Actually, fly by wire can benefit anyone who cannot manipulate a steering wheel or floor pedals. The floor pedals being, probably, the most common problem.
But once you open up a system to fly-by-wire, you aren't limited by ANY specific mechanical force to provide the input. You could pretty easily make that a handheld control with buttons or sliders. You could make "accelerate" and "decelerate" buttons on the floor similar to the brake/accel pedals today, and even put a steering wheel in front of the driver for those who insist on it ( a steering wheel that doesn't have a long steering column behind it ).
Fly-by-wire is not limited to specific mechanical forces, it is limited only by the various means by which you could control points along two discrete continua, (right-center-left) and (faster-coast-slower). So you could adapt a control mechanism that addresses a specific physical handicap and simply plug it in to the car you want to use. Quadriplegic but still have your neck muscles? Move your head backward and forward for speed and left-right for direction. Yes, I realize this would not make an ideal driver, but the point is that you can get really creative.
Hell, you could put sensors under their left and right butt cheeks and people could steer by leaning (though you'd have to start a campaign against eating Mexican food and driving, because the first time you lean over to pass gas you'd cause an accident).
I don't think this would be as much of an "I've lost electric power" as an "a wire just broke and nothing can tell the servos what to do" or "a servo just burned out and I lost steering completely" kind of problem.
Which will happen very infrequently, but still could happen. Good diagnostics and failsafe brakes could at least ensure that the car comes to a halt if something goes terribly wrong.
Personally, I'd design a system like this with failsafe brakes. Mechanical brakes which are, by default, engaged. Perhaps a spring-based system with the brake servos pulling against the spring to disengage the brake pads. That way, if the servos run out of power, the default condition is for the mechanical brakes to be fully engaged.
This is similar to "big rig" truck brakes today, which run off a "pressure disengage" system instead of a pressure engage system. The brakes are constantly engaged by default, and it takes mechanical force to pull the pads away and disengage them. This is done with an air pressure system. The driver brakes the vehicle by a controlled release of this pressure, and if a pressure hose goes bang or if any other failure develops in the system, the brakes are ON.
It can be rather disconcerting to see a brake failure in a big rig on the highway, because the vehicle goes from "tootling along at speed" to "brakes fully locked, tires squealing and smoking, and truck stopping in middle of road". Sure beats the hell out of the alternative (runaway rig) most of the time, though. Also, it doesn't happen very often, and truck brakes have a lot more hose and moving parts than your average Prius would need.
Think "fighter jet" with the joystick at the right hand and the left hand and both feet free to anchor you.
The advantage of this system is that you have three limbs that are completely free to handle the bracing since only one is required for steering.
And if you're continually steering abruptly enough to require the steering wheel as a brace, you may want to consider a 5-point harness and a profession such as racecar driving to get the "gotta go fast and beat everyone else" in cars designed to be crashed up and with other people of like mindsets.:)
I suppose you could have a middle-stick similar to older airplanes, but this would be more analogous to a newer fighter jet with the control at your right hand.
The article provides no pictures, but the mockup I saw of this some years ago had the control located approximately where the shifter would be on most standard-shift cars. In other words, your right hand, relaxed on an armrest, would control the stick. The "joystick" they used was actually more of a cylinder that slid in/out and rotated, with a handle on top. Twist left/right to steer, push in to go faster, pull out to go slower. The device didn't operate exactly like a "joystick", and you could brace against it to an extent while steering. Plus your arm can brace against the armrest, and your other hand is free for an "ohshit" bar if you really need one. Plus, your feet can brace you in place against the seat - your feet are not involved at all in driving a car like this.
So even the insanest of drivers would have no need for a 5-point harness - you get in, put on a normal lap/shoulder belt, and put your hand on the control stick just like you put one hand on the shifter today, except that one hand can control all movement of the car. Environmental/wiper controls, radio, turn signal controls, etc, can be placed in front of you where your left hand can control them and you don't need to look away from the road as much to do so, nor does the hand responsible for steering and speed ever need to leave that control for any reason whatsoever.
Where I live my car is inspected for a helluva lot more than emissions. Actually, it isn't inspected for emissions at all. But if I don't have enough tread on the tires, or the brakes or steering or other control systems look iffy, or if I have windshield damage, or any lights are out, or any holes are rusted through the body, or.. well, a whole crapload of things - the car fails and I need to get it off the road until I get it fixed.
A diagnostic of a fly-by-wire system not only "isn't that far of a leap" for me, it would probably be simpler than the current mechanical inspection.
So, dude, like, I'm totally snarfed up on this good shiznet, and, oh, God there's a whole universe in my thumbnail man. Anyway. Just got back from scarfing another 5 pounds of free munchies. Wow, the cheetos are amazing. It's like life, in a little foil wrapper. You know I could make a few hats out of these, but hats are a sign of The Man. Oh, no, speaking of - there's The Man coming in and nattering something about deadlines on a review or something. Gotta go, he's asking me to submit it or something. Whatever. Anyway, corner of West Third and Ninth, see "Frank", rating: Excellente'. Time for some munchiesssss...
California needs samples of saliva. If you live in California, proceed directly to the capital and spit on the front door. Your state is counting on you.
At least that way they can get saliva samples of conservatives. Of course, in California, that's a sample size of about four, but it's a start...
Trouble is, if you do a search for the Riemann zeta function, all you'll get is 1,000,000,000 hits for a particularly attractive actress. And that'll stimulate activity, but for the wrong brain.
What if the game server also had the GPU engine on board for all of the clients?
Current case: Game server tells client "you are at coordinates X,Y,Z within the game, you're facing this way, the following is happening in front of you, etc". Client takes all of that an renders a local copy of the game map to match what the server says.
New case: Game server sends game imagery as compressed streaming video and audio for each client, and receives back motion/command instructions from client. All of the calculations and rendering are done on the centralized server, clients are just looking at the equivalent of streaming video.
Sure, it would require a pretty high-bandwidth connection, but as long as the client could render fixed (2D) images quickly, the remote server would do all the tricky 3D rendering and just stream the results to the client. So you're a lot less hardware-dependent for each gaming client. This could be a huge win for LAN parties.
I don't see this as absolutely revolutionary, but for certain things, it could be pretty significant. No loading custom maps to individual gaming stations, because the maps are all on the server. Gamers could sit on pretty low-end hardware (not even requiring a 3D rendering engine). The client software could be measured in kilobytes or maybe megabytes instead of gigabytes like it is today.
You just need some very heavy-duty hardware for a server, and some serious upstream capacity coming from that server. But gaming companies could practically give away (or maybe completely give away) the clients and charge a monthly fee for access to servers.
Duke Nukem Forever is a homage to Zen. It's the sound of one hand clapping. It's the tree that falls in the forest with no one around. It's the rock that falls in the puddle and makes no splash. It is, therefore, the purest form of gameplay. The ability to get your heart rate up and feel the excitement of playing a game with no actual game.
It is the ZPS. The Zeroth Person Shooter.
Eventually, it will deliver, and people will be unsurprised to purchase it, take it home, and have it be an empty box. And it will get good reviews, for the game will have ended as it began.
Because marriage imparts certain legal, financial, and societal benefits. Among them are:
1. Common Property: If you are married, your spouse automatically gains control over your common goods and property if you should die or become incapacitated, bypassing the probate/estate system. This means that, as one example - in the case of the death of one parent, the other immediately gains control of all assets so they can continue raising and caring for their children.
2. Tax incentives: There is usually a "break" given to married couples in their taxes, the theory probably being that getting married means that there is a higher likelihood that one of them will work to support both of them. In case of a loss of one job in a two-person household, it's a lot less likely that one person will go on welfare. There is also an implied societal benefit in a stable household to raise kids.
3. Access: If your spouse is sick, you are allowed to visit them in the hospital. Many hospitals have "immediate family member only" policies for things like Intensive Care. That is usually defined as a parent, child, sibling, or spouse. In many cases, Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Domestic Partner need not apply.
4. Insurance pooling: A married couple can purchase family health insurance, which is almost invariably cheaper than two individual plans, and is generally available most affordably though an employer. See #2 - if only one has to earn wages and get health insurance, there's a lower likelihood that the other will have to go on Medicaid as well as Welfare.
"Marriage" is dual-purpose term. Some see it as a religious term, others as a civil term. In reality, it's both, and has both meanings (in many cases simultaneously).
Send them all their "database" data that people tend to want in Excel spreadsheets in a SQL import for MySQL instead, and suggest that they use an actual database for data analysis instead of a spreadsheet?;)
Excel: Strong enough for a primitive database, but made for number crunching.
I suspect they eliminated a password length requirement because the security of the password is really up to the needs and desires of the user who set that password. If I have a password length of 5, then someone who wants a trivial password to keep casual lookie-loos out is going to choose 12345 anyway.
("Amazing! That's the same as the combination on my suitcase!")
Allow me to choose one character minimum and I'll choose one character and use it. No real loss in security, and since I'm choosing the level of security it's my decision to make. I can't sue OO for "lack of security" because OO is simply allowing me to choose how secure I want my stuff.
Someone who wants to protect (as in really protect) their document is going to choose a 50-character password with a mix of uppers, lowers, numbers, and scrunchy special characters. Then it'll be so secure, even the original author can't open it.
Interesting story a professor of mine told: An old university mainframe was brought offline after decades of operation. A core dump was performed and investigation revealed that there was a process that had been waiting to run for close to 30 years. Somehow, its priority was set to be lower than the idle process and this particular machine did not have automatic escalation of priority in its scheduler.
Actually, I think EDF would fix that, at least to an extent.
Currently, prioritization is done based on, well priority. So if you took a job and set its priority to lower-than-idle, as you stated above, it will obviously never run.
However, with EDF,you assign (if I understand it correctly) a deadline to each task rather than a priority. "Task X really should get done in the next 50 msec, but Task Y can wait up to 12 hours and no one's going to scream". On a normal peak-and-valley loaded machine, it'll work on the first deadline first, and if things queue up the low-"priority" ones will simply have longer deadlines. Ideally, the system has enough capacity to accommodate the longer deadline stuff "early" when it has time.
However, on a heavily-peaked system, eventually those long-deadline jobs are going to get priority simply because their deadlines have been reached. So if you have a 50ms deadline job running every 20ms and those jobs start queuing up, then you submit a 12hour deadline job, in 12 hours that job will get the full attention of the system until it's done, because it has the earliest deadline.
As with all things, this has its advantages and disadvantages. If that job that runs every 20ms is truly critical, then you're not going to like this scheme - eventually the low-"priority" stuff is going to come due and take precedent over your "critical" stuff because it's all based on what you asked for first, not how important each task was. On the other hand, this does prevent the very problem you describe - jobs running at such a low priority that they never get any lovin' at all.
With respect, the vote isn't about how people choose to live their lives, but whether their partnerships get the full legal respect of the law. And that is something that, by definition, must be decided through law. While there are people who would discriminate against a gay couple for living together (and that's wrong), the debate here is about inheritance rights, spousal rights, and legal recognition of union.
As it stands, for example, inheritance law states that spouses don't need to go through Probate to get their inheritance, because anything owned within the marriage is common property. This is a right unique to marriage, but it's a legal right and in order to determine when it applies you need to have a legal statute defining what constitutes an applicable partnership. Some states have a "common law marriage" that in essence forces hetero couples to be considered "married" if they've lived together for a period of time.
We have a body of laws that legally define who is eligible for marriage, what it takes to be considered "married," how marriages are dissolved, and what rights and responsibilities are part that institution. If we change the eligibility for marriage, then the relevant laws to do so would need to be changed.
And it's important to avoid the slippery slope of "anything is justified", because it will. These are tricky issues, because (and this is oversimplifying the issue) it pits newly-enabled rights for one group against core religious beliefs of another, and once emotion and self-righteousness enter the debate, it'll end in tears or blood.
If you feel you need to resort to intimidation to accomplish your goals, and this goes for both sides of the debate, then you should really look at whether your goals are worth pursuing. Intimidation begets violence.
For the record, I agree with your overall view on gay marriage - I fully support gays getting the full legal rights currently available to heteros. I signed the petition here in Maine that got the ball rolling, and I will be at the ballot box on November 4 to vote against the recall initiative of the gay marriage law here in Maine.
However, I must disagree with anyone who has the slightest inkling that debate on this issue needs to resort to intimidation, lies, or violence to get there. The end DOES NOT justify the means. Look up "Pyrrhic Victory" sometime. You might get a law passed, but you'll also show the people on the other side that you had to resort to unpleasant measures to get it, which means they'll be motivated next year to overturn the measure with even more unpleasant means of their own.
If the law stands, it needs to stand because a majority of people looked at the issue and decided with a clear conscience that it was the right thing to do. If the law falls, it must fall because a majority decided with a clear conscience that it was the wrong thing to do. Not because a bunch of them on either side were intimidated with threats of violence into voting against their conscience.
If the law is voted down, then that means the people are not ready yet, and another petition will start up to test the waters again, and it'll pass eventually. I think anyone with eyes can see how the tide is flowing. It just takes time, diligence, respect, and patience. All of which are hard.
If intimidation is a valid answer, you need to look at the question again.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you're reading this from the perspective of a project manager.
"If it takes 520 days for 6 people to get to Mars, we'll get 520 people and make it in 6 days!"
My bad. Never tried either. :)
Actually, fly by wire can benefit anyone who cannot manipulate a steering wheel or floor pedals. The floor pedals being, probably, the most common problem.
But once you open up a system to fly-by-wire, you aren't limited by ANY specific mechanical force to provide the input. You could pretty easily make that a handheld control with buttons or sliders. You could make "accelerate" and "decelerate" buttons on the floor similar to the brake/accel pedals today, and even put a steering wheel in front of the driver for those who insist on it ( a steering wheel that doesn't have a long steering column behind it ).
Fly-by-wire is not limited to specific mechanical forces, it is limited only by the various means by which you could control points along two discrete continua, (right-center-left) and (faster-coast-slower). So you could adapt a control mechanism that addresses a specific physical handicap and simply plug it in to the car you want to use. Quadriplegic but still have your neck muscles? Move your head backward and forward for speed and left-right for direction. Yes, I realize this would not make an ideal driver, but the point is that you can get really creative.
Hell, you could put sensors under their left and right butt cheeks and people could steer by leaning (though you'd have to start a campaign against eating Mexican food and driving, because the first time you lean over to pass gas you'd cause an accident).
Sit in the other seat.
I don't think this would be as much of an "I've lost electric power" as an "a wire just broke and nothing can tell the servos what to do" or "a servo just burned out and I lost steering completely" kind of problem.
Which will happen very infrequently, but still could happen. Good diagnostics and failsafe brakes could at least ensure that the car comes to a halt if something goes terribly wrong.
Personally, I'd design a system like this with failsafe brakes. Mechanical brakes which are, by default, engaged. Perhaps a spring-based system with the brake servos pulling against the spring to disengage the brake pads. That way, if the servos run out of power, the default condition is for the mechanical brakes to be fully engaged.
This is similar to "big rig" truck brakes today, which run off a "pressure disengage" system instead of a pressure engage system. The brakes are constantly engaged by default, and it takes mechanical force to pull the pads away and disengage them. This is done with an air pressure system. The driver brakes the vehicle by a controlled release of this pressure, and if a pressure hose goes bang or if any other failure develops in the system, the brakes are ON.
It can be rather disconcerting to see a brake failure in a big rig on the highway, because the vehicle goes from "tootling along at speed" to "brakes fully locked, tires squealing and smoking, and truck stopping in middle of road". Sure beats the hell out of the alternative (runaway rig) most of the time, though. Also, it doesn't happen very often, and truck brakes have a lot more hose and moving parts than your average Prius would need.
Think "fighter jet" with the joystick at the right hand and the left hand and both feet free to anchor you.
The advantage of this system is that you have three limbs that are completely free to handle the bracing since only one is required for steering.
And if you're continually steering abruptly enough to require the steering wheel as a brace, you may want to consider a 5-point harness and a profession such as racecar driving to get the "gotta go fast and beat everyone else" in cars designed to be crashed up and with other people of like mindsets. :)
I suppose you could have a middle-stick similar to older airplanes, but this would be more analogous to a newer fighter jet with the control at your right hand.
The article provides no pictures, but the mockup I saw of this some years ago had the control located approximately where the shifter would be on most standard-shift cars. In other words, your right hand, relaxed on an armrest, would control the stick. The "joystick" they used was actually more of a cylinder that slid in/out and rotated, with a handle on top. Twist left/right to steer, push in to go faster, pull out to go slower. The device didn't operate exactly like a "joystick", and you could brace against it to an extent while steering. Plus your arm can brace against the armrest, and your other hand is free for an "ohshit" bar if you really need one. Plus, your feet can brace you in place against the seat - your feet are not involved at all in driving a car like this.
So even the insanest of drivers would have no need for a 5-point harness - you get in, put on a normal lap/shoulder belt, and put your hand on the control stick just like you put one hand on the shifter today, except that one hand can control all movement of the car. Environmental/wiper controls, radio, turn signal controls, etc, can be placed in front of you where your left hand can control them and you don't need to look away from the road as much to do so, nor does the hand responsible for steering and speed ever need to leave that control for any reason whatsoever.
Where I live my car is inspected for a helluva lot more than emissions. Actually, it isn't inspected for emissions at all. But if I don't have enough tread on the tires, or the brakes or steering or other control systems look iffy, or if I have windshield damage, or any lights are out, or any holes are rusted through the body, or.. well, a whole crapload of things - the car fails and I need to get it off the road until I get it fixed.
A diagnostic of a fly-by-wire system not only "isn't that far of a leap" for me, it would probably be simpler than the current mechanical inspection.
But doesn't that lead to a vicious cycle?
Man, those brownies were some good stuff. But now I've got a case of the muchies. Oh, look, brownies!
All this time, my parents were after me saying I'd never get a good job and be successful if I did drugs. Then I find out about this.
Does the position include free munchies?
I can imagine the first review.
So, dude, like, I'm totally snarfed up on this good shiznet, and, oh, God there's a whole universe in my thumbnail man. Anyway. Just got back from scarfing another 5 pounds of free munchies. Wow, the cheetos are amazing. It's like life, in a little foil wrapper. You know I could make a few hats out of these, but hats are a sign of The Man. Oh, no, speaking of - there's The Man coming in and nattering something about deadlines on a review or something. Gotta go, he's asking me to submit it or something. Whatever. Anyway, corner of West Third and Ninth, see "Frank", rating: Excellente'. Time for some munchiesssss...
California needs samples of saliva. If you live in California, proceed directly to the capital and spit on the front door. Your state is counting on you.
At least that way they can get saliva samples of conservatives. Of course, in California, that's a sample size of about four, but it's a start...
Trouble is, if you do a search for the Riemann zeta function, all you'll get is 1,000,000,000 hits for a particularly attractive actress. And that'll stimulate activity, but for the wrong brain.
What if the game server also had the GPU engine on board for all of the clients?
Current case: Game server tells client "you are at coordinates X,Y,Z within the game, you're facing this way, the following is happening in front of you, etc". Client takes all of that an renders a local copy of the game map to match what the server says.
New case: Game server sends game imagery as compressed streaming video and audio for each client, and receives back motion/command instructions from client. All of the calculations and rendering are done on the centralized server, clients are just looking at the equivalent of streaming video.
Sure, it would require a pretty high-bandwidth connection, but as long as the client could render fixed (2D) images quickly, the remote server would do all the tricky 3D rendering and just stream the results to the client. So you're a lot less hardware-dependent for each gaming client. This could be a huge win for LAN parties.
I don't see this as absolutely revolutionary, but for certain things, it could be pretty significant. No loading custom maps to individual gaming stations, because the maps are all on the server. Gamers could sit on pretty low-end hardware (not even requiring a 3D rendering engine). The client software could be measured in kilobytes or maybe megabytes instead of gigabytes like it is today.
You just need some very heavy-duty hardware for a server, and some serious upstream capacity coming from that server. But gaming companies could practically give away (or maybe completely give away) the clients and charge a monthly fee for access to servers.
Duke Nukem Forever is a homage to Zen. It's the sound of one hand clapping. It's the tree that falls in the forest with no one around. It's the rock that falls in the puddle and makes no splash. It is, therefore, the purest form of gameplay. The ability to get your heart rate up and feel the excitement of playing a game with no actual game.
It is the ZPS. The Zeroth Person Shooter.
Eventually, it will deliver, and people will be unsurprised to purchase it, take it home, and have it be an empty box. And it will get good reviews, for the game will have ended as it began.
Because marriage imparts certain legal, financial, and societal benefits. Among them are:
1. Common Property: If you are married, your spouse automatically gains control over your common goods and property if you should die or become incapacitated, bypassing the probate/estate system. This means that, as one example - in the case of the death of one parent, the other immediately gains control of all assets so they can continue raising and caring for their children.
2. Tax incentives: There is usually a "break" given to married couples in their taxes, the theory probably being that getting married means that there is a higher likelihood that one of them will work to support both of them. In case of a loss of one job in a two-person household, it's a lot less likely that one person will go on welfare. There is also an implied societal benefit in a stable household to raise kids.
3. Access: If your spouse is sick, you are allowed to visit them in the hospital. Many hospitals have "immediate family member only" policies for things like Intensive Care. That is usually defined as a parent, child, sibling, or spouse. In many cases, Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Domestic Partner need not apply.
4. Insurance pooling: A married couple can purchase family health insurance, which is almost invariably cheaper than two individual plans, and is generally available most affordably though an employer. See #2 - if only one has to earn wages and get health insurance, there's a lower likelihood that the other will have to go on Medicaid as well as Welfare.
"Marriage" is dual-purpose term. Some see it as a religious term, others as a civil term. In reality, it's both, and has both meanings (in many cases simultaneously).
Well done, sir! My kingdom for some mod points, though choosing between "Funny" and "Insightful" would probably cause my synapses to fry anyway.
That's better (for me) than ex-ter-mi-NATE.
Signed,
- Nate
Sorry, I was answering your specific stated issue of wanting another subtle way to annoy your co-workers.
Send them all their "database" data that people tend to want in Excel spreadsheets in a SQL import for MySQL instead, and suggest that they use an actual database for data analysis instead of a spreadsheet? ;)
Excel: Strong enough for a primitive database, but made for number crunching.
5 characters isn't much to bruteforce anyway.
I suspect they eliminated a password length requirement because the security of the password is really up to the needs and desires of the user who set that password. If I have a password length of 5, then someone who wants a trivial password to keep casual lookie-loos out is going to choose 12345 anyway.
("Amazing! That's the same as the combination on my suitcase!")
Allow me to choose one character minimum and I'll choose one character and use it. No real loss in security, and since I'm choosing the level of security it's my decision to make. I can't sue OO for "lack of security" because OO is simply allowing me to choose how secure I want my stuff.
Someone who wants to protect (as in really protect) their document is going to choose a 50-character password with a mix of uppers, lowers, numbers, and scrunchy special characters. Then it'll be so secure, even the original author can't open it.
Interesting story a professor of mine told: An old university mainframe was brought offline after decades of operation. A core dump was performed and investigation revealed that there was a process that had been waiting to run for close to 30 years. Somehow, its priority was set to be lower than the idle process and this particular machine did not have automatic escalation of priority in its scheduler.
Actually, I think EDF would fix that, at least to an extent.
Currently, prioritization is done based on, well priority. So if you took a job and set its priority to lower-than-idle, as you stated above, it will obviously never run.
However, with EDF,you assign (if I understand it correctly) a deadline to each task rather than a priority. "Task X really should get done in the next 50 msec, but Task Y can wait up to 12 hours and no one's going to scream". On a normal peak-and-valley loaded machine, it'll work on the first deadline first, and if things queue up the low-"priority" ones will simply have longer deadlines. Ideally, the system has enough capacity to accommodate the longer deadline stuff "early" when it has time.
However, on a heavily-peaked system, eventually those long-deadline jobs are going to get priority simply because their deadlines have been reached. So if you have a 50ms deadline job running every 20ms and those jobs start queuing up, then you submit a 12hour deadline job, in 12 hours that job will get the full attention of the system until it's done, because it has the earliest deadline.
As with all things, this has its advantages and disadvantages. If that job that runs every 20ms is truly critical, then you're not going to like this scheme - eventually the low-"priority" stuff is going to come due and take precedent over your "critical" stuff because it's all based on what you asked for first, not how important each task was. On the other hand, this does prevent the very problem you describe - jobs running at such a low priority that they never get any lovin' at all.
I know that both sides will, sadly, probably use the information to harass or pillory the other. That doesn't make it right on either side.
But petitions are public movements, and are (under current law) signed and supported in public. It's a different standard than a private vote.
With respect, the vote isn't about how people choose to live their lives, but whether their partnerships get the full legal respect of the law. And that is something that, by definition, must be decided through law. While there are people who would discriminate against a gay couple for living together (and that's wrong), the debate here is about inheritance rights, spousal rights, and legal recognition of union.
As it stands, for example, inheritance law states that spouses don't need to go through Probate to get their inheritance, because anything owned within the marriage is common property. This is a right unique to marriage, but it's a legal right and in order to determine when it applies you need to have a legal statute defining what constitutes an applicable partnership. Some states have a "common law marriage" that in essence forces hetero couples to be considered "married" if they've lived together for a period of time.
We have a body of laws that legally define who is eligible for marriage, what it takes to be considered "married," how marriages are dissolved, and what rights and responsibilities are part that institution. If we change the eligibility for marriage, then the relevant laws to do so would need to be changed.
And it's important to avoid the slippery slope of "anything is justified", because it will. These are tricky issues, because (and this is oversimplifying the issue) it pits newly-enabled rights for one group against core religious beliefs of another, and once emotion and self-righteousness enter the debate, it'll end in tears or blood.
If you feel you need to resort to intimidation to accomplish your goals, and this goes for both sides of the debate, then you should really look at whether your goals are worth pursuing. Intimidation begets violence.
For the record, I agree with your overall view on gay marriage - I fully support gays getting the full legal rights currently available to heteros. I signed the petition here in Maine that got the ball rolling, and I will be at the ballot box on November 4 to vote against the recall initiative of the gay marriage law here in Maine.
However, I must disagree with anyone who has the slightest inkling that debate on this issue needs to resort to intimidation, lies, or violence to get there. The end DOES NOT justify the means. Look up "Pyrrhic Victory" sometime. You might get a law passed, but you'll also show the people on the other side that you had to resort to unpleasant measures to get it, which means they'll be motivated next year to overturn the measure with even more unpleasant means of their own.
If the law stands, it needs to stand because a majority of people looked at the issue and decided with a clear conscience that it was the right thing to do. If the law falls, it must fall because a majority decided with a clear conscience that it was the wrong thing to do. Not because a bunch of them on either side were intimidated with threats of violence into voting against their conscience.
If the law is voted down, then that means the people are not ready yet, and another petition will start up to test the waters again, and it'll pass eventually. I think anyone with eyes can see how the tide is flowing. It just takes time, diligence, respect, and patience. All of which are hard.
If intimidation is a valid answer, you need to look at the question again.