I think that would be a fine solution, but I doubt the religious organizations would settle there either. I don't believe this has ever been 'only about the word'. They find it 'wrong' as a core belief. I honestly don't think they could ever abide by it's very existence.
I most certainly agree that this must be federal mandate, rather than a state one. I just don't see these being treated equally from state to state without federal involvement.
Not a legal right? To be recognized as married by an adjoining state? Are you kidding??
Join taxes are not a legal right? The government would beg to differ with you. Ask anyone who prepares tax returns and they will tell you that you cannot file jointly unless you are married. In case you hadn't noticed, there are federal taxes in addition to state taxes unless your living somewhere I'm not aware of that doesn't require federal taxes?
A United States citizen who is married can sponsor his or her non-American spouse for immigration into this country. Those with Civil Unions have no such privilege. This is a legal right granted by the federal government.
As to the hospital reference, you can't be that obtuse. Do you seriously think this has happened only a single time at some remote hospital. It happens every day.
Here's a few rights granted to married couples but denied to civil unions: Joint parental rights of children Joint adoption Status as "next-of-kin" for hospital visits and medical decisions Right to make a decision about the disposal of loved ones remains Immigration and residency for partners from other countries Crime victims recovery benefits Domestic violence protection orders Judicial protections and immunity Automatic inheritance in the absence of a will Public safety officers death benefits Spousal veterans benefits Social Security Medicare Joint filing of tax returns Wrongful death benefits for surviving partner and children Bereavement or sick leave to care for partner or children Child support Joint Insurance Plans Tax credits including: Child tax credit, Hope and lifetime learning credits Deferred Compensation for pension and IRAs Estate and gift tax benefits Welfare and public assistance Joint housing for elderly Credit protection Medical care for survivors and dependents of certain veterans
If you're going to claim "civil unions provide fewer legal rights than marriages", you're going to have to substantiate that claim, you can't hide behind "well a large portion of the country doesn't even allow gay civil unions".
For instance, the California 'domestic partnership' law grants almost the same rights as a marriage. It's actually was one of the best union laws, but even it did not go far enough. This one is so easy, even you will understand it right off. What happens when you cross the state line? Oh, I'm sorry, we don't recognize your 'union'. How is that equal to any 'marriage'? What about a divorce? Married couples can divorce anywhere. Civil unions? Not a chance. You have to live in the state in question, in some cases up to a year before you can dissolve the union. What about marrying to a foreign citizen? Doing so with 'marriage' will grant that person immediate citizenship. Not so with a civil union. Taxes? Forget it. The federal government doesn't recognize civil unions. You can't file jointly. There are also over a thousand benefits (yes, that's 1,000+) granted to married couples. Unions in the few states that allow them grant SOME of those, but not all. Not a single state in the union grants all of those protections.
Still think they are the same?
Do you seriously thing these civil unions as available today are in any way equivalent to a marriage? It is marriage lite. They should all be treated equally under the law. I don't care what word you use to describe it, be that civil union, or marriage, but it should apply to ALL, not just one class of citizens.
To turn your argument around, gay marriage supporters are willing to inflict real emotional damage on people over the definition of the word marriage, so why should they be surprised when their opposition feels the same way?
You forget that the folks who are already allowed to marry are not suffering in the slightest. They can visit their partners in the hospital. They can inherit. They can adopt. They are actively trying to prevent these folks from having the same rights. Do you feel that is right?
I happen to disagree with hate crimes legislation if there are already laws on the books that handle those crimes. I don't believe that someone should get a greater punishment under the law if the person they killed is gay, of a particular race, or what not.
I think the punishment should be based on the acts performed and not the race or class of the victim.
I think that is a perfectly reasonable solution if the civil union grants the same rights to anyone who enters into one and everyone who gets one gets a 'civil union'.
The word used is irrelevant as long as it applies to everyone. No 'marriage' for this group, but this group over here gets a 'civil union'. If they all get 'marriage' or they all get 'civil union', then it is fair to my eyes.
They are not asking for 'marriage' to be redefined. In it's current definition, it is a legal or binding contact (meaning recognized by law). The church injected this 'man and woman' bit with these defense of marriage acts.
I don't have to show you anything. There are 40+ states that demonstrate that fact rather plainly where these folks can't even have a civil union as they are treated like second class citizens.
You're willing to inflict real emotional damage on people over a definition of a word because you don't want someone else using it? You would prefer they accept a lesser yet same definition that is 'no different' except in name?
Would you accept such a thing? It's very different for people on the other end of that Greater Than > sign.
Your not disagreeing with me, so I'm not sure what your angle is here. Your piece about "will be later honored in good faith when necessary by the government" is key. Religious groups would deny this LEGAL recognition for no other reason than the fact that it conflicts with their FAITH.
When you involve the government, as this issue MUST as it involves legal benefits, then religion should not play a role.
It sounds like your trying to say the government "shouldn't" be involved without acknowledging the fact that the very basis of these legal challenges is to grant legal benefits to this group of people. There is no way that the government cannot be involved as it is the very basis for these legal challenges.
I understand separation of church and state very well. It is to protect you and your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) from the government. It is not to protect the government from you and your beliefs.
No, what I'm saying is that the church has no legal ownership of the word Marriage. it should have no problem if Gays want to call their union a marriage.
You stated: "most religious people who oppose gay marriage do not oppose gay civil unions". You're implying that somehow these organized religions somehow own the word marriage and can dictate who can and cannot use it.
These people just want to be married. They could care less what the church thinks of it. They are looking for the LEGAL benefits of marriage, which only the government can give. The church is irrelevant in the equation as is the word used to describe it. The whole argument that they are fine with 'civil unions' as opposed to 'marriage' is ridiculous as no one owns the word.
That argument reeks of 'back of the bus' for obvious reasons: "You can have 'marriage lite' and like it."
You forget that your peers are the ones representing you in congress, the ones writing your laws, and the people living next to you. They are indeed important in the law of the land.
If protections are needed for petitioners, then by all means, but if you read TFA, you'll see that there has been no harm to any who signed, although there has been some embarrassment. No one has broken the law and taken illegal retribution as of yet.
No one has hijacked anything. You can get married tomorrow, and never notify the government. You don't even have to involve them. Of course if you did so you wouldn't get any LEGAL benefits, which is where this is being argued. This has nothing to do with religion.
Same goes for getting a marriage license from the state. You don't have to involve the church either. The two are totally separate and should remain so.
That's a nice story, but unfortunately, it IS a civil process. It doesn't matter what it was 2000 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5 years ago. It doesn't matter who 'invented' the word "married", or what it meant to Jesus, the planters peanut guy, or whoever.
What is relevant is what it is right now. As far as the 'church' is concerned, it's just a word. Legally it is a whole other issue which has nothing to do with the Church.
If they were the same it would be called 'voting'. It is not. It is a public record and should be treated as such. If people do not have the strength of their convictions then they shouldn't sign it. That is the point of peer pressure. It molds society into what is acceptable and what is not.
If someone steps over the line and takes illegal retribution against someone who signed a petition after that info was made public then they would be in the wrong and handled under the law. If someone signs onto a discriminatory petition and is treated badly (but legally) as a result, once it becomes known, then they've reaped what they've sewn.
Because marriage is a civil union. You have it backwards. The whole church involvement is simply a nice ceremony. It has no authority to do anything until the government validates the marriage. You could get married all day in church and it would mean nothing until you file the proper papers. Try to get married five times and the church wouldn't know you had, and certainly couldn't come after you. The government on the other hand, certainly could.
Now from the other perspective, if you go the government, and get a marriage performed, there is no church needed.
See the difference?
This is the part that the church and organized religion fails to understand. They are taking a civil issue and trying to push their religious views into it. Granting civil unions, or even marriage to two people doesn't harm them in the slightest. It might affront their beliefs, but there is simply no harm done to them personally, and that is an important distinction.
Separation of church and state doesn't protect the government from religion. It protects you, me, and everyone else from government sponsored religion. That is what makes these "defense of marriage" acts so wrong. There is no provable harm in these civil unions, and when they state that it is 'morally wrong according to the bible', they are essentially forcing government sponsored religion onto US citizens when these acts are passed even if these citizens are not followers of the bible. The 'harm' is stated in a religious document. There is no prove-able harm outside of the bible.
So what they need to do is reduce the weight of these independent motors, or find a way to place the suspension within the wheel assembly itself. Some kind of circular leaf spring assembly comes immediately to mind. Imagine a wheel axel, surrounded by springs rather than hard 'spokes' that connect it to the rubber.
Kind of a 2 state suspension system with a small leaf spring system between the actual rubber and the motor, and then a heavier duty suspension between the axels and the rest of the car.
I meant more in a mechanical sense that the old idea for an Ion engine had them taking forever to build up acceleration, but give the fact that they could accelerate plasma out at extremely fast speeds, they were great for long range implementations. How did they resolve the poor thrust issues?
What happened to the 'old hat' where ION rockets were considered great long range solutions, but terrible for short term acceleration? Has the technology changed that much that they are just much more efficient on actual thrust?
This 'test' seems rather lacking. It doesn't note if the AAC is HE or LC. That can have a very big impact on quality as HE takes more processing power but delivers much better quality at low bitrates. Each codec would also have it's quirks and 'tricks' that establish it's strong and weak points. Some people will simply like one aspect of a codecs compression methods over another, whether that pertains to filterout out high frequency, chopping out repetitive or white noise that is typically not heard, or whatnot.
The fact that they also only tested 16 people should tell the rest of the story. It's not even remotely a good sampling of users and considering the source, it probably consists of users who are 'in the know' about compression techniques and what to listen for.
I would be very interested in a larger study with a random sampling of the users of these two services, with a much larger study group to see what it shows.
Then you've obviously never owned or used an iPhone. The firmware updates are downloaded before the install initiates. Any user of an iphone could tell you this as it's very obvious when it's downloading. Your phone is still fully functional. It also won't install a 'partial' update. You can also just download the update and install it manually if you choose. There are instructions all over the net. There are also means to simply install your old firmware, even with a 'bricked' iphone, also all over the net by putting it into recovery mode
As to iTunes being 'bloated'. Lets see.. it has a menu on the left, and columns on the right, all of which you can turn on and off at will. The left frame contains basic navigation,a and the right contains song lists. Exactly how minimal are you wanting?
Your idea of 'bloated' seems confused. If you're going to slam software, you should at least possibly try it first. You were doing better by calling it annoying as I've run it on very old hardware and have had no response issues. At least with annoying you could say 'I don't like this software because X, Y, and Z" and it would be perfectly valid for you to do so since your opinion is important to you as are your likes and dislikes. Simply stating you 'hate' it is valid. Stating it's 'bloated' and slow when it's obviously not, even on an old single core processor, smacks of trolling. Frankly you sound like a troll who simply hates Apple without any concrete experience with their products.
My iTunes is currently open with about 8GB of music. It takes up 48MB of ram, and 0.0 CPU cycles according to my activity monitor. While playing an AAC audio file, it uses 3.5 % CPU. I would not consider this bloated.
Would these possibly be some sort of 'northern lights' phenomena? If the earth's magnetic field generates a phenomena at a planetary scale, why not a solar system generating a similar field that interacts with galactic particles?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that would be a fine solution, but I doubt the religious organizations would settle there either. I don't believe this has ever been 'only about the word'. They find it 'wrong' as a core belief. I honestly don't think they could ever abide by it's very existence.
I most certainly agree that this must be federal mandate, rather than a state one. I just don't see these being treated equally from state to state without federal involvement.
Not a legal right? To be recognized as married by an adjoining state? Are you kidding??
Join taxes are not a legal right? The government would beg to differ with you. Ask anyone who prepares tax returns and they will tell you that you cannot file jointly unless you are married. In case you hadn't noticed, there are federal taxes in addition to state taxes unless your living somewhere I'm not aware of that doesn't require federal taxes?
A United States citizen who is married can sponsor his or her non-American spouse for immigration into this country. Those with Civil Unions have no such privilege. This is a legal right granted by the federal government.
As to the hospital reference, you can't be that obtuse. Do you seriously think this has happened only a single time at some remote hospital. It happens every day.
Here's a few rights granted to married couples but denied to civil unions:
Joint parental rights of children
Joint adoption
Status as "next-of-kin" for hospital visits and medical decisions
Right to make a decision about the disposal of loved ones remains
Immigration and residency for partners from other countries
Crime victims recovery benefits
Domestic violence protection orders
Judicial protections and immunity
Automatic inheritance in the absence of a will
Public safety officers death benefits
Spousal veterans benefits
Social Security
Medicare
Joint filing of tax returns
Wrongful death benefits for surviving partner and children
Bereavement or sick leave to care for partner or children
Child support
Joint Insurance Plans
Tax credits including: Child tax credit, Hope and lifetime learning credits
Deferred Compensation for pension and IRAs
Estate and gift tax benefits
Welfare and public assistance
Joint housing for elderly
Credit protection
Medical care for survivors and dependents of certain veterans
If you're going to claim "civil unions provide fewer legal rights than marriages", you're going to have to substantiate that claim, you can't hide behind "well a large portion of the country doesn't even allow gay civil unions".
For instance, the California 'domestic partnership' law grants almost the same rights as a marriage. It's actually was one of the best union laws, but even it did not go far enough. This one is so easy, even you will understand it right off. What happens when you cross the state line? Oh, I'm sorry, we don't recognize your 'union'. How is that equal to any 'marriage'? What about a divorce? Married couples can divorce anywhere. Civil unions? Not a chance. You have to live in the state in question, in some cases up to a year before you can dissolve the union. What about marrying to a foreign citizen? Doing so with 'marriage' will grant that person immediate citizenship. Not so with a civil union. Taxes? Forget it. The federal government doesn't recognize civil unions. You can't file jointly. There are also over a thousand benefits (yes, that's 1,000+) granted to married couples. Unions in the few states that allow them grant SOME of those, but not all. Not a single state in the union grants all of those protections.
Still think they are the same?
Do you seriously thing these civil unions as available today are in any way equivalent to a marriage? It is marriage lite. They should all be treated equally under the law. I don't care what word you use to describe it, be that civil union, or marriage, but it should apply to ALL, not just one class of citizens.
To turn your argument around, gay marriage supporters are willing to inflict real emotional damage on people over the definition of the word marriage, so why should they be surprised when their opposition feels the same way?
You forget that the folks who are already allowed to marry are not suffering in the slightest. They can visit their partners in the hospital. They can inherit. They can adopt. They are actively trying to prevent these folks from having the same rights. Do you feel that is right?
I happen to disagree with hate crimes legislation if there are already laws on the books that handle those crimes. I don't believe that someone should get a greater punishment under the law if the person they killed is gay, of a particular race, or what not.
I think the punishment should be based on the acts performed and not the race or class of the victim.
lol..ok, you've got me on the age side. I had HD Lasik. Couldn't afford the intraocular lens ;)
That was an interesting point as well. They give added benefits to married couples that are denied to single individuals.
I'm not sure what the reasoning is there.
Anyone who's fluent in history know the answer?
I think that is a perfectly reasonable solution if the civil union grants the same rights to anyone who enters into one and everyone who gets one gets a 'civil union'.
The word used is irrelevant as long as it applies to everyone. No 'marriage' for this group, but this group over here gets a 'civil union'. If they all get 'marriage' or they all get 'civil union', then it is fair to my eyes.
They are not asking for 'marriage' to be redefined. In it's current definition, it is a legal or binding contact (meaning recognized by law). The church injected this 'man and woman' bit with these defense of marriage acts.
I don't have to show you anything. There are 40+ states that demonstrate that fact rather plainly where these folks can't even have a civil union as they are treated like second class citizens.
You're willing to inflict real emotional damage on people over a definition of a word because you don't want someone else using it? You would prefer they accept a lesser yet same definition that is 'no different' except in name?
Would you accept such a thing? It's very different for people on the other end of that Greater Than > sign.
Straight > gay
Marriage > civil union
Your not disagreeing with me, so I'm not sure what your angle is here. Your piece about "will be later honored in good faith when necessary by the government" is key. Religious groups would deny this LEGAL recognition for no other reason than the fact that it conflicts with their FAITH.
When you involve the government, as this issue MUST as it involves legal benefits, then religion should not play a role.
It sounds like your trying to say the government "shouldn't" be involved without acknowledging the fact that the very basis of these legal challenges is to grant legal benefits to this group of people. There is no way that the government cannot be involved as it is the very basis for these legal challenges.
I understand separation of church and state very well. It is to protect you and your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) from the government. It is not to protect the government from you and your beliefs.
No, what I'm saying is that the church has no legal ownership of the word Marriage. it should have no problem if Gays want to call their union a marriage.
You stated: "most religious people who oppose gay marriage do not oppose gay civil unions". You're implying that somehow these organized religions somehow own the word marriage and can dictate who can and cannot use it.
These people just want to be married. They could care less what the church thinks of it. They are looking for the LEGAL benefits of marriage, which only the government can give. The church is irrelevant in the equation as is the word used to describe it. The whole argument that they are fine with 'civil unions' as opposed to 'marriage' is ridiculous as no one owns the word.
That argument reeks of 'back of the bus' for obvious reasons: "You can have 'marriage lite' and like it."
I actually think that would work, but I doubt the religious groups would want to 'give it up' as they feel they 'own' the word marriage.
Can you show me where the Church owns the word "Marriage"?
You forget that your peers are the ones representing you in congress, the ones writing your laws, and the people living next to you. They are indeed important in the law of the land.
If protections are needed for petitioners, then by all means, but if you read TFA, you'll see that there has been no harm to any who signed, although there has been some embarrassment. No one has broken the law and taken illegal retribution as of yet.
No one has hijacked anything. You can get married tomorrow, and never notify the government. You don't even have to involve them. Of course if you did so you wouldn't get any LEGAL benefits, which is where this is being argued. This has nothing to do with religion.
Same goes for getting a marriage license from the state. You don't have to involve the church either. The two are totally separate and should remain so.
That's a nice story, but unfortunately, it IS a civil process. It doesn't matter what it was 2000 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5 years ago. It doesn't matter who 'invented' the word "married", or what it meant to Jesus, the planters peanut guy, or whoever.
What is relevant is what it is right now. As far as the 'church' is concerned, it's just a word. Legally it is a whole other issue which has nothing to do with the Church.
A damn sight better than yours. Now get off my lawn!
If they were the same it would be called 'voting'. It is not. It is a public record and should be treated as such. If people do not have the strength of their convictions then they shouldn't sign it. That is the point of peer pressure. It molds society into what is acceptable and what is not.
If someone steps over the line and takes illegal retribution against someone who signed a petition after that info was made public then they would be in the wrong and handled under the law. If someone signs onto a discriminatory petition and is treated badly (but legally) as a result, once it becomes known, then they've reaped what they've sewn.
Because marriage is a civil union. You have it backwards. The whole church involvement is simply a nice ceremony. It has no authority to do anything until the government validates the marriage. You could get married all day in church and it would mean nothing until you file the proper papers. Try to get married five times and the church wouldn't know you had, and certainly couldn't come after you. The government on the other hand, certainly could.
Now from the other perspective, if you go the government, and get a marriage performed, there is no church needed.
See the difference?
This is the part that the church and organized religion fails to understand. They are taking a civil issue and trying to push their religious views into it. Granting civil unions, or even marriage to two people doesn't harm them in the slightest. It might affront their beliefs, but there is simply no harm done to them personally, and that is an important distinction.
Separation of church and state doesn't protect the government from religion. It protects you, me, and everyone else from government sponsored religion. That is what makes these "defense of marriage" acts so wrong. There is no provable harm in these civil unions, and when they state that it is 'morally wrong according to the bible', they are essentially forcing government sponsored religion onto US citizens when these acts are passed even if these citizens are not followers of the bible. The 'harm' is stated in a religious document. There is no prove-able harm outside of the bible.
So what they need to do is reduce the weight of these independent motors, or find a way to place the suspension within the wheel assembly itself. Some kind of circular leaf spring assembly comes immediately to mind. Imagine a wheel axel, surrounded by springs rather than hard 'spokes' that connect it to the rubber.
Kind of a 2 state suspension system with a small leaf spring system between the actual rubber and the motor, and then a heavier duty suspension between the axels and the rest of the car.
I meant more in a mechanical sense that the old idea for an Ion engine had them taking forever to build up acceleration, but give the fact that they could accelerate plasma out at extremely fast speeds, they were great for long range implementations. How did they resolve the poor thrust issues?
What happened to the 'old hat' where ION rockets were considered great long range solutions, but terrible for short term acceleration? Has the technology changed that much that they are just much more efficient on actual thrust?
This 'test' seems rather lacking. It doesn't note if the AAC is HE or LC. That can have a very big impact on quality as HE takes more processing power but delivers much better quality at low bitrates. Each codec would also have it's quirks and 'tricks' that establish it's strong and weak points. Some people will simply like one aspect of a codecs compression methods over another, whether that pertains to filterout out high frequency, chopping out repetitive or white noise that is typically not heard, or whatnot.
The fact that they also only tested 16 people should tell the rest of the story. It's not even remotely a good sampling of users and considering the source, it probably consists of users who are 'in the know' about compression techniques and what to listen for.
I would be very interested in a larger study with a random sampling of the users of these two services, with a much larger study group to see what it shows.
Then you've obviously never owned or used an iPhone. The firmware updates are downloaded before the install initiates. Any user of an iphone could tell you this as it's very obvious when it's downloading. Your phone is still fully functional. It also won't install a 'partial' update. You can also just download the update and install it manually if you choose. There are instructions all over the net. There are also means to simply install your old firmware, even with a 'bricked' iphone, also all over the net by putting it into recovery mode
As to iTunes being 'bloated'. Lets see.. it has a menu on the left, and columns on the right, all of which you can turn on and off at will. The left frame contains basic navigation,a and the right contains song lists. Exactly how minimal are you wanting?
Your idea of 'bloated' seems confused. If you're going to slam software, you should at least possibly try it first. You were doing better by calling it annoying as I've run it on very old hardware and have had no response issues. At least with annoying you could say 'I don't like this software because X, Y, and Z" and it would be perfectly valid for you to do so since your opinion is important to you as are your likes and dislikes. Simply stating you 'hate' it is valid. Stating it's 'bloated' and slow when it's obviously not, even on an old single core processor, smacks of trolling. Frankly you sound like a troll who simply hates Apple without any concrete experience with their products.
My iTunes is currently open with about 8GB of music. It takes up 48MB of ram, and 0.0 CPU cycles according to my activity monitor. While playing an AAC audio file, it uses 3.5 % CPU. I would not consider this bloated.
Would these possibly be some sort of 'northern lights' phenomena? If the earth's magnetic field generates a phenomena at a planetary scale, why not a solar system generating a similar field that interacts with galactic particles?