way outside my legal know-how about medicine. I know the last package I got out of London was opened several times to make sure the 'gift, no VAT required' was opened several times to make sure it was just a costume ring. Can't picture drugs going the other way without issue, but it's beyond my realm. Maybe it's still that old "India is part of the Empire" thing . . . if that's your part of Europe.
I don't know how transport of a prescription only substance across international borders without the person they are prescribed for present would even go. I know in the USA, it would raise so many red flags as to get a DEA and ATF agent to shoot my cat before throwing me in jail....but Americans are strange.
my law knowledge only goes so far, and is mostly for contracts involved in photography. But, even though this case is at an appellate level court, it's still not an appeal case, just a case that the local court said 'forget it, you do all the work'. Probably my brain just misread the section on precedent from 'must be from an appellate level' as 'must be from an overturned appeal'. which is completely possible. I was reading only for contracts and right of publicity (limited areas affected because of certain appeal precedents). Also the reason that the only legal work I do for myself is printing up model release contracts and keeping up on what is 'fair value' for a valid photography contract (copy of some shots for the model's folio, a few dollars, even just a fast food lunch in some places). I won't pretend to be a lawyer, just a geek with enough knowledge to be dangerous. Anything bigger gets a real hired gun.
As for why the case is still alive, I think the judge wants to give them room to appeal, and also have enough in court records to keep the appeal from being overturned. By not dismissing, he'll have put enough evidence into record to make an appeal on venue suicidal (dismissed by a judge before a jury sees it for the whole "yeah, we hired a closet and paid someone to fake a signature of a not real entity" part) while also leaving just enough room to appeal the ruling, but with enough "see how we sued before we even owned the patent!" to make most jurists cringe.
I'm not sure if this is a *facepalm* moment, of if it warrants a full *headdesk*. I hope you are over in Asia, because a 'script from India, even for generic antibiotics, shouldn't even be accepted at a pharmacy in the USA, especially if the doc didn't see the patient. That's how half the junkies get their fixes.
It would be nice, but designing a phage doesn't seem like a process that could be sped up that much. Growing enough of it takes time, and because you've got a library of viruses you can use and a library of bacteria to go against and have to hope that you can combine the right ones fast enough. IDing the bacteria involved is a gram-stain test, usually, not a very intense or slow process but not a full DNA scan. But making the phage and making it only kill what you want it to kill, there is your DNA scan for each different sample you make, and then for each sample of a good one that you get to make sure it didn't mutate in a bad way . . . maybe 30 more years, maybe it's just around the corner and we haven't seen it yet. But then we run the risk of phage resistant bacteria, or a phage that doesn't die when it's target does; though if that meant enhanced immunity to a target bacteria for life, sign me up right away!
That paper looks very interesting, and since some of my pediatric doctors are now heads at UVA (another university hospital) something that might be of use to them. Though, there had to be some reason they got rid of silver and copper equipment anyways? I dunno, maybe the gurnies and such get autoclaved, which copper might not do so well with.
I see a bigger problem with shared rooms, frankly. One PT with one resistance infection sharing a bathroom with another, and those bloody grippy hospital socks getting bathroom floor germs into the bed with the PTs is a disaster waiting to happen. I keep shoes just for bathroom use when I'm in a hospital, just to keep my socks and bed cleaner.
The up side is that most antibiotic resistances tend to cause the bacteria to be weaker in some other regard. Maybe more susceptible to another antibiotic, or just requiring more calories to reproduce. Rarely is it free for the bacteria or something it can maintain. And if you kill all of the bacteria that's resistant to one thing with something else, you can eliminate that one resistant instance. Getting all of it tends to be a problem, since PTs stop meds early, and sewer lines don't all have high power germ killing UV lights or other effective measures.
You don't often get that option. If a patient comes in and the only drugs that will cure them are ones that are phased out for this decade, how do you "first do no harm"?
Ahh, sulphas and 'cillin's, the drugs so many people are allergic to. I know childhood 'cillin allergies can go away (medical test is take a dose, and have someone standing by with an epipen and benadryl, I wish I were kidding). But not sulpha drugs; once allergic always allergic. And the allergy transfers to so many non-antibiotic sulphonaminids that is's mind boggling.
The rugby joke didn't go over my head, I just was picturing people who only one of those drugs would work for.
So convince the Asian doctors to start calling those minor infections viral and sending them home with some zinc or vit C pills? Not much an antibiotic can do to a virus which is where lots of the over prescription comes from. Sinus infections, colds, flus...go home, take a pep-pill in the morning and a sleepy one at night (some of those are legal there, right? Maybe a brand name for a caffeine pill in the morning, and a benzo or z-drug or even phenergan at night), and some herbal BS or an aspirin placebo, and feel better in the same amount of time that a virus would run it's course (2 days or so). And if phenergan and caffeine is the choice, they'll feel better anyways!
But when you have hours or minutes (or even a day, just long enough to get a culture and preliminary resistance check) to start treating a bacterial infection before septic shock sets in, DNA typing and creating a phage takes too long. The opposite problem is that if your first guess isn't 100% effective, than you also just upped the chance of training the bacteria to be more resistant.
It's not the standard e.coli UTI that causes resistances (chances are macrodantin or 'cillin or 'sporin will kill it good). It's the strange Kleb or Psudomonas A UTI that gets treated with standard UTI drugs for 24 hours and then switched to a proper cure. That action leads to e.coli and enterococcus and any other gut bacteria and even skin bacteria getting a head start on resistance. Replace UTI with respiratory or blood infections, and the same thing happens. TB carriers are probably the reason that TB has gotten into the extreme resistance bandwagon; going through the same UTI/sinus/respiratory/gastric infections.
And then there is the whole deal of treating every sinus and upper respiratory infection with antibiotics without proof that they aren't viral. I'd blame parents and doctors, and adore that my doctors have a 'no sinus infection antibiotics' sign in every room that stays in force until they get a positive culture result.
Carbapanem is the last I heard about. Finally got a dose of that recently, or it might have been carbenacillin...was post surgery, I had methadone, fentanyl, morphine, and lidocaine drips, my memory has a few holes. But you are right, the stuff being developed now is so strong that they kill human cells as easily as bacteria. It's almost like chemo drugs now.
Still need amikacin and a few of the 'penems to fill my punch card for antibiotics of last resort.
I had one doctor who was that stupid, and I didn't pick 'em. A idiot hospitalist that nearly got me killed. If your primary even talks to Big Pharm reps, find a different one; mine has a giant sign saying 'you can leave paperwork, and then leave. we don't do lunch, we don't do samples, so papers and gtfo'
That assumes that chronic UTIs have a few days to do a 'reset'. I've had one recurrent for 2 years (psuedo a, it's resistance to 'cillins is a bit different) and would go from not knowing it's active to being near septic in hours (we thought it was a different infection for the first year, til someone put 2 and 2 together to wonder how the same strange bacteria was sticking around). Cipro isn't too bad used right, though I find they push it too fast through small IVs and blow veins. And the expensive stuff . . . I dunno, Linazolid had fewer side effects than dying, but the effect on my family's wallet till insurance decided that 5 days wasn't enough and the Dr was right about 10 was painful; somewhere between 300 and 500 a day for pills...had a bloody PICC, should have gotten the cheaper liquid but I think the docs forgot about it. (linazolid was for what was left after the anti-psuedos and a idiot hospitalist (didn't call infectious disease for 6 days to figure out that omnicef or recephen or gent weren't going to work) made everything else resistant. When you sneak a look at a culture resistance check and see only drugs of last resort listed, and only 4 of them will work, you get a little panic-y.
10 years seems too long to me, actually. The problem is, a patient has an infection that's resistant to 'cillins or 'mycins or 'floaxins or 'sporins or what ever. Instead of throwing the biggest drug available at it (say it's resistant to all 'cillins) then throw something weak from another family (keflex or something on those lines). Don't throw Vanc/Gent at it, or Rocephin. But make sure the infection is dead dead. Not just in hiding and building a resistance to that new antibiotic too, treat with the full regimen and retest afterwards! And for gods sakes, drill it into the patients heads to take all X days worth, don't skip just because 'you feel better'!
Having just gone through this over 3 years, it's easy to say and harder to do. Bacteria hide (UTIs are bad about this, so are cysts), and when they do they can build up resistance and patients want the strong stuff so it kills it fast. But, and this is a bit of pt side talking, I wish I got the weaker meds first so the later infections weren't resistant to everything but Vanc/Gent/Strepto+Linazolid. Having on two drugs types available post-surgery (both 'of last resort' types) was a pain in the ass.
Second thing to do is for hospitals to be a little more cautious. Every antibiotic flavor for two years left my gut bacteria resistant to nearly everything. So, post surgery, and abscess appeared. Guess how many it was resistant to? Linazolid is the first antibiotic I've met that was more expensive, by weight, than gold. And that was the active drug weight, not the horse pill the crammed it in to!
For the curious, psuedomonas a started it and several idiot docs didn't call infectious disease to learn that omnicef and ampicillin wouldn't work; but they made everything else resistant. Then 4 PICC (well, 3 PICC and one PIC that got a little misplaced) for 3rd gen cefs' which are anti-psudo drugs. All the while, entero was getting resistant to all of those (lucky they killed all the e. coli or I'd have been toast).
Precedent is only set at the appeal level, not after the initial trial. So, if the troll wins the first trial, then loses on the appeal, precedent against patent trolls would be set. If the troll loses now, and continues to lose every appeal, there would still be no precedent. It is only set when a verdict is overturned.
Not to say that the ruling can't be cited and referenced in other court cases, but just that it does not become binding like a precedent is. And besides, a precedent is only binding in the area that the appellate court covers. So if this got overturned at a state level, the precedent would only be binding there and could just be a reference for other cases depending on how the judge wrote the ruling.
Picasa itself will do that same thing locally. I have all my photos taken from my DSLR in folders that Picasa can sort (yeah, it sucks for editing some of the multiple exposure, but it's nice for sorting the finished ones). The local app recognized family members from several angles, but if I filled in any of that information (by relation, ooo, google knows that guy's name is 'dad', scary!) it didn't do anything with it. It just let me sort the pictures in a different way. I could pull just pictures of certain people, I could get rid of certain faces (who cares which photos my art professor showed up in when I was taking photos for a behind the scenes look at an exhibit, sort those by folder/date instead) and I could merge certain faces (yup, those two faces are the same person, get smarter please).
At no point did it suddenly start adding public tags to photos I uploaded to PicasaWeb, or send skynet to kill my family.
Also numbers with repeatings digits can be expressed as a fraction.
No always. Please express e or pi or tau or the square root of 2 as fractions. Not as an infinite Taylor series of fractions for pi, but just pi = x/y.
No, because they did not have the copyright to the 5th to begin with. The copyright on the book is on the book alone, not the musical work included. The copyright would include the arrangement of the measures on the page, the conductors notes, the layout; not the musical work. Since the 5th is out in the public domain, anyone playing it from an older copy of music is fine. However, there is some argument to be had about anyone playing it as a direct (say: midi) copy of the copyrighted book.
10 bits is only 1024 variations. You'd need 20 symbols to get a million, and a way of tying each user's ID with a set of symbols, and a way of generating those symbols on the fly as the user requests the download. Not impossible, but not as simple as a post process watermark with the user's name and home address on the bottom of each page.
"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." From the ruling on Loving v. Virginia, 1967
Let me ask you this: how does 2 guys or 2 women getting "married" affect you in any way?
It offends me.
How does drilling in ANWAR affect you in any way? How does a woman having or being denied an abortion in Texas affect you in any way? How does taxing rich people affect you in any way? I can do this all day, but I think you get the point. So don't give me that "how does it affect you" bullshit until you can answer these:
Drilling in ANWAR reduces my chance of seeing native species in their native habitat. It might, unknown at this time, affect me by spilled oil reducing the selectivity of ice and causing climate changes.
A woman getting an abortion doesn't affect me. An individual woman being denied an abortion does not affect me either. But the systemic "anti-abortion" groups affect me because they tend to forget that before abortions were legal, they still occured. In back alley doctor's offices, and the patient mortality rate was absurdly high. Lowers the population, sure, but it also lowers the population. You should be able to figure out why that could be good or bad.
Taxes on the rich affect everyone. Higher taxes on them means more revenue for the government. Whether that's good or bad is up to you, but seeing "don't bankrupt medicaid and don't raise taxes" is the rally cry for certain people makes me giggle.
So you can make up straw-men arguments and move goal posts all day? Fine. The answer you are looking for is that separate but equal is not allowed in this country. Period. The end.
Now answer me one: how does the fact that my religion allows for same-sex marriages affect you? Oh, it doesn't, because I'm not your branch of christian so I'm going to hell anyways? Then piss off, wanker.
As to the rest of your screed, marriage pre-christianity was regulated by the different religions that existed at the time. Greeks, Romans, Goths, Vikings, they all had variants of marriage; and that's just sticking with the cultures that modern Christians are likely descended from. Take a look at historical marriage in Old England, dowry and arranged marriages. Are you proposing that since that is your history we should all go back to that? Or should we at least embrace a modern only view? If it must be modern major religions only, take a look at Hindi and other Indian marriage rites. Prepare to have your closed mind blown.
You never could take the stand to testify in your own defense, and the just claim the 5th when the other side asked a question you didn't like. The guy apparently went to the police on his own. He answered some questions, then refused to answer more. They used their observation (he practically waived the 5th by just going without a lawyer) to aid in convicting him. The modern interpretation of the 5th is that the police can't use a blanket refusal to talk as evidence, and a jury can't use you not taking the stand against you; this changes neither.
Slashdot Mirror
way outside my legal know-how about medicine. I know the last package I got out of London was opened several times to make sure the 'gift, no VAT required' was opened several times to make sure it was just a costume ring. Can't picture drugs going the other way without issue, but it's beyond my realm. Maybe it's still that old "India is part of the Empire" thing . . . if that's your part of Europe.
I don't know how transport of a prescription only substance across international borders without the person they are prescribed for present would even go. I know in the USA, it would raise so many red flags as to get a DEA and ATF agent to shoot my cat before throwing me in jail....but Americans are strange.
my law knowledge only goes so far, and is mostly for contracts involved in photography. But, even though this case is at an appellate level court, it's still not an appeal case, just a case that the local court said 'forget it, you do all the work'. Probably my brain just misread the section on precedent from 'must be from an appellate level' as 'must be from an overturned appeal'. which is completely possible. I was reading only for contracts and right of publicity (limited areas affected because of certain appeal precedents). Also the reason that the only legal work I do for myself is printing up model release contracts and keeping up on what is 'fair value' for a valid photography contract (copy of some shots for the model's folio, a few dollars, even just a fast food lunch in some places). I won't pretend to be a lawyer, just a geek with enough knowledge to be dangerous. Anything bigger gets a real hired gun.
As for why the case is still alive, I think the judge wants to give them room to appeal, and also have enough in court records to keep the appeal from being overturned. By not dismissing, he'll have put enough evidence into record to make an appeal on venue suicidal (dismissed by a judge before a jury sees it for the whole "yeah, we hired a closet and paid someone to fake a signature of a not real entity" part) while also leaving just enough room to appeal the ruling, but with enough "see how we sued before we even owned the patent!" to make most jurists cringe.
I'm not sure if this is a *facepalm* moment, of if it warrants a full *headdesk*. I hope you are over in Asia, because a 'script from India, even for generic antibiotics, shouldn't even be accepted at a pharmacy in the USA, especially if the doc didn't see the patient. That's how half the junkies get their fixes.
It would be nice, but designing a phage doesn't seem like a process that could be sped up that much. Growing enough of it takes time, and because you've got a library of viruses you can use and a library of bacteria to go against and have to hope that you can combine the right ones fast enough. IDing the bacteria involved is a gram-stain test, usually, not a very intense or slow process but not a full DNA scan. But making the phage and making it only kill what you want it to kill, there is your DNA scan for each different sample you make, and then for each sample of a good one that you get to make sure it didn't mutate in a bad way . . . maybe 30 more years, maybe it's just around the corner and we haven't seen it yet. But then we run the risk of phage resistant bacteria, or a phage that doesn't die when it's target does; though if that meant enhanced immunity to a target bacteria for life, sign me up right away!
Vanc is actually hard to make, so is Linazolid. The linazolid patent is making someone big money on 100$ pills there, but it's still tough to make.
That paper looks very interesting, and since some of my pediatric doctors are now heads at UVA (another university hospital) something that might be of use to them. Though, there had to be some reason they got rid of silver and copper equipment anyways? I dunno, maybe the gurnies and such get autoclaved, which copper might not do so well with.
I see a bigger problem with shared rooms, frankly. One PT with one resistance infection sharing a bathroom with another, and those bloody grippy hospital socks getting bathroom floor germs into the bed with the PTs is a disaster waiting to happen. I keep shoes just for bathroom use when I'm in a hospital, just to keep my socks and bed cleaner.
The up side is that most antibiotic resistances tend to cause the bacteria to be weaker in some other regard. Maybe more susceptible to another antibiotic, or just requiring more calories to reproduce. Rarely is it free for the bacteria or something it can maintain. And if you kill all of the bacteria that's resistant to one thing with something else, you can eliminate that one resistant instance. Getting all of it tends to be a problem, since PTs stop meds early, and sewer lines don't all have high power germ killing UV lights or other effective measures.
You don't often get that option. If a patient comes in and the only drugs that will cure them are ones that are phased out for this decade, how do you "first do no harm"?
Ahh, sulphas and 'cillin's, the drugs so many people are allergic to. I know childhood 'cillin allergies can go away (medical test is take a dose, and have someone standing by with an epipen and benadryl, I wish I were kidding). But not sulpha drugs; once allergic always allergic. And the allergy transfers to so many non-antibiotic sulphonaminids that is's mind boggling.
The rugby joke didn't go over my head, I just was picturing people who only one of those drugs would work for.
So convince the Asian doctors to start calling those minor infections viral and sending them home with some zinc or vit C pills? Not much an antibiotic can do to a virus which is where lots of the over prescription comes from. Sinus infections, colds, flus...go home, take a pep-pill in the morning and a sleepy one at night (some of those are legal there, right? Maybe a brand name for a caffeine pill in the morning, and a benzo or z-drug or even phenergan at night), and some herbal BS or an aspirin placebo, and feel better in the same amount of time that a virus would run it's course (2 days or so). And if phenergan and caffeine is the choice, they'll feel better anyways!
But when you have hours or minutes (or even a day, just long enough to get a culture and preliminary resistance check) to start treating a bacterial infection before septic shock sets in, DNA typing and creating a phage takes too long. The opposite problem is that if your first guess isn't 100% effective, than you also just upped the chance of training the bacteria to be more resistant.
It's not the standard e.coli UTI that causes resistances (chances are macrodantin or 'cillin or 'sporin will kill it good). It's the strange Kleb or Psudomonas A UTI that gets treated with standard UTI drugs for 24 hours and then switched to a proper cure. That action leads to e.coli and enterococcus and any other gut bacteria and even skin bacteria getting a head start on resistance. Replace UTI with respiratory or blood infections, and the same thing happens. TB carriers are probably the reason that TB has gotten into the extreme resistance bandwagon; going through the same UTI/sinus/respiratory/gastric infections.
And then there is the whole deal of treating every sinus and upper respiratory infection with antibiotics without proof that they aren't viral. I'd blame parents and doctors, and adore that my doctors have a 'no sinus infection antibiotics' sign in every room that stays in force until they get a positive culture result.
Carbapanem is the last I heard about. Finally got a dose of that recently, or it might have been carbenacillin...was post surgery, I had methadone, fentanyl, morphine, and lidocaine drips, my memory has a few holes. But you are right, the stuff being developed now is so strong that they kill human cells as easily as bacteria. It's almost like chemo drugs now.
Still need amikacin and a few of the 'penems to fill my punch card for antibiotics of last resort.
I had one doctor who was that stupid, and I didn't pick 'em. A idiot hospitalist that nearly got me killed. If your primary even talks to Big Pharm reps, find a different one; mine has a giant sign saying 'you can leave paperwork, and then leave. we don't do lunch, we don't do samples, so papers and gtfo'
That assumes that chronic UTIs have a few days to do a 'reset'. I've had one recurrent for 2 years (psuedo a, it's resistance to 'cillins is a bit different) and would go from not knowing it's active to being near septic in hours (we thought it was a different infection for the first year, til someone put 2 and 2 together to wonder how the same strange bacteria was sticking around). Cipro isn't too bad used right, though I find they push it too fast through small IVs and blow veins. And the expensive stuff . . . I dunno, Linazolid had fewer side effects than dying, but the effect on my family's wallet till insurance decided that 5 days wasn't enough and the Dr was right about 10 was painful; somewhere between 300 and 500 a day for pills...had a bloody PICC, should have gotten the cheaper liquid but I think the docs forgot about it. (linazolid was for what was left after the anti-psuedos and a idiot hospitalist (didn't call infectious disease for 6 days to figure out that omnicef or recephen or gent weren't going to work) made everything else resistant. When you sneak a look at a culture resistance check and see only drugs of last resort listed, and only 4 of them will work, you get a little panic-y.
10 years seems too long to me, actually. The problem is, a patient has an infection that's resistant to 'cillins or 'mycins or 'floaxins or 'sporins or what ever. Instead of throwing the biggest drug available at it (say it's resistant to all 'cillins) then throw something weak from another family (keflex or something on those lines). Don't throw Vanc/Gent at it, or Rocephin. But make sure the infection is dead dead. Not just in hiding and building a resistance to that new antibiotic too, treat with the full regimen and retest afterwards! And for gods sakes, drill it into the patients heads to take all X days worth, don't skip just because 'you feel better'!
Having just gone through this over 3 years, it's easy to say and harder to do. Bacteria hide (UTIs are bad about this, so are cysts), and when they do they can build up resistance and patients want the strong stuff so it kills it fast. But, and this is a bit of pt side talking, I wish I got the weaker meds first so the later infections weren't resistant to everything but Vanc/Gent/Strepto+Linazolid. Having on two drugs types available post-surgery (both 'of last resort' types) was a pain in the ass.
Second thing to do is for hospitals to be a little more cautious. Every antibiotic flavor for two years left my gut bacteria resistant to nearly everything. So, post surgery, and abscess appeared. Guess how many it was resistant to? Linazolid is the first antibiotic I've met that was more expensive, by weight, than gold. And that was the active drug weight, not the horse pill the crammed it in to!
For the curious, psuedomonas a started it and several idiot docs didn't call infectious disease to learn that omnicef and ampicillin wouldn't work; but they made everything else resistant. Then 4 PICC (well, 3 PICC and one PIC that got a little misplaced) for 3rd gen cefs' which are anti-psudo drugs. All the while, entero was getting resistant to all of those (lucky they killed all the e. coli or I'd have been toast).
BZZZT WRONG!
Precedent is only set at the appeal level, not after the initial trial. So, if the troll wins the first trial, then loses on the appeal, precedent against patent trolls would be set. If the troll loses now, and continues to lose every appeal, there would still be no precedent. It is only set when a verdict is overturned.
Not to say that the ruling can't be cited and referenced in other court cases, but just that it does not become binding like a precedent is. And besides, a precedent is only binding in the area that the appellate court covers. So if this got overturned at a state level, the precedent would only be binding there and could just be a reference for other cases depending on how the judge wrote the ruling.
Picasa itself will do that same thing locally. I have all my photos taken from my DSLR in folders that Picasa can sort (yeah, it sucks for editing some of the multiple exposure, but it's nice for sorting the finished ones). The local app recognized family members from several angles, but if I filled in any of that information (by relation, ooo, google knows that guy's name is 'dad', scary!) it didn't do anything with it. It just let me sort the pictures in a different way. I could pull just pictures of certain people, I could get rid of certain faces (who cares which photos my art professor showed up in when I was taking photos for a behind the scenes look at an exhibit, sort those by folder/date instead) and I could merge certain faces (yup, those two faces are the same person, get smarter please).
At no point did it suddenly start adding public tags to photos I uploaded to PicasaWeb, or send skynet to kill my family.
Also numbers with repeatings digits can be expressed as a fraction.
No always. Please express e or pi or tau or the square root of 2 as fractions. Not as an infinite Taylor series of fractions for pi, but just pi = x/y.
No, because they did not have the copyright to the 5th to begin with. The copyright on the book is on the book alone, not the musical work included. The copyright would include the arrangement of the measures on the page, the conductors notes, the layout; not the musical work. Since the 5th is out in the public domain, anyone playing it from an older copy of music is fine. However, there is some argument to be had about anyone playing it as a direct (say: midi) copy of the copyrighted book.
10 bits is only 1024 variations. You'd need 20 symbols to get a million, and a way of tying each user's ID with a set of symbols, and a way of generating those symbols on the fly as the user requests the download. Not impossible, but not as simple as a post process watermark with the user's name and home address on the bottom of each page.
"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." From the ruling on Loving v. Virginia, 1967
Polygamy is an abomination. One should not mix greek and latin roots.
Let me ask you this: how does 2 guys or 2 women getting "married" affect you in any way?
It offends me.
How does drilling in ANWAR affect you in any way? How does a woman having or being denied an abortion in Texas affect you in any way? How does taxing rich people affect you in any way? I can do this all day, but I think you get the point. So don't give me that "how does it affect you" bullshit until you can answer these:
Drilling in ANWAR reduces my chance of seeing native species in their native habitat. It might, unknown at this time, affect me by spilled oil reducing the selectivity of ice and causing climate changes.
A woman getting an abortion doesn't affect me. An individual woman being denied an abortion does not affect me either. But the systemic "anti-abortion" groups affect me because they tend to forget that before abortions were legal, they still occured. In back alley doctor's offices, and the patient mortality rate was absurdly high. Lowers the population, sure, but it also lowers the population. You should be able to figure out why that could be good or bad.
Taxes on the rich affect everyone. Higher taxes on them means more revenue for the government. Whether that's good or bad is up to you, but seeing "don't bankrupt medicaid and don't raise taxes" is the rally cry for certain people makes me giggle.
So you can make up straw-men arguments and move goal posts all day? Fine. The answer you are looking for is that separate but equal is not allowed in this country. Period. The end.
Now answer me one: how does the fact that my religion allows for same-sex marriages affect you? Oh, it doesn't, because I'm not your branch of christian so I'm going to hell anyways? Then piss off, wanker.
As to the rest of your screed, marriage pre-christianity was regulated by the different religions that existed at the time. Greeks, Romans, Goths, Vikings, they all had variants of marriage; and that's just sticking with the cultures that modern Christians are likely descended from. Take a look at historical marriage in Old England, dowry and arranged marriages. Are you proposing that since that is your history we should all go back to that? Or should we at least embrace a modern only view? If it must be modern major religions only, take a look at Hindi and other Indian marriage rites. Prepare to have your closed mind blown.
You never could take the stand to testify in your own defense, and the just claim the 5th when the other side asked a question you didn't like. The guy apparently went to the police on his own. He answered some questions, then refused to answer more. They used their observation (he practically waived the 5th by just going without a lawyer) to aid in convicting him. The modern interpretation of the 5th is that the police can't use a blanket refusal to talk as evidence, and a jury can't use you not taking the stand against you; this changes neither.