Or, it occurs to me now another alternative: the rich themselves breed themselves out of existence thanks to sexbots, leaving nobody but the poor to inherit their wealth. The question then is whether the ex-poor in turn fuck themselves to death, leaving only robots to inherit the Earth...
As everyone else in this thread is saying, the way we have society organized today, increases in automation are only going to amplify the gap between the rich and the poor, as the haves have more and the have-nots have nothing. We either have to radically reorganize the way we distribute the wealth generated by this automation (and make no mistake about it, automation is increasing wealth overall and is in and of itself unquestionably a good thing -- its the distribution of that good and the making "expendable" of many people that's a problem), giving us some utopian paradise where everybody works only on whatever they feel like and a paltry few people tend to the machines which provide for everybody's needs... or we end up with some dystopian nightmare where a tiny wealthy fraction of the people live that fabulous life while the rest are left to toil on the margins of the rich's personal empires, scampering insects under their boots.
Allow me to present a third, and I think probably most likely (but not most ideal), alternative. Even as the percentage of people who are relatively poor grows, the standard of living for the poorest of the poor continues to rise. That is, there are more and more "poorest of the poor", but they are no longer living in holes in the dirt eating non-nutritive leaves off trees just to feel something in their bellies. They are kept fat with cheap sugary and fatty foods, and distracted by heaps and heaps of ever-flashier entertainment. I predict that as automation makes more and more people "useless" and dumps them into the ever-growing vat of the "destitute", the standard for "destitute" will rise to something of a comfortable powerlessness, where people are unable to really do or accomplish anything of note with their lives, but where they can sit in idle squalor fat, stupid, and happy -- except those few wise enough to realize what's become of them -- until that entire segment of the population dies out of old age. Currently the poor reproduce at a higher rate than the rich, true, but all that's required to "solve" that "problem" is the invention of machines that provide better sex than their human counterparts -- why would you want to fuck another fat poor slob when you could fuck a sexy supermodel-bot? Eventually the poor just die of old age (and diseases associated with the idle lifestyle used to sedate them), and the surviving upper class are left in an underpopulated world serviced by their legions of robot minions, in an ironically egalitarian post-scarcity economy (now that everybody [who's left] has their own personal robot servants).
Of course, the first issue that comes to mind is: by that point, why wouldn't the rich also prefer to sleep with robots designed for that purpose instead of each other, but I imagine issues of "legacy" and "lineage" and other euphemisms for immortality-by-proxy would motivate enough of them to breed inheritors for their empires.
Then again, the second issue that comes to mind is: if you're rich and have a legion of robots servicing your every whim, of what use is money? Money is useful because you can buy stuff with it and get people to do stuff for you. When you can just have stuff made and done for you at your whim without having to pay someone else for it, why do you care about money? Give it a generation or two of such a post-scarcity economy, with the aforementioned bread-and-circuses keeping the "redundant" masses from tearing it all down meanwhile, and I see no reason why the grandchildren of the first robot-owner overlords would have any motive to withhold anything from the teeming masses, especially if it will make a world full of beautiful and interesting people to play with instead of a bunch of fat morons.
So maybe in the end, as we move toward a dystopian nightmare, my "dystopian paradise" might only be used to forestall the downfall of civilization, until such time as we realize we have a utopian paradise at our fingers just waiting to be unleashed on the world.
The problem is that people are stupid, and that the only candidates for political office are people, but we somehow pretend that the people holding office aren't as stupid as everybody else.
Never trust any authority any more than you would trust an ordinary schmuck, because ordinary schmucks are all there are. You and me included.
They could always show footage of the sport, cut with explanations of the objectives and challenges of it, so people would better appreciate why the event they're watching is significant.
(Instead of explanations of the aspirations and hardships of the contestants highlighting why the person they're watching is significant.)
I don't see why the police should have any additional rights above that of a citizen. They should be subject to the same laws. They should be allowed to detain someone but in order to search need a warrant. The person being detained should be allowed to sue for kidnapping if the officer can't prove there was a reason for the stop in front of a jury.
I've been advocating this for years. Don't allow the police any powers you wouldn't allow any ordinary joe, because the police are just ordinary joes. And then if police powers are limited to what you'd allow any ordinary joe, obviously you can allow those same powers to any ordinary joe too. The question to sort out is: when is it appropriate to use what kind of force for what purpose? Who exercises that force should be irrelevant, if they're exercising it properly for the proper reasons in the proper circumstances; and if they're using it improperly, for improper reasons, or in improper circumstances, then it shouldn't matter who they are or what kind of uniform or badge they wear, they should be considered guilty of a violent crime.
The only difference between police and ordinary citizens should be that police are paid to go around protecting people, whereas ordinary citizens are just free to volunteer if they like.
I don't see why "reductive" has to be a bad thing, but beside that point: how else would you define it? Religion isn't synonymous with morality or ethics, as some would make it out; there are rationalistic moral or ethical systems as well, and religions make all kinds of factual claims about the origins and structure of reality too. Religion isn't synonymous with ritual either, as there are all kinds of secular rituals people observe all the time, from morning tea to Superbowl Sunday. Religion isn't synonymous with philosophy either, though I would argue that they are on the same level of abstraction and have a similar domain and range, but their methodologies are really quite antithetical (yes, despite the existence of plenty of religious philosophers; people are capable of doublethink).
What all religions have in common is the assertion of things, not only without reason, and not necessarily always against reason, but with the claim that reason is unnecessary: "Just believe it, because I say it's it's true", or at least "I just believe it, because I know it's true".
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
Atheists and skeptics acknowledge "authorities" in a different sense than in the logical fallacy of appealing to authority. We may point at some notable figure as the source of our belief, trust them to have good reasons for their claims, and defer to them for more in-depth explanation of those reasons. For example, I believe lots of scientific facts because I have read about them in what I consider to be reputable sources, and if questioned on them beyond my own ability to defend them I would defer to those sources for further argument. I might make a claim about black holes, point to Stephen Hawking as my source for that information, and defer to the paper of his which I read it in for a full defense of that claim. But I would never say "Stephen Hawking said so, therefore it is true", and only that is an appeal to authority. "I don't really know, but I trust Hawking to get it right, here's his paper if you want to argue the point with him further, let me know how that goes" is not.
Any appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, though I wouldn't put it past a religious thinker like Aquinas to qualify that with "unsuitable" (much like the Chinese constitution guarantees all kinds of rights, so long as they don't 'threaten the stability of the state' or some such catch-all nonsense excuse).
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
So authoritarianism is inherently religious (based on faith), even if devoid of the trappings we associate with "traditional" religion, e.g. the supernatural.
What makes the supernatural in turn inherently religious (based on faith) is that nothing can be known about it from evidence, and so any opinions on it must be based on faith, and whoever you have faith in (as in, whoever's word you take as 'gospel truth'), you are taking to be an authority.
If you have faith only in things that come to you directly by some sort of inspiration, then you are simply taking yourself as the authority of your own religion.
In my other post on the subject I suggested exactly that would be a logical extension of this. If the "civil union" is entirely about financial and legal arrangements, separated from sex, children, love, and any social trappings, then it's basically a kind of "household incorporation", and why should we limit it to two-"shareholder" households?
The "give that no legal weight whatsoever" part was more important than the "churches" part (it's just that the people making a ruckus about this are generally religious). Better put would be: leave "marriage" to informal social arrangements with no legal weight whatsoever. Whether those arrangements are religious in nature or not should be legally irrelevant.
And that's fine. I knew a Wiccan couple once who were handfasted with no legal instrument to officiate it and they called each other "married". But if all declarations of marriage are up to individuals and society informally, and the law says nothing about them, then this stupid argument about how the state should define marriage can go away.
Also, I'm pretty sure modern marriage contracts aren't "to be with each other exclusively for the length of the contract". According to Wikipedia at least, "Extramarital sex is not illegal in many countries and most states in the U.S." I know a number of legally married couples who (knowingly and voluntarily) have sex with other people all the time, and to my knowledge nobody has ever been charged with a crime for it.
You seem to have missed the sentence immediately following that one: use that exact same institute, under the exact same name (civil union), for straight couples too. I'm saying don't call anything legally "marriage" -- give the legal contract its own name, for everybody equally, and let people decide what they want to call it beyond that themselves.
The debate over "redefining marriage" is bigots hiding behind a stupid semantic argument. If we dissolve the semantic argument entirely by not defining marriage period, then if they want to keep arguing they'll have to be openly bigots and not pretend they're just sticklers about the meaning of a word.
What you describe is true in the US as well. The legal standing of "marriage" comes from a civil contract, and without that you are not officially, legally married. Any religious ceremony is both unnecessary and insufficient for legal marriage.
What I am talking about is entirely the name of the thing. If religious people are in a huff about the government "redefining marriage", then lets get the government to not officially condone any "marriages" at all. It can keep doing what it's doing, and just call that contract a "civil union" instead, for gays and straights alike. Then the religious people can either shut up about it, or reveal their true colors and complain outright that the government is granting the same rights to gays as it does to straights (and probably complain that it isn't stopping liberal churches from performing their own non-legally-binding gay marriages ceremonies, too).
Only very slightly. It sounded like you were saying that if marriages and civil unions are equivalent, what do gay couples care what they're called? I just felt that needed the second half of it stated as well: what do straight couples care what they're called, either?
- Rest energy. This is the stuff made possible by the Higgs.
Some of it is made possibly by the Higgs; namely, that which elementary particles have all by themselves when not bound up together.
The ordinary matter that we interact with day to day, however, has much more rest energy than that imparted by the Higgs mechanism, bound up in the binding energy of the electronuclear forces holding quarks together into nucleons and nucleons together into atoms and atoms together into molecules, etc.
Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved. Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same. The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
If you're going to take that line of thought, then "marriage" in that sense should be automatic between any couple who have children together, and excluded from anyone who doesn't yet have children. If marriage is to be about childrearing, then there should be (legally) no such thing as a childless marriage or a child out of wedlock. If you have a kid, you're "married"; if not, you're not. No contesting it.
Of course, there are other things involved in marriage besides the rights and responsibilities of children. Mutual rights in each others' property and lives (e.g. medical decisions in case of incapacitation). I can see a reason why people who aren't romantically or sexually involved at all might want to do something like that. Say you have two very straight guys who have no intention of ever settling down with one woman but plan to play the field their entire lives; but they are very close friends, have been housemates for years, etc, and want to buy a house together, file joint taxes on their mutual incomes and expenses, and have the other guy watch out for them if anything horrible should ever happen to them. Neither has any sexual or romantic interest in the other, and they each plan on having a different girl over every night, in their separate rooms, for the rest of their lives.
Why shouldn't they be able to make such financial and legal arrangements so resembling what we now call marriage? We don't have to call that marriage, call it a kind of incorporation, partnership, or union... a civil one, you might say. And let men and women in love with each other planning to raise a family get that exact same thing, and call it the exact same thing. And if those two guys want to make that arrangement, and are also having sex with each other, what difference does that make? What if more than two people want to live together and pool their lives and finances together -- whether or not any of them are having sex with each other -- what's wrong with letting them? And the slippery slope stops there, because children, dead people, goats, and furniture can't enter into contracts at all, and so there's no worry about anybody "marrying" any of those things if we replace marriage with a generic civil contract.
And then there's the social ceremony. This is legally meaningless, and should be the thing that gets the term "marriage". Let your favorite church, temple, mosque, coven, social club, or renaissance faire guild decide who they want to give what ceremony and recognize what title to, and let the law not give a shit about any of that. "Marriage" should be legally meaningless. Civil unions for everyone!
Yet when we observe something that doesn't match up with our predictions, we never take that as evidence that the universe is unpredictable. We take that as evidence that we made the wrong predictions -- but that some other, different predictions are right.
Seriously, what observation would possibly count as evidence that the universe does not behave in a predictable fashion, rather than that our particular theories were wrong? That base assumption -- that we should never say "inexplicable! it's a miracle!" but instead always says "huh, that's weird. why did that happen?" -- is practically the definition of science.
And that assumption itself cannot be tested, we can only assume either it or its negation, "on faith" if you like (inasmuch as any assumption is made "on faith"). But assuming its negation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume the universe is inexplicable, and call things miracles instead of trying to explain them, then we will never explain them, even if they are explicable. If we assume the universe is explicable, then we might still never explain it, but we at least have some chance of explaining them if they turn out to be explainable.
So it is a game-theoretically rational assumption to make; and conversely, it would be irrational to assume otherwise. But it is still an assumption.
That wasn't always the case with Windows, though; with Outlook and IE, you could at one point infect your system just by reading an email or visiting a website. I still have completely nontechnical clients to this day who are under the impression that it is not safe to visit a suspicious site or read a suspicious email because you might get a virus, so this was a common enough problem to get into even the densest parts of the popular consciousness.
Windows security has improved since then, but THAT was the angle that the "Macs are more secure" claim came from. You weren't just going to end up with a virus by looking at the wrong thing. Which was really more to speak of the absolutely horrid state of Windows security than anything special about Mac security, but with the various other *nixes not really in the public consciousness at all, Mac vs Windows is the topic at hand.
The only way to patch the "bug" of stupid users being able to install malware on their computers is to prohibit users from installing arbitrary software on their computers, which would be a much bigger bug than any social exploit vulnerability.
If the system didn't get infected by exploiting some weakness of the system, but rather by exploiting a weakness of its user, then the system is not at fault. THIS is why people get defensive. Much like making DRM work, it is impossibly to completely patch the social-exploit hole without destroying general purpose computing in the process, so stories of some social exploit making the rounds on one platform or another say nothing at all about the security of that platform.
THAT is why people get defensive when you say "see, Macs are vulnerable too!" at every story like this. If the only way someone can get into my house is if I invite them in through the front door, then my house is secure, as the only way to plug that hole would be to keep me from having guests over at all.
The problem with breaking down the costs and benefits piecemeal is that of course everyone is going to like the benefits and dislike the costs, so that tells you nothing about whether they think the benefits are worth the costs.
Would you like to pay $100? HELL NO! Would you like a donut? HELL YEAH! Would you like to pay $100 for a donut? Can we determine the answer to that question from people's answers to the first two questions?
Slashdot Mirror
more than a century before the Second Millennium
So, some time before 900 AD? (We're in the third millennium now).
Or, it occurs to me now another alternative: the rich themselves breed themselves out of existence thanks to sexbots, leaving nobody but the poor to inherit their wealth. The question then is whether the ex-poor in turn fuck themselves to death, leaving only robots to inherit the Earth...
As everyone else in this thread is saying, the way we have society organized today, increases in automation are only going to amplify the gap between the rich and the poor, as the haves have more and the have-nots have nothing. We either have to radically reorganize the way we distribute the wealth generated by this automation (and make no mistake about it, automation is increasing wealth overall and is in and of itself unquestionably a good thing -- its the distribution of that good and the making "expendable" of many people that's a problem), giving us some utopian paradise where everybody works only on whatever they feel like and a paltry few people tend to the machines which provide for everybody's needs... or we end up with some dystopian nightmare where a tiny wealthy fraction of the people live that fabulous life while the rest are left to toil on the margins of the rich's personal empires, scampering insects under their boots.
Allow me to present a third, and I think probably most likely (but not most ideal), alternative. Even as the percentage of people who are relatively poor grows, the standard of living for the poorest of the poor continues to rise. That is, there are more and more "poorest of the poor", but they are no longer living in holes in the dirt eating non-nutritive leaves off trees just to feel something in their bellies. They are kept fat with cheap sugary and fatty foods, and distracted by heaps and heaps of ever-flashier entertainment. I predict that as automation makes more and more people "useless" and dumps them into the ever-growing vat of the "destitute", the standard for "destitute" will rise to something of a comfortable powerlessness, where people are unable to really do or accomplish anything of note with their lives, but where they can sit in idle squalor fat, stupid, and happy -- except those few wise enough to realize what's become of them -- until that entire segment of the population dies out of old age. Currently the poor reproduce at a higher rate than the rich, true, but all that's required to "solve" that "problem" is the invention of machines that provide better sex than their human counterparts -- why would you want to fuck another fat poor slob when you could fuck a sexy supermodel-bot? Eventually the poor just die of old age (and diseases associated with the idle lifestyle used to sedate them), and the surviving upper class are left in an underpopulated world serviced by their legions of robot minions, in an ironically egalitarian post-scarcity economy (now that everybody [who's left] has their own personal robot servants).
Of course, the first issue that comes to mind is: by that point, why wouldn't the rich also prefer to sleep with robots designed for that purpose instead of each other, but I imagine issues of "legacy" and "lineage" and other euphemisms for immortality-by-proxy would motivate enough of them to breed inheritors for their empires.
Then again, the second issue that comes to mind is: if you're rich and have a legion of robots servicing your every whim, of what use is money? Money is useful because you can buy stuff with it and get people to do stuff for you. When you can just have stuff made and done for you at your whim without having to pay someone else for it, why do you care about money? Give it a generation or two of such a post-scarcity economy, with the aforementioned bread-and-circuses keeping the "redundant" masses from tearing it all down meanwhile, and I see no reason why the grandchildren of the first robot-owner overlords would have any motive to withhold anything from the teeming masses, especially if it will make a world full of beautiful and interesting people to play with instead of a bunch of fat morons.
So maybe in the end, as we move toward a dystopian nightmare, my "dystopian paradise" might only be used to forestall the downfall of civilization, until such time as we realize we have a utopian paradise at our fingers just waiting to be unleashed on the world.
The problem is the the Public is really stupid.
The problem is that people are stupid, and that the only candidates for political office are people, but we somehow pretend that the people holding office aren't as stupid as everybody else.
Never trust any authority any more than you would trust an ordinary schmuck, because ordinary schmucks are all there are. You and me included.
...of uniform density, in a frictionless vacuum....
They could always show footage of the sport, cut with explanations of the objectives and challenges of it, so people would better appreciate why the event they're watching is significant.
(Instead of explanations of the aspirations and hardships of the contestants highlighting why the person they're watching is significant.)
No, that's called the "hash sign".
This is a pound symbol: £
Oh, that's an easy one too: Option-3 > £. There ya go.
Unless you're working on some kind of backwards dinosaur computer that still requires funky numeric sequences to access its extended character set...
I don't see why the police should have any additional rights above that of a citizen. They should be subject to the same laws. They should be allowed to detain someone but in order to search need a warrant. The person being detained should be allowed to sue for kidnapping if the officer can't prove there was a reason for the stop in front of a jury.
I've been advocating this for years. Don't allow the police any powers you wouldn't allow any ordinary joe, because the police are just ordinary joes. And then if police powers are limited to what you'd allow any ordinary joe, obviously you can allow those same powers to any ordinary joe too. The question to sort out is: when is it appropriate to use what kind of force for what purpose? Who exercises that force should be irrelevant, if they're exercising it properly for the proper reasons in the proper circumstances; and if they're using it improperly, for improper reasons, or in improper circumstances, then it shouldn't matter who they are or what kind of uniform or badge they wear, they should be considered guilty of a violent crime.
The only difference between police and ordinary citizens should be that police are paid to go around protecting people, whereas ordinary citizens are just free to volunteer if they like.
Religion is defined by faith.
Don't you think that's a little reductive?
I don't see why "reductive" has to be a bad thing, but beside that point: how else would you define it? Religion isn't synonymous with morality or ethics, as some would make it out; there are rationalistic moral or ethical systems as well, and religions make all kinds of factual claims about the origins and structure of reality too. Religion isn't synonymous with ritual either, as there are all kinds of secular rituals people observe all the time, from morning tea to Superbowl Sunday. Religion isn't synonymous with philosophy either, though I would argue that they are on the same level of abstraction and have a similar domain and range, but their methodologies are really quite antithetical (yes, despite the existence of plenty of religious philosophers; people are capable of doublethink).
What all religions have in common is the assertion of things, not only without reason, and not necessarily always against reason, but with the claim that reason is unnecessary: "Just believe it, because I say it's it's true", or at least "I just believe it, because I know it's true".
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
Atheists and skeptics acknowledge "authorities" in a different sense than in the logical fallacy of appealing to authority. We may point at some notable figure as the source of our belief, trust them to have good reasons for their claims, and defer to them for more in-depth explanation of those reasons. For example, I believe lots of scientific facts because I have read about them in what I consider to be reputable sources, and if questioned on them beyond my own ability to defend them I would defer to those sources for further argument. I might make a claim about black holes, point to Stephen Hawking as my source for that information, and defer to the paper of his which I read it in for a full defense of that claim. But I would never say "Stephen Hawking said so, therefore it is true", and only that is an appeal to authority. "I don't really know, but I trust Hawking to get it right, here's his paper if you want to argue the point with him further, let me know how that goes" is not.
Any appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, though I wouldn't put it past a religious thinker like Aquinas to qualify that with "unsuitable" (much like the Chinese constitution guarantees all kinds of rights, so long as they don't 'threaten the stability of the state' or some such catch-all nonsense excuse).
Religion is defined by faith.
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
So authoritarianism is inherently religious (based on faith), even if devoid of the trappings we associate with "traditional" religion, e.g. the supernatural.
What makes the supernatural in turn inherently religious (based on faith) is that nothing can be known about it from evidence, and so any opinions on it must be based on faith, and whoever you have faith in (as in, whoever's word you take as 'gospel truth'), you are taking to be an authority.
If you have faith only in things that come to you directly by some sort of inspiration, then you are simply taking yourself as the authority of your own religion.
In my other post on the subject I suggested exactly that would be a logical extension of this. If the "civil union" is entirely about financial and legal arrangements, separated from sex, children, love, and any social trappings, then it's basically a kind of "household incorporation", and why should we limit it to two-"shareholder" households?
The "give that no legal weight whatsoever" part was more important than the "churches" part (it's just that the people making a ruckus about this are generally religious). Better put would be: leave "marriage" to informal social arrangements with no legal weight whatsoever. Whether those arrangements are religious in nature or not should be legally irrelevant.
And that's fine. I knew a Wiccan couple once who were handfasted with no legal instrument to officiate it and they called each other "married". But if all declarations of marriage are up to individuals and society informally, and the law says nothing about them, then this stupid argument about how the state should define marriage can go away.
Also, I'm pretty sure modern marriage contracts aren't "to be with each other exclusively for the length of the contract". According to Wikipedia at least, "Extramarital sex is not illegal in many countries and most states in the U.S." I know a number of legally married couples who (knowingly and voluntarily) have sex with other people all the time, and to my knowledge nobody has ever been charged with a crime for it.
You seem to have missed the sentence immediately following that one: use that exact same institute, under the exact same name (civil union), for straight couples too. I'm saying don't call anything legally "marriage" -- give the legal contract its own name, for everybody equally, and let people decide what they want to call it beyond that themselves.
The debate over "redefining marriage" is bigots hiding behind a stupid semantic argument. If we dissolve the semantic argument entirely by not defining marriage period, then if they want to keep arguing they'll have to be openly bigots and not pretend they're just sticklers about the meaning of a word.
Off topic: can you tell me where the quote in your sig comes from, if it's not something original you wrote yourself?
What you describe is true in the US as well. The legal standing of "marriage" comes from a civil contract, and without that you are not officially, legally married. Any religious ceremony is both unnecessary and insufficient for legal marriage.
What I am talking about is entirely the name of the thing. If religious people are in a huff about the government "redefining marriage", then lets get the government to not officially condone any "marriages" at all. It can keep doing what it's doing, and just call that contract a "civil union" instead, for gays and straights alike. Then the religious people can either shut up about it, or reveal their true colors and complain outright that the government is granting the same rights to gays as it does to straights (and probably complain that it isn't stopping liberal churches from performing their own non-legally-binding gay marriages ceremonies, too).
Did I imply otherwise?
Only very slightly. It sounded like you were saying that if marriages and civil unions are equivalent, what do gay couples care what they're called? I just felt that needed the second half of it stated as well: what do straight couples care what they're called, either?
- Rest energy. This is the stuff made possible by the Higgs.
Some of it is made possibly by the Higgs; namely, that which elementary particles have all by themselves when not bound up together.
The ordinary matter that we interact with day to day, however, has much more rest energy than that imparted by the Higgs mechanism, bound up in the binding energy of the electronuclear forces holding quarks together into nucleons and nucleons together into atoms and atoms together into molecules, etc.
Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved. Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same. The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
If you're going to take that line of thought, then "marriage" in that sense should be automatic between any couple who have children together, and excluded from anyone who doesn't yet have children. If marriage is to be about childrearing, then there should be (legally) no such thing as a childless marriage or a child out of wedlock. If you have a kid, you're "married"; if not, you're not. No contesting it.
Of course, there are other things involved in marriage besides the rights and responsibilities of children. Mutual rights in each others' property and lives (e.g. medical decisions in case of incapacitation). I can see a reason why people who aren't romantically or sexually involved at all might want to do something like that. Say you have two very straight guys who have no intention of ever settling down with one woman but plan to play the field their entire lives; but they are very close friends, have been housemates for years, etc, and want to buy a house together, file joint taxes on their mutual incomes and expenses, and have the other guy watch out for them if anything horrible should ever happen to them. Neither has any sexual or romantic interest in the other, and they each plan on having a different girl over every night, in their separate rooms, for the rest of their lives.
Why shouldn't they be able to make such financial and legal arrangements so resembling what we now call marriage? We don't have to call that marriage, call it a kind of incorporation, partnership, or union... a civil one, you might say. And let men and women in love with each other planning to raise a family get that exact same thing, and call it the exact same thing. And if those two guys want to make that arrangement, and are also having sex with each other, what difference does that make? What if more than two people want to live together and pool their lives and finances together -- whether or not any of them are having sex with each other -- what's wrong with letting them? And the slippery slope stops there, because children, dead people, goats, and furniture can't enter into contracts at all, and so there's no worry about anybody "marrying" any of those things if we replace marriage with a generic civil contract.
And then there's the social ceremony. This is legally meaningless, and should be the thing that gets the term "marriage". Let your favorite church, temple, mosque, coven, social club, or renaissance faire guild decide who they want to give what ceremony and recognize what title to, and let the law not give a shit about any of that. "Marriage" should be legally meaningless. Civil unions for everyone!
Yet when we observe something that doesn't match up with our predictions, we never take that as evidence that the universe is unpredictable. We take that as evidence that we made the wrong predictions -- but that some other, different predictions are right.
Seriously, what observation would possibly count as evidence that the universe does not behave in a predictable fashion, rather than that our particular theories were wrong? That base assumption -- that we should never say "inexplicable! it's a miracle!" but instead always says "huh, that's weird. why did that happen?" -- is practically the definition of science.
And that assumption itself cannot be tested, we can only assume either it or its negation, "on faith" if you like (inasmuch as any assumption is made "on faith"). But assuming its negation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume the universe is inexplicable, and call things miracles instead of trying to explain them, then we will never explain them, even if they are explicable. If we assume the universe is explicable, then we might still never explain it, but we at least have some chance of explaining them if they turn out to be explainable.
So it is a game-theoretically rational assumption to make; and conversely, it would be irrational to assume otherwise. But it is still an assumption.
Doc Brown also resorted to calling things "heavy" by Part III, in response to Marty's exclamation of "Great Scott!"
That wasn't always the case with Windows, though; with Outlook and IE, you could at one point infect your system just by reading an email or visiting a website. I still have completely nontechnical clients to this day who are under the impression that it is not safe to visit a suspicious site or read a suspicious email because you might get a virus, so this was a common enough problem to get into even the densest parts of the popular consciousness.
Windows security has improved since then, but THAT was the angle that the "Macs are more secure" claim came from. You weren't just going to end up with a virus by looking at the wrong thing. Which was really more to speak of the absolutely horrid state of Windows security than anything special about Mac security, but with the various other *nixes not really in the public consciousness at all, Mac vs Windows is the topic at hand.
The only way to patch the "bug" of stupid users being able to install malware on their computers is to prohibit users from installing arbitrary software on their computers, which would be a much bigger bug than any social exploit vulnerability.
If the system didn't get infected by exploiting some weakness of the system, but rather by exploiting a weakness of its user, then the system is not at fault. THIS is why people get defensive. Much like making DRM work, it is impossibly to completely patch the social-exploit hole without destroying general purpose computing in the process, so stories of some social exploit making the rounds on one platform or another say nothing at all about the security of that platform.
THAT is why people get defensive when you say "see, Macs are vulnerable too!" at every story like this. If the only way someone can get into my house is if I invite them in through the front door, then my house is secure, as the only way to plug that hole would be to keep me from having guests over at all.
The problem with breaking down the costs and benefits piecemeal is that of course everyone is going to like the benefits and dislike the costs, so that tells you nothing about whether they think the benefits are worth the costs.
Would you like to pay $100? HELL NO!
Would you like a donut? HELL YEAH!
Would you like to pay $100 for a donut? Can we determine the answer to that question from people's answers to the first two questions?