Those prices may be wrong, but I, personally, have been offered a warranty for more than the price of the item at Best Buy. It was a discounted 12 dollar PS/2 mouse/keyboard to USB converter, and they offered me a warranty for 14 or 15 dollars, I forget which.
I automatically said no, like I do to all extended warranties for cheap stuff, and as I was paying my brain caught up with my ears and I started laughing.
I would dislike the rebate scammers if mail-in rebates were the slightest bit ethical. They are not. They are a complete and utter scam, so I can't get upset at someone scamming Best Buy back on them.
There is no purpose whatsoever to mail-in rebates except to steal money from customers. Not a single one. Sometimes they're just stealing from the lazy and actually give ten dollars to people willing to spend a few hours to get everything in order, sometimes they create impossible processes, sometimes they just outright never send the money and hope the customer has forgotten about it two months later.
Maybe if more people abused them they'd stop advertising them as actual prices, or even stop using them altogether.
You are completely wrong. In the process of the steam turning a turbine, it loses energy - heat energy. Where do you think the energy to turn a turbine comes from? It comes from the heat.
Um...no. Stream turbines generate electricity by transferring heat into the enviroment. I don't know in what universe you're from where you can directly turn heat into electricity, but in this universe we obey the laws of thermodynamics. We use heat imbalances to generate motion, and the motion to generate electricity. You can never end up with less heat, you just end up with a more average distribution.
Completely and utterly wrong. In most solar cells, if the photon has less energy than the bandgap, the photon *passes through* the material. Waste heat is generated from photons that have *too much* energy.
And then the photons just magically vanish from the universe. No, wait. They get absorbed by whatever's behind the material. Which in theory could be a material that wants slightly more energetic photons, but in reality isn't, because no one's figured out how to do that for more than two layers. And making those are so much more expensive that no one bothers to do even that.
Silicon panels will tend to run warmer than the surrounding ground, because some of the incoming photons' energy gets transferred into vibrating the crystal lattice to create the electron-hole pairs. Direct bandgap semiconductors don't do this. Indium gallium nitride cells, for example, will absorb almost no heat energy on Earth.
Oh, sure, if we use magically grown indium gallium nitride crystals, we can get 70% efficent conversion into electricity, in theory. Here in the real world, of course, absolutely no solar cells are made of multiple levels of indium gallium nitride, each doped at exactly the right layer. And they won't, because covering most of a state in that would cost more than just driving to the sun and grabbing some hydrogen and bring it back here to burn. (I'm not entirely certain I'm exagerating there.) They'd generate much less electricity in their lifetime than they'd cost to produce.
But, I will admit, if we did that, sure, it would give off less heat than the enviroment did before...which results in exactly the same problem I started this with. It's exactly the same climatic changes! I guess you could get around it by alternating solar panels with areas painted black, though.
We're not talking about what's 'generally' done, we're talking about covering most of a state in solar panels.
And when you're trying to make water boil, yes, you are absorbing heat that's normally reflected. And you don't even have possiblity to convert it into electricity.
I don't really understand your objection there. Solar heating of water generates more waste heat than solar panels. It's not like you can magically lower the temperature of the stream when you're done. You have to dump the heat somewhere, absolutely none of it is converted into electricity.
As for normal solar panels absorbing less heat, they don't, not in any noticable amounts. Solar panels work by their atoms absorbing photons and knocking knocking out electrons. If the photon isn't energetic enough to knock electrons, the energy just gets absorbed, and if the photon is too energetic, the photon leaves and the rest of the energy is absorbed. All absorbed energy is heat.
The problem comes about when you realize that the energy of a photon is the frequency, and photons from the sun come in, duh, all frequencies, minus the ones that don't make it to the ground. (And we can ignore those that go right though the solar panel, cause they're going to be going right through the ground, too.)
So...what we've basically got is a complete inability to match the frequencies. Each type of atom will match one frequency exactly. Anything under that frequency gets entirely turned into heat, and anything over that frequency gets the left over energy turn into heat.
That's not to imply, of course, that solar panels are a waste of time. They're just very inefficent, because the photoelectric effect is very inefficient when used on multiple frequencies of light, and the sun is about as much 'multiple frequencies of light' as you can get. Usually, they're just on a few.
And, exactly because they're so inefficent, they're made to be a little reflective as possible, because every reflected photon is one you're not making into any energy at all. They aren't 'shiny black', they are as close to non-reflective as possible.
But if you don't believe me, there's a simple way to check this. Find a solar panel that's been in the sun all day. Touch it and the ground at the same time.
Frankly, as another Georgia voter, I don't see how those amendments were even constitutional.
Since when can we amend the state constitution by voting for a description of the amendment? Shouldn't we see the actual amendment? What the hell is going on here?
And how can a proposed amendment dictate the form the voting for it will take?
Yes. Serial numbers. I keep saying that, but people keep missing it.
Every vote should have a randomly generated serial number with it. It should end up on the printout, and in the database. We obviously don't want it trackable to the voter, so it should not be a timestamp or a counter. And there's the issue of people somehow remembering their serial number, and using it to prove who they voted for, so it should not even be readable, just a barcode. Or possibly invisible ink. (Of course, if you think about it, there's nothing stopping people from making a unique mark on their paper ballot right now, and telling someone about that mark, and them watching the counters to see it. Or even a delibrate overvote in some unimportant category.)
But when you have that, you don't need to worry about vote tampering. You can (and should) verify the count hasn't been tampered with by just taking out a few dozen paper ballots and checking them against the computer. (Not that you shouldn't count them all anyway.)
See, at that point it's stopped 'do two completely unrelated tallies', it's 'independently count every ballot twice and compare the results', which would be much tougher to alter.
And we've managed to do it while keeping a secret ballot.
People who think there's a hard line between sci-fi and fantasy need to glance at Pern. I, personally, don't think that's an example of good writing, but defining that as either sci-fi or fantasy is absurd. It's fantasy following sci-fi rules.
Or compare, say, Discworld and HHGttG. They've both saterical societies as a reflection on the real world. HHGttG has 'magic' in it, with improbablity fields floating around, ghosts, total perspective vortexes, etc, and Discworld has of technology hitting it left and right, completely turning the world upside down. They're a lot closer to each other than, say, HHGttG and 2001, a Space Oddessy, or Discworld and the Chronicles of Thomas Convenant.
And, yes, historical worlds are not sci-fi. I would classify them as a third category, next to sci-fi and fantasy...of course, like I said, those categories are plenty unclear in the first place.
Of course solar panels reflect less light than your average bit of deserts. Deserts are white. Solar panels are black. It's not like we need some sort of physics expert here.
The question then becomes: Are solar panels converting that extra energy to electricity enough to offset the collected amount? The answer is, at this point, no, not via photoelectric processes.
You can get there by just going to heat and running something off the heat, but it's rather difficult to build a heat-based power plant over several hundred square miles. (And for single-user solar plants, operating a steam generator in the basement is a bit excessive. But we're not talking about them.)
So now the questions now, are: How much more heat would enough solar panels to run the nation give off than current power plants in use, and would concentrating all that heat into the air in a few hundred square miles alter the climate more or less than operating hundreds of power plants around the county, many of which dump heat to water, not the air?
I don't know the answer to those questions, but they aren't trivial. The mid-continent desert in north america, despite appearences, is not pointless. Doing something that increased its temperature by five degrees is quite possibly a very bad idea.
Don't we already have enough worries about changing the climate via energy use and production?
Why do all these people who are adamently against global warming like to propose giant areas covered in solar panels? Won't that, um...make a hell of a lot of heat from all the light that should have reflected into space?
Or did we magically come up with solar panels that generated large amounts of electricity and no heat while I wasn't looking?
Microwave energy has exactly the same problem, BTW.
Actually, people can step down before the election, or, even more infamously in the case of one senate race, die, and they still will be elected if they end up on the ballot and people vote for them.
With the president, though, it's a bit different, as we're electing electors, and electors can pick someone else. So if Bush were to die between now and the electoral college voting (Assuming, in the end, he did win.), Cheney would probably pick someone, and the electorial college would vote for Cheney/Whoever. Whereas if Bush died after the electorial vote, but before the crowning, Bush/Cheney would be elected, and Cheney would be sworn in as president, and have to pick a new VP then.
And, of course, either way, he already had to pick a VP for the end of this term. (Well, he doesn't have to, but he will.)
What I'm now wondering is what happens if electors die? I guess the state governments appoint someone to replace them.
Actually, I heard somewhere that Ohio does have a paper trail, but it's not used in the normal counting. If they do, I'm sure we'll hear more on this later.
Florida, however, definatively doesn't have any way of recounting, thus solving those pesky questions about who won once and for all. Interestingly enough, electronic voting was only used in the traditionally democratic areas. So you wouldn't even need to change votes, all you'd need to do is drop them randomly, or even 'misplace' them, like what happened here in Georgia in 2002.
Dropping one out of every 22 votes is much less obviously purposeful if someone catches, and is nicely ironic...traditionally, democratic areas are poorer and get the crappiest voting equipment, which doesn't register votes, but Fort Laurderdale ended up with the more expensive, even crappier equipment, which we have no idea if it registered votes.
You follow now? Having a more accurate prediction makes the network look better, especially since a) They were really incompetant last time, and b) They were unable to call something like a third of the important elections in any reasonable amount of time this time.
For a write-in for the president to be counted, the write-in must register his electors before the election. (Which is either free, or a nominal cost.)
Why? Because you're not voting for that person, you're voting for his electors. If he has no electors, they will just throw the vote away.
This also solves the problem of the fact that, in the US, more than one person is named 'Ralph Nader'. (Nader wasn't on the ballot in this state.) If only one Ralph Nader registered electors here, and 'Ralph Nader' wins, those electors go.
I don't know what happens if two write-ins with the same name are registered...but I think all presidential candidates must belong to a party, so what you'd do is write the party in. (Registering a party, incidently, is basically the same as registering electors...it's a nominal fee.)
That said, they really should summarize all the invalid write-ins and publish them, if only to see what people who didn't vote for anyone thought.
I was just wondering if all the posters here have never had an ATM do anything wrong.
The difference is, neither banks, nor most customers, want anything wrong to happen at an ATM.
If something goes wrong in favor of the bank, the customer will come in screaming bloody murder, and walk out a little distrustful of ATMs but not that worried. If the ATM makes an error in favor of the customer, the bank will quietly and quickly fix it.
With electronic voting machines, there is a) the inability to discover errors, and b) possible motive for the company to make an 'error'. Neither of those exist with ATMs. There's absolutely no incentive for the designers, or even most of the users, to make 'mistakes'.
Which, incidentally, is also where the term 'gypsy' came from...it means someone from Egypt. Of course, gypsies are not, in fact, from Egypt, rather like the Pennsylvania Dutch who are, in fact, from Germany, or the Indians, who are not from India.
Damn that thing takes forever. And you can't compile it in pieces, at least not via portage. (I don't think you can compile it pieces under any circumstances, actually.)
With my Athlon XP 1800 and 196 megs of RAM, it took something like 28 hours to compile. I can easily imagine a 400 taking five days or longer.
'portage' is only really an advantage over Red Hat. Other distros have ways to get packages via something like emerge, like apt-get. Even BSD.
But USE flags are amazing. With other distros, you have to use the default packages. This either means you get support for stuff you don't care about (And have to download the dependencies you don't care about.), or you don't, and cannot, get support for those things. Yes, yes, you can download source packages and compile them, but it happens automatically on Gentoo.
Anyone who thinks you get a noticable speed increase from compling 95% of the things yourself is silly. There might be a slight speed increase from a few things, but it's not noticable. (What is noticable, though, is the new prelink support. That's sped up KDE startup at least 20%.) If you want speed, stop using gcc, download icc and use it. (I've actually been tempted to compile some Gentoo packages with that and see what happens.)
Now, what is nice, is that almost every package, being source, is available for all Gentoo architectures. (Assuming the program actually works on said architecture.) None of that trying to track down mod_mysql_auth compiled for the PowerPC. As long as you boot into Linux via LiveCD or, really, any way, you can install Gentoo with any packages you want.
And I've never seen or heard of these supposed Gentoo fanboys. I, personally, think Gentoo is the best distro out there for people who want to do a lot of tweaking. It's not the best for people who want a stable enviroment, like a server, (Yes, sometimes things break. It's still getting its footing. And you can shoot yourself in the foot easily if you ignore warnings.) Debian is the best there. It's not the best for a prepared desktop enviroment, I'd go with Mandrake there, or SuSE.
A 'tipping point' perhaps means that it isn't pure market share, but something else that causes the tip. And maybe we should be going after that something instead of market share.
There's nothing sacred about marriage in the same way there's nothing sacred about the Easter bunny...it's a secular ritual that Christianity has coopted. Or, alternately, it's a secular ritual that has coopted Christianity.
But anyway, there have been some singular notable instances of violations of their rights in the past decade, but they've been able to get redress through the legal system.
But I think gay people have already altered public opinion enough, and I think they think that also. At least, they've altered it enough in areas they actually are trying to get gay marriage.
Exactly. If we wanted to reward childbearing the easiest way would be to reward childbearing, not some insane hypothetical reason for approving marriage, which never once appeared until this whole gay marriage thing came up.
It's really amazing how far some people will go in an attempt to make their stance anything but pure bigotry. Suddenly, marriage is about having kids. Hey, you loons, if marriage is about having kids, why do we let people get marriage and have contraceptives? Why do we let infertile couples have marriages? More importantly, why do we let couples where one of them is infertile get married?
And, assuming the point of marriage is to encourage having children, why, exactly, should we stop gay people...they already aren't going to have children. (Ignoring adoption and artifical insemination, but bringing those up just weakens these crazy peoples' case even more.)
It seems like, logically, pretending that the purpose of marriage is to encourage people to have children (Which has, mysteriously, never needed encouraging before...look at China. Look at teen pregnancy.) it makes more sense stop a fertile person from marrying an infertile person, and removing themselves from childbearing, then it does to stop two gay people, who are rather unlike to have childen no matter what you do with them, unless you're considering forcing them to get married to fertile people of the opposite gender and have sex with them.
The real reason we have marriage is because at some point in your life you shift your family from your blood relatives, to a new family that consists of you and another person, and then manybe even some more people if you make them or adopt them. Gay people just want the right to have a new family that's recognized by law as their family.
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I automatically said no, like I do to all extended warranties for cheap stuff, and as I was paying my brain caught up with my ears and I started laughing.
There is no purpose whatsoever to mail-in rebates except to steal money from customers. Not a single one. Sometimes they're just stealing from the lazy and actually give ten dollars to people willing to spend a few hours to get everything in order, sometimes they create impossible processes, sometimes they just outright never send the money and hope the customer has forgotten about it two months later.
Maybe if more people abused them they'd stop advertising them as actual prices, or even stop using them altogether.
I thought everyone knew that trick.
Um...no. Stream turbines generate electricity by transferring heat into the enviroment. I don't know in what universe you're from where you can directly turn heat into electricity, but in this universe we obey the laws of thermodynamics. We use heat imbalances to generate motion, and the motion to generate electricity. You can never end up with less heat, you just end up with a more average distribution.
Completely and utterly wrong. In most solar cells, if the photon has less energy than the bandgap, the photon *passes through* the material. Waste heat is generated from photons that have *too much* energy.
And then the photons just magically vanish from the universe. No, wait. They get absorbed by whatever's behind the material. Which in theory could be a material that wants slightly more energetic photons, but in reality isn't, because no one's figured out how to do that for more than two layers. And making those are so much more expensive that no one bothers to do even that.
Silicon panels will tend to run warmer than the surrounding ground, because some of the incoming photons' energy gets transferred into vibrating the crystal lattice to create the electron-hole pairs. Direct bandgap semiconductors don't do this. Indium gallium nitride cells, for example, will absorb almost no heat energy on Earth.
Oh, sure, if we use magically grown indium gallium nitride crystals, we can get 70% efficent conversion into electricity, in theory. Here in the real world, of course, absolutely no solar cells are made of multiple levels of indium gallium nitride, each doped at exactly the right layer. And they won't, because covering most of a state in that would cost more than just driving to the sun and grabbing some hydrogen and bring it back here to burn. (I'm not entirely certain I'm exagerating there.) They'd generate much less electricity in their lifetime than they'd cost to produce.
But, I will admit, if we did that, sure, it would give off less heat than the enviroment did before...which results in exactly the same problem I started this with. It's exactly the same climatic changes! I guess you could get around it by alternating solar panels with areas painted black, though.
And when you're trying to make water boil, yes, you are absorbing heat that's normally reflected. And you don't even have possiblity to convert it into electricity.
I don't really understand your objection there. Solar heating of water generates more waste heat than solar panels. It's not like you can magically lower the temperature of the stream when you're done. You have to dump the heat somewhere, absolutely none of it is converted into electricity.
As for normal solar panels absorbing less heat, they don't, not in any noticable amounts. Solar panels work by their atoms absorbing photons and knocking knocking out electrons. If the photon isn't energetic enough to knock electrons, the energy just gets absorbed, and if the photon is too energetic, the photon leaves and the rest of the energy is absorbed. All absorbed energy is heat.
The problem comes about when you realize that the energy of a photon is the frequency, and photons from the sun come in, duh, all frequencies, minus the ones that don't make it to the ground. (And we can ignore those that go right though the solar panel, cause they're going to be going right through the ground, too.)
So...what we've basically got is a complete inability to match the frequencies. Each type of atom will match one frequency exactly. Anything under that frequency gets entirely turned into heat, and anything over that frequency gets the left over energy turn into heat.
That's not to imply, of course, that solar panels are a waste of time. They're just very inefficent, because the photoelectric effect is very inefficient when used on multiple frequencies of light, and the sun is about as much 'multiple frequencies of light' as you can get. Usually, they're just on a few.
And, exactly because they're so inefficent, they're made to be a little reflective as possible, because every reflected photon is one you're not making into any energy at all. They aren't 'shiny black', they are as close to non-reflective as possible.
But if you don't believe me, there's a simple way to check this. Find a solar panel that's been in the sun all day. Touch it and the ground at the same time.
Since when can we amend the state constitution by voting for a description of the amendment? Shouldn't we see the actual amendment? What the hell is going on here?
And how can a proposed amendment dictate the form the voting for it will take?
Every vote should have a randomly generated serial number with it. It should end up on the printout, and in the database. We obviously don't want it trackable to the voter, so it should not be a timestamp or a counter. And there's the issue of people somehow remembering their serial number, and using it to prove who they voted for, so it should not even be readable, just a barcode. Or possibly invisible ink. (Of course, if you think about it, there's nothing stopping people from making a unique mark on their paper ballot right now, and telling someone about that mark, and them watching the counters to see it. Or even a delibrate overvote in some unimportant category.)
But when you have that, you don't need to worry about vote tampering. You can (and should) verify the count hasn't been tampered with by just taking out a few dozen paper ballots and checking them against the computer. (Not that you shouldn't count them all anyway.)
See, at that point it's stopped 'do two completely unrelated tallies', it's 'independently count every ballot twice and compare the results', which would be much tougher to alter.
And we've managed to do it while keeping a secret ballot.
People who think there's a hard line between sci-fi and fantasy need to glance at Pern. I, personally, don't think that's an example of good writing, but defining that as either sci-fi or fantasy is absurd. It's fantasy following sci-fi rules.
Or compare, say, Discworld and HHGttG. They've both saterical societies as a reflection on the real world. HHGttG has 'magic' in it, with improbablity fields floating around, ghosts, total perspective vortexes, etc, and Discworld has of technology hitting it left and right, completely turning the world upside down. They're a lot closer to each other than, say, HHGttG and 2001, a Space Oddessy, or Discworld and the Chronicles of Thomas Convenant.
And, yes, historical worlds are not sci-fi. I would classify them as a third category, next to sci-fi and fantasy...of course, like I said, those categories are plenty unclear in the first place.
The question then becomes: Are solar panels converting that extra energy to electricity enough to offset the collected amount? The answer is, at this point, no, not via photoelectric processes.
You can get there by just going to heat and running something off the heat, but it's rather difficult to build a heat-based power plant over several hundred square miles. (And for single-user solar plants, operating a steam generator in the basement is a bit excessive. But we're not talking about them.)
So now the questions now, are: How much more heat would enough solar panels to run the nation give off than current power plants in use, and would concentrating all that heat into the air in a few hundred square miles alter the climate more or less than operating hundreds of power plants around the county, many of which dump heat to water, not the air?
I don't know the answer to those questions, but they aren't trivial. The mid-continent desert in north america, despite appearences, is not pointless. Doing something that increased its temperature by five degrees is quite possibly a very bad idea.
Why do all these people who are adamently against global warming like to propose giant areas covered in solar panels? Won't that, um...make a hell of a lot of heat from all the light that should have reflected into space?
Or did we magically come up with solar panels that generated large amounts of electricity and no heat while I wasn't looking?
Microwave energy has exactly the same problem, BTW.
With the president, though, it's a bit different, as we're electing electors, and electors can pick someone else. So if Bush were to die between now and the electoral college voting (Assuming, in the end, he did win.), Cheney would probably pick someone, and the electorial college would vote for Cheney/Whoever. Whereas if Bush died after the electorial vote, but before the crowning, Bush/Cheney would be elected, and Cheney would be sworn in as president, and have to pick a new VP then.
And, of course, either way, he already had to pick a VP for the end of this term. (Well, he doesn't have to, but he will.)
What I'm now wondering is what happens if electors die? I guess the state governments appoint someone to replace them.
Florida, however, definatively doesn't have any way of recounting, thus solving those pesky questions about who won once and for all. Interestingly enough, electronic voting was only used in the traditionally democratic areas. So you wouldn't even need to change votes, all you'd need to do is drop them randomly, or even 'misplace' them, like what happened here in Georgia in 2002.
Dropping one out of every 22 votes is much less obviously purposeful if someone catches, and is nicely ironic...traditionally, democratic areas are poorer and get the crappiest voting equipment, which doesn't register votes, but Fort Laurderdale ended up with the more expensive, even crappier equipment, which we have no idea if it registered votes.
TO
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THEMSELVES
LOOK
MORE
ACCURATE
You follow now? Having a more accurate prediction makes the network look better, especially since a) They were really incompetant last time, and b) They were unable to call something like a third of the important elections in any reasonable amount of time this time.
Why? Because you're not voting for that person, you're voting for his electors. If he has no electors, they will just throw the vote away.
This also solves the problem of the fact that, in the US, more than one person is named 'Ralph Nader'. (Nader wasn't on the ballot in this state.) If only one Ralph Nader registered electors here, and 'Ralph Nader' wins, those electors go.
I don't know what happens if two write-ins with the same name are registered...but I think all presidential candidates must belong to a party, so what you'd do is write the party in. (Registering a party, incidently, is basically the same as registering electors...it's a nominal fee.)
That said, they really should summarize all the invalid write-ins and publish them, if only to see what people who didn't vote for anyone thought.
The difference is, neither banks, nor most customers, want anything wrong to happen at an ATM.
If something goes wrong in favor of the bank, the customer will come in screaming bloody murder, and walk out a little distrustful of ATMs but not that worried. If the ATM makes an error in favor of the customer, the bank will quietly and quickly fix it.
With electronic voting machines, there is a) the inability to discover errors, and b) possible motive for the company to make an 'error'. Neither of those exist with ATMs. There's absolutely no incentive for the designers, or even most of the users, to make 'mistakes'.
By pieces, I meant the word processing bit, the spreadsheet bit, etc.
Which, incidentally, is also where the term 'gypsy' came from...it means someone from Egypt. Of course, gypsies are not, in fact, from Egypt, rather like the Pennsylvania Dutch who are, in fact, from Germany, or the Indians, who are not from India.
Damn that thing takes forever. And you can't compile it in pieces, at least not via portage. (I don't think you can compile it pieces under any circumstances, actually.)
With my Athlon XP 1800 and 196 megs of RAM, it took something like 28 hours to compile. I can easily imagine a 400 taking five days or longer.
'portage' is only really an advantage over Red Hat. Other distros have ways to get packages via something like emerge, like apt-get. Even BSD.
But USE flags are amazing. With other distros, you have to use the default packages. This either means you get support for stuff you don't care about (And have to download the dependencies you don't care about.), or you don't, and cannot, get support for those things. Yes, yes, you can download source packages and compile them, but it happens automatically on Gentoo.
Anyone who thinks you get a noticable speed increase from compling 95% of the things yourself is silly. There might be a slight speed increase from a few things, but it's not noticable. (What is noticable, though, is the new prelink support. That's sped up KDE startup at least 20%.) If you want speed, stop using gcc, download icc and use it. (I've actually been tempted to compile some Gentoo packages with that and see what happens.)
Now, what is nice, is that almost every package, being source, is available for all Gentoo architectures. (Assuming the program actually works on said architecture.) None of that trying to track down mod_mysql_auth compiled for the PowerPC. As long as you boot into Linux via LiveCD or, really, any way, you can install Gentoo with any packages you want.
And I've never seen or heard of these supposed Gentoo fanboys. I, personally, think Gentoo is the best distro out there for people who want to do a lot of tweaking. It's not the best for people who want a stable enviroment, like a server, (Yes, sometimes things break. It's still getting its footing. And you can shoot yourself in the foot easily if you ignore warnings.) Debian is the best there. It's not the best for a prepared desktop enviroment, I'd go with Mandrake there, or SuSE.
A 'tipping point' perhaps means that it isn't pure market share, but something else that causes the tip. And maybe we should be going after that something instead of market share.
But anyway, there have been some singular notable instances of violations of their rights in the past decade, but they've been able to get redress through the legal system.
But I think gay people have already altered public opinion enough, and I think they think that also. At least, they've altered it enough in areas they actually are trying to get gay marriage.
Like I said last election: I voted Libertarian, but only because I knew they wouldn't win.
It's really amazing how far some people will go in an attempt to make their stance anything but pure bigotry. Suddenly, marriage is about having kids. Hey, you loons, if marriage is about having kids, why do we let people get marriage and have contraceptives? Why do we let infertile couples have marriages? More importantly, why do we let couples where one of them is infertile get married?
And, assuming the point of marriage is to encourage having children, why, exactly, should we stop gay people...they already aren't going to have children. (Ignoring adoption and artifical insemination, but bringing those up just weakens these crazy peoples' case even more.)
It seems like, logically, pretending that the purpose of marriage is to encourage people to have children (Which has, mysteriously, never needed encouraging before...look at China. Look at teen pregnancy.) it makes more sense stop a fertile person from marrying an infertile person, and removing themselves from childbearing, then it does to stop two gay people, who are rather unlike to have childen no matter what you do with them, unless you're considering forcing them to get married to fertile people of the opposite gender and have sex with them.
The real reason we have marriage is because at some point in your life you shift your family from your blood relatives, to a new family that consists of you and another person, and then manybe even some more people if you make them or adopt them. Gay people just want the right to have a new family that's recognized by law as their family.
You mean, like Diabold is being accused of doing?
It's trivial to do. You just rig the machine so it will break election night, and then you come in and fix it.
Um...so? Quite a lot of organizations have a much much much more restrictive scope than that!
For all you 'ALCU is an evil liberal organization' types, take a look at this .