Needless to say, you have been bought out by the capitalist propaganda. You just basically placed an entity called THE CORPORATION above a worker.
I said nothing of the kind. From the perspective of this guy's employer, they place their CLIENTS above the worker, and that's nothing new. I'd get fired, too, if I said "Fuck You" to our clients, or in this case, our ONLY (major) client. It'd be bad business, otherwise.
Geez, I'm beginning to wonder if you've ever *been* in the work force. I mean, you expect a company to perform corporate suicide to protect the ideals of one employee, who apparently doesn't give a damn about the life or death of the business he works for?
But if you are bad for business (and you know there are a few racist customers), you'll be fired.
Now this is a bad example. They didn't fire this guy because his mere presence offended Microsoft. They fired him because he ATTACKED their largest customer! As in, encouraged people not to purchase the products produced by them! This is VASTLY different from the racism example you provide. It shows that this guy is clearly not interested in the health of the company he works for, as he's perfectly willing to risk their largest source of revenue... seems like pretty good grounds to get rid of him.
Of course you worship corporations, if that's who's paying your bills. You have heard of bills, right? See, companies have bills (employee salaries, for example), and the way some companies pay those bills is by selling services to, you guessed it, corporations. But, if you do something to piss of those corporations, they might spend their money elsewhere, and then you can't pay your bills. You see where I'm going with this? So, if you have an employee that pisses off, or threatens to piss off, one of your corporate clients, well, you fire that employee, because they're risking your business, just as you would fire an engineer who was building faulty components, or a programmer who was building faulty code.
So, no, this is not a violation of free speech. This guy can continue to speak his mind all he wants, nobody is stopping him from doing that. But his employer is not obligated to support or condone his actions, especially considering they are, quite clearly, damaging to the employer.
You're assuming that if something is a "science", it must immediately produce predictive theories. However, there is a LOT of work in science which is done purely to try and explain the world around us.
For example, much of the effort in Biology has been spent in trying to explain how living systems work. Even now, we are pretty far from being able to predict how biological systems react to change. For a concrete example, take the theory of evolution. Darwin's work was done primarily to try and explain how complex life evolved. Even now, it's pretty useless for prediction, other than making broad claims like "if I subject this colony of bateria to an antibiotic, evolution will cause a resistent strain to form". This is a FAR cry from the kind of predictions that most Physics or Chemistry theories make.
My point is that science is every bit as much about discovering and explaining the past as it is about predicting the future. Otherwise, areas like Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, Astronomy, etc, which focus primarily on explaining phenomena, would not be called "science". 'course, if you feel that way, fine... but I'd disagree with that.
No, because I can easily contact my ISP, another admin, etc, and ask them to add me to their list of trusted servers. Bam, suddenly I'm part of the system. The point is, with this architecture, the power to decide who can and can't be a member of the system isn't being placed in the hands of a single, all-powerful organization (just look how that's worked for DNS!).
Bullshit. All you need is a distributed mechanism of establishing trust between the varying entities. Guess what, that's called PKI. You could set up a web of trust (akin to PGP/GPG) between the various SMTP servers, which could then be used to authenticate all maildrop attempts.
Now, I know it's not as easy a picture as I'm painting it, but going to a centralized, closed system is NOT the only answer (nor is it the preferable one).
Umm... if you're setting up a "(medium|large)-scale Unix/linux deployment", the odds are you have the skill to put "UsePAM = yes" in your config file. For the rest of us, having a more secure default is always a good thing.
No way! I only need to be 40% sure before I start killing Iraqis. 50%, tops.
Re:flaming debian-legal list=legal issues?
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 1
Which is, incidentally, also the case with mplayer. Unless you have libdecss installed, and have compiled mplayer with said library, it will not decrypt DVDs.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
And you have no idea what you're talking about. Holes in user-space can be insulated from the rest of the system in many ways.
1) You can reduce the privileges of the daemon/user-space app such that an exploit in the app doesn't necessarily result in a root exploit. This is the technique Qmail uses.
2) You can run the apps in a secure 'jail' (UML, FreeBSD jails, etc). This is used quite frequently to enhance the security of Sendmail, Apache, etc. No, not replace security, enhance it.
However, if the hole is in your kernel, you're screwed... there's no way to insulate the kernel from itself.
Moreover, if the hole is in a user-space app, it's easily patched, and the daemon restarted. If it's deeper in the OS (ie, in the kernel), the fix is typically far more invasive and will likely require a reboot to take effect, something which sysadmins are loathe to do. How many service packs have you installed that required a reboot to take effect?
Closed-source holes aren't covered up anyway;
Again, you're misinformed. It has *very* often been the case that organizations are made aware of security vulnerabilities in their software, and that organization chooses not to release the information to those who need it. Microsoft is the most obvious example of this... there have been many stories on Slashdot about individuals who have reported security holes to MS only to have their discovery covered up, or only released to a special, select few, which happen not to be you and me.
OTOH, you could claim that CIPE's holes were covered up
Fine, one friggin' example. Would you care to tell me how this *one* example can possibly speak for the whole of OSS? In my experience, this sort of behaviour is *definitely* out of the ordinary, and means I probably shouldn't use that package. Big deal, I'll use something else.
This is precisely the kind of idiotic hand-waving that the article was about. These projects were not fixed up quickly, or at all for that matter!
Which is why I said "in general". If there's a hole in, for example, SSH, Apache, Sendmail, Bind, wuftpd, the Linux kernel, a fix is available *very* quickly (typically within 24 hours). Sure, there are some exceptions where maintainers aren't diligent enough. But I would argue that this is the exception rather than the rule... feel free to try and prove me wrong. You'll probably have trouble, though.
CIPE and vtun use open standards? Bullshit.
Oh please, like two examples defines the whole. What about standard SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SSH, SSL, or IPSec? Those look like open standards to me.
A better solution is to use something like dnsmasq, which is capable of blocking VeriSign's wildcard responses directly. This way, you'll get a proper NXDOMAIN response. This should be perfectly usable under MacOSX, since it's just a straight-up Unix daemon.
Of course it'll have a similar number of holes. After all, there's nothing about OSS that makes the software fundamentally more secure. BUT:
1) These holes are far less likely to be in the base operating system implementation, as the OSS mantra is generally to put as much logic in user-space as possible.
2) These holes won't be covered up and released only after the vendor has decided to let us know about them.
3) These holes will be fixed up very quickly (in general, anyway), in individual patches or point releases, without onerous licenses attached to them, and without fear that the release might break the rest of my operating system.
4) Because OSS products use open standards, if one particular package is simply too insecure, at least I can change to another product and have things interoperate (eg, switching from Sendmail to Qmail/Postfix/MTA-de-jour).
Right, streaming and embedding. Why is it so hard to imagine that this is, in fact, a large and rapidly growing market in which these codecs are competing? Besides, in the high-bitrate end, these next-gen codecs are practically indistinguishable, so why bother testing them? The new frontier is in the low-bitrate market...
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of OGG at 64 kb/s. It's easily FM quality, and FAR better than MP3 at a similar rate, making it a superb codec for live audio streaming. Heck, while I'd never use OGG at this rate for *archival* purposes, I'd be quite willing to use it for a mobile audio device, since the odds are I'd end up using sub-par earphones in a noisy environment anyway. And if bitrate peeling ends up working as advertised... well, use your imagination.:)
OOC, is it a program generating these posts, or are you actually taking the care and attention necessary to produce, by hand, these massive volumes of surprisingly well-written vitriol?
No... Pu-238 cannot generate a run-away fission reaction because, as the article states, "the products of this fission... just don't have the right characteristics to create a chain reaction".
You see, for a fission reaction to runaway, when an atom of material splits (which is triggered by, say, bombardment by neutrons), the reaction emits various forms of energy. In a run-away fission reaction, the splitting of one atom generates enough neutrons to cause other atoms to split, and so on. From the article text, as well as the linked document on various Pu isotopes, you see that Pu-238 cannot do this! Why? Because the split of a Pu-238 atom does not generate the necessary products (ie, neutrons in sufficient number) to sustain a chain-reaction.
Yeah, I realized the sillyness of my response after the fact. Although, I believe the main point of the grandparent was that the UK is nowhere near the US, and as such, it makes no sense to even mention them in the same breath when discussing gun control.
It is interesting to note, though, that all the nations above the US are 2nd or 3rd world countries... amongst the first world, the US is definitely at the top of the list.
You would be correct. See here. This site lists gun murder rates per capita... you'll notice Britain is right at the bottom of this list, while the United States is number eight (out of 32 nations listed).
He is, unfortunately, absolutely right. MS doesn't believe in full disclosure... something which is incredibly common in the commercial world. As a result, it is quite possible for an MS security bug to exist, possibly with an exploit, and for the public to find out only because someone other than Microsoft finally reports it.
I'm going to assume that you're gay. If you're not, well, I'll change my assumption. (I would apologize, except there's nothing to apologize for, as sexual orientation is neither a sin nor a mental illness nor a crime.)
Heh, actually, I'm very much a hetero (and, coincidentally, engaged to be married this winter). I do, however, have gay friends, and thus feel the need to defend them.
I should also point out that I'm Canadian, which probably contributes to my social progressiveness. I'm simply a little outraged at the treatment gays and lesbians are currently getting in the states, primarily because the extreme religious right has so much political clout right now.
You're right. I don't. But I do have a right--and others don't have an absolute right to redefine what is and isn't marriage, either.
Which is why the word "marriage" simply shouldn't be used by the government. It's far too loaded... everyone wants to define it their way. However, there is a real need to for the government to recognize civil unions for legal reasons.
Were they OK in a relativistic political-science kind of way? Yes. On an absolute level? Hell no, and you know it. Of course, absolute-level morality is a religious thing...
That's silly... I think we can agree that there are certain things which can be considered universally immoral (murder, rape, etc, etc). One of those things, which is codified in American law, is descrimination based on race, religion, etc. How is sexual orientation any different?
I don't think it's discrimination to not allow marriage between same-gender couples.
Why not? By discrinating based on the orientation of the couple, you're effectively stating that hetero and homo relationships don't have the same moral or legal standing.
concieve and raise children.
But what does children have to do with it? Okay, take this example: A gay couple has lived together for 25 years, but are not allowed to get married. One of the spouses comes down with a fatal illness and dies. None of the assets from that spouse move over to the still-living spouse automatically. Moreover, while that person is sick, the spouse may not be allowed to make key decisions (ie, regarding life support, etc). So, if the sick-spouses family decides to take over, the other spouse has no legal recourse. How is this okay?
My point is that marriage is about more than just children. It's a partnership between two people. But according to current law, a homosexual partnership is not recognized, and so the spouses in that relationship do not have the rights granted to a traditional hetero couple. This is not right.
You replied in a harsh and reactionary way
Yeah, my apologies, I tend to do that with issues like this... after all, these are my friends, and fellow human beings, who are being discriminated against.
Actually, due to some inherent differences in the physical possibilities of same-gender couples, there has to be at least some difference.
Again, why? Marriage is a partnership between individuals, whether it be between a man and a woman, or a man and a man. It's the *same thing*. The only difference is the genders of the people involved, by why does this matter?
I could start talking about how "love is love" no matter the genders involved, but I don't feel like getting that touchy-feely this early in the morning.:)
Legally, it's just a name, and if you can get the same (or effectively the same) benefits from your romantic union as I have from mine, why should you care what it's called?
Again, it's symbolic. Let's say the US military allowed women into the armed forces, but refused to call them soldiers, because traditionally, soldiers were men. Would you agree that the nomenclature still implies a level of subconscious discrimination?
The point is that, in my view, marriage is simply a union of
All three of those are "rights." Not "absolute right", but "right."
And you have no "absolute right" to impose your beliefs regarding what is and isn't marriage on other individuals. That was the whole point of my examples.
Prohibition was passed, and later repealed, by democratic process. Slavery was totally and perfectly legal until the states outlawed it.
So you're saying that these examples were morally correct because the majority of Americans supported it? What about the burning of witches? The majority of puritans supported that... does that make it okay?
The fact is, non-heteros are descriminated against purely because the majority disagrees with their lifestyle. Unfortunately, the majority agreed with slavery of the blacks, and I think we can agree that was wrong. So why is it that it's okay for the majority to impose their will on gays and lesbians?
The Catholic Church, even today, is perfectly welcome to fund churches and deny contraceptives, or to attempt to convince just about anyone that contraceptives and abortion are wrong;
Sure. But the minute the government outlaws birth control because the Catholics disagree with it, I will object very loudly.
Wow, a gay troll.
I'm a troll because I believe in separation of church and state?
The state does not exist in a vacum. It is a product of and by its citizens,
Okay, so majority rules. Gotcha. So, if the majority decides that computer geeks deserve to be burned at the stake, I guess that's okay, right? It is, after all, the will of the people... well, most of them, anyway.
Care to convince me how not being able to call your Civil Union a "marriage" is an infringement on your basic rights?
I don't give a damn what it's called as long as hetero and gay relationships are given the exact same standing under the law and the word marriage is struck from the books, to be replaced with something like "legal union", as "marriage" implies far too much in the way of religious connotation. However, I do feel that the joining of a hetero couple and the joining of a gay couple should have the same name, simply for symbolic reasons... after all, they are, legally, the same thing, so why differentiate them?
Actually, we're both partly wrong. I was wrong, in that Britain didn't force Canada's hand regarding WWI (even though it could). You are wrong, in that Canada was still somewhat under the thumb of the British until the Westminster act of 1931, at which point Canada was granted full autonomy.
Uhh, atheism is not defined by the absence of a religious allegiance. It is the belief that there is, in fact, no God at all. The states you list do not make any such claims. In fact, they are completely silent on the issue. Now,
theocracy : government of a state by immediate divine guidance
Thus, by definition, a country which does not rule based on any religion cannot be a theocracy (nor can a country which directly promotes atheism, BTW). The current US administration, however, quite clearly bases many of their decisions on Christian and Zionist ideals (just look at their policies in Israel, not to mention their stance regarding gay marriage). Heck, the whole "under god" bit in the Pledge of Allegiance seems pretty theocratic to me...
Incidentally, I would agree that atheism is a religion, simply because it requires faith, as you cannot prove a negative (the non-existance of God). Thus, any true scientist should, in fact, be unwilling to take any position regarding matters of religion, one way or the other.
I feel that my right to maintain the cultural meaning of
Pfft... you have no "right to maintain the cultural meaning of" anything. That isn't a *right*, any more than the prohibitionists had the right to enforce their values on the rest of American society. Or supporters of slavery could enforce their values on blacks. Or the Catholic Church has the right to enforce their values regarding contraceptives on the rest of the American public.
The fact is, the government should not exist to impose the moral/religious values of one set of people (heteros who want to "preserve the institution of marriage") on another (gays and lesbians). Frankly, the state shouldn't even perceive the concept of a marriage as a religious institution, as that assumes that there is only one definition of "marriage" which is defined by a certain religion or religions which are chosen by the state. The state's roll in marriage should simply be to sanction a contract between two individuals which grants the certain additional privileges (tax breaks, etc).
Holy shit, you should be ashamed to call yourself a Canadian. Learn some history! Canada was still technically under British rule during WW*I*, and as such was forced into action during that war. However, by WWII, Canada had full autonomy from the British empire and chose independantly to enter the war.
Slashdot Mirror
Needless to say, you have been bought out by the capitalist propaganda. You just basically placed an entity called THE CORPORATION above a worker.
I said nothing of the kind. From the perspective of this guy's employer, they place their CLIENTS above the worker, and that's nothing new. I'd get fired, too, if I said "Fuck You" to our clients, or in this case, our ONLY (major) client. It'd be bad business, otherwise.
Geez, I'm beginning to wonder if you've ever *been* in the work force. I mean, you expect a company to perform corporate suicide to protect the ideals of one employee, who apparently doesn't give a damn about the life or death of the business he works for?
But if you are bad for business (and you know there are a few racist customers), you'll be fired.
Now this is a bad example. They didn't fire this guy because his mere presence offended Microsoft. They fired him because he ATTACKED their largest customer! As in, encouraged people not to purchase the products produced by them! This is VASTLY different from the racism example you provide. It shows that this guy is clearly not interested in the health of the company he works for, as he's perfectly willing to risk their largest source of revenue... seems like pretty good grounds to get rid of him.
Of course you worship corporations, if that's who's paying your bills. You have heard of bills, right? See, companies have bills (employee salaries, for example), and the way some companies pay those bills is by selling services to, you guessed it, corporations. But, if you do something to piss of those corporations, they might spend their money elsewhere, and then you can't pay your bills. You see where I'm going with this? So, if you have an employee that pisses off, or threatens to piss off, one of your corporate clients, well, you fire that employee, because they're risking your business, just as you would fire an engineer who was building faulty components, or a programmer who was building faulty code.
So, no, this is not a violation of free speech. This guy can continue to speak his mind all he wants, nobody is stopping him from doing that. But his employer is not obligated to support or condone his actions, especially considering they are, quite clearly, damaging to the employer.
You're assuming that if something is a "science", it must immediately produce predictive theories. However, there is a LOT of work in science which is done purely to try and explain the world around us.
For example, much of the effort in Biology has been spent in trying to explain how living systems work. Even now, we are pretty far from being able to predict how biological systems react to change. For a concrete example, take the theory of evolution. Darwin's work was done primarily to try and explain how complex life evolved. Even now, it's pretty useless for prediction, other than making broad claims like "if I subject this colony of bateria to an antibiotic, evolution will cause a resistent strain to form". This is a FAR cry from the kind of predictions that most Physics or Chemistry theories make.
My point is that science is every bit as much about discovering and explaining the past as it is about predicting the future. Otherwise, areas like Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, Astronomy, etc, which focus primarily on explaining phenomena, would not be called "science". 'course, if you feel that way, fine... but I'd disagree with that.
No, because I can easily contact my ISP, another admin, etc, and ask them to add me to their list of trusted servers. Bam, suddenly I'm part of the system. The point is, with this architecture, the power to decide who can and can't be a member of the system isn't being placed in the hands of a single, all-powerful organization (just look how that's worked for DNS!).
Bullshit. All you need is a distributed mechanism of establishing trust between the varying entities. Guess what, that's called PKI. You could set up a web of trust (akin to PGP/GPG) between the various SMTP servers, which could then be used to authenticate all maildrop attempts.
Now, I know it's not as easy a picture as I'm painting it, but going to a centralized, closed system is NOT the only answer (nor is it the preferable one).
Umm... if you're setting up a "(medium|large)-scale Unix/linux deployment", the odds are you have the skill to put "UsePAM = yes" in your config file. For the rest of us, having a more secure default is always a good thing.
No way! I only need to be 40% sure before I start killing Iraqis. 50%, tops.
Which is, incidentally, also the case with mplayer. Unless you have libdecss installed, and have compiled mplayer with said library, it will not decrypt DVDs.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
And you have no idea what you're talking about. Holes in user-space can be insulated from the rest of the system in many ways.
1) You can reduce the privileges of the daemon/user-space app such that an exploit in the app doesn't necessarily result in a root exploit. This is the technique Qmail uses.
2) You can run the apps in a secure 'jail' (UML, FreeBSD jails, etc). This is used quite frequently to enhance the security of Sendmail, Apache, etc. No, not replace security, enhance it.
However, if the hole is in your kernel, you're screwed... there's no way to insulate the kernel from itself.
Moreover, if the hole is in a user-space app, it's easily patched, and the daemon restarted. If it's deeper in the OS (ie, in the kernel), the fix is typically far more invasive and will likely require a reboot to take effect, something which sysadmins are loathe to do. How many service packs have you installed that required a reboot to take effect?
Closed-source holes aren't covered up anyway;
Again, you're misinformed. It has *very* often been the case that organizations are made aware of security vulnerabilities in their software, and that organization chooses not to release the information to those who need it. Microsoft is the most obvious example of this... there have been many stories on Slashdot about individuals who have reported security holes to MS only to have their discovery covered up, or only released to a special, select few, which happen not to be you and me.
OTOH, you could claim that CIPE's holes were covered up
Fine, one friggin' example. Would you care to tell me how this *one* example can possibly speak for the whole of OSS? In my experience, this sort of behaviour is *definitely* out of the ordinary, and means I probably shouldn't use that package. Big deal, I'll use something else.
This is precisely the kind of idiotic hand-waving that the article was about. These projects were not fixed up quickly, or at all for that matter!
Which is why I said "in general". If there's a hole in, for example, SSH, Apache, Sendmail, Bind, wuftpd, the Linux kernel, a fix is available *very* quickly (typically within 24 hours). Sure, there are some exceptions where maintainers aren't diligent enough. But I would argue that this is the exception rather than the rule... feel free to try and prove me wrong. You'll probably have trouble, though.
CIPE and vtun use open standards? Bullshit.
Oh please, like two examples defines the whole. What about standard SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SSH, SSL, or IPSec? Those look like open standards to me.
A better solution is to use something like dnsmasq, which is capable of blocking VeriSign's wildcard responses directly. This way, you'll get a proper NXDOMAIN response. This should be perfectly usable under MacOSX, since it's just a straight-up Unix daemon.
Of course it'll have a similar number of holes. After all, there's nothing about OSS that makes the software fundamentally more secure. BUT:
1) These holes are far less likely to be in the base operating system implementation, as the OSS mantra is generally to put as much logic in user-space as possible.
2) These holes won't be covered up and released only after the vendor has decided to let us know about them.
3) These holes will be fixed up very quickly (in general, anyway), in individual patches or point releases, without onerous licenses attached to them, and without fear that the release might break the rest of my operating system.
4) Because OSS products use open standards, if one particular package is simply too insecure, at least I can change to another product and have things interoperate (eg, switching from Sendmail to Qmail/Postfix/MTA-de-jour).
Assuming you're doing joint stereo encoding. IIRC, in true stereo encoding, these kinds of optimizations are not performed.
Oh, come on... offtopic, yes. But flamebait? Hardly...
Right, streaming and embedding. Why is it so hard to imagine that this is, in fact, a large and rapidly growing market in which these codecs are competing? Besides, in the high-bitrate end, these next-gen codecs are practically indistinguishable, so why bother testing them? The new frontier is in the low-bitrate market...
:)
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of OGG at 64 kb/s. It's easily FM quality, and FAR better than MP3 at a similar rate, making it a superb codec for live audio streaming. Heck, while I'd never use OGG at this rate for *archival* purposes, I'd be quite willing to use it for a mobile audio device, since the odds are I'd end up using sub-par earphones in a noisy environment anyway. And if bitrate peeling ends up working as advertised... well, use your imagination.
OOC, is it a program generating these posts, or are you actually taking the care and attention necessary to produce, by hand, these massive volumes of surprisingly well-written vitriol?
No... Pu-238 cannot generate a run-away fission reaction because, as the article states, "the products of this fission ... just don't have the right characteristics to create a chain reaction".
You see, for a fission reaction to runaway, when an atom of material splits (which is triggered by, say, bombardment by neutrons), the reaction emits various forms of energy. In a run-away fission reaction, the splitting of one atom generates enough neutrons to cause other atoms to split, and so on. From the article text, as well as the linked document on various Pu isotopes, you see that Pu-238 cannot do this! Why? Because the split of a Pu-238 atom does not generate the necessary products (ie, neutrons in sufficient number) to sustain a chain-reaction.
Yeah, I realized the sillyness of my response after the fact. Although, I believe the main point of the grandparent was that the UK is nowhere near the US, and as such, it makes no sense to even mention them in the same breath when discussing gun control.
It is interesting to note, though, that all the nations above the US are 2nd or 3rd world countries... amongst the first world, the US is definitely at the top of the list.
You would be correct. See here. This site lists gun murder rates per capita... you'll notice Britain is right at the bottom of this list, while the United States is number eight (out of 32 nations listed).
He is, unfortunately, absolutely right. MS doesn't believe in full disclosure... something which is incredibly common in the commercial world. As a result, it is quite possible for an MS security bug to exist, possibly with an exploit, and for the public to find out only because someone other than Microsoft finally reports it.
I'm going to assume that you're gay. If you're not, well, I'll change my assumption. (I would apologize, except there's nothing to apologize for, as sexual orientation is neither a sin nor a mental illness nor a crime.)
:)
Heh, actually, I'm very much a hetero (and, coincidentally, engaged to be married this winter). I do, however, have gay friends, and thus feel the need to defend them.
I should also point out that I'm Canadian, which probably contributes to my social progressiveness. I'm simply a little outraged at the treatment gays and lesbians are currently getting in the states, primarily because the extreme religious right has so much political clout right now.
You're right. I don't. But I do have a right--and others don't have an absolute right to redefine what is and isn't marriage, either.
Which is why the word "marriage" simply shouldn't be used by the government. It's far too loaded... everyone wants to define it their way. However, there is a real need to for the government to recognize civil unions for legal reasons.
Were they OK in a relativistic political-science kind of way? Yes. On an absolute level? Hell no, and you know it. Of course, absolute-level morality is a religious thing...
That's silly... I think we can agree that there are certain things which can be considered universally immoral (murder, rape, etc, etc). One of those things, which is codified in American law, is descrimination based on race, religion, etc. How is sexual orientation any different?
I don't think it's discrimination to not allow marriage between same-gender couples.
Why not? By discrinating based on the orientation of the couple, you're effectively stating that hetero and homo relationships don't have the same moral or legal standing.
concieve and raise children.
But what does children have to do with it? Okay, take this example: A gay couple has lived together for 25 years, but are not allowed to get married. One of the spouses comes down with a fatal illness and dies. None of the assets from that spouse move over to the still-living spouse automatically. Moreover, while that person is sick, the spouse may not be allowed to make key decisions (ie, regarding life support, etc). So, if the sick-spouses family decides to take over, the other spouse has no legal recourse. How is this okay?
My point is that marriage is about more than just children. It's a partnership between two people. But according to current law, a homosexual partnership is not recognized, and so the spouses in that relationship do not have the rights granted to a traditional hetero couple. This is not right.
You replied in a harsh and reactionary way
Yeah, my apologies, I tend to do that with issues like this... after all, these are my friends, and fellow human beings, who are being discriminated against.
Actually, due to some inherent differences in the physical possibilities of same-gender couples, there has to be at least some difference.
Again, why? Marriage is a partnership between individuals, whether it be between a man and a woman, or a man and a man. It's the *same thing*. The only difference is the genders of the people involved, by why does this matter?
I could start talking about how "love is love" no matter the genders involved, but I don't feel like getting that touchy-feely this early in the morning.
Legally, it's just a name, and if you can get the same (or effectively the same) benefits from your romantic union as I have from mine, why should you care what it's called?
Again, it's symbolic. Let's say the US military allowed women into the armed forces, but refused to call them soldiers, because traditionally, soldiers were men. Would you agree that the nomenclature still implies a level of subconscious discrimination?
The point is that, in my view, marriage is simply a union of
All three of those are "rights." Not "absolute right", but "right."
And you have no "absolute right" to impose your beliefs regarding what is and isn't marriage on other individuals. That was the whole point of my examples.
Prohibition was passed, and later repealed, by democratic process. Slavery was totally and perfectly legal until the states outlawed it.
So you're saying that these examples were morally correct because the majority of Americans supported it? What about the burning of witches? The majority of puritans supported that... does that make it okay?
The fact is, non-heteros are descriminated against purely because the majority disagrees with their lifestyle. Unfortunately, the majority agreed with slavery of the blacks, and I think we can agree that was wrong. So why is it that it's okay for the majority to impose their will on gays and lesbians?
The Catholic Church, even today, is perfectly welcome to fund churches and deny contraceptives, or to attempt to convince just about anyone that contraceptives and abortion are wrong;
Sure. But the minute the government outlaws birth control because the Catholics disagree with it, I will object very loudly.
Wow, a gay troll.
I'm a troll because I believe in separation of church and state?
The state does not exist in a vacum. It is a product of and by its citizens,
Okay, so majority rules. Gotcha. So, if the majority decides that computer geeks deserve to be burned at the stake, I guess that's okay, right? It is, after all, the will of the people... well, most of them, anyway.
Care to convince me how not being able to call your Civil Union a "marriage" is an infringement on your basic rights?
I don't give a damn what it's called as long as hetero and gay relationships are given the exact same standing under the law and the word marriage is struck from the books, to be replaced with something like "legal union", as "marriage" implies far too much in the way of religious connotation. However, I do feel that the joining of a hetero couple and the joining of a gay couple should have the same name, simply for symbolic reasons... after all, they are, legally, the same thing, so why differentiate them?
Actually, we're both partly wrong. I was wrong, in that Britain didn't force Canada's hand regarding WWI (even though it could). You are wrong, in that Canada was still somewhat under the thumb of the British until the Westminster act of 1931, at which point Canada was granted full autonomy.
Uhh, atheism is not defined by the absence of a religious allegiance. It is the belief that there is, in fact, no God at all. The states you list do not make any such claims. In fact, they are completely silent on the issue. Now,
theocracy : government of a state by immediate divine guidance
Thus, by definition, a country which does not rule based on any religion cannot be a theocracy (nor can a country which directly promotes atheism, BTW). The current US administration, however, quite clearly bases many of their decisions on Christian and Zionist ideals (just look at their policies in Israel, not to mention their stance regarding gay marriage). Heck, the whole "under god" bit in the Pledge of Allegiance seems pretty theocratic to me...
Incidentally, I would agree that atheism is a religion, simply because it requires faith, as you cannot prove a negative (the non-existance of God). Thus, any true scientist should, in fact, be unwilling to take any position regarding matters of religion, one way or the other.
I feel that my right to maintain the cultural meaning of
Pfft... you have no "right to maintain the cultural meaning of" anything. That isn't a *right*, any more than the prohibitionists had the right to enforce their values on the rest of American society. Or supporters of slavery could enforce their values on blacks. Or the Catholic Church has the right to enforce their values regarding contraceptives on the rest of the American public.
The fact is, the government should not exist to impose the moral/religious values of one set of people (heteros who want to "preserve the institution of marriage") on another (gays and lesbians). Frankly, the state shouldn't even perceive the concept of a marriage as a religious institution, as that assumes that there is only one definition of "marriage" which is defined by a certain religion or religions which are chosen by the state. The state's roll in marriage should simply be to sanction a contract between two individuals which grants the certain additional privileges (tax breaks, etc).
Holy shit, you should be ashamed to call yourself a Canadian. Learn some history! Canada was still technically under British rule during WW*I*, and as such was forced into action during that war. However, by WWII, Canada had full autonomy from the British empire and chose independantly to enter the war.