In England in the 18th century many juries found blatantly guilty people "Not guilty" of sheep-stealing because the penatly (death or transportation to Australia) was too severe given the circumstances.
This is an important principle which recognizes the sovereignty of citizens as being supreme at least in some instances.
It is dumb to suspend all but the most urgent benficial actions; such a strategy would create more urgent needs and also reduce the capacity to address urgent needs.
Shall I never have clean water while one person in africa is still in danger of river blindness?
Shall my ability to provide for and educate my family be destroyed because noise control engineers (who are good at noise control) have all been SENT to africa (against their will) to do err... non-noise-control related things?
If you were after first post I could understand your hasty ill-thought response.
Many EU countries vote against further economic integration for entirely different reasons.
so what you are saying is that you have never had to ask the question!
I have, and after a lot of searching I settled on Amarok (KDE project).
Sorry GNOME folks, but your music player sucks. Its a bit like Amarok but it doesn't even work on RH FC3.
Amarok beats windows media player for usability and functionality in everything EXCEPT it won't read TAGS from WMA files, and it only plays audio. Yes I miss playing video but its search facility is so good, I don't care.
Just point Amarok at your music wherever you put it, and enjoy!
As I understand it the mesh network makes use of multiple uncoordinated internet connections to provide internet connectivity for the nodes of the mesh. Although the edge nodes may co-ordinate with eachothers, the internet connections may be with various providers in various address ranges making it generally too-late to re-route once a stream has begun.
If you control the network there are a lot of possibilities, including MPLS, but for a single user on a network there is not much that can be done as anything that is broadly accepted so that "it works" can be used by everyone and the problem is just reduced back to bandwidth contention.
If bit-torrent becomes to slow compared to VOIP people WILL encapsulate it as some kind of VOIP protocol in order to use the faster network.
If VOIP quality is good too many people WILL use it instead of regular telephone till the VOIP quality becomes poor.
Commoditize the bandwidth (as my manager keeps telling me) and charge people for the quality of service they need. Variable price sounds scary compared to "all you can eat DSL" but it is the only model that will provide a service of the quality people need by charging what they are willing to pay.
As long as the customer has choice over DSL provider it will be best for everyone as DSL providers get best return on best bandwidth utilisation and customers only pay a premium for highly contended service types, which stimulates provision of more service (to cash in on those prices) which in turn reduces the price.
So you poor Americans stuck in cable-only DSL areas really really really need to write to your representatives and get competition opened up in your cable areas.
Sam
I maybe talking through my hat, but it makes sense to me.
Sure, it's an interesting question, but in what environment does your mesh network exist?
To my mind, the most compelling situation for a mesh network is a multitude of nodes requiring internet bandwidth from the few nodes that have internet bandwidth.
The situation you are suggestion is that the application can discover from all the edge and in between nodes if there is a better route to a better internet-connected node to provide that bandwidth.
The answer may be "yes" but unless all the other bandwidth consuming apps at other mesh nodes co-operate, flip-flop-ing of the route is more likely to occur as other mesh nodes select their routes according to other rules, and cause congestion on the new route. (Unless you are the only one online at that time of night)
To avoid this there does need to be an arbiter of bandwidth, this could be done jointly by all apps (fat chance) or by the internet connected nodes which recognize the video stream or other request mechanisms from the streaming client and then use traffic shaping or other means to reserve enough bandwidth.
(Unless there is an abundance of internet bandwidth you are eventually going to be talking about throwing some of someone's packets away in the end)
Talking about re-routing is a red-herring as far as the solution goes, and presumes there will be an edge mesh node with enough bandwidth.
To illustrate; take the general case and presume some encapsulation protocol by which all the internet connected edge nodes are used as some distributed big pipe and can all have their bandwidth used to full capacity and you'll see that it just becomes a problem of reserving enough bandwidth for the stream. Going back to your specific case we just need all the bandwidth to be via one node.
So... let the internet connected nodes be able to recognize time sensitive traffic and prioritize bandwidth for these with some per-client-host rules to stop some clients hogging it all day. Now you are no longer talking about re-routing based on QoS but just plain routing based on QoS because once the route is chosen you get the neccessary bandwidth reserved and wont need to re-route.
Of course beware of hacker-type neighbours who start encapsulating their kernel mirror sessions over video stream protocols or the like - and so you see the simplest way is to charge a slight premium for better quality un-interrupted service.
Where bandwidth is scarce, sell it to the highest bidder and the profits will encourage the provision of more bandwidth.
Which brings me back to the start, I thought that mesh networks mostly existed where bandwidth (or internet conenctivity) is scarce, so any solution will only solve your problem indirectly by raising interest (and price) of this newly convenient streaming bandwidth, till someone providers a better and cheaper connection.
There are companies that produce such dynamic bandwidth management boxes (I'm sure if you ask me I'll tell you one) which help users get the best service from their connectivity providers, who in turn get the best price for the bandwidth they provide.
Best, meaning the bandwidth is more fully utilized, and paid for.
BTW, all I have done is reduce the problem from re-routing to routing based available bandwidth, but I would hope that this is something mesh networks have been able to solve?
Otherwise I think IP6 and SCTP protocols also will offer solutions to your problem (re-routing) presuming you can get enough continuous bandwidth at all, but I don't think they are used much for streaming commercially at the moment.
Probably not, and I'd guess for the same reason that I'm not sure what reverse astro-turfing is.
I don't know if you mean astro turfing for the other side, or astro-turfing without the knowledge of the leaders of the other side, or astro turfing ineffectively.
However, what I said is true, and I know, because I was that man.
FSF was born out of RMS being bitten. My appreciation of its ideals are born out of me being bitten.
Perhaps it takes loss of freedom to appreciate it?
Thankfully that last unix where these didn't work for me was SCO ODT3
And don't tell me about it being quicker to use ^F type keys because my fingers are already in that area, to make a great saving I'd have to be using them an awful lot for it to be worthwhile remembering to use ^F instead of right arrow (or is it down arrow? forward/next sortof seem the same)
I got by on pico for years, even for editing C source.
This was after giving up on JOVE in disgust, which our (blessed) Uni systadmins had installed because it was simpler than emac - well it was, but the everyday bits were just as complicated. ^X^C to quit,etc!
Now I use vi cos I have to. The full set of commands I know are: s I i A a ESC:w:q:w!:q!:f/
I think they do take credit cards but the chocie to donate money to debian goes like this:
* I think I'll donate to debian * Ah here's the link * ahh SPI * ahh ahh read lots off stuff * Hmmm different debian groups, who gets the money? * hmm someone else to give my credit card number to
By this time what I'm doing involves comprehending more information and making more decisions that triggered the impulse to donate, so the result is "too complicated, can't be bothered"
Use paypal and empty it regularly into the real bank account.
I built my 2.6.11 debian kernels from source, but it was from deb-src, I know I could give myself a pristine kernel but I just have to check over what was in all the ubuntu kernel patches and see if any of my ubuntu packages are going to depend on any of that.
Such is life when one departs from the packagers path, I just hoped ubuntu was going to save me this grief.
I moved to ubunto because it had up to date python4 packages which I needed for pymusique, and used x.org x server, but thats about it.
Its behind on kernel releases, I need 2.6.11 to support my USB drive and the best Ubuntu has is 2.6.11.1, and Ubunto doesn't even have Firefox 1.03 out yet.
Previous to that I was using a de-mepis'd Mepis become testing/unstable and it was very stable. (Mepis was also falling behind the times)
My testing/unstable was running recent 2.6.11 releases and doing well.
So I didn't gain much by moving to ubuntu at all, as I now use allofmp3.com instead of pyMusique, as iTunes music catalogue is sadly deficient in too many areas.
By the time I got this far it seemed to complicated so I gave up.
It's hardly good for impulsive donations, and certainly a long way away from 1-click-ordering.
I did suggest they take pay-pal to make it easy for people to donate quickly and simply. I was told they had talked about it before and would bring it up again later.
In normal debian timescales they could be getting on quite quickly with making debian donations easy.
I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.
Just because you don't know the answer to your question doesn't mean it isn't true.
How do MySQL make moneyof their software, when the source isavailable? But they do!
How does Hans Reiser make money of reiserFS? He does?
I know people who make develop and make money from xapian, an excellent open source search engine (ton better that most of the open source search engines you will have heard of)
But answer this, why would you wantto pay for software who's main marketable value was its proprietaryness, or locked-in-ness?
On a small scale, why did I donate to the bit-torrent author? Why did I contribute to gubed hosting? Why did I contribute to bpmdj music software? Because I appreciate it and want it to keep existing.
When you worry that opensource software users wont pay, perhaps it is because you don't pay.
When I worked for Orange and we left behind the proprietary search engine vendor we hired people to develop "open source xapian" which benefitted us, the rest of the world, and other employers of mine later.
Sure you can sell open source, you just cant sell "advantages of proprierary-ness" because (thankfully) there isn't any.
I've taken that chance and twice, lost with high profile projects.
One of the suppliers was Microsoft, and I was working for an MS preferred partner. Sometimes business priorities work out that way, sometimes its due to internal resourcing problems even if the supplier is co-operative as MS were.
I've now come to value free(dom). If we had had access to the source, we could have got somewhere.
RMS belives it's WRONG for programmers to recieve money for what they do...or at least the high and mighty corporations that employ them
No he doesn't
MS thinks buying software is a mortal sin
No he doesn't. I think you need to do some more reading at www.gnu.org. RMS started off selling his own GNU software on tape in the early GNU days. The last time I looked the FSF was selling GNU software.
I have had two commercial software projects stall and one cancel because of the lack of co-operation of suppliers of non-free software.
In the first case we were developing on an open platform so we switched to a free(dom) replacement and were able to complete the project.
In the second case we were also developing on a non-free platform so after stalling for 18 months the project was cancelled at the expense the development time and loss of expected revenew. (This is a real loss as the development time would have been used on another revenue generating product)
I have come to appreciate the value of free(dom) software in the world of commercial software.
I see that you haven't.
I observed nothing bullying in RMS post there, in fact I thought it gave a clarity, which is needed to eradicate the confusion about "free(dom)" that many people suffer.
In the end it comes down to how much you value of free(dom) in software. I have been bitten twice. The bites were not quick, lasting 6 months and 18 months. I have begun to guard my freedom.
I think these specific bills are going to have the opposite effect their supporters want.
I think such specific bills will increase resentment against the segments whose rights they are designed to favour.
I support a general idea opposing unbased discrimination on the basis of legally acceptable behaviour.
i.e. if what Jim does is quite legal, there is no grounds to discriminate against him in relation to anything other than his behaviour.
e.g., if he supports the SF-49ers which is legally acceptable, I can't use that to discriminate against him in relation to employment unless he is applying for position as coach with the Dolphins.
If a guy is gay, I can't use that fact to discriminate against him in relation to selling goods or services.
Unless the cause can be presented as a general principle that favours all social segments equally it will appear to favour rights of particular groups above those who previously have not been enemies and this does cause resentment.
I'm a supporter of rights, not not gay-rights or straight-rights,
Where I live there is gay-rights, ethnic-rights, womens-rights and I think the segmentation does more harm than good.
Gays, ethnic minorities and women don't get any more rights than anyone else, and ever growing list specific things not to discriminate against make a big joke out of the whole equal opportunitues thing:
* sex * sexual-orientation * religion * ethnic-background * country * race (yes these last 3 are all different) * political opinion * social background * sports teams you support (yes, this is a very serious sort of discrimination in some places) * physique * disabilities (hey, disabled people can be pretty punative to their peers who take treatment to "cure" the disability)
So when someone comes to me and wants to claim special rights under one of these categories I have to think "and whats so special about you compared with the rest of the massive long list?"
And when they start whinging for special treatment it just annoys me.
Gay rights bills will do more to harm and stir up hatred than just general "all happy together general rights bills" will.
My own view is "we don't need another law", if the ones we have don't cover the issue, what is going to make the next one work?
Slashdot Mirror
In England in the 18th century many juries found blatantly guilty people "Not guilty" of sheep-stealing because the penatly (death or transportation to Australia) was too severe given the circumstances.
This is an important principle which recognizes the sovereignty of citizens as being supreme at least in some instances.
Sam
Stallman himself acknowledges that software used to be free, he takes software back to those roots with GPL to protect it there.
Make that: Fortunately yes.
It is dumb to suspend all but the most urgent benficial actions; such a strategy would create more urgent needs and also reduce the capacity to address urgent needs.
Shall I never have clean water while one person in africa is still in danger of river blindness?
Shall my ability to provide for and educate my family be destroyed because noise control engineers (who are good at noise control) have all been SENT to africa (against their will) to do err... non-noise-control related things?
If you were after first post I could understand your hasty ill-thought response.
Many EU countries vote against further economic integration for entirely different reasons.
Sam
It implements the API (API = interface), it may imitiate or emulate what goes on behind the interface.
Sam
so what you are saying is that you have never had to ask the question!
I have, and after a lot of searching I settled on Amarok (KDE project).
Sorry GNOME folks, but your music player sucks. Its a bit like Amarok but it doesn't even work on RH FC3.
Amarok beats windows media player for usability and functionality in everything EXCEPT it won't read TAGS from WMA files, and it only plays audio. Yes I miss playing video but its search facility is so good, I don't care.
Just point Amarok at your music wherever you put it, and enjoy!
Sam
mod parent up, this is NOT just about a graphics card, this is about open hardware.
/WILL/ follow.
Thie is a highly visible open hardware project.
If it is successful, more
The last one I came across was the penguin processor board that fitted into a memory slot, but it didn't have wide appeal (naturally).
If you have an FPGA based PCI/AGP card, sure as hell you are going to use it for more than graphics.
Folk will use them for SSL accelorators, crypto-disk accelerators, or anything that benefits from re-definable logic.
its a new world for open source folks when open source hardware is as well used as open source software.
Sam
You do have some money. Send some to this.
How badly do you want there to be open hardware?
10 cents worth? 10 dollars worth? Not badly enough to be bothered to put in into monetary terms?
No sweat if you don't, but if you do want open hardware, how badly?
Sam
As I understand it the mesh network makes use of multiple uncoordinated internet connections to provide internet connectivity for the nodes of the mesh. Although the edge nodes may co-ordinate with eachothers, the internet connections may be with various providers in various address ranges making it generally too-late to re-route once a stream has begun.
If you control the network there are a lot of possibilities, including MPLS, but for a single user on a network there is not much that can be done as anything that is broadly accepted so that "it works" can be used by everyone and the problem is just reduced back to bandwidth contention.
If bit-torrent becomes to slow compared to VOIP people WILL encapsulate it as some kind of VOIP protocol in order to use the faster network.
If VOIP quality is good too many people WILL use it instead of regular telephone till the VOIP quality becomes poor.
Commoditize the bandwidth (as my manager keeps telling me) and charge people for the quality of service they need. Variable price sounds scary compared to "all you can eat DSL" but it is the only model that will provide a service of the quality people need by charging what they are willing to pay.
As long as the customer has choice over DSL provider it will be best for everyone as DSL providers get best return on best bandwidth utilisation and customers only pay a premium for highly contended service types, which stimulates provision of more service (to cash in on those prices) which in turn reduces the price.
So you poor Americans stuck in cable-only DSL areas really really really need to write to your representatives and get competition opened up in your cable areas.
Sam
I maybe talking through my hat, but it makes sense to me.
Sure, it's an interesting question, but in what environment does your mesh network exist?
To my mind, the most compelling situation for a mesh network is a multitude of nodes requiring internet bandwidth from the few nodes that have internet bandwidth.
The situation you are suggestion is that the application can discover from all the edge and in between nodes if there is a better route to a better internet-connected node to provide that bandwidth.
The answer may be "yes" but unless all the other bandwidth consuming apps at other mesh nodes co-operate, flip-flop-ing of the route is more likely to occur as other mesh nodes select their routes according to other rules, and cause congestion on the new route. (Unless you are the only one online at that time of night)
To avoid this there does need to be an arbiter of bandwidth, this could be done jointly by all apps (fat chance) or by the internet connected nodes which recognize the video stream or other request mechanisms from the streaming client and then use traffic shaping or other means to reserve enough bandwidth.
(Unless there is an abundance of internet bandwidth you are eventually going to be talking about throwing some of someone's packets away in the end)
Talking about re-routing is a red-herring as far as the solution goes, and presumes there will be an edge mesh node with enough bandwidth.
To illustrate; take the general case and presume some encapsulation protocol by which all the internet connected edge nodes are used as some distributed big pipe and can all have their bandwidth used to full capacity and you'll see that it just becomes a problem of reserving enough bandwidth for the stream. Going back to your specific case we just need all the bandwidth to be via one node.
So... let the internet connected nodes be able to recognize time sensitive traffic and prioritize bandwidth for these with some per-client-host rules to stop some clients hogging it all day. Now you are no longer talking about re-routing based on QoS but just plain routing based on QoS because once the route is chosen you get the neccessary bandwidth reserved and wont need to re-route.
Of course beware of hacker-type neighbours who start encapsulating their kernel mirror sessions over video stream protocols or the like - and so you see the simplest way is to charge a slight premium for better quality un-interrupted service.
Where bandwidth is scarce, sell it to the highest bidder and the profits will encourage the provision of more bandwidth.
Which brings me back to the start, I thought that mesh networks mostly existed where bandwidth (or internet conenctivity) is scarce, so any solution will only solve your problem indirectly by raising interest (and price) of this newly convenient streaming bandwidth, till someone providers a better and cheaper connection.
There are companies that produce such dynamic bandwidth management boxes (I'm sure if you ask me I'll tell you one) which help users get the best service from their connectivity providers, who in turn get the best price for the bandwidth they provide.
Best, meaning the bandwidth is more fully utilized, and paid for.
BTW, all I have done is reduce the problem from re-routing to routing based available bandwidth, but I would hope that this is something mesh networks have been able to solve?
Otherwise I think IP6 and SCTP protocols also will offer solutions to your problem (re-routing) presuming you can get enough continuous bandwidth at all, but I don't think they are used much for streaming commercially at the moment.
Sam
Probably not, and I'd guess for the same reason that I'm not sure what reverse astro-turfing is.
I don't know if you mean astro turfing for the other side, or astro-turfing without the knowledge of the leaders of the other side, or astro turfing ineffectively.
However, what I said is true, and I know, because I was that man.
FSF was born out of RMS being bitten. My appreciation of its ideals are born out of me being bitten.
Perhaps it takes loss of freedom to appreciate it?
Sam
Does any keyboard not have arrow keys these days?
Thankfully that last unix where these didn't work for me was SCO ODT3
And don't tell me about it being quicker to use ^F type keys because my fingers are already in that area, to make a great saving I'd have to be using them an awful lot for it to be worthwhile remembering to use ^F instead of right arrow (or is it down arrow? forward/next sortof seem the same)
Sam
Don't laugh!
:w :q :w! :q! :f /
I got by on pico for years, even for editing C source.
This was after giving up on JOVE in disgust, which our (blessed) Uni systadmins had installed because it was simpler than emac - well it was, but the everyday bits were just as complicated. ^X^C to quit,etc!
Now I use vi cos I have to.
The full set of commands I know are:
s I i A a ESC
And that brings me up to pico ability!
mad!
Sam
I think they do take credit cards but the chocie to donate money to debian goes like this:
* I think I'll donate to debian
* Ah here's the link
* ahh SPI
* ahh ahh read lots off stuff
* Hmmm different debian groups, who gets the money?
* hmm someone else to give my credit card number to
By this time what I'm doing involves comprehending more information and making more decisions that triggered the impulse to donate, so the result is "too complicated, can't be bothered"
Use paypal and empty it regularly into the real bank account.
Sam
ubunto still doesn't have firefox 1.03
This has been mentioned on support forums.
Sam
Oh, sure, I will.
I built my 2.6.11 debian kernels from source, but it was from deb-src, I know I could give myself a pristine kernel but I just have to check over what was in all the ubuntu kernel patches and see if any of my ubuntu packages are going to depend on any of that.
Such is life when one departs from the packagers path, I just hoped ubuntu was going to save me this grief.
Sam
I moved to ubunto because it had up to date python4 packages which I needed for pymusique, and used x.org x server, but thats about it.
Its behind on kernel releases, I need 2.6.11 to support my USB drive and the best Ubuntu has is 2.6.11.1, and Ubunto doesn't even have Firefox 1.03 out yet.
Previous to that I was using a de-mepis'd Mepis become testing/unstable and it was very stable. (Mepis was also falling behind the times)
My testing/unstable was running recent 2.6.11 releases and doing well.
So I didn't gain much by moving to ubuntu at all, as I now use allofmp3.com instead of pyMusique, as iTunes music catalogue is sadly deficient in too many areas.
Sam
By the time I got this far it seemed to complicated so I gave up.
It's hardly good for impulsive donations, and certainly a long way away from 1-click-ordering.
I did suggest they take pay-pal to make it easy for people to donate quickly and simply. I was told they had talked about it before and would bring it up again later.
In normal debian timescales they could be getting on quite quickly with making debian donations easy.
I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.
Sam
Just because you don't know the answer to your question doesn't mean it isn't true.
How do MySQL make moneyof their software, when the source isavailable? But they do!
How does Hans Reiser make money of reiserFS? He does?
I know people who make develop and make money from xapian, an excellent open source search engine (ton better that most of the open source search engines you will have heard of)
But answer this, why would you wantto pay for software who's main marketable value was its proprietaryness, or locked-in-ness?
On a small scale, why did I donate to the bit-torrent author? Why did I contribute to gubed hosting? Why did I contribute to bpmdj music software? Because I appreciate it and want it to keep existing.
When you worry that opensource software users wont pay, perhaps it is because you don't pay.
When I worked for Orange and we left behind the proprietary search engine vendor we hired people to develop "open source xapian" which benefitted us, the rest of the world, and other employers of mine later.
Sure you can sell open source, you just cant sell "advantages of proprierary-ness" because (thankfully) there isn't any.
Sam
LDS=Latter-day Saint, abbreviation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Utah. The guy in question is at the University of Utah.
I'm not sure if that was the joke, but you said you didn't know what LDS is.
He's a better joke, though:
What do you get if you cross LDS with LSD?
A high-priest!
Sam
I've taken that chance and twice, lost with high profile projects.
One of the suppliers was Microsoft, and I was working for an MS preferred partner. Sometimes business priorities work out that way, sometimes its due to internal resourcing problems even if the supplier is co-operative as MS were.
I've now come to value free(dom). If we had had access to the source, we could have got somewhere.
Sam
RMS belives it's WRONG for programmers to recieve money for what they do...or at least the high and mighty corporations that employ them
No he doesn't
MS thinks buying software is a mortal sin
No he doesn't. I think you need to do some more reading at www.gnu.org. RMS started off selling his own GNU software on tape in the early GNU days. The last time I looked the FSF was selling GNU software.
Yep, well said, start the publicity campaign.
"Linux distributions" are now "GLX distributions"
I run GLX at home.
Sam
I have had two commercial software projects stall and one cancel because of the lack of co-operation of suppliers of non-free software.
In the first case we were developing on an open platform so we switched to a free(dom) replacement and were able to complete the project.
In the second case we were also developing on a non-free platform so after stalling for 18 months the project was cancelled at the expense the development time and loss of expected revenew. (This is a real loss as the development time would have been used on another revenue generating product)
I have come to appreciate the value of free(dom) software in the world of commercial software.
I see that you haven't.
I observed nothing bullying in RMS post there, in fact I thought it gave a clarity, which is needed to eradicate the confusion about "free(dom)" that many people suffer.
In the end it comes down to how much you value of free(dom) in software. I have been bitten twice. The bites were not quick, lasting 6 months and 18 months. I have begun to guard my freedom.
Sam
I think these specific bills are going to have the opposite effect their supporters want.
I think such specific bills will increase resentment against the segments whose rights they are designed to favour.
I support a general idea opposing unbased discrimination on the basis of legally acceptable behaviour.
i.e. if what Jim does is quite legal, there is no grounds to discriminate against him in relation to anything other than his behaviour.
e.g., if he supports the SF-49ers which is legally acceptable, I can't use that to discriminate against him in relation to employment unless he is applying for position as coach with the Dolphins.
If a guy is gay, I can't use that fact to discriminate against him in relation to selling goods or services.
Unless the cause can be presented as a general principle that favours all social segments equally it will appear to favour rights of particular groups above those who previously have not been enemies and this does cause resentment.
It sounds like "we are more equal than others"
Sam
I'm a supporter of rights, not not gay-rights or straight-rights,
Where I live there is gay-rights, ethnic-rights, womens-rights and I think the segmentation does more harm than good.
Gays, ethnic minorities and women don't get any more rights than anyone else, and ever growing list specific things not to discriminate against make a big joke out of the whole equal opportunitues thing:
* sex
* sexual-orientation
* religion
* ethnic-background
* country
* race (yes these last 3 are all different)
* political opinion
* social background
* sports teams you support (yes, this is a very serious sort of discrimination in some places)
* physique
* disabilities (hey, disabled people can be pretty punative to their peers who take treatment to "cure" the disability)
So when someone comes to me and wants to claim special rights under one of these categories I have to think "and whats so special about you compared with the rest of the massive long list?"
And when they start whinging for special treatment it just annoys me.
Gay rights bills will do more to harm and stir up hatred than just general "all happy together general rights bills" will.
My own view is "we don't need another law", if the ones we have don't cover the issue, what is going to make the next one work?
Sam