At the time of the show's start, Courney Cox was far and away the most recognizable celebrity on the show, due to her recent stint on the failed CBS drama "China Beach"
China Beach? I don't remember C.Cox in China Beach (presuming we are talking about the same China Beach, the one with Dana Delany, Marg Helgenberger and Robert Picardo).
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
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As others have said, there is PEAR::DB and adoDb, but I dont' like either of them very much. PEAR is just plain klunky (and heavy) IMHO, and ado is a bit wierd if you ask me.
It's not hard to write your own abstraction layer though, that way you can get it just how you like it:)
This is only *one* way of running a trial. Some countries practice guilty until proven innocent, including as it happens, Indonesia.
In the "western" system of proving guilt over a presumption of innocence we have the possibility of releasing (perhaps dangerously) guilty people because we couldn't adequately prove thier guilt, but it's very hard for innocent people to get locked up.
However in countries where we must prove innocence over a presumption of guilt we have the possibility of locking up innocent people because they couldn't adequately prove thier innocence, but it is very hard for guilty people to be erroneously released, without bribery of course.
Six of one, half dozen of the other really, both systems have advantages, both have problems. You have to decide for yourself if you would rather have some guilty people get away with it, or some innocent people serve time erroneously.
Introduce yourself, tell them why you hav decided to write to them, why you are looking for a job, highlight the areas of your curriculum vitae that are particularly relevant to the business area, personalise it a bit (so it doesn't look like a form letter, they can see you've actuall put some thought into it) and thank them for thier time.
You might want to also include a "business card" with your name, primary skills and contact details - while the CV might get binned, the business card might just make it to the card file.
Because IN THE MOVIE they are referred to as mecha (mechanicals), while humans are orga (organics).
For example in the quote spoken by Dr Know...
Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand For the world's more full of weeping, than you can understand.
Your journey will be perilous but the reward worth the price. In his book 'How can a robot become Human' Professor Allen Hobby writes of the process that will turn MECHA into ORGA. Our "Blue Fairy" does exist in one place only At the end of the world where the Lions Weep This is the place where dreams are born.
Or from Joe in..
Is Blue Fairy mecha, orga, man or woman?
indicating that mecha is seperate to all orga and that orga is a more all encompassing term (presumadly covering all organics) than man and woman togethor.
Or right at he beginning of the movie spoken by the female collegue of Professor Hobby...
If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that Mecha in return?
Or in the sequence with Joe and a client...
Joe: "Is this you first time with something like me?" Woman: "I've never been with Mecha." Joe: "That makes two of us."
I think that now you can see that mecha is the correct term for description of the robots, at least in common usage in the 22nd century portion of the movie (although David does refer to himself as a robot so we know that is at least a technically correct term even if it's not in colloquial usage).
ARGH! For fucks sake, they are NOT ALIENS. They are the mecha! How the hell do people come to think they are aliens?!
The humans built the mecha, but eventually the humans destroyed themselves through thier greed and hate and predjudice and wastefullness and... it was the robots who inherited the earth, and learned to evolve themselves into the beings we see at the end of the film.
They are the compassionate ones, the good ones, they are the ones who help David, thier very distant ancestor, who allow him the love he sought, and bring him peace, while the humans could show him only disdain and apathy at best.
More than that, a parsec is a unit of distance derived from 1 AU (astronomical unit, roughly the distance between the sun and the mean orbit of the earth around it).
This means that a parsec has no meaning for people not from earth, or at least from a planet with a very similar orbit to the earth around it's own star.
One might say that's OK, perhaps Han comes from such a planet, but it stands to reason that in a galaxy where there are so many sentient beings in constant contact, coming from many different planets (and moons), that a parsec would be wholly unsuitable to convey information.
You might say that "yeah, but remember all these languages are being "translated" for us into english, Parsec is just the 'human' trsnslation of the distance measurement they use". But that's highly improbable, that thier universal distance measurement is exactly or even closely equivalent to a parsec.
At the end of the day, we have to remember that Star Wars is not science fiction, it's fantasy, there is a big difference, in fantasy the author doesn't need to (nor should they) explain stuff, in sci-fi they do, or at least write explainable stuff.
Not arguing one way or the other, but that has nothing to do with case sensitivity. It's common convention, in both case sensitive and insensitive languages for constants to be UPPERCASE, and for variables to be camelCase or under_scored. Whether the language is case sensitive or not has nothing to do with the matter.
Another vote for a used Miata (AKA Mazda MX5, Eunos Roadster depending on where you are), best bang for your buck bar nothing. Close to the ground, top down on a sunny day winding round the hills at speed...mmmmmmmm/me looks out window
People dismiss them as girly or gay cars, they'd change thier mind if they drove one:)
Whenever I "fix" a computer (invariably because somebody had been browsing porn and had caught a multitude of spyware and perhaps the occasional virus) the first thing I do after getting it clean is install firefox, remove IE from the desktop, change firefox's desktop icon to be that of IE, and rename the icon to "The Internet".
Nobody complains, to them it does exactly the same thing, except it's faster, better and won't leave them quite so vulnerable.
Somebody should come up with a firefox installer and skin that does something like the above, and looks like IE to boot.
Time travel is a logical fallacy. If a theory allows us to posit a possible time travel scenario that doesn't mean that time travel is possible; it means that our theory is fucked up in some fashion and needs to be improved.
Or it means you havn't considered that humankind doesn't yet know enough about the dimension of time or the physics of the universe in general to know that time travel is possible.
It might be possible, probably not through the ways we have currently considered though as the theories we have now are probably incorrect but they seem to work well enough.
Time travel is not a logical fallacy, you might be able to provide a logical proof showing that a particular type of time travel with particular assumptions is impossible, but there are other sets of assumptions and rules that can provide for time travel, perhaps ones nobody has thought of yet.
We don't know very much about time really especially not at the extremes, to most it's "just this thing, you know", but once you start really thinking about what time is you find out there is so much more to it, and very likely so much more we don't know yet.
Time, space and the speed of light are funny things, don't presume that you can state a property as fact.
To save people the exercise (and because black holes are a red herring, perhaps you could use the power of a BH to power it but it's not a time machine on it's own)...
Step 1. Make a wormhole, preferably large enough to travel through, or at least large enough to send data through. Step 2. Put one end of the hole on a spacecraft and send it out into space as close to the speed of light as you can. Step 3. After a while turn around and bring it back. The end of the worm hole that went near light speed is now "older" than the end that stayed where it was (time passed more slowly for the moving end relative to the stationary end). Step 4. Send stuff in the older end of the hole and have it come out in the future, send stuff in the newer end of the hole and have it come out in the past.
The catch of course is that you can never go back earlier than you created the hole, you can only travel in discreet units of time (unit being the time difference between the ends), and you can not travel into "the future" (you can only travel forward from the past, not the present).
even though I love that monologue, I agree with its deletion
So because some people who wouldn't know funny if it hit them over the head think that the film is thrusting Aethism down thier throat with a 30 second bit of humor then we should remove one of the most intellectually amusing parts of the story?
Sigh. Why can't people just grow the fuck up and learn to laugh at themselves sometimes.
Results 1 - 10 of about 12,200 for "nine tenths of the law". (0.25 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 851 for "nine points of the law". (0.07 seconds)
Read into that what you will. It's a very old proverb, possibly going as far back as the roman empire, I imagine that it's been munged a bit from it's original meaning (which may well have been that there were nine points of law devoted to possession).
Tenths is definatly the modern version in to say that possession is the overriding factor in law - 9 points wouldn't be much in the hundreds, maybe thousands of laws we have in modern times.
It does not impart information to use "points", if I say "I have 9 units of the world supply of widgets" you do not know if that's a large proportion or not, it imparts no useful information on my affect on the world supply of widgets, if I say I have "nine tenths of the world supply of wigets" you know I'm very nearly a monopoly on the supply of widgets.
All that said, it's unlikely anybody will ever know which is the original version of the proverb as that is has been lost into the mists of time.
Yes, but this is a different thing to marriage as it is being discussed.
Marriage for the sake of this argument consists of two facets
1. The religious aspect of a "union under god". 2. The legal aspect of the rights and privileges granted to "recognized" couples.
neither of which is in any way related to evolution, not that "evolution" is a valid "argument" against gay marriage anyway.
If we break apart those two facets, as I firmly believe we should, and evaluate only the second (the first is not the job of the government, nor anybody not a member of the particular religion), then surely it is clear that gay couples should have equal access to getting these legal rights and privileges? How can you argue against it?
Sexuality is a genetic thing. Ever heard of the X and Y chromozones?
Slip of the tongue, I meant, as you know I did, sexual preference.
He might have been trying to ascertain an insulin to carb ratio for you so he can tell you how much insulin you require per gram of carbohydrate.
With that knowledge you can pretty accuratly adjust the insulin you take prior to a meal to suit the meal. All very well, but frankly it's too much bother for me, I just play it by ear.
You sometimes just have to take things into your own hands. The specialists at the end of the day can only give you a recommendation based on what they think your life is like, only you know what is really going on and only you can properly treat your diabetes.
If I stuck to what my doctors said I'd probably be miserable, trying to eat 6 times a day at the right times, taking set doses, having to try and keep regular hours which just are not in my nature.
Doctors don't know it all, you know your diabetes better than anybody.
Are you saying that I neglect my diabetes? My Hemoglobin A1C tests are always under 7. Anything under 7 is considered the range for a non diabetic.
No! Hba1c of 7 is to be admired! I'm saying that you're doing well, you detected the hypoglycemia in time, you couldn't have predicted that you would have the problem but you recognized it when it happened.
As you're using a pump, I imagine your diabetes doesn't really affect your life much - would your life be different without it, of course, would it be better, well that depends on the person - for me, not noticibly (except I could be a commercial pilot instead of only recreationally), for you, perhaps it would.
But I think in the general case diabetes can be managed such that it's impact on the lifestyle of the individual can be minimal. It's a compromise of course, you can't get as great control if you lead a hectic life, but you can get *good enough* control without to much impact.
I would have much rather detected it when it hit 50 or so, not 19 (or 38 for that matter). How many people do know that can drop to 19 and still be coherent?
19 (1-2 mmol/L) is very low, by that point I'd be almost incoherent but not so much I couldn't treat it. You were obviously coherent enough to treat yourself (and not make a scene at the church).
In this case it's your pump at fault anyway, you can't say "my pump unexpectedly failed, so that means diabetes is unpredictable and hard to control" - now you are speaking in (false) generalities. Conversely, had your pump worked normally you could have accuratly predicted that you would have stable BG readings all day.
you reach 3 (W[ever]TF that means)
3mmol/L (~54 mg/dl), mmol/L (millimol/liter) is the international standard measurement for blood glucose, mg/dl (milligrams/deciliter) is the old measurement which is now pretty much only used in America.
diabetic that reaches 3 will feel the same way
Of course, everything is always in the general case and everybody is affected differently, through no fault of thier own.
But in that general case I stand by my statement that diabetes is for all intents and purposes treatable, predictable, and should not be a hinderence on life (unless you want to do one of the prohibited activities such as be a commercial pilot, truck driver, diver etc..)
The majority decided against it. If it is allowed against the will of the majority, it takes their freedom of self-detemination (THE most important freedom you have) away.
What about the minority's self-determination! And how does giving this right at all affect the SELF-determination (determining what one's SELF does) of anybody else.
Let me say that again... How does allowing it at all affect the majority's ability to determine thier own path through life?
The sun will still rise, ordinary marriages will still go on, everything will be completely normal, except that now some people who were denied rights and privileges through no fault of thier own will have them restored.
What is wrong with giving people rights and privileges that they have been denied because of the way they were made?
You have to ask yourself if you support the notion of equal rights for blacks, and how this issue is any different - gays are denied rights and privileges available to straights, why should that be tolerated?
NB: I'm straight, and live in New Zealand. Thankfully the religious right does not rule this land.
and why is it, that because you want to see 2 girls make out
I think that the reason that many guys like to see 2 girls make out is that they have a morbid fear of "catching teh gay" if they even see a penis, let alone watch it in action.
Funny thing is that these are probably the same people who are less straight than the majority, hence they know that should they see a handsome penis they might feel some arousal. So by denying themselves this they only deny themselves harmless pleasure really.
Personally, I think girl on girl is rather dull. I guess a lesbian would disagree. Different strokes for different folks (excuse the innuendo).
Here are three reasons... 1. What the hell does marriage have to do with evolution?! Do you honestly believe that the only way people can breed is if they get married? Answer me this, Bill and Bob get married, how, in your mind, does this magically enable them to pass thier genes on - does one of them suddenly grow a uterous?!
2. Explain homosexuality in any of the other species that exhibit it. You know your argument that evolution says that homosexuality cannot exist in nature? Well, I just contradticted it.
3. Who the hell are you to tell somebody else, who you have never met, who will probably never meet you, who will have zero impact on you, who they may or may not become legally bound to with all the rights and privileges associated with that.
Look, sexuality is not a genetic thing, it's not a learned thing, it's just a specific setting on a scale for each individual.
Some of us are heavily pegged towards the hetero end, some of us towards the homo end, most of us are on the hetero side of the center, a few more on the homo side of the center and a handful of us are smack bang in the middle.
It's not something to be changed, it's just diversity in action.
I don't think anybody can seriously say that that are 100% hetero or 100% homo, our species is not built that way - we need human contact and at the end of the day it doesn't matter which gender.
As for the marriage debate - GET RID OF THE RELIGION and everything becomes simple, gay people and straight people deserve to have the same legal rights, privileges and processes available to them, marriage included.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in NZ using a Clear/Paradise connection are you?
o de.gogo.co.nz/
For some reason thier transparent proxy sometimes craps itself over that domain name (and only that domain name).
While it's fine from elsewhere...
http://www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/+cfg=32/http://c
Sorry I got confused. I wasn't thinking of Open All Hours, but Are You Being Served?
...Mensweaaaaar...
The first couple of seasons of AYBS are humorous, but afer that things start getting repetitive, and unfunny.
At the time of the show's start, Courney Cox was far and away the most recognizable celebrity on the show, due to her recent stint on the failed CBS drama "China Beach"
China Beach? I don't remember C.Cox in China Beach (presuming we are talking about the same China Beach, the one with Dana Delany, Marg Helgenberger and Robert Picardo).
IMDB doesn't seem to know about C.Cox in China Beach either... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001073/
As others have said, there is PEAR::DB and adoDb, but I dont' like either of them very much. PEAR is just plain klunky (and heavy) IMHO, and ado is a bit wierd if you ask me.
:)
It's not hard to write your own abstraction layer though, that way you can get it just how you like it
innocence until proven guilty
This is only *one* way of running a trial. Some countries practice guilty until proven innocent, including as it happens, Indonesia.
In the "western" system of proving guilt over a presumption of innocence we have the possibility of releasing (perhaps dangerously) guilty people because we couldn't adequately prove thier guilt, but it's very hard for innocent people to get locked up.
However in countries where we must prove innocence over a presumption of guilt we have the possibility of locking up innocent people because they couldn't adequately prove thier innocence, but it is very hard for guilty people to be erroneously released, without bribery of course.
Six of one, half dozen of the other really, both systems have advantages, both have problems. You have to decide for yourself if you would rather have some guilty people get away with it, or some innocent people serve time erroneously.
Introduce yourself, tell them why you hav decided to write to them, why you are looking for a job, highlight the areas of your curriculum vitae that are particularly relevant to the business area, personalise it a bit (so it doesn't look like a form letter, they can see you've actuall put some thought into it) and thank them for thier time.
You might want to also include a "business card" with your name, primary skills and contact details - while the CV might get binned, the business card might just make it to the card file.
For example in the quote spoken by Dr Know...
Or from Joe in..
indicating that mecha is seperate to all orga and that orga is a more all encompassing term (presumadly covering all organics) than man and woman togethor.
Or right at he beginning of the movie spoken by the female collegue of Professor Hobby...
Or in the sequence with Joe and a client...
I think that now you can see that mecha is the correct term for description of the robots, at least in common usage in the 22nd century portion of the movie (although David does refer to himself as a robot so we know that is at least a technically correct term even if it's not in colloquial usage).
When the aliens discover the frozen boy robot
ARGH! For fucks sake, they are NOT ALIENS. They are the mecha! How the hell do people come to think they are aliens?!
The humans built the mecha, but eventually the humans destroyed themselves through thier greed and hate and predjudice and wastefullness and... it was the robots who inherited the earth, and learned to evolve themselves into the beings we see at the end of the film.
They are the compassionate ones, the good ones, they are the ones who help David, thier very distant ancestor, who allow him the love he sought, and bring him peace, while the humans could show him only disdain and apathy at best.
Aliens. Bloody hell.
At least you liked the movie.
Are you...local?
More than that, a parsec is a unit of distance derived from 1 AU (astronomical unit, roughly the distance between the sun and the mean orbit of the earth around it).
This means that a parsec has no meaning for people not from earth, or at least from a planet with a very similar orbit to the earth around it's own star.
One might say that's OK, perhaps Han comes from such a planet, but it stands to reason that in a galaxy where there are so many sentient beings in constant contact, coming from many different planets (and moons), that a parsec would be wholly unsuitable to convey information.
You might say that "yeah, but remember all these languages are being "translated" for us into english, Parsec is just the 'human' trsnslation of the distance measurement they use". But that's highly improbable, that thier universal distance measurement is exactly or even closely equivalent to a parsec.
At the end of the day, we have to remember that Star Wars is not science fiction, it's fantasy, there is a big difference, in fantasy the author doesn't need to (nor should they) explain stuff, in sci-fi they do, or at least write explainable stuff.
Not arguing one way or the other, but that has nothing to do with case sensitivity. It's common convention, in both case sensitive and insensitive languages for constants to be UPPERCASE, and for variables to be camelCase or under_scored. Whether the language is case sensitive or not has nothing to do with the matter.
Or you could just send back javascript code and eval(.responseText). Saves that whole parsing large amounts of XML, saves all that XML verbosity.
Another vote for a used Miata (AKA Mazda MX5, Eunos Roadster depending on where you are), best bang for your buck bar nothing. Close to the ground, top down on a sunny day winding round the hills at speed...mmmmmmmm /me looks out window
:)
People dismiss them as girly or gay cars, they'd change thier mind if they drove one
Whenever I "fix" a computer (invariably because somebody had been browsing porn and had caught a multitude of spyware and perhaps the occasional virus) the first thing I do after getting it clean is install firefox, remove IE from the desktop, change firefox's desktop icon to be that of IE, and rename the icon to "The Internet".
Nobody complains, to them it does exactly the same thing, except it's faster, better and won't leave them quite so vulnerable.
Somebody should come up with a firefox installer and skin that does something like the above, and looks like IE to boot.
Time travel is a logical fallacy. If a theory allows us to posit a possible time travel scenario that doesn't mean that time travel is possible; it means that our theory is fucked up in some fashion and needs to be improved.
Or it means you havn't considered that humankind doesn't yet know enough about the dimension of time or the physics of the universe in general to know that time travel is possible.
It might be possible, probably not through the ways we have currently considered though as the theories we have now are probably incorrect but they seem to work well enough.
Time travel is not a logical fallacy, you might be able to provide a logical proof showing that a particular type of time travel with particular assumptions is impossible, but there are other sets of assumptions and rules that can provide for time travel, perhaps ones nobody has thought of yet.
We don't know very much about time really especially not at the extremes, to most it's "just this thing, you know", but once you start really thinking about what time is you find out there is so much more to it, and very likely so much more we don't know yet.
Time, space and the speed of light are funny things, don't presume that you can state a property as fact.
To save people the exercise (and because black holes are a red herring, perhaps you could use the power of a BH to power it but it's not a time machine on it's own)...
Step 1. Make a wormhole, preferably large enough to travel through, or at least large enough to send data through.
Step 2. Put one end of the hole on a spacecraft and send it out into space as close to the speed of light as you can.
Step 3. After a while turn around and bring it back. The end of the worm hole that went near light speed is now "older" than the end that stayed where it was (time passed more slowly for the moving end relative to the stationary end).
Step 4. Send stuff in the older end of the hole and have it come out in the future, send stuff in the newer end of the hole and have it come out in the past.
The catch of course is that you can never go back earlier than you created the hole, you can only travel in discreet units of time (unit being the time difference between the ends), and you can not travel into "the future" (you can only travel forward from the past, not the present).
even though I love that monologue, I agree with its deletion
So because some people who wouldn't know funny if it hit them over the head think that the film is thrusting Aethism down thier throat with a 30 second bit of humor then we should remove one of the most intellectually amusing parts of the story?
Sigh. Why can't people just grow the fuck up and learn to laugh at themselves sometimes.
Results 1 - 10 of about 12,200 for "nine tenths of the law". (0.25 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 851 for "nine points of the law". (0.07 seconds)
Read into that what you will. It's a very old proverb, possibly going as far back as the roman empire, I imagine that it's been munged a bit from it's original meaning (which may well have been that there were nine points of law devoted to possession).
Tenths is definatly the modern version in to say that possession is the overriding factor in law - 9 points wouldn't be much in the hundreds, maybe thousands of laws we have in modern times.
It does not impart information to use "points", if I say "I have 9 units of the world supply of widgets" you do not know if that's a large proportion or not, it imparts no useful information on my affect on the world supply of widgets, if I say I have "nine tenths of the world supply of wigets" you know I'm very nearly a monopoly on the supply of widgets.
All that said, it's unlikely anybody will ever know which is the original version of the proverb as that is has been lost into the mists of time.
Nine TENTHS of the law, not nine "points".
There are animals that mate for life.
Yes, but this is a different thing to marriage as it is being discussed.
Marriage for the sake of this argument consists of two facets
1. The religious aspect of a "union under god".
2. The legal aspect of the rights and privileges granted to "recognized" couples.
neither of which is in any way related to evolution, not that "evolution" is a valid "argument" against gay marriage anyway.
If we break apart those two facets, as I firmly believe we should, and evaluate only the second (the first is not the job of the government, nor anybody not a member of the particular religion), then surely it is clear that gay couples should have equal access to getting these legal rights and privileges? How can you argue against it?
Sexuality is a genetic thing. Ever heard of the X and Y chromozones?
Slip of the tongue, I meant, as you know I did, sexual preference.
He might have been trying to ascertain an insulin to carb ratio for you so he can tell you how much insulin you require per gram of carbohydrate.
With that knowledge you can pretty accuratly adjust the insulin you take prior to a meal to suit the meal. All very well, but frankly it's too much bother for me, I just play it by ear.
You sometimes just have to take things into your own hands. The specialists at the end of the day can only give you a recommendation based on what they think your life is like, only you know what is really going on and only you can properly treat your diabetes.
If I stuck to what my doctors said I'd probably be miserable, trying to eat 6 times a day at the right times, taking set doses, having to try and keep regular hours which just are not in my nature.
Doctors don't know it all, you know your diabetes better than anybody.
Are you saying that I neglect my diabetes? My Hemoglobin A1C tests are always under 7. Anything under 7 is considered the range for a non diabetic.
No! Hba1c of 7 is to be admired! I'm saying that you're doing well, you detected the hypoglycemia in time, you couldn't have predicted that you would have the problem but you recognized it when it happened.
As you're using a pump, I imagine your diabetes doesn't really affect your life much - would your life be different without it, of course, would it be better, well that depends on the person - for me, not noticibly (except I could be a commercial pilot instead of only recreationally), for you, perhaps it would.
But I think in the general case diabetes can be managed such that it's impact on the lifestyle of the individual can be minimal. It's a compromise of course, you can't get as great control if you lead a hectic life, but you can get *good enough* control without to much impact.
I would have much rather detected it when it hit 50 or so, not 19 (or 38 for that matter). How many people do know that can drop to 19 and still be coherent?
19 (1-2 mmol/L) is very low, by that point I'd be almost incoherent but not so much I couldn't treat it. You were obviously coherent enough to treat yourself (and not make a scene at the church).
In this case it's your pump at fault anyway, you can't say "my pump unexpectedly failed, so that means diabetes is unpredictable and hard to control" - now you are speaking in (false) generalities. Conversely, had your pump worked normally you could have accuratly predicted that you would have stable BG readings all day.
you reach 3 (W[ever]TF that means)
3mmol/L (~54 mg/dl), mmol/L (millimol/liter) is the international standard measurement for blood glucose, mg/dl (milligrams/deciliter) is the old measurement which is now pretty much only used in America.
diabetic that reaches 3 will feel the same way
Of course, everything is always in the general case and everybody is affected differently, through no fault of thier own.
But in that general case I stand by my statement that diabetes is for all intents and purposes treatable, predictable, and should not be a hinderence on life (unless you want to do one of the prohibited activities such as be a commercial pilot, truck driver, diver etc..)
The majority decided against it. If it is allowed against the will of the majority, it takes their freedom of self-detemination (THE most important freedom you have) away.
What about the minority's self-determination! And how does giving this right at all affect the SELF-determination (determining what one's SELF does) of anybody else.
Let me say that again...
How does allowing it at all affect the majority's ability to determine thier own path through life?
The sun will still rise, ordinary marriages will still go on, everything will be completely normal, except that now some people who were denied rights and privileges through no fault of thier own will have them restored.
What is wrong with giving people rights and privileges that they have been denied because of the way they were made?
You have to ask yourself if you support the notion of equal rights for blacks, and how this issue is any different - gays are denied rights and privileges available to straights, why should that be tolerated?
NB: I'm straight, and live in New Zealand. Thankfully the religious right does not rule this land.
and why is it, that because you want to see 2 girls make out
I think that the reason that many guys like to see 2 girls make out is that they have a morbid fear of "catching teh gay" if they even see a penis, let alone watch it in action.
Funny thing is that these are probably the same people who are less straight than the majority, hence they know that should they see a handsome penis they might feel some arousal. So by denying themselves this they only deny themselves harmless pleasure really.
Personally, I think girl on girl is rather dull. I guess a lesbian would disagree. Different strokes for different folks (excuse the innuendo).
Here are three reasons...
1. What the hell does marriage have to do with evolution?! Do you honestly believe that the only way people can breed is if they get married? Answer me this, Bill and Bob get married, how, in your mind, does this magically enable them to pass thier genes on - does one of them suddenly grow a uterous?!
2. Explain homosexuality in any of the other species that exhibit it. You know your argument that evolution says that homosexuality cannot exist in nature? Well, I just contradticted it.
3. Who the hell are you to tell somebody else, who you have never met, who will probably never meet you, who will have zero impact on you, who they may or may not become legally bound to with all the rights and privileges associated with that.
Look, sexuality is not a genetic thing, it's not a learned thing, it's just a specific setting on a scale for each individual.
Some of us are heavily pegged towards the hetero end, some of us towards the homo end, most of us are on the hetero side of the center, a few more on the homo side of the center and a handful of us are smack bang in the middle.
It's not something to be changed, it's just diversity in action.
I don't think anybody can seriously say that that are 100% hetero or 100% homo, our species is not built that way - we need human contact and at the end of the day it doesn't matter which gender.
As for the marriage debate - GET RID OF THE RELIGION and everything becomes simple, gay people and straight people deserve to have the same legal rights, privileges and processes available to them, marriage included.