Blank Interpreting Request Form: Fill & Download for Free

In 2012, a majority of Puerto Ricans voted, in an island-wide referendum, to request admission to the United States as a state (although the fact that 24% of ballots were blank on the question has been used by opponents to statehood as grounds to discount the result). However, this vote is not, in itself, sufficient; Puerto Rico must apply to Congress for admission, and Congress must approve that application before it can become a state. Legislation admitting Puerto Rico as a state has been introduced in both the House and the Senate; both bills are currently languishing in committee, where they will no doubt die when Congress adjourns on January 2. In addition, Congress has authorized yet another island-wide referendum, on the premise that the 2012 referendum was "unclear" in its results. The current leadership of the territorial government opposes statehood, and has done everything in its power to obfuscate matters (e.g. by drafting confusing referendum questions).It's generally accepted that the Republicans oppose the admission of Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico is expected to vote strongly Democratic in its elections. Puerto Rico would (based on 2010 Census data) be awarded five seats in Congress (with Florida, Washington, Texas, California, and Minnesota each losing one, as the number of seats in the House is fixed by law at 435). The net loss to the Republicans would probably be three seats. There would also be two new Democratic Senators, and seven additional solidly Democratic electors in the Presidential election (although three of those replace usually-Democratic electors in California, Washington, and Minnesota). None of this is appealing to Republicans, and so they're not inclined to allow it to happen.In the event that the Democrats regain control of both Congress and the White House, a bill admitting Puerto Rico (which can be introduced at any time by their Resident Commissioner) would have a good chance of passing. Until then, don't expect much to happen on this front.Edit to add: Many people seem to be of the belief that the November 2012 referendum resulted in rejecting statehood. This is not consistent with a strict technical interpretation of the results of the referendum. However, if one takes the position that all of the blank ballots that were cast on the form-of-government question represented votes for remaining a commonwealth (an interpretation which is inconsistent with basic principles of election law), then supporters of statehood only have a plurality. It would seem that such an interpretation is being advanced fairly regularly by those opposed to statehood.Also, lest anyone be confused, I have no particular interest in Puerto Rican statehood, and have no connections with Puerto Rico at all. For me, this is strictly an academic interest.

The key spec in describing an HTTP request is RFC 7230, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing." The message format is defined in section 3 of this document.An HTTP request is one case of a general HTTP message (the HTTP response being the other), which consists of:A start line, terminated by a carriage return-line feed (CRLF) pair.Optionally, one or more header lines, each terminated by a CRLF pair.A blank line (a CRLF pair by itself).Optionally, a message body.The HTTP request's start line contains three elements, separated by spaces:The request method, or "verb" for the request.The request target, indicating what is to be operated on.The protocol name and version, in this case, "HTTP/1.1".The most common request method is GET, which fetches the contents of a page. Next most common is POST, which is used by "forms" on a Web page to send data to the server. There are a number of less common ones.The request target is usually a URI specified relative to the "root" of the site, to indicate what resource to access.Header lines are in the form "keyword: value". They are used to specify various "parameters" for the request, such as what type of content the client would like to retrieve, what kind of message body (if any) is being sent, and so forth.The message body may be any data required as part of the message. Its format and length are generally specified by the Content-Type: and Content-Length: headers. GET requests don't use a message body, so they just end after the blank line following the headers. POST requests usually contain the form data submitted by the browser, encoded as "name1=value1&name2=value2&...".Here's an example of an HTTP request used to retrieve my Web server's home page:GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: erbosoft .com Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 If-Modified-Since: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:44:06 GMT (N.B.: The extra space in between "erbosoft" and ".com" is required to fake out the Quora URL parser. It was not present in the original request. The extra blank line at the end of the request is also omitted.)The first line tells the server we're asking for its "root" page (that's what the "/" means). Most Web servers interpret the URI path as a directory path relative to some "Web root directory," and, if the resulting path identifies a directory, look for a file in that directory called "index.html" and send that. The Host: header tells it we're asking for a particular host name; Web servers can serve pages for multiple hosts, so that's how the server distinguishes it.The Connection: keep-alive header says to the server, "Don't close the connection after you send us this file, we'll probably have more things to ask you for." The Cache-Control: max-age=0 header says we don't want a cached copy; we want a fresh one.The various "accept" headers tell the server exactly what type and format of content we want to look for. Without getting into too much detail, the browser is saying it would prefer to receive HTML or XHTML text (the Accept: header), can use certain encoding methods to reduce the size of the content for transmission (the Accept-Encoding: header), and would prefer to get U.S. English text, though regular English would be OK (the Accept-Language: header).The complicated string of text sent in the User-Agent: header identifies the browser exactly, with all kinds of "compatibility" text included so if the server is counting on seeing another kind of browser, it will not freak out. The browser, in this case, is Chrome, though it also identifies itself with strings for Mozilla, Apple WebKit, KHTML, Gecko, and Safari. It also tells the server that the browser is running under the X11 window system on a 64-bit Linux machine.The If-Modified-Since: header tells the server, "I retrieved a copy of this Web page already at this-and-such a time. If it hasn't changed since then, just tell me that instead of sending the whole thing again."The server will then take all this and send back an appropriate response.Hat tip: Daniel Catalan for the A2A.

Did the writers of the Constitution intend to write a "living" Constitution that would continually change with interpretation (rather than chiefly through the Amendments process)?Thank you for the request to answer Douglas.I have read several of the other responses to this question. Most seem to think we cannot know what they thought. One even stated he was pretty sure they didn’t think too much about it at all.Well, both are wrong. They actually thought about it a great deal, and a good bit of it was recorded for posterity. So, rather than me tell you what I think (for whatever that might be worth), let me have the founders tell you what they thought.The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution, which at any time exists, ‘till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. … If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.— George Washington (emphasis added)Can it be of less consequence that the meaning of a Constitution should be fixed and known, than a meaning of a law should be so?— James MadisonThe important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country.— James MadisonOn every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.—Thomas Jefferson (emphasis added)Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. … If it is, then we have no Constitution.— Thomas Jefferson (emphasis added)To take a single step beyond the text would be to take possession of a boundless field of power.— Thomas JeffersonJefferson gave an even more definitive answer about the need AND the mechanism for Constitutional change. But he remained committed to the “Article 5 Process”Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness… It is now forty years since the constitution of Virginia was formed. The same tables inform us, that, within that period, two-thirds of the adults then living are now dead. Have then the remaining third, even if they had the wish, the right to hold in obedience to their will, and to laws heretofore made by them, the other two-thirds, who, with themselves, compose the present mass of adults? … That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.~ Thomas JeffersonThere are many more quotes along these lines. But I have never encountered any that even hinted at flexibility in interpretation of The Constitution (as amended).It is clear to me that the Framers expected strict adherence to not only the wording of The Constitution, but also when read at future times it should be analyzed as it was intended when written. Again from Thomas Jefferson, ”On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates…” This seems like a pretty clear instruction to the Judiciary.