You can claim that you're married to your dog or car, but few enough people will also call that relationship "marriage" that it won't be anywhere near a language-wide definition of the term. In the case of speakers of American English, a sufficient number agree with gay folks' use of the word "marriage" to describe their relationships that this is now common usage. Perhaps you don't think this is what "marriage" means, but enough of your countrymen disagree with you that there is wide recognition of a broader meaning of the words "marriage" and "married" than the one you espouse.
This isn't a legal thing or a government thing; it's a social and linguistic thing.
According to a large fraction of the American people, according to several large American religious institutions, and according to an overwhelming majority of the people I interact with, two men or two women can marry.
Language is defined by its users. Lots of gay couples use the word "married" to describe themselves, and lots of people recognize that use and use it also to describe them.
Why the hell are our gun laws so complicated? Is there any policy purpose, even a bad one, served by making the law so complicated that it makes me want to go write Xorg.conf modelines to rest my brains?
It is a lot harder to actually find that collection of computer bits or enforce the law against it. We have child porn, a thing that an overwhelming majority of the population finds abhorrent, more evil than Hitler himself. It's a collection of bits that can't be created (usually) without the involvement of an unwilling third party. And yet people have it. Gun plans, something that there's far more sympathy (or, at least, apathy) toward? Good luck.
The point is that making something a collection of bits makes it far more difficult to ban.
You're not forced to call my boyfriend any particular thing. I'm not forced to call the woman whose vagina you crawled out of your mother, either. But in English that's what the word "mother" means, just like the word "husband" means "man in an institutionally-formalized long-term romantic relationship of a particular character." Two men go to a church and a priest says some funny words and they come out wearing rings; you're welcome to call them whatever you like, but most folks will call them husbands.
I've lived in a city with some of the most permissive gun laws in the US (Tucson AZ, population around 800k) and a city with some of the most restrictive (Washington DC, population 600k-ish). Famous Tucson shooting notwithstanding, it's a far far safer place -- despite having a much lower average income. This isn't *because* of its gun laws, of course -- but they don't cause huge problems. If you went there the only thing you'd probably notice would be the "No guns" signs in front of restaurants and bars. (The law gives private property owners the right to ban armed guests from their property, and many choose to.)
I'm a physicist, not CS -- I know only as much about Linux as I find interesting and/or necessary for me to work.
But I know I can run an animation remotely and it'll run as fast as it's able over the network, automagically and transparently, but I can run it locally, and it'll run even faster, and with local GPU acceleration if it's available. I know there's no magic involved here because I wrote the animation code in GLUT, and it is pretty ghetto.
X11 is fucking magic to my students the first time they see it -- "Wait, my program is running over there, but I see the window here, but the computer's over there? And I can do this from home, too?" It's fantastic. Please don't break this; it's one of the truly fantastic things about the Linux work environment. I may have windows on my desktop from four different computers, and I don't have to worry about anything -- it just works.
Corner cases are the argument for hacker heaven: that rather than presenting an interface to the user that is a list of things she can do, you should present her a question: "So, what do you want to do?" Apple -- and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft -- have tried this, but users are far better at thinking of things that they want to do than UI designers.
Case in point: A student of mine came in with a bunch of files, over a thousand of them, with names like E234NNNN.jpg, where NNNN were successive four-digit numbers starting at some random value: they were frames in a sequence he'd shot that he wanted to assemble into a timelapse sequence. He had some timelapse software that took, as its input, a bunch of jpegs that had successive numbers in the filename, starting with 1 (the first frame), and spat out a movie. Now, perhaps the timelapse software should have been more flexible, but that's not the point: it should be pretty easy to mash them into the format the timelapse program wanted, no?
Wrong. He had a Windows laptop. Perhaps there is or was some way to do this in DOS, but googling around revealed nothing, and we tried to google "Windows batch rename software", but found nothing other than things wanting us to install MyBonziCleanPCBuddy or whatever. We wound up copying all the files to the clunker linux machine in the closet that they all used for class, where there is a lovely thing called a shell that is an interface that says "What do you want to do?" rather than "Here are the things you might want to do, pick one", doing an awk one-liner, and then copying them back.
Exactly. Nature is far better at building a mouse that survives to make more mice than we are, even if that were our goal; were there some mutation we could make to the mouse to make it better, Nature would have found it (literally) a million years ago.
All those white lab mice just have "HERE, OWLS, OVER HERE" written on them.
Yep. And the worst tragedy is that all of those people could have been saved if the police had said to the paramedics "We are going to gas the terrorists with fentanyl. Have lots of naloxone on hand ready to go, and after we storm the place get ready to administer it to the people inside." But they didn't, because they wanted to keep their chemical weapon secret.
When you meet a libertarian, remember, the oppression of government is not what he objects to, it is that it is the government doing the subjugation and not him.
That's not always true. There actually are some people out there who don't want to reduce the power of government because they want it instead; they want less coercion all around, and would prefer nobody to be waving guns at all. Maybe theirs is a mad quest, maybe it isn't, but not all of them want to be the boss instead.
... why nobody's made a drone with the profile of a vulture. In the US, at least, some species of vulture is common in most areas. They're big (so there's room for interesting hardware, and perhaps even a grenade-sized glide bomb), they're black (so no need to worry about mimicking particular coloring), and they don't flap. They also ride thermals; it shouldn't be that hard to program a drone to sense updrafts and use them to stay aloft.
I'm racing you on that one -- I want to cut a hole at the top of the Capitol Rotunda and replace it with a turbine, powered off of the hot air coming out of the folks inside.
Slashdot Mirror
You can claim that you're married to your dog or car, but few enough people will also call that relationship "marriage" that it won't be anywhere near a language-wide definition of the term. In the case of speakers of American English, a sufficient number agree with gay folks' use of the word "marriage" to describe their relationships that this is now common usage. Perhaps you don't think this is what "marriage" means, but enough of your countrymen disagree with you that there is wide recognition of a broader meaning of the words "marriage" and "married" than the one you espouse.
This isn't a legal thing or a government thing; it's a social and linguistic thing.
According to a large fraction of the American people, according to several large American religious institutions, and according to an overwhelming majority of the people I interact with, two men or two women can marry.
Language is defined by its users. Lots of gay couples use the word "married" to describe themselves, and lots of people recognize that use and use it also to describe them.
Definition according to who?
Non-gun-owning American asks:
Why the hell are our gun laws so complicated? Is there any policy purpose, even a bad one, served by making the law so complicated that it makes me want to go write Xorg.conf modelines to rest my brains?
It is a lot harder to actually find that collection of computer bits or enforce the law against it. We have child porn, a thing that an overwhelming majority of the population finds abhorrent, more evil than Hitler himself. It's a collection of bits that can't be created (usually) without the involvement of an unwilling third party. And yet people have it. Gun plans, something that there's far more sympathy (or, at least, apathy) toward? Good luck.
The point is that making something a collection of bits makes it far more difficult to ban.
You're not forced to call my boyfriend any particular thing. I'm not forced to call the woman whose vagina you crawled out of your mother, either. But in English that's what the word "mother" means, just like the word "husband" means "man in an institutionally-formalized long-term romantic relationship of a particular character." Two men go to a church and a priest says some funny words and they come out wearing rings; you're welcome to call them whatever you like, but most folks will call them husbands.
I've lived in a city with some of the most permissive gun laws in the US (Tucson AZ, population around 800k) and a city with some of the most restrictive (Washington DC, population 600k-ish). Famous Tucson shooting notwithstanding, it's a far far safer place -- despite having a much lower average income. This isn't *because* of its gun laws, of course -- but they don't cause huge problems. If you went there the only thing you'd probably notice would be the "No guns" signs in front of restaurants and bars. (The law gives private property owners the right to ban armed guests from their property, and many choose to.)
Obama is neither a very good liberal nor a very good conservative.
Mandrake was the first distro I used, way back in undergrad; why have they changed their name yet again?
I'm a physicist, not CS -- I know only as much about Linux as I find interesting and/or necessary for me to work.
But I know I can run an animation remotely and it'll run as fast as it's able over the network, automagically and transparently, but I can run it locally, and it'll run even faster, and with local GPU acceleration if it's available. I know there's no magic involved here because I wrote the animation code in GLUT, and it is pretty ghetto.
X11 is fucking magic to my students the first time they see it -- "Wait, my program is running over there, but I see the window here, but the computer's over there? And I can do this from home, too?" It's fantastic. Please don't break this; it's one of the truly fantastic things about the Linux work environment. I may have windows on my desktop from four different computers, and I don't have to worry about anything -- it just works.
Corner cases are the argument for hacker heaven: that rather than presenting an interface to the user that is a list of things she can do, you should present her a question: "So, what do you want to do?" Apple -- and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft -- have tried this, but users are far better at thinking of things that they want to do than UI designers.
Case in point: A student of mine came in with a bunch of files, over a thousand of them, with names like E234NNNN.jpg, where NNNN were successive four-digit numbers starting at some random value: they were frames in a sequence he'd shot that he wanted to assemble into a timelapse sequence. He had some timelapse software that took, as its input, a bunch of jpegs that had successive numbers in the filename, starting with 1 (the first frame), and spat out a movie. Now, perhaps the timelapse software should have been more flexible, but that's not the point: it should be pretty easy to mash them into the format the timelapse program wanted, no?
Wrong. He had a Windows laptop. Perhaps there is or was some way to do this in DOS, but googling around revealed nothing, and we tried to google "Windows batch rename software", but found nothing other than things wanting us to install MyBonziCleanPCBuddy or whatever. We wound up copying all the files to the clunker linux machine in the closet that they all used for class, where there is a lovely thing called a shell that is an interface that says "What do you want to do?" rather than "Here are the things you might want to do, pick one", doing an awk one-liner, and then copying them back.
Why not realize that a child seeing porn is not a problem?
[insert crack about "toggling the naughty bits" here]
Exactly. Nature is far better at building a mouse that survives to make more mice than we are, even if that were our goal; were there some mutation we could make to the mouse to make it better, Nature would have found it (literally) a million years ago.
All those white lab mice just have "HERE, OWLS, OVER HERE" written on them.
Yep. And the worst tragedy is that all of those people could have been saved if the police had said to the paramedics "We are going to gas the terrorists with fentanyl. Have lots of naloxone on hand ready to go, and after we storm the place get ready to administer it to the people inside." But they didn't, because they wanted to keep their chemical weapon secret.
Replying to undo accidental moderation. Lol slashdot ui.
When you meet a libertarian, remember, the oppression of government is not what he objects to, it is that it is the government doing the subjugation and not him.
That's not always true. There actually are some people out there who don't want to reduce the power of government because they want it instead; they want less coercion all around, and would prefer nobody to be waving guns at all. Maybe theirs is a mad quest, maybe it isn't, but not all of them want to be the boss instead.
The Russians did that the last time the Chechens caused trouble over there. It ended sort of badly.
"That'll be 9/11 ... times a thousand."
I prefer JW to GW (jiggawatts)
Many large raptors don't flap when hunting -- in the USA, red-tailed hawks, bald and golden eagles, turkey vultures...
How are you going to hit a vulture hundreds of feet in the air? Spray rounds at it with an AK47 until one of them just happens to hit?
... why nobody's made a drone with the profile of a vulture. In the US, at least, some species of vulture is common in most areas. They're big (so there's room for interesting hardware, and perhaps even a grenade-sized glide bomb), they're black (so no need to worry about mimicking particular coloring), and they don't flap. They also ride thermals; it shouldn't be that hard to program a drone to sense updrafts and use them to stay aloft.
Are you saying they have trouble erecting their dongs?
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
I'm racing you on that one -- I want to cut a hole at the top of the Capitol Rotunda and replace it with a turbine, powered off of the hot air coming out of the folks inside.