I don't think that means that women are not fit for computing
Did I ever say that? I simply said on average that women are not as adept in certain fields (computer science being one of them) as men are. There are always outliers. They do not invalidate my claim whatsoever.
By the way, I don't see how your theory about wiring could be correct considering that the percentage of degrees awarded to women in many engineering fields has risen. If women are kept from computer science by wiring, why wouldn't they be kept from engineering fields, which in many cases have at least as much math and science involved?
Well, I would say part of that is due to this aggressive "get women in CS no matter what" attitude. If you up female enrollment significantly, you're bound to have more women getting degrees eventually. I also think that college standards have dropped, which certainly helps. You're also falling into the trap of equating "getting a degree" with "ability to be a CS/engineering professional". Please. I know I'm talented at CS, and I got a degree. Does that put all the other jokers who slacked off and got a degree from my school on the same level as me? No.
Besides, if more women are getting degrees that still doesn't address the issue that their skills in CS on average are not equivalent to male's skills.
You keep saying this... can you point me to some scientific research that shows this, please?
Certainly. Here is a study that shows male/female intelligence testing and the which forms of intelligence favored males or females. The result?
Quantitative ability: males favored 4:1 over females. Visual-Spatial Ability (non-analytic): males favored 4.5:1 over females. Visual-Spatial Ability (analytic): males favored 8.33:1 over females.
And just to be fair, females are favored in areas like verbal ability (which I will not contest -- and experience shows us that women tend to concentrate their studies in areas that exercies their verbal abilities).
Here's some choice quotes to get your blood boiling:
The resulting proportion of males and females at age 13 at various cut-off scores on SAT-M is approximately as follows: 500 (average score of college-bound 12th-grade [18-year-old] males): 2:1; 600: 4:1; 700 (top 1 in 10,000 for 7th graders [13-year-olds]): 13:1. These ratios have remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, and have now been observed among mathematically gifted students in the 3rd grade (8-year-olds), and cross-culturally (though they are smaller in Asian populations).
. . it took five years of extensive nation-wide search to find 36 extremely mathematically talented girls.
I don't know about you, but if I knew that going into a particular field would result in the above happening on a daily basis, and that my intelligence would constantly be under-estimated by my peers, I would probably want to pick a different field. I would want to learn and work somewhere where I would not be perceived as a token exception to the rule.
Hmm, you seem to have all these worries about people doubting your abilities and yet you chose to go ahead with it anyway. Please explain why you did so if you think this is such a barrier to entry for women. You seem to think this is the only real obstacle for women in tradtionally male-dominated fields, so your insight will obviously solve the problem. After all, these brilliant women just need to do exactly what you did and rationalize the situation exactly the way you did. Problem solved!
... Or maybe you will concede that there are a variety of factors, one of which may be the stigma (and I'm not convinced that anybody passionate about their interests will be turned off by any amount of stigma -- hello, men have to deal with being considered "nerds" for pursuing their interests in computers). Another more significant factor, in my opinion, is that men and women are simply wired differently. They are differently abled, with men, on average, having greater mental facilities for math and science due to thousands of years of genetic evolution imparted by the roles that men and women have naturally assumed.
Wow, you must think you're so clever turning my words around like that!
The fact is, there is significant documented evidence showing that men and women are very, very different, both physically and mentally. Men (of any race), on average, are much stronger than women. Would you care to argue this fact too?
Likewise, men (again, of any race) on average have better developed mental abilities in the areas of math and science due to the roles men and women have assumed for the past several thousand years. It is a FACT that women have traditionally assumed homemaker and caretaker roles, and this has a big effect on the kind of abilities that women of today are genetically predisposed towards. Likewise, men have traditionally assumed roles that stress physical strength and math and science abilities, leading them to be genetically more able in these areas.
You can call me sexist if you want, but I'm not convinced that women in general are as capable as men when it comes to disciplines like engineering or Computer Science. I'm not saying that there aren't women who are talented in these fields -- they're just not as easy to find as these politically-correct types would like to believe. There will always be talented women who are drawn to Computer Science and they don't need special programs or camps to "convince" them that they will enjoy studying Computer Science.
On one hand, it would be nice to have those controls. However, let's be realistic -- the standard can't include every single control that everyone thinks is an essential part of a form.
I have a feeling that in the future the XForm spec will probably be expanded to allow custom controls that are defined by some other XML standard (rendered perhaps by SVG?), and that will lead to people publishing standard libraries of every kind of crazy control people want. That seems like the best approach to me.
My own gripe is that in my own experience, existing forms could be so much more convenient to use if only there was an accepted standard for a couple of extra data types.
That's one of the things that XForms tries to address. All information submitted in the form gets placed in an XML document, so you can easily write a schema that places restrictions on valid input. So for instance you can create data types by writing regular expressions for them or by extending existing data types like string, int, etc.
You know I could download and fork MONO all by my self - and it wouldnt matter would it ? I could do the same to Mozilla etc... and it wouldnt matter.
If your fork became very popular, yes it would matter because the effect would be the same: there would be two (or more) forks of the same program that are both regularly used and incompatible with one another on some level. You don't have to be a monopoly to accomplish that.
Either way, Microsoft adding a language feature is no worse than Open Source languages creating forks, each with their own language extensions that are mutually incompatible...
To be more precise, Microsoft bundled a set of Windows-specific libraries with their JVM, so applications written using those libraries would only work in a Windows environment (and with those libraries). It was not as sinister as everyone on Slashdot thinks it was -- the MS JVM allowed developers to write *fast* Windows-only applications. The language itself was not extended in any way whatsoever.
You could do the exact same thing in Linux by writing a bunch of libraries that will only work on Linux systems and then ship them with some JVM implementation.
I don't see why they couldn't do that with their own.NET as well, so alas your point does not settle my concerns.
The language and runtime are ECMA standards and the cat is out of the bag already, so I doubt they're going to alter the language and not resubmit to the standards body. And even if they did, it not like it's illegal to implement a programming language that looks and feels just like another one (so long as you implement it in a clean room environment). And Microsoft will always publish API docs for their.NET standard library, and again, it's not illegal to implement those libraries on your own system using nothing more than API docs to create an API-compatible implementation. There's really nothing Microsoft can do to stop anyone from doing it, and it's not like they care if someone can implement 99% of their language and libraries. The only thing that ties.NET to Windows are Windows-specific libraries that Linux systems can't (conceivably) implement due to the simple fact that Linux isn't Windows.
Of course, if you were paying attention you'd realize that Newsbot isn't displaying ONLY MSNBC articles, but MSNBC articles first (in addition to others) IF multiple news organizations are reporting the same story.
So... it's not like they're shutting out anybody. And Newsbot is part of MSNBC, so really, what would you expect, for Newsbot to ALWAYS prefer other news organization's stories over MSNBC? Is that "unbiased" enough for you?
This might actually be funny if you were talking about Windows 98. As other posters have pointed out, Ctrl-Alt-Del is used to log on to Windows. Also, as far as I know, Ctrl-Alt-Del WON'T restart Windows no matter how many times you press it. So clearly it's not there for rebooting purposes.
You must be kidding. A patent on Google News? Do you think Google News was the first website to collect a bunch of news stories from various sources and post them on a page? Do you even know what site you're reading right now?
Microsoft isn't ripping anyone off any more than Google is.
OK, when you grow up a little and (possibly) get a job in the real world, you will realize that the average program is much more complicated than some program that reads keystrokes. Applications like Mozilla, Eclipse, Emacs, Konqueror, etc. are MASSIVE and require a SIGNIFICANT time investment to understand. Why is it important to understand how the program works? Because with most bugs, fixing the bug will have implications elsewhere in the code and you need to know how all the "pieces" of the program interact with each other to make sure you aren't breaking something ELSE by fixing your bug.
To make the oft-repeated car analogy, consider a really massive program, like Mozilla. Think of it as a car that, under the hood, looks and acts almost completely different from every other car you've ever seen. So if you've got a problem, sure your experience repairing other cars will help, but you still need to know how this kind of car operates before you can attempt to fix your problem (for instance, the engine randomly cutting off). Oh, and let's not forget that only a few dozen people (the core Mozilla developers) truly know how this car operates. Again, in this example, you've got the "source" (you can get under the hood) and you "can" fix the car yourself, but realistically it's going to take you a massive time and effort investment, so the reality of the situation is that you're as able to fix the problem with an "open source" car as you are with a car that has its hood welded shut.
You're missing the point entirely, and to draw your example to this analogy, it would be like hearing a noise, opening the hood, and tightening a screw as opposed to solving a major problem.
So to reiterate what I originally said: if you've got the source, fixing trivial problems is easy. Fixing more involved problems is a LOT of effort, whether you've got the source or not.
Yes but it's sort of like having access to something you reasonably can't do anything with. In other words, for most people and for most applications, having the source is as useful as NOT having the source (it's not going to make the problem any more solveable for the person).
If only it were that simple... have you ever worked with a large codebase before? Unless you're trying to fix a very simple, very easily isolated problem it takes more than "change this and recompile" to fix bugs. You have to know the basic structure of the program in order to know a) where to look/what to do and b) if your change will affect other parts of the program. I would say that fixing the average bug will require a significant time investment from people who have never seen the source before.
2 : Never in the explanation did he explain why Open Source doesn't allow you to go under the hood. YOU CAN. That's a fact. If you don't, that's no fault of Open Source (or Free Software)
Er, no. The point he was making was that just because you "can" get under the hood of free software doesn't mean that you can really do anything worthwhile.
For instance, if I find a bug in some massive application like Eclipse, sure I can get the source and "get under the hood", but for all intents and purposes I really can't because the source tree is so huge and complicated that I have about as good an understanding how the program works with the source as I do without it.
So realistically, unless the source code is very simple and the problem to fix is a trivial one, just having the source doesn't really help you very much unless you intend on devoting a large amount of time to fixing the program.
Having more choice doesn't prevent you from having a choice pre selected for you.
You sure wouldn't know it reading Slashdot! It seems like the prevailing attitude among the free software zealots here is that the worst possible thing that could happen is to get a Linux CD with only one of every kind of application on it.
How do you know that? Did you actually write both an HTML and an XHTML parser?
I'll tell you why it's easier to parse XHTML than HTML: if you're sure you've got well-formed XHTML data, then ALL you need to "parse" XHTML (that is, get it in a document tree format) is an XML parser, which someone else has conveniently written. Compare this with parsing HTML, which requires hacks to compensate for HTML's looser rules (i.e., elements like <p> and <br> which don't need to be closed off, etc.).
Now rendering XHTML is another story altogether, but there is no doubt that parsing XHTML is FAR easier than parsing HTML.
Other than that some local telephone monopolies (in geographic areas where any existing CLECs refuse to market to residences) require all residential customers to carry long distance service?
Okay, but that's not how my telephone company (Bellsouth) does it. Guess I must be lucky.
Many of the cheap "2 cent per minute" calling cards one finds at a gas station have a 50 cent per call connection fee, even when the call isn't made from a pay phone.
Not mine. I bought it at Sam's Club and it's an AT&T card, with no connection fees unless I'm calling from a payphone.
A monthly charge AND you pay five cents per minute? That sounds crazy compared to calling cards. You can walk into just about any store and pick up AT&T calling cards that are ridiculously cheap, like under two cents per minute. No monthly charge either. Considering all that, it baffles me as to why people still get long distance service considering how mind-bogglingly cheap calling cards are. Is there something I'm missing? Is there a reason people continue to get long distance service? Is there some major advantage over calling cards (besides having to enter a number every time you make a call)?
The reason such high end machines are used is to ensure that the bottleneck could (conceivably) only be the video card, not any other component in the PC.
And you are probably overestimating the value of the CPU in games like these. Remember, the CPU is only used for the physics engine, basic scene setup, some sound stuff, and the input loop. I'm sure there's a point (a fairly low point, at that) where it makes almost no difference how fast your CPU is. Remember, it's the video card that does all the hard work in today's games.
I think the original poster's point was that pretty much no matter where you go in the world you're more likely to be understood by speaking English than any other language.
Your article has NOTHING to do with constitutionality. Which is why I did not address it.
No, it sounds to me like you didn't address it because you ASSUMED the core argument revolved around morality and religious beliefs. You've got to be kidding me if you think the only acceptable argument AGAINST gay marriage is to somehow prove that the equal protection amendment is somehow UN-constitutional. The fact of the matter is that there ARE valid social consequences to legalizing gay marriage and that IS a valid reason to oppose it.
People are being arrested in areas because they have a sign that is anti-bush and for no other reason.
Cite please (and not from some blog where a guy "says" he got arrested for doing that).
Your answer on Same sex marriage is extremely weak. That does not justify putting a constitutional ammendment in place that violates the very constitution it is ammending (equal protection). Name me one justification that does not involve offending someones moral code based on relgion?
Well, the ENTIRE article I linked to had NOTHING to do with religion. It has to do with the fact that in the Scandinavian countries that have legalized gay marriage the idea of marriage itself has dissolved, leading to a record high ~60% birth rate out of wedlock. That's not a good situation for children.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that means that women are not fit for computing
Did I ever say that? I simply said on average that women are not as adept in certain fields (computer science being one of them) as men are. There are always outliers. They do not invalidate my claim whatsoever.
By the way, I don't see how your theory about wiring could be correct considering that the percentage of degrees awarded to women in many engineering fields has risen. If women are kept from computer science by wiring, why wouldn't they be kept from engineering fields, which in many cases have at least as much math and science involved?
Well, I would say part of that is due to this aggressive "get women in CS no matter what" attitude. If you up female enrollment significantly, you're bound to have more women getting degrees eventually. I also think that college standards have dropped, which certainly helps. You're also falling into the trap of equating "getting a degree" with "ability to be a CS/engineering professional". Please. I know I'm talented at CS, and I got a degree. Does that put all the other jokers who slacked off and got a degree from my school on the same level as me? No.
Besides, if more women are getting degrees that still doesn't address the issue that their skills in CS on average are not equivalent to male's skills.
You keep saying this... can you point me to some scientific research that shows this, please?
Certainly. Here is a study that shows male/female intelligence testing and the which forms of intelligence favored males or females. The result?
Quantitative ability: males favored 4:1 over females.
Visual-Spatial Ability (non-analytic): males favored 4.5:1 over females.
Visual-Spatial Ability (analytic): males favored 8.33:1 over females.
And just to be fair, females are favored in areas like verbal ability (which I will not contest -- and experience shows us that women tend to concentrate their studies in areas that exercies their verbal abilities).
Here's some choice quotes to get your blood boiling:
The resulting proportion of males and females at age 13 at various cut-off scores on SAT-M is approximately as follows: 500 (average score of college-bound 12th-grade [18-year-old] males): 2:1; 600: 4:1; 700 (top 1 in 10,000 for 7th graders [13-year-olds]): 13:1. These ratios have remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, and have now been observed among mathematically gifted students in the 3rd grade (8-year-olds), and cross-culturally (though they are smaller in Asian populations).
. . it took five years of extensive nation-wide search to find 36 extremely mathematically talented girls.
Here's the link
I don't know about you, but if I knew that going into a particular field would result in the above happening on a daily basis, and that my intelligence would constantly be under-estimated by my peers, I would probably want to pick a different field. I would want to learn and work somewhere where I would not be perceived as a token exception to the rule.
... Or maybe you will concede that there are a variety of factors, one of which may be the stigma (and I'm not convinced that anybody passionate about their interests will be turned off by any amount of stigma -- hello, men have to deal with being considered "nerds" for pursuing their interests in computers). Another more significant factor, in my opinion, is that men and women are simply wired differently. They are differently abled, with men, on average, having greater mental facilities for math and science due to thousands of years of genetic evolution imparted by the roles that men and women have naturally assumed.
Hmm, you seem to have all these worries about people doubting your abilities and yet you chose to go ahead with it anyway. Please explain why you did so if you think this is such a barrier to entry for women. You seem to think this is the only real obstacle for women in tradtionally male-dominated fields, so your insight will obviously solve the problem. After all, these brilliant women just need to do exactly what you did and rationalize the situation exactly the way you did. Problem solved!
Wow, you must think you're so clever turning my words around like that!
The fact is, there is significant documented evidence showing that men and women are very, very different, both physically and mentally. Men (of any race), on average, are much stronger than women. Would you care to argue this fact too?
Likewise, men (again, of any race) on average have better developed mental abilities in the areas of math and science due to the roles men and women have assumed for the past several thousand years. It is a FACT that women have traditionally assumed homemaker and caretaker roles, and this has a big effect on the kind of abilities that women of today are genetically predisposed towards. Likewise, men have traditionally assumed roles that stress physical strength and math and science abilities, leading them to be genetically more able in these areas.
You can call me sexist if you want, but I'm not convinced that women in general are as capable as men when it comes to disciplines like engineering or Computer Science. I'm not saying that there aren't women who are talented in these fields -- they're just not as easy to find as these politically-correct types would like to believe. There will always be talented women who are drawn to Computer Science and they don't need special programs or camps to "convince" them that they will enjoy studying Computer Science.
OK, I see what you're saying.
On one hand, it would be nice to have those controls. However, let's be realistic -- the standard can't include every single control that everyone thinks is an essential part of a form.
I have a feeling that in the future the XForm spec will probably be expanded to allow custom controls that are defined by some other XML standard (rendered perhaps by SVG?), and that will lead to people publishing standard libraries of every kind of crazy control people want. That seems like the best approach to me.
My own gripe is that in my own experience, existing forms could be so much more convenient to use if only there was an accepted standard for a couple of extra data types.
That's one of the things that XForms tries to address. All information submitted in the form gets placed in an XML document, so you can easily write a schema that places restrictions on valid input. So for instance you can create data types by writing regular expressions for them or by extending existing data types like string, int, etc.
You know I could download and fork MONO all by my self - and it wouldnt matter would it ? I could do the same to Mozilla etc... and it wouldnt matter.
If your fork became very popular, yes it would matter because the effect would be the same: there would be two (or more) forks of the same program that are both regularly used and incompatible with one another on some level. You don't have to be a monopoly to accomplish that.
Really? Didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
Either way, Microsoft adding a language feature is no worse than Open Source languages creating forks, each with their own language extensions that are mutually incompatible...
To be more precise, Microsoft bundled a set of Windows-specific libraries with their JVM, so applications written using those libraries would only work in a Windows environment (and with those libraries). It was not as sinister as everyone on Slashdot thinks it was -- the MS JVM allowed developers to write *fast* Windows-only applications. The language itself was not extended in any way whatsoever.
.NET as well, so alas your point does not settle my concerns.
.NET standard library, and again, it's not illegal to implement those libraries on your own system using nothing more than API docs to create an API-compatible implementation. There's really nothing Microsoft can do to stop anyone from doing it, and it's not like they care if someone can implement 99% of their language and libraries. The only thing that ties .NET to Windows are Windows-specific libraries that Linux systems can't (conceivably) implement due to the simple fact that Linux isn't Windows.
You could do the exact same thing in Linux by writing a bunch of libraries that will only work on Linux systems and then ship them with some JVM implementation.
I don't see why they couldn't do that with their own
The language and runtime are ECMA standards and the cat is out of the bag already, so I doubt they're going to alter the language and not resubmit to the standards body. And even if they did, it not like it's illegal to implement a programming language that looks and feels just like another one (so long as you implement it in a clean room environment). And Microsoft will always publish API docs for their
Of course, if you were paying attention you'd realize that Newsbot isn't displaying ONLY MSNBC articles, but MSNBC articles first (in addition to others) IF multiple news organizations are reporting the same story.
So... it's not like they're shutting out anybody. And Newsbot is part of MSNBC, so really, what would you expect, for Newsbot to ALWAYS prefer other news organization's stories over MSNBC? Is that "unbiased" enough for you?
This might actually be funny if you were talking about Windows 98. As other posters have pointed out, Ctrl-Alt-Del is used to log on to Windows. Also, as far as I know, Ctrl-Alt-Del WON'T restart Windows no matter how many times you press it. So clearly it's not there for rebooting purposes.
You must be kidding. A patent on Google News? Do you think Google News was the first website to collect a bunch of news stories from various sources and post them on a page? Do you even know what site you're reading right now?
Microsoft isn't ripping anyone off any more than Google is.
OK, when you grow up a little and (possibly) get a job in the real world, you will realize that the average program is much more complicated than some program that reads keystrokes. Applications like Mozilla, Eclipse, Emacs, Konqueror, etc. are MASSIVE and require a SIGNIFICANT time investment to understand. Why is it important to understand how the program works? Because with most bugs, fixing the bug will have implications elsewhere in the code and you need to know how all the "pieces" of the program interact with each other to make sure you aren't breaking something ELSE by fixing your bug.
To make the oft-repeated car analogy, consider a really massive program, like Mozilla. Think of it as a car that, under the hood, looks and acts almost completely different from every other car you've ever seen. So if you've got a problem, sure your experience repairing other cars will help, but you still need to know how this kind of car operates before you can attempt to fix your problem (for instance, the engine randomly cutting off). Oh, and let's not forget that only a few dozen people (the core Mozilla developers) truly know how this car operates. Again, in this example, you've got the "source" (you can get under the hood) and you "can" fix the car yourself, but realistically it's going to take you a massive time and effort investment, so the reality of the situation is that you're as able to fix the problem with an "open source" car as you are with a car that has its hood welded shut.
You're missing the point entirely, and to draw your example to this analogy, it would be like hearing a noise, opening the hood, and tightening a screw as opposed to solving a major problem.
So to reiterate what I originally said: if you've got the source, fixing trivial problems is easy. Fixing more involved problems is a LOT of effort, whether you've got the source or not.
Yes but it's sort of like having access to something you reasonably can't do anything with. In other words, for most people and for most applications, having the source is as useful as NOT having the source (it's not going to make the problem any more solveable for the person).
If only it were that simple... have you ever worked with a large codebase before? Unless you're trying to fix a very simple, very easily isolated problem it takes more than "change this and recompile" to fix bugs. You have to know the basic structure of the program in order to know a) where to look/what to do and b) if your change will affect other parts of the program. I would say that fixing the average bug will require a significant time investment from people who have never seen the source before.
2 : Never in the explanation did he explain why Open Source doesn't allow you to go under the hood. YOU CAN. That's a fact. If you don't, that's no fault of Open Source (or Free Software)
Er, no. The point he was making was that just because you "can" get under the hood of free software doesn't mean that you can really do anything worthwhile.
For instance, if I find a bug in some massive application like Eclipse, sure I can get the source and "get under the hood", but for all intents and purposes I really can't because the source tree is so huge and complicated that I have about as good an understanding how the program works with the source as I do without it.
So realistically, unless the source code is very simple and the problem to fix is a trivial one, just having the source doesn't really help you very much unless you intend on devoting a large amount of time to fixing the program.
Having more choice doesn't prevent you from having a choice pre selected for you.
You sure wouldn't know it reading Slashdot! It seems like the prevailing attitude among the free software zealots here is that the worst possible thing that could happen is to get a Linux CD with only one of every kind of application on it.
How do you know that? Did you actually write both an HTML and an XHTML parser?
I'll tell you why it's easier to parse XHTML than HTML: if you're sure you've got well-formed XHTML data, then ALL you need to "parse" XHTML (that is, get it in a document tree format) is an XML parser, which someone else has conveniently written. Compare this with parsing HTML, which requires hacks to compensate for HTML's looser rules (i.e., elements like <p> and <br> which don't need to be closed off, etc.).
Now rendering XHTML is another story altogether, but there is no doubt that parsing XHTML is FAR easier than parsing HTML.
Other than that some local telephone monopolies (in geographic areas where any existing CLECs refuse to market to residences) require all residential customers to carry long distance service?
Okay, but that's not how my telephone company (Bellsouth) does it. Guess I must be lucky.
Many of the cheap "2 cent per minute" calling cards one finds at a gas station have a 50 cent per call connection fee, even when the call isn't made from a pay phone.
Not mine. I bought it at Sam's Club and it's an AT&T card, with no connection fees unless I'm calling from a payphone.
Not sure. My card doesn't say and I've been carrying it around for over a year and it still works...
A monthly charge AND you pay five cents per minute? That sounds crazy compared to calling cards. You can walk into just about any store and pick up AT&T calling cards that are ridiculously cheap, like under two cents per minute. No monthly charge either. Considering all that, it baffles me as to why people still get long distance service considering how mind-bogglingly cheap calling cards are. Is there something I'm missing? Is there a reason people continue to get long distance service? Is there some major advantage over calling cards (besides having to enter a number every time you make a call)?
The reason such high end machines are used is to ensure that the bottleneck could (conceivably) only be the video card, not any other component in the PC.
And you are probably overestimating the value of the CPU in games like these. Remember, the CPU is only used for the physics engine, basic scene setup, some sound stuff, and the input loop. I'm sure there's a point (a fairly low point, at that) where it makes almost no difference how fast your CPU is. Remember, it's the video card that does all the hard work in today's games.
I think the original poster's point was that pretty much no matter where you go in the world you're more likely to be understood by speaking English than any other language.
Your article has NOTHING to do with constitutionality. Which is why I did not address it.
No, it sounds to me like you didn't address it because you ASSUMED the core argument revolved around morality and religious beliefs. You've got to be kidding me if you think the only acceptable argument AGAINST gay marriage is to somehow prove that the equal protection amendment is somehow UN-constitutional. The fact of the matter is that there ARE valid social consequences to legalizing gay marriage and that IS a valid reason to oppose it.
People are being arrested in areas because they have a sign that is anti-bush and for no other reason.
Cite please (and not from some blog where a guy "says" he got arrested for doing that).
Your answer on Same sex marriage is extremely weak. That does not justify putting a constitutional ammendment in place that violates the very constitution it is ammending (equal protection). Name me one justification that does not involve offending someones moral code based on relgion?
Well, the ENTIRE article I linked to had NOTHING to do with religion. It has to do with the fact that in the Scandinavian countries that have legalized gay marriage the idea of marriage itself has dissolved, leading to a record high ~60% birth rate out of wedlock. That's not a good situation for children.