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Hey, the original parent poster: (I figure I'd weigh in)

I'm not strongly against gay marriage. I simply don't support it. Sorry if my explanation is a little disjointed. There isn't one particular issue that explains it all.

I see the whole issue as completely artificial. It was almost entirely created and started by Gavin Newsom (former mayor of SF). It was a demogogic move on his part to try to get support for his run for governor several years later.

Aside: Ironic it backfired and ended up pigeon holeing him as a far left politician.

No one talked about or wanted gay marriage before he brought it up.

A more nebulous reason is that society is moving away from marriage. People are more and more living in civil unions. Marriage has become a religious/traditional thing. So revising/redefining antiquated traditions to appease a group of people seems unnecessary.

I think the idea of redefining a term like marriage is also rather problematic for me. It's always described a union between a man and a woman, since like the times of Hammurabi - and now we're just redefining it? It seems a little absurd.

The address the issue, we created a new term. "Civil Unions". But for some reason this isn't good enough - and I don't know why. Seems like the real goal is to redefine a several thousand year old term - which kinda seems revisionist to me.

Another argument I've seen and that I've never seen addressed is: why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.I personally feel like if they're going to go through all of this, they might as well allow all marriage.

At the end of the day I wouldn't really care if gay marriage passed. What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.

The right to visit loved ones at a hospital and the tax benefits are more symptomatic of broken hospital/tax laws than a huge national issue on par with the civil rights movement. I think calling gay marriage a civil rights issue is hyperbolic and disingenuous (and is polyamorous marriage a civil rights issue too?). I think there are way way way more important issues currently to deal. Thousands of people are rotting in jails for non violent crimes, thousands of people have their lives ruined by medical bills, thousands of people are forced into plea bargains for crimes they never committed. There is so much suffering happening around us, and we spend out time arguing about redefining marriage. It's just really frustrating for me to see this artificial debate occupy so much of the collective unconscious of the country (and now the world).

Yeah, and that was kinda my point.

I don't see why they don't make it possible to earmark money - I think they would end up getting a LOT more funding:

People that don't want to fund gay marriage advocacy would donate to the issues that they find more important, and people that feel strongly about gay marriage would donate more because they know it would all go towards their pet issue.

Hey thanks for sharing that. Glad to see there is some diversity when it comes to civil liberties advocates. (not that there is anything wrong with the ACLU as far as I can tell)

"Our four pillars of litigation are private property, economic liberty, free speech and school choice." - their website

What's the deal with school choice? Seems kinda random

One thing I wish advocacy groups allowed is donating towards narrower goals. For instance I support most of what the ACLU does, but I don't really care for their views on gay marriage and don't particularly want to fund that part. It would be great if I could donate to more specific parts of the organization (same goes for public radio, haha)

So why not contribute to (or extend) say ScaLAPACK to make it do what you need and add a wrapped to an existing linear algebra library?

Looking at ScaLAPACK, it's been developed since 1995. I've never touched it, but it's probably many many lines of code (and maybe a few PhD thesis) with all sorts of kinks worked out that will take you decades to iron out yourself. To throw out all that knowledge/work/man-hours and to start from scratch seems like a waste.

I guess I don't get what you're saying:

the C++ linear algebra libraries are basically syntactic sugar for interacting with optimized Fortran libraries like BLAS, LAPACK, etc. (I'm sure I'm overlooking some complexity here, because the C++ libraries, while linking to the same Fortran libraries have very different run times)

Yours interacts with ScaLAPACK and other distributed memory libraries.

Why would it not be possible to simply extend say armadillo or eigen to interact with distributed memory libraries? If you need more syntax, then extend the interface.

And why exactly can't that be made part of an existing library?

Great.. another C++ linear algebra library...

  boost::uBLAS
  eigen
  armadillo
  a dozen other...

why not contribute to an existing project?

The reoccurring bifurcation of talent and resources in the open source community is really disheartening. Can't we focus on one or two libraries and make them actually good? Or at least fork off of something that already exists and add your own features. I look at benchmarks of the existing tools and one library will do one operation very efficiently, while another will work well with something. Often the differences in speed are huge (more than a factor of 10). So I end up having to flip a coin in choosing which library to use.

Is the EFF really strapped for cash? If their budget was 2 or 3 times bigger, would they really be able to do a lot more?

Sounds like Forth would be perfect for the JVM

Thank you for the explanation!

Can someone actually explain to me what Cygwin does internally? Doesn't Windows already implement POSIX?

Zeppelins can't really deflate because there is not pressure difference between the inside and outside of the zeppelin. If there were to be a tear in the fabric, gases would simple start mixing and the buoyancy of the aircraft would start to decrease. I suspect this would cause a rapid decent (but I'm not sure if it would be lethal)

Thanks for that clarification

"Personally I know I eat much more fries if I eat them with ketchup and I will eat much more steak if I eat it with steak sauce."

Not to detract from your other excellent points but:

1 - it makes it easier to eat more because it's less dry. If you eat a bunch of fries with nothing it will turn into a huge lump in your stomach and you won't want more.

2 - insoluble fiber in apples slows fructose absorption, but a hunk of fatty meat does not? Fat slows absorption through the intestine.

3 - Vinegar is supposed to suppress appetite. Eating a pickle when your hungry will 4/6 times make you feel a lot less hungry.

how about ATLAS ?

Figuring out which libary to use is a huge PITA. I don't really understand when I should use uBLAS, mtl, or eigen or whatever else is out there.

Anyone have some insight?

Not only glib but also a false dichotomy.

Choosing between two careers, say engineering and being a marine zoologist are equivalent in socially attributed worth and both require a similar amount of effort education-wise. Most people wouldn't argue that being an engineer is in an obvious way "better".

Choosing between going to college or not, for most people isn't an equal choice. The vast majority of people view going to college as a better option.

Rogain

People primarily speak Russian in Ukraine not because they were afraid of being killed but because it was the lingua franca of the region and it was taught in Soviet schools. There was a lot less literature available in Ukrainian because Ukrainian was a language spoken primarily by serfs (educated people spoke a mixture of French and Russian).

The farmers are the people bringing in money into the economy. The rest of society starts to simply charge more for their services b/c their expenses have gone up.

The other possibility is that it's people that have looked up your name on Facebook before you had an account. So HQ logged it as X wanting to find Y. When Y makes an account, we'll let him know X was trying to find them.

Oh this is symptomatic of a larger problem of age discrimination in Europe. People have zero problem firing old people explicitly for their age. Many academic institutions have hard set requirements for retirement at 65. It's very very hard to work in to your 80s in Europe like it is in the US. (My experience more of less limited to academia)

The idea (originating from France as far as I can tell) is that if you fire all the old folks you will make more room for a younger generation. It's a theory that has been disprove again and again. It's also why they try to cut the work week. If everyone can only work 30 hours then there will be more jobs! (Except it never ends up happening)

I think there is a lot less black magic than you think. The overwhelming majority of the time the small price fluctuations are in response to changes in the price by 3rd party sellers (the ones selling the same item in "new" condition).

just check for yourself at http://camelcamelcamel.com/

They virtually always undercut the 3rd party - which always begged the question: why do the 3rd parties even bother trying to sell on amazon?

Actually if you think about the kind of testing you're talking about, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a human psychology perspective. You don't look for a camera and think: "This should cost $123.76" and anything less will be huge turn off. There are probably more drastic things at play, like if the price ends in .99 or if it's more than a hundred dollars, or maybe people don't like certain price numbers for some completely random reason.

They probably have some internal database of the average (across all inventory) of the rate-of-sales vs. the listed-price and the algo just looks for a local maximum around the price that is a bit lower than the 3rd parties.

To be honest, I've always found the evidence that ancient Mexicans had the wheel rather dubious. All we have that supports this claim are small clay fired figurines that allegedly had wheels on them. The problem with the claim is that the axles would have been made of wood so they no longer exist. So all you have are some clay fired figures with 4 round disks... If they really did have wheels, then it's rather mind boggling (and rather implausible) that they didn't apply the technology to something more practical.

I think it's important to approach history/art-history of ancient cultures with a health dose of skepticism - especially ones that didn't have a written language. These academic fields sometimes promote theories that are based on rather wild speculations.

Yeah, but that's often hard to pull off.

For instance in the original example you're violating an internet law. It's not exactly something the PD can just pretend to stumble upon unless you're really careless and do it in a public place.

Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? If their raid is based on illegal info, then it's not legal.

Turning secret inadmissible evidence into legal admissible evidence seems tricky.

The only game plan I can see is this: You find out someone is up to something illegal; then you just happen have have a police officer walking by the coffee shop when you're discussing it with an associate.

Honest question: Can someone draw the lines for me from looking at call meta data to human rights?

Is privacy even a right in the same sense as other human rights? Human rights are generally about what you CAN do, not about what others (ie.the government) CAN'T do.

That's not a great rational to not use drones.

You're throwing away tons of money maintaining helicopters that you don't need most of the time because it's too hard to regulate the use of drones?

That's like forcing police officers to only use 18th century muskets so they don't shoot too much

That's really messed up. More outrageous than the TSA... Thanks for the link and sharing the information. Why isn't this discussed more? I guess we only talk about news, not our preexisting long term problems (ex: prisons)

You mean back when people thought blacks were less human than white and women didn't have the right to vote? Back when a depression meant people starving to death?

We're not the same society we were back in the 1940s.