backdoors in hardware/software/infrastructure, (b) do it in secret, (c) claim to be in some way "above the law" w.r.t. secret courts, (d) use public taxpayer money, and (e) motivate their behaviour using bogus anti-terror claims. None of these infractions exist in the "right to be forgotten" scenario.
Fundamentally, in the story of the NSA, it is the NSA that is in a position of power that can and will be abused. In this case, it is the power to scrub the entire internet of information by imposing centralized censorship which, in my mind, is simply too much power to put in one place.
> Part of the appeal of libraries is abstracting away implementation details. I want to be able to have foo.h #include a hash table, or a binary search tree, depending on #ifdef's or its internal implementation. The user of foo.h shouldn't even have to know about it.
I agree with your premise (re: abstraction of implementation details), but I think you've applied it incorrectly to reach the wrong conclusion.
If the implementation of foo (contained in foo.c) uses a hash table or binary search tree, then foo.c may of course include whatever it likes. On the other hand, foo.h is (by definition) the interface to foo; any headers the interface requires (e.g. for function argument types) ought to be explicitly understood by the user of the library.
I definitely agree with this (-:
You're right, in that a reasonably informed voter should have known the nature of the proposition. Unfortunately, due to the broken initiative process, those weighing the options tend not to be sufficiently informed. In my opinion (though not that of the US Supreme Court, see Calder v Bull), such ex-post-facto tax laws should be as prohibited as similar laws are in criminal circumstances.
http://www.cesarbs.org/blog/2010/07/19/run-time-machine-code...