It's not their sex lives that lead to problems and discrimination. It's casual conversation like "I'm meeting my boyfriend/girlfriend for dinner" that people latch onto and then give the person a hard time for 'pushing their lifestyle'. The people who do the harrassing don't want gays around them PERIOD and the very knowledge that someone is gay is enough for them to claim an agenda or gross details.
The only way to avoid it is to watch your smalltalk VERY carefully and never mention even having a significant other.
Simple water cooler questions like 'so what did you do this weekend' become serious problems.
The problem is that normal workplace socalizing includes stuff like 'so what are you doing this weekend', and unfortunately I have seen cases were a simply response like "I am having dinner with my girlfriend (from a girl obviously)" resulting in people yelling and complaining about how the poor girl was bringing her homosexual agenda into the workplace by, well, admitting she is dating a girl.
So in order for a gay person to avoid such stuff, they not only have to keep sexual details to themselves, but avoid quite a bit of casual workplace conversation that most people take for granted or outright lie.
Actually there WAS legislation that used to allow this case, specifically states were required to respect each other's marriage laws.. so once one state allowed gay marriage if you got married there and moved your marriage would still be valid in your new home. Even reverting the law to before the Federal Defense of Marriage Act would do the trick.
I think the interesting piece to pull from this is how little impact individual industries have compared to the perceived impact.
The airlines are a good example of this effect. There are quite a few high profile environmentalists who decry airlines and the damage they are doing,.. the probably do NOT think about the enviromental impact of the computers they use or the networks they attach to.
This is probalby because people have an easier time thinking in terms of singular things with big impacts rather then lots of little tings. Airplanes are big, so they must have a big impact. Computers and networks are spread out everywhere, so people don't think about them.
Software companies already add all sorts of high-cost features for small sections of their market. It's called 'marquee value' and it can eat HUGE chunks of d development budget.
A classic example would be on-line play (StarDock had an exelent article about this). It's used by a small percentage of the users, but increases the cost of production and testing significantly (not to mention it usually requires crippling the single player version in order to keep the UIs consistent, see Merc2 as an example). But you include it anyway because it looks good on the box and reviewers care about it.
I can recall one product I worked on, we figured out that only 1% of our users actually used the network features of our game, but supporting it easily took up 20% of our development time and potentially 30-40% of our testing time.
Having done some game work on OSX, I'm not even sure I see the point in an OSX specific SDK or toolkit. While it would be good PR for them to do so, the game APIs for OSX are generally things like SDL/OpenGL/etc which already have their own rich communities. That is one of the nice things about cross platform APIs,.. you don't have to go to the OS developer for anything unless you are really digging around the guts or interfacing to the OS specific layer (like Cocoa, which they have plenty of help for).
I've never understood software houses that insist on releasing games on a single platform with propriatry APIs rather then starting development with a cross platform engine and then porting to other platforms.
In any other industry, if I went up to a manager and said 'hey, this API will get us an extra 10-15% market share for similar development costs' and they will go 'wow! let's go with that! more money for us!'
yet in software there seems to be this almost psychotic attachment to 'we must support only Windows because that is all people use'.
The FCC has been overstepping it's authority for a LONG time.
The FCC exists to dole out a limited public resource, content (and esp obscenity) has never been part of it's mandate and represents little more then a moral power grab.
DAs and Judges both have an incentive to convict people. DAs get promotions and office based off their conviction rate and judges tend not to be re-elected if they are not 'tough on crime'.
It is pretty easy to 'get the wrong DA and Judge' because the system encourages them to be wrong. They both have a financial incentive to behave that way... esp if they get to mark up the number of 'sex offenders' they can claim to have put away. People don't look to hard at the details.
The governor even more so. Parden a convicted sex offender? But only child molesters are sex offenders! Front page news while the details saying the guy only pissed in the bushes might make the 7th page in a little correction bubble. Meanwhile the political damage has already been done.. so the governor has NO incentive to help the guy.
Unfortunately, there is little to no incentive for the inverse behavior.
I actually worry about how long parents take to teach their kids stuff. As you say, the earlier one starts the earlier they learn, but also the earlier one starts the better chance one has to develop life long habbits/skills. If one is not exposed to something till later in life the chances of learning to cope with it become vanishingly small.
Alcohol is the classic example of course,.. cournties with high drinking ages tend to have more alcohol problems (esp since these ages are often high enough that the parents are not even involved at that point), sex ed being another common on. Exposure to erotica is a fun one to examine too (I've found people who don't run into it until their 30s-40s go overboard for instance)
That gets into the entire 'what is normal' problem. Current attitudes concerning when someone is sexually mature are neither normal nor natural. Over the last century or so we have been pushing the age of 'child' further and further and putting more and more importance on 'keeping innocence' and have really been forcing the myth that minors (i.e. people between 12 and 18) are unable to act like adults...
That is what elected judges do. The problem is elected judges do not want to rule in such a way that they will loose their jobs. Any judge who rules in favor of something painted with the brush of 'sex' and 'children' is unlikely to survive re-election.
Long tail got a bit too much hype as people hoped that obscure artists would be AS successful as the popular ones and that turned out to be garbage.
However, long tail DID hold true for obscure artists having any chance at all and made obscure stuff MUCH easier to find. Now instead of only having access to what most people want, the smaller stuff is available for purchase.
Music is a good example, esp if you look at dementia/filk/etc. In the past you basicly had Weird Al and a few other major ones that, well, the big labels decided to make available. Now you can go strait to topic specific sites and get access to all the artists that, while not as well known, produce much more targeted material and thus still do 'ok'. not rich but they sell far more then they would have in previous decades.
Pity we don't know the region that this took place in. Most areas have romeo and juliet laws that cover cases like this (like the california example above).. this does not always stop law enforcement form doing an initial arrest then dropping the charges.
A plausible situation here is that he was covered, the father deciced to pull his 'big scary' weight to arrest the guy, knew the charges were not legally supported, had to release him, but still got to charge him in the court of public opinion.
A corrupt cop looking to hurt someone doesn't need them to actually violate a law. They only need to convince the public that what they did was close enough.
Well, for starters local law enforcement was not neutral in this case so there wasn't much the person could do. Secondly the real damage wasn't the charge but the reputation. You can be arrested on trumped up charges pretty easily.. they won't stick (in this story they didn't) but that doesn't stop the mob who now assocates your name with 'pedophile'.
Well yes, the holocaust happened, but that doesn't stop some teachers from teaching that it didn't and in some places it actually is considered controversial. There are plenty of people in both America and the UK who honestly believe it never happened and rail when they hear about such 'lies' being taught in school. It doesn't help things that over the last few decades schools have been caught teaching official lies (Gulf of Tonkin being an example) which gives a lot of ammunition to the holocaust deniers.
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The choice of process is partly based on how much effect it has, or more specifically the content and it's effects determines which process to use.
It applies because the simple procedure is generally reserved for low impact amendments and clarifications.
Google's claim is that such a change has significant effects beyond a clarification and thus should require the full process.
I can answer this one ^_^
It's not their sex lives that lead to problems and discrimination. It's casual conversation like "I'm meeting my boyfriend/girlfriend for dinner" that people latch onto and then give the person a hard time for 'pushing their lifestyle'. The people who do the harrassing don't want gays around them PERIOD and the very knowledge that someone is gay is enough for them to claim an agenda or gross details.
The only way to avoid it is to watch your smalltalk VERY carefully and never mention even having a significant other.
Simple water cooler questions like 'so what did you do this weekend' become serious problems.
The problem is that normal workplace socalizing includes stuff like 'so what are you doing this weekend', and unfortunately I have seen cases were a simply response like "I am having dinner with my girlfriend (from a girl obviously)" resulting in people yelling and complaining about how the poor girl was bringing her homosexual agenda into the workplace by, well, admitting she is dating a girl.
So in order for a gay person to avoid such stuff, they not only have to keep sexual details to themselves, but avoid quite a bit of casual workplace conversation that most people take for granted or outright lie.
This is specifically due to the Defense of Marriage act with exempted gay marriage from the requirements of inter-state marriage laws.
Any other type of marriage (such as age, family relationship, etc), states are required to respect eachother's laws.
Actually there WAS legislation that used to allow this case, specifically states were required to respect each other's marriage laws.. so once one state allowed gay marriage if you got married there and moved your marriage would still be valid in your new home. Even reverting the law to before the Federal Defense of Marriage Act would do the trick.
Considering it was not all that long ago that there was serious national debate concerning if blacks should be allowed to marry non-blacks,....
Apparently CA has two different types of amendment procedures with one having a MUCH lower barrier to pass.
One is simple referendum (and thus just needs 50% of the vote) while the other is a more involved process that requires legislative support.
The court case is going over which type of amendment prop-8 was and thus was the method used to pass it valid.
I think the interesting piece to pull from this is how little impact individual industries have compared to the perceived impact.
The airlines are a good example of this effect. There are quite a few high profile environmentalists who decry airlines and the damage they are doing,.. the probably do NOT think about the enviromental impact of the computers they use or the networks they attach to.
This is probalby because people have an easier time thinking in terms of singular things with big impacts rather then lots of little tings. Airplanes are big, so they must have a big impact. Computers and networks are spread out everywhere, so people don't think about them.
Software companies already add all sorts of high-cost features for small sections of their market. It's called 'marquee value' and it can eat HUGE chunks of d development budget.
A classic example would be on-line play (StarDock had an exelent article about this). It's used by a small percentage of the users, but increases the cost of production and testing significantly (not to mention it usually requires crippling the single player version in order to keep the UIs consistent, see Merc2 as an example). But you include it anyway because it looks good on the box and reviewers care about it.
I can recall one product I worked on, we figured out that only 1% of our users actually used the network features of our game, but supporting it easily took up 20% of our development time and potentially 30-40% of our testing time.
For the big companies yep, that is completely correct. For small companies that are going to die a slow horrible death as, you are also correct ^_^
Small clever companies however don't do this and can make a nice little profit for themselves if they find a market that is being poorly served.
Having done some game work on OSX, I'm not even sure I see the point in an OSX specific SDK or toolkit. While it would be good PR for them to do so, the game APIs for OSX are generally things like SDL/OpenGL/etc which already have their own rich communities. That is one of the nice things about cross platform APIs,.. you don't have to go to the OS developer for anything unless you are really digging around the guts or interfacing to the OS specific layer (like Cocoa, which they have plenty of help for).
I've never understood software houses that insist on releasing games on a single platform with propriatry APIs rather then starting development with a cross platform engine and then porting to other platforms.
In any other industry, if I went up to a manager and said 'hey, this API will get us an extra 10-15% market share for similar development costs' and they will go 'wow! let's go with that! more money for us!'
yet in software there seems to be this almost psychotic attachment to 'we must support only Windows because that is all people use'.
The FCC has been overstepping it's authority for a LONG time.
The FCC exists to dole out a limited public resource, content (and esp obscenity) has never been part of it's mandate and represents little more then a moral power grab.
Wrong. Wrong wrong. dear god how does this stupid myth keep coming up!
Sex offenders have some of the lowest recidivism rate. I don't know who started this whole myth of high reoffensive but it is blatantly wrong.
DAs and Judges both have an incentive to convict people. DAs get promotions and office based off their conviction rate and judges tend not to be re-elected if they are not 'tough on crime'.
It is pretty easy to 'get the wrong DA and Judge' because the system encourages them to be wrong. They both have a financial incentive to behave that way... esp if they get to mark up the number of 'sex offenders' they can claim to have put away. People don't look to hard at the details.
The governor even more so. Parden a convicted sex offender? But only child molesters are sex offenders! Front page news while the details saying the guy only pissed in the bushes might make the 7th page in a little correction bubble. Meanwhile the political damage has already been done.. so the governor has NO incentive to help the guy.
Unfortunately, there is little to no incentive for the inverse behavior.
I actually worry about how long parents take to teach their kids stuff. As you say, the earlier one starts the earlier they learn, but also the earlier one starts the better chance one has to develop life long habbits/skills. If one is not exposed to something till later in life the chances of learning to cope with it become vanishingly small.
Alcohol is the classic example of course,.. cournties with high drinking ages tend to have more alcohol problems (esp since these ages are often high enough that the parents are not even involved at that point), sex ed being another common on. Exposure to erotica is a fun one to examine too (I've found people who don't run into it until their 30s-40s go overboard for instance)
That gets into the entire 'what is normal' problem. Current attitudes concerning when someone is sexually mature are neither normal nor natural. Over the last century or so we have been pushing the age of 'child' further and further and putting more and more importance on 'keeping innocence' and have really been forcing the myth that minors (i.e. people between 12 and 18) are unable to act like adults...
That is what elected judges do. The problem is elected judges do not want to rule in such a way that they will loose their jobs. Any judge who rules in favor of something painted with the brush of 'sex' and 'children' is unlikely to survive re-election.
Long tail got a bit too much hype as people hoped that obscure artists would be AS successful as the popular ones and that turned out to be garbage.
However, long tail DID hold true for obscure artists having any chance at all and made obscure stuff MUCH easier to find. Now instead of only having access to what most people want, the smaller stuff is available for purchase.
Music is a good example, esp if you look at dementia/filk/etc. In the past you basicly had Weird Al and a few other major ones that, well, the big labels decided to make available. Now you can go strait to topic specific sites and get access to all the artists that, while not as well known, produce much more targeted material and thus still do 'ok'. not rich but they sell far more then they would have in previous decades.
The Law of Gravitation and the Theory of Gravity are two related but different things.
The Law of Gravitation is (like most laws) is an equation describing the effect of gravity and nothing else.
The Theory of Gravity goes over gravities existence (or not) and how it actually works.
Theories can never become Laws (and Laws were never Theories) because they are two fundamentally different concepts within science.
Pity we don't know the region that this took place in. Most areas have romeo and juliet laws that cover cases like this (like the california example above).. this does not always stop law enforcement form doing an initial arrest then dropping the charges.
A plausible situation here is that he was covered, the father deciced to pull his 'big scary' weight to arrest the guy, knew the charges were not legally supported, had to release him, but still got to charge him in the court of public opinion.
A corrupt cop looking to hurt someone doesn't need them to actually violate a law. They only need to convince the public that what they did was close enough.
Well, for starters local law enforcement was not neutral in this case so there wasn't much the person could do. Secondly the real damage wasn't the charge but the reputation. You can be arrested on trumped up charges pretty easily.. they won't stick (in this story they didn't) but that doesn't stop the mob who now assocates your name with 'pedophile'.
Well yes, the holocaust happened, but that doesn't stop some teachers from teaching that it didn't and in some places it actually is considered controversial. There are plenty of people in both America and the UK who honestly believe it never happened and rail when they hear about such 'lies' being taught in school. It doesn't help things that over the last few decades schools have been caught teaching official lies (Gulf of Tonkin being an example) which gives a lot of ammunition to the holocaust deniers.
Now?
Christmas was non-Christian LONG before is was a Christian holiday. Moving it to a more inclusive 'winter holiday' is actually taking it BACK.