This works fine... as long as the browser (or the HDD it's stored on) doesn't crash. The reason we use passwords is that we need something we can take with us anywhere, which pretty much limits it to "something you know" (as "something you are" - i.e. biometrics - isn't implemented for this sort of thing yet, and we tend to lose the "something we have").
Best kind of password though: the nonsense phrase. Easy to remember, hard to guess. I read "Beagles twirl whiddershins up my saxophone" in a magazine article about passwords some 10 - 15 years ago and have never had trouble remembering it since. The "acronym" nonsense phrase is about as good (e.g. "I like eating ten elephants" = "ile10e").
Yes, this. I think that the "levels" idea is probably the best way to manage passwords, as it strikes a balance between uniqueness where it matters and not having to remember too many passwords.
Also, I would add one comment: not all sites that ask for personal information actually need it (e.g. why should Facebook know - and advertise!? - my real birth date; if people know me well enough, they'll know my real birthday. If not, tough; the site has no need for being given enough information to fake my identity when calling my bank...!)
I do reuse the same password in places, but only on sites where I don't care if it gets hacked (and it amazes me how many times I've had to use it). What annoys me though is that I can't always use it as sometimes it's too long (?!), and I've had to adapt to having a version that includes digits and mixed-case (despite the fact that even the basic all-lowercase version is pretty much unhackable - hint: it's more than one word, it makes no sense, and it's not even English). But for important sites (banks, even email) I use completely different passwords. What reusing one password does do though is save me ever having to write down passwords: is it an important site? Then I can probably remember the password. Is it some site I can't even remember signing up to? Then I'll know it's my "throwaway" password.
Although, a smarter version would probably be to adapt the "throwaway" password with some arbitrary variation based on the name of the site or whatever (e.g. add the third letter of the site name as the second-to-last character, or something similarly obfuscated but easy to remember).
This is just a case of adding an unnecessary middleman. If your customer's customer is the general public, then that's still where the money comes from, and they are still the ultimate customer. The reality of the modern internet-accessing world is that there is only one market. If you're dumb enough to sign a multi-million-dollar deal for something that is fundamentally unenforceable, then both parties deserve to lose money.
Ergo, they're still abusing their customers. They still don't have a right to complain when someone circumvents their artificially-engineered restrictions.
(And yes, I do realise that with most television media, the paying customer is actually the advertisers, not the general populace - however, advertisers are paying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so it's still in the provider's best interest to make it as widely available as possible, with the ads included - which it won't be on a torrented copy). Smart people wouldn't region limit, but would have regionally-targeted ads.
Yes, this is basically what it comes down to. One company, who have been fairly used to having a stranglehold on paid content in NZ, don't like that, and oh, there might be this scary thing called competition, so rather than adapt, they get out the lawyers. There is no legitimate reason for Sky to have a stranglehold,* so as far as I'm concerned, this just needs to get chucked out of court to make a clear demonstration that it is not ok to abuse your customers and complain when someone undercuts you.
* I'm not a hardcore capitalist, so I do see that there are places where legislation or government intervention are needed to protect a market in order for it to stay free and fair. Of course, one of those places is protecting against abusive monopolies...
Unless the ISP covers the VPN part itself (which is the case here). I'm in New Zealand and have friends who do pay for a VPN and the US version of Netflix. Netflix just launched in NZ, but from what I hear, the content choice is a lot more limited. I haven't dived into subscribing to either yet because (a) the NZ version of Netflix isn't guaranteed to have what I want, and (b) the overseas version isn't guaranteed to stay accessible (I'm a customer of one of the ISPs involved in this). If you gave me a service that would have current product (i.e. not more than about 2 hours after original airing) and a complete collection (i.e. all the shows, not just some, and more than just the most recent 3 episodes), I'd happily sign up. That's not an option here though, so I am prevented from paying.
I live in New Zealand and am a customer of one of the ISPs involved in this.
The thing is, the media companies seem to miss that we're now in an international community, so if the people in Burgerland realise that they can import a disk at $10, rather than pay for a local copy at $50, they're going to do that. And, trying to prevent this is going to hurt their sales. Some years back, when I visited the USA, I thought I'd pick up a couple of DVDs as they were cheaper, but in the end I didn't, because they were the wrong region. I was more than happy to spend money on their product, but was prevented by the region locking.
As for the case in question though, we never bothered updating our TV when NZ terrestrial broadcasting went digital as we just didn't have any interest in the lame TV on offer and/or stupid schedules for stuff we did want. We get pretty much all of our media online now (with the occasional rare visit to the local DVD store). If it's online in a format that's legal and easy (and of a decent quality and DRM free), then we'll get it that way, but that's rarely easy. What I think the media companies miss is that if you block access to the original sites, people are going to go elsewhere - choose your favourite TV show and see how long it takes you to find a reasonable streaming version of it using Google (e.g. "Watch Game of Thrones online"). (Interestingly, if my understanding of NZ law is correct - although IANAL - I don't think watching a streaming copy of something is illegal/punishable, but sharing one is).
The more they make legitimate (or borderline-legitimate, like the present case) copies hard to get to, the more they (a) give people reason to hunt down illegal copies, and (b) give people reason to rip them off, because they're being nasty to us (I would be quite happy for the MPAA and RIAA to just die off, to be honest).
I would be more than happy to have somewhere that I can pay a small fee per episode (say ~$1) to be able to download a DRM-free copy of my favourite shows. I don't want the only way to get something to be of questionable legality. I'd even be happy to watch a streaming version with ads, if I had to, and if the ads weren't too annoying (most I've seen so far that do this play the same ad 6 times in one show...) We have worked this out with music, why not with TV and movies?
The media supply chain is competing with a (black) market with zero costs. The tighter they grip, the more they will lose. They need to open up and adapt, or they'll die off. At some point, someone is going to work out how to monetize torrent- or YouTube-distributed shows (maybe paid product placement, maybe Kickstarter), and by that point, it will be too late for the big boys to try and adapt. If they were smart, they would already be there. Apparently they're not smart.
Gives me a lot of reason to like my ISP though - they're out to offer a useful service for their customers, and willing to fight for it. That kind of company I can support.
"outside observer of American politics" (I've only been there once). I had no idea I had that wrong, sorry. Though, my post was a deliberate attempt to be an amusing, slightly-trolling response to an obviously stupid GP comment (although, in thinking about it, that GP's comment about how click-bait works on Republicans was in itself a sort of comment-bait...) To my amusement however, my comment has been modded +1 Insightful.
I wonder if I should feel bad that I know all of those acronyms so well (including that WiFi isn't normally capitalised like you had it - though personally I hate camel case).
You really do have to hope that someone RTFM before trying to use the ICBM though, and never, ever opens it up to FTP or WiFi... I'm not even sure I'd trust IBM or the FBI or NSA with an ICBM.:-)
So, someone needs to post a click-bait headline specifically aimed at Democrat supporters who think themselves smarter than Republicans...?:-) (Of course, now I'm trying to think of a politically-loaded headline that would be clickbait to anyone with strong political views...) I'm guessing from the GP's stereotyping that they're a Democrat supporter, though as an outside observer of American politics, I'm glad I don't have to vote for either party.
This is an interesting post: Microsoft is now the good guy and Google the bad? The insane thing is that I think you're right.
I doubt Minecraft would ever have an EOL, no matter what its current owner tried to do to it though... Methinks it will be the kind of thing that someone is going to keep running indefinitely, and eventually porting to all kinds of bizarre platforms that don't even exist yet (google for "It runs Doom" if you want to know what I'm meaning). I do wonder if Notch's original plan of "eventually" open-sourcing it will ever happen - it would be nice if MS kept to that (once they've let it print them money for another 5 or 10 years, of course...)
We once had an in-house bug tracking software, which split items into "Issues" (bugs) or "Enhancements" (new feature suggestions). Our manager was very clear that we should use the term "issues" not "bugs", so the common quote was "it's an issue, not a bug". Amusingly though, the icon we used for the "issues" section was an insect. So, in a little menu screen used to switch between categories, I made it so that the bug icon would move if you double-clicked it, and if you kept clicking enough, it would pop up text next to the insect icon saying, "It's a bug, not an issue!"
I eventually told the boss about it - when visiting a couple of years after I had left the company. However, by that point, someone had changed the menu screen so my little "feature" no longer existed. He found it kind of funny, though was a little shocked I had put something in that he didn't know about - but, it was an internal product only, so we weren't so worried about finish.
However, my personal favourite easter egg was actually in hardware: Our old Amiga 500 had an expansion unit you could plug in the side that included a hard drive (30 whole megabytes, wooh!) and RAM expansion slots. There was a little jumper you'd use to set how much RAM you had added, with the settings labelled: "2MB", "1MB", "512K", and "Amnesia". Also, the LEDs on the front were labelled "Fred" and "Wilma". So, humour used to exist in hardware as well, but I think that died long before it did in software.
My brother-in-law's stock answer was "Twenty minutes". Apparently it took his kids a number of years before they realised that he'd always say the same time remaining (even later on the same journey).:-)
Actually, trains, which to me makes more sense than cars (of course, if you're thinking longer-term, then you probably want to make it electric trains). The link is from tracing the links in TFA back to a more original source ("trains (oh and some road)" --> "road!" after sufficient iterations of teh media...)
New Zealand has had a tech expo with similar rules - a company ignoring the rules made news last year, so it's not a first (kind of old news here, really).
Or the corollary: gay rights are an existential threat to religion and therefore must be destroyed? Are you aware of what you just said? Anyone saying "group A should be eliminated because they disagree with us" has no place in civil society. We all have a right to disagree - and the GP has a point: you are only as tolerant as you are to the person you most despise, and we are starting to see a little too much forced compliance in the name of supposed "tolerance" (i.e. believe anything you like, as long as it's this). It means you have the right to hold a repulsive opinion. Doesn't mean you should, and doesn't mean you should be a dick about it, but means you can.
This actually makes some sense. But, how do you handle what I expect is probably at the core of this debate: whether or not a religious minister can refuse to preside at a wedding he or she disagrees with? (So, in the most common case, whether Christian ministers can say no to same-sex couples). To me, I think they should be able to say no, because a lot of religions teach that homosexual sex is sinful, so you would be forcing them to condone something they consider isn't ok (that view is in disagreement with the zeitgeist obviously, and even considered repulsive by many, but that doesn't stop them being allowed to hold that view). But, I would ask why a same-sex couple would want someone involved in their wedding who doesn't like what they do - I certainly wouldn't want someone there who I knew didn't like me or what I did, and I would rather have that person say it up front rather than pretend they like me because they're afraid I might sue them.
It scares me that this is happening. In what screwed-up version of the world do we need to even be thinking about laws that force people to serve others if they don't want to, or force people to put up with being denied service? Is it seriously so messed up in America that we need to legislate on things like basic human decency? Why is this even a debate? If someone has a really strong moral reasoning that says they don't want to do something, then fine - examples of forcing a muslim baker to make a cake for a gay wedding have already been suggested here; they have a right to stick to their own principles (but, similarly, they must be open to the fact that it isn't going to make them popular). Why do we ridicule someone for having principles (or feel we need to sue and/or legislate), even if we disagree with those principles? But at the same time, why are people so stuck up that they refuse someone based on reasons that have nothing to do with their being a customer? The fact that we even have to consider legislating on things like "don't refuse service someone you don't like" suggests our society has fundamentally failed.
I think the law is too blunt a tool for this: it is much more something that needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, I could see that a Christian minister shouldn't be forced to preside over a gay wedding if he disagrees with it - regardless of if you think he's right, it's bonkers to suggest that we should have to force someone to perform a service that disagrees with their basic beliefs. That's just rude, if nothing else (and, why would you want someone involved in a special occasion who is only there because you forced him to be and he had no legitimate way to say no - if a minister can say "I don't feel I'm suitable" to a straight couple, then surely they could say that to a same-sex couple as well, without fear of being sued?). But, at the same time, nowhere can I see it being ok for a restaurant owner to refuse two guys to have a table together because he thinks they look homosexual, or a bus driver refuse two women because he saw them kissing at the bus stop, or because of the colour of one's skin. Surely there is a balance in here somewhere? Or are we so screwed up that our only way to find solutions now is by getting lawyers and/or the government involved?
I think a person is allowed to hold an opinion, regardless of how repulsive we think that opinion is (and as long as they're ok with us telling them that we think it's repulsive), but at the same time, whatever happened to serving one's fellow man (or woman) - I'm pretty sure most religions have had kindness to others as a basic tenet for centuries?
To me, this whole debate seems to signal the end of common human decency...:-(
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This works fine... as long as the browser (or the HDD it's stored on) doesn't crash. The reason we use passwords is that we need something we can take with us anywhere, which pretty much limits it to "something you know" (as "something you are" - i.e. biometrics - isn't implemented for this sort of thing yet, and we tend to lose the "something we have").
Best kind of password though: the nonsense phrase. Easy to remember, hard to guess. I read "Beagles twirl whiddershins up my saxophone" in a magazine article about passwords some 10 - 15 years ago and have never had trouble remembering it since. The "acronym" nonsense phrase is about as good (e.g. "I like eating ten elephants" = "ile10e").
You mean this? (Obligatory XKCD).
You know, I think I should change my work password to "Correcthorsebatterystaple1" (2, 3, 4...) just because of the idiot policies. :-)
Yes, this. I think that the "levels" idea is probably the best way to manage passwords, as it strikes a balance between uniqueness where it matters and not having to remember too many passwords.
Also, I would add one comment: not all sites that ask for personal information actually need it (e.g. why should Facebook know - and advertise!? - my real birth date; if people know me well enough, they'll know my real birthday. If not, tough; the site has no need for being given enough information to fake my identity when calling my bank...!)
I do reuse the same password in places, but only on sites where I don't care if it gets hacked (and it amazes me how many times I've had to use it). What annoys me though is that I can't always use it as sometimes it's too long (?!), and I've had to adapt to having a version that includes digits and mixed-case (despite the fact that even the basic all-lowercase version is pretty much unhackable - hint: it's more than one word, it makes no sense, and it's not even English). But for important sites (banks, even email) I use completely different passwords. What reusing one password does do though is save me ever having to write down passwords: is it an important site? Then I can probably remember the password. Is it some site I can't even remember signing up to? Then I'll know it's my "throwaway" password.
Although, a smarter version would probably be to adapt the "throwaway" password with some arbitrary variation based on the name of the site or whatever (e.g. add the third letter of the site name as the second-to-last character, or something similarly obfuscated but easy to remember).
This is just a case of adding an unnecessary middleman. If your customer's customer is the general public, then that's still where the money comes from, and they are still the ultimate customer. The reality of the modern internet-accessing world is that there is only one market. If you're dumb enough to sign a multi-million-dollar deal for something that is fundamentally unenforceable, then both parties deserve to lose money.
Ergo, they're still abusing their customers. They still don't have a right to complain when someone circumvents their artificially-engineered restrictions.
(And yes, I do realise that with most television media, the paying customer is actually the advertisers, not the general populace - however, advertisers are paying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so it's still in the provider's best interest to make it as widely available as possible, with the ads included - which it won't be on a torrented copy). Smart people wouldn't region limit, but would have regionally-targeted ads.
Yes, this is basically what it comes down to. One company, who have been fairly used to having a stranglehold on paid content in NZ, don't like that, and oh, there might be this scary thing called competition, so rather than adapt, they get out the lawyers. There is no legitimate reason for Sky to have a stranglehold,* so as far as I'm concerned, this just needs to get chucked out of court to make a clear demonstration that it is not ok to abuse your customers and complain when someone undercuts you.
* I'm not a hardcore capitalist, so I do see that there are places where legislation or government intervention are needed to protect a market in order for it to stay free and fair. Of course, one of those places is protecting against abusive monopolies...
Unless the ISP covers the VPN part itself (which is the case here). I'm in New Zealand and have friends who do pay for a VPN and the US version of Netflix. Netflix just launched in NZ, but from what I hear, the content choice is a lot more limited. I haven't dived into subscribing to either yet because (a) the NZ version of Netflix isn't guaranteed to have what I want, and (b) the overseas version isn't guaranteed to stay accessible (I'm a customer of one of the ISPs involved in this). If you gave me a service that would have current product (i.e. not more than about 2 hours after original airing) and a complete collection (i.e. all the shows, not just some, and more than just the most recent 3 episodes), I'd happily sign up. That's not an option here though, so I am prevented from paying.
I live in New Zealand and am a customer of one of the ISPs involved in this.
The thing is, the media companies seem to miss that we're now in an international community, so if the people in Burgerland realise that they can import a disk at $10, rather than pay for a local copy at $50, they're going to do that. And, trying to prevent this is going to hurt their sales. Some years back, when I visited the USA, I thought I'd pick up a couple of DVDs as they were cheaper, but in the end I didn't, because they were the wrong region. I was more than happy to spend money on their product, but was prevented by the region locking.
As for the case in question though, we never bothered updating our TV when NZ terrestrial broadcasting went digital as we just didn't have any interest in the lame TV on offer and/or stupid schedules for stuff we did want. We get pretty much all of our media online now (with the occasional rare visit to the local DVD store). If it's online in a format that's legal and easy (and of a decent quality and DRM free), then we'll get it that way, but that's rarely easy. What I think the media companies miss is that if you block access to the original sites, people are going to go elsewhere - choose your favourite TV show and see how long it takes you to find a reasonable streaming version of it using Google (e.g. "Watch Game of Thrones online"). (Interestingly, if my understanding of NZ law is correct - although IANAL - I don't think watching a streaming copy of something is illegal/punishable, but sharing one is).
The more they make legitimate (or borderline-legitimate, like the present case) copies hard to get to, the more they (a) give people reason to hunt down illegal copies, and (b) give people reason to rip them off, because they're being nasty to us (I would be quite happy for the MPAA and RIAA to just die off, to be honest).
I would be more than happy to have somewhere that I can pay a small fee per episode (say ~$1) to be able to download a DRM-free copy of my favourite shows. I don't want the only way to get something to be of questionable legality. I'd even be happy to watch a streaming version with ads, if I had to, and if the ads weren't too annoying (most I've seen so far that do this play the same ad 6 times in one show...) We have worked this out with music, why not with TV and movies?
The media supply chain is competing with a (black) market with zero costs. The tighter they grip, the more they will lose. They need to open up and adapt, or they'll die off. At some point, someone is going to work out how to monetize torrent- or YouTube-distributed shows (maybe paid product placement, maybe Kickstarter), and by that point, it will be too late for the big boys to try and adapt. If they were smart, they would already be there. Apparently they're not smart.
Gives me a lot of reason to like my ISP though - they're out to offer a useful service for their customers, and willing to fight for it. That kind of company I can support.
I bow to your superior geekery. I still don't like capitals in the middle of words though. :-)
"outside observer of American politics" (I've only been there once). I had no idea I had that wrong, sorry. Though, my post was a deliberate attempt to be an amusing, slightly-trolling response to an obviously stupid GP comment (although, in thinking about it, that GP's comment about how click-bait works on Republicans was in itself a sort of comment-bait...) To my amusement however, my comment has been modded +1 Insightful.
Or this?
Does this help? (Amusingly, found using a non-advanced Google search...!)
Like this one? Now that would be hard to break into.
I wonder if I should feel bad that I know all of those acronyms so well (including that WiFi isn't normally capitalised like you had it - though personally I hate camel case).
You really do have to hope that someone RTFM before trying to use the ICBM though, and never, ever opens it up to FTP or WiFi... I'm not even sure I'd trust IBM or the FBI or NSA with an ICBM. :-)
So, someone needs to post a click-bait headline specifically aimed at Democrat supporters who think themselves smarter than Republicans...? :-) (Of course, now I'm trying to think of a politically-loaded headline that would be clickbait to anyone with strong political views...) I'm guessing from the GP's stereotyping that they're a Democrat supporter, though as an outside observer of American politics, I'm glad I don't have to vote for either party.
This is an interesting post: Microsoft is now the good guy and Google the bad? The insane thing is that I think you're right.
I doubt Minecraft would ever have an EOL, no matter what its current owner tried to do to it though... Methinks it will be the kind of thing that someone is going to keep running indefinitely, and eventually porting to all kinds of bizarre platforms that don't even exist yet (google for "It runs Doom" if you want to know what I'm meaning). I do wonder if Notch's original plan of "eventually" open-sourcing it will ever happen - it would be nice if MS kept to that (once they've let it print them money for another 5 or 10 years, of course...)
We once had an in-house bug tracking software, which split items into "Issues" (bugs) or "Enhancements" (new feature suggestions). Our manager was very clear that we should use the term "issues" not "bugs", so the common quote was "it's an issue, not a bug". Amusingly though, the icon we used for the "issues" section was an insect. So, in a little menu screen used to switch between categories, I made it so that the bug icon would move if you double-clicked it, and if you kept clicking enough, it would pop up text next to the insect icon saying, "It's a bug, not an issue!"
I eventually told the boss about it - when visiting a couple of years after I had left the company. However, by that point, someone had changed the menu screen so my little "feature" no longer existed. He found it kind of funny, though was a little shocked I had put something in that he didn't know about - but, it was an internal product only, so we weren't so worried about finish.
However, my personal favourite easter egg was actually in hardware: Our old Amiga 500 had an expansion unit you could plug in the side that included a hard drive (30 whole megabytes, wooh!) and RAM expansion slots. There was a little jumper you'd use to set how much RAM you had added, with the settings labelled: "2MB", "1MB", "512K", and "Amnesia". Also, the LEDs on the front were labelled "Fred" and "Wilma". So, humour used to exist in hardware as well, but I think that died long before it did in software.
My brother-in-law's stock answer was "Twenty minutes". Apparently it took his kids a number of years before they realised that he'd always say the same time remaining (even later on the same journey). :-)
Actually, trains, which to me makes more sense than cars (of course, if you're thinking longer-term, then you probably want to make it electric trains). The link is from tracing the links in TFA back to a more original source ("trains (oh and some road)" --> "road!" after sufficient iterations of teh media...)
Just posted this to a comment below yours (whoops, excuse the double-posting), but it's this.
You might be right: at least one booth organiser who tested it thinks so anyway.
New Zealand has had a tech expo with similar rules - a company ignoring the rules made news last year, so it's not a first (kind of old news here, really).
Or the corollary: gay rights are an existential threat to religion and therefore must be destroyed? Are you aware of what you just said? Anyone saying "group A should be eliminated because they disagree with us" has no place in civil society. We all have a right to disagree - and the GP has a point: you are only as tolerant as you are to the person you most despise, and we are starting to see a little too much forced compliance in the name of supposed "tolerance" (i.e. believe anything you like, as long as it's this). It means you have the right to hold a repulsive opinion. Doesn't mean you should, and doesn't mean you should be a dick about it, but means you can.
This actually makes some sense. But, how do you handle what I expect is probably at the core of this debate: whether or not a religious minister can refuse to preside at a wedding he or she disagrees with? (So, in the most common case, whether Christian ministers can say no to same-sex couples). To me, I think they should be able to say no, because a lot of religions teach that homosexual sex is sinful, so you would be forcing them to condone something they consider isn't ok (that view is in disagreement with the zeitgeist obviously, and even considered repulsive by many, but that doesn't stop them being allowed to hold that view). But, I would ask why a same-sex couple would want someone involved in their wedding who doesn't like what they do - I certainly wouldn't want someone there who I knew didn't like me or what I did, and I would rather have that person say it up front rather than pretend they like me because they're afraid I might sue them.
It scares me that this is happening. In what screwed-up version of the world do we need to even be thinking about laws that force people to serve others if they don't want to, or force people to put up with being denied service? Is it seriously so messed up in America that we need to legislate on things like basic human decency? Why is this even a debate? If someone has a really strong moral reasoning that says they don't want to do something, then fine - examples of forcing a muslim baker to make a cake for a gay wedding have already been suggested here; they have a right to stick to their own principles (but, similarly, they must be open to the fact that it isn't going to make them popular). Why do we ridicule someone for having principles (or feel we need to sue and/or legislate), even if we disagree with those principles? But at the same time, why are people so stuck up that they refuse someone based on reasons that have nothing to do with their being a customer? The fact that we even have to consider legislating on things like "don't refuse service someone you don't like" suggests our society has fundamentally failed.
I think the law is too blunt a tool for this: it is much more something that needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, I could see that a Christian minister shouldn't be forced to preside over a gay wedding if he disagrees with it - regardless of if you think he's right, it's bonkers to suggest that we should have to force someone to perform a service that disagrees with their basic beliefs. That's just rude, if nothing else (and, why would you want someone involved in a special occasion who is only there because you forced him to be and he had no legitimate way to say no - if a minister can say "I don't feel I'm suitable" to a straight couple, then surely they could say that to a same-sex couple as well, without fear of being sued?). But, at the same time, nowhere can I see it being ok for a restaurant owner to refuse two guys to have a table together because he thinks they look homosexual, or a bus driver refuse two women because he saw them kissing at the bus stop, or because of the colour of one's skin. Surely there is a balance in here somewhere? Or are we so screwed up that our only way to find solutions now is by getting lawyers and/or the government involved?
I think a person is allowed to hold an opinion, regardless of how repulsive we think that opinion is (and as long as they're ok with us telling them that we think it's repulsive), but at the same time, whatever happened to serving one's fellow man (or woman) - I'm pretty sure most religions have had kindness to others as a basic tenet for centuries?
To me, this whole debate seems to signal the end of common human decency... :-(