Except they "give an error" because the provided field doesn't exist in the database. Ignore for a second that half the reposts would break websites if an unexpected parameter yield an error instead of being ignored, if an untrusted client sent an "id" field, that would go through like hot steel through melted butter.
Well. The likeliest thing is that there is no "middle man fucking with them". The likeliest thing, since it's an iOS app posting to their API, is that they're introspecting a client-side object to get the values they care about. And that they're blacklisting values they know they don't want, rather than whitelisting values they know they do want.
Which meant that when a new property showed up their app blindly submitted it to their web API, and their web API blindly accepted it because it was doing mass assignment, and that's when the API broke.
Which really just hammers home the point people have been trying to get you to see, which is that these types of idioms -- mass assignment, blind trust of client-supplied data, blacklisting instead of whitelisting -- are really serious problems that should not be encouraged, and should not be swept under the rug.
I'm no expert, but this doesn't seem to be any significantly better than a k-d tree, does it? I might be missing something. I find academic papers hard to parse.
I'm unsure about the House, but there are a handful of states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin) that have state laws allowing for the recall of their US Senators. It's been attempted a few times, but it has never succeeded.
I don't think there's any reason to believe they can't have their own rules in this regard - especially since senators in particular represent the state itself and the United States is (was?) a federation of the states, therefore the states technically have (had?) the power over the feds and not the other way around. Sending representatives from each state is (or should be) the state's privilege and should not elevate them to king-hood over the very state they are supposed to represent the interests of.
Of course.. it's never been tested because a recall attempt of a US Senator in any state that allows for it has never progressed to the point where it'd have to have been implemented and so it may ultimately be illegal if the supreme courts says it is. However states have a certain right to withdraw from the union as a whole because of disputes like this because the union itself exists at the request of the member states themselves. We at least know that has been tried, but it didn't go very well...
The Supreme Court does not share your views of state power and the nature of Congressional representation. See U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779. Assorted passages from Justice Stevens' majority opinion:
"Even if we believed that States possessed as part of their original powers some control over congressional qualifica- tions, the text and structure of the Constitution, the relevant historical materials, and, most importantly, the “basic principles of our democratic system” all demonstrate that the Qualifications Clauses were intended to preclude the States from exercising any such power and to fix as exclusive the qualifications in the Constitution."
Footnote 20: "The Framers’ decision to reject a proposal allowing for States to recall their own representatives, see 1 Farrand 20, 217, reflects these same concerns."
"In light of the Framers’ evident concern that States would try to undermine the National Government, they could not have intended States to have the power to set qualifications. Indeed, one of the more anomalous consequences of petitioners’ argument is that it accepts federal supremacy over the procedural aspects of determining the times, places, and manner of elections while allowing the States carte blanche with respect to the substantive qualifications for membership in Congress."
"The Framers decided that the qualifications for service in the Congress of the United States be fixed in the Constitution and be uniform throughout the Nation. That decision reflects the Framers’ understanding that Members of Congress are chosen by separate constituencies, but that they become, when elected, servants of the people of the United States. They are not merely delegates appointed by separate, sovereign States; they occupy offices that are inte- gral and essential components of a single National Government. In the absence of a properly passed constitutional amendment, allowing individual States to craft their own qualifications for Congress would thus erode the structure envisioned by the Framers, a structure that was designed, in the words of the Preamble to our Constitution, to form a “more perfect Union.”"
I'm not sure why parent was downvoted when the article itself mentions that a NJ law allowing for the recall of Senators has been struck down. Granted, it also says that the issue never reached the Supreme Court, but if it happened and if it were upheld, that's exactly the sort of scenario that would get Supreme Court review.
That said, I wish them the best of luck. Even if it doesn't work for whatever reason, I think it's an important way for people to make their wishes known.
No, the point is that even if you ban it in order to protect "everyone else", people who insist on being unsafe will find new ways to do so regardless of the law. Banning behaviors is only effective if the ban is actually observed by the people who are most likely to cause the behavior you're trying to ban in the first place.
Edit: And yes, I agree with your last point about a PR campaign. Personally, I'm not convinced we should go about banning every little behavior (especially in cases like this which are effectively unenforceable) but instead spend the resources on education about why a behavior is undesirable, uncool, dangerous, etc.
I love this idea and fully support it, but a possibly unintended side effect would be reporting of this event taking a turn towards: "Holy crap, we all rely a lot on Wikipedia! Who are these people who run this global resource, anyway? Can we trust them? Should this sort of information source be regulated for the sake of the public good? Should it even be possible for these unaccountable people to pull such an important site from the internet without any oversight?! We need more laws!"
Does anyone know why that pile was valued at $1.1M in the first place? I occationally stack junk in piles myself, so I'm kind of interested in the prospect of turning that habit into a business model...
