When the mother of my child was in hospital giving birth, I was allowed to visit at anytime. Others were limited to certain times. In that case marriage didn't matter but would have made it simpler for my claim as the father.
If my now wife was in hospital, I'd probably be allowed to visit at most any time and the marriage would make it easier but if only common law I'd expect it to be similar though the marriage documents make it easier to prove that you're extra close family.
Really it was the hospital that decided with the government only formalizing the relationship. For a gay couple the marriage document would probably help more to prove that they had more of a right to visit at inconvenient times. Your visitors were probably visiting during visiting hours.

The Canadian Supreme Court considered this and decided the negatives of allowing polygamy outweighed the benefits.
Having lived close to Bountiful BC where the polygamists who brought the suite are based, I have to agree at least in that case.
The negatives included that the standard practice was to force 13yr old girls into marriage with 50+ yr old men and what it did to the other single males in their society, eg kicked out so they didn't compete for the young girls. Quite a few of the witnesses in the case were victims of the Mormon breakaway sect.
If the case had been about equals agreeing to a multiple marriage the result likely would have been different.
As for the tax breaks part you brought up up the page, traditionally it was based on dependents. Is it fair that I pay the same taxes as you if I'm supporting two other people and you're only supporting yourself? I do agree that basing it purely on marriage isn't optimal though and if you had to support a younger sibling as an example should allow you to have tax benefits as well.

When the Judges are appointed by a democratic process such as the elected legislature appointing them.
In common law based societies (most countries descended from England) the judiciary has always had the power to make law in the absence of legislation. The legislature and/or crown/people can always override the judiciary as well, though sometimes it is hard. eg, in America if enough people agree it is possible to even get rid of free speech.
Someones got to decide what things like "equal" mean. And there are always edge cases.

Most of us live in Constitutional Representative Democracies with constitutions that override most laws and take a super-majority to change. Assuming you're American the people through their States and Federal govbernments can democratically change your Constitution to outlaw anything. Until that happens their are certain rights enshrined in the Constitution that can not be changed by a simple majority.
Americans do have the problem of the Judiciary ignoring very simple and clear rights such as the First Amendment. And often laws are not so clear cut so the Judiciary has to do some interpretation such as "What exactly does equal mean".
In my country the rights aren't so clear cut so the government can limit speech if it is considered in societies interest as a democratic and just society, so banning things like child porn is simpler but once again judges often make the final decision.

You are young :)

Hey, they had nicer icons then the competition.

What was the SAA crap? The first version of OS/2 I ran was the redbox Warp v3 that used my preexisting copy of Win3.1. Worked very well until MS broke it with WIN32s ver 1.30 and DLLs that were hardwired to load above 1GB.

OS/2 2.x+ ran most any DOS and 16bit Windows app fine (much better then NT and even Win95 unless booted to DOS). What it was missing was device drivers for much generic hardware and enough ram to run without swap file thrashing. Price was high as well, partially due to the price of the included Windows which seemed free to most users as it came with their computer and was easily pirated.

Windows 3.x could actually preemptively multitask, with all Win apps in one process and other DOS apps in separate processes. It was still crappy at it.
Even Win95 wasn't really a true OS as it still used DOS as the kernel though with the right hardware it used protected mode drivers instead of the DOS drivers.

Warp Connect (Warp v3+) that actually that shipped with a full networking stack. Warp v3 shipped with the IAK (Internet access kit) which had just enough of a network stack to allow dial-in to work. Only had SLIP at first while the refresh included PPP. Also had WebExplorer (along with a gopher client, usenet client and email client which used sendmail) which was mostly a big DLL so other apps could have a browser based UI. MS took this idea, and even the name, and used it for their GUI. Warp v3 was released in 1994.

IBM had a license for Windows up to v4 and that is why Win95 was ver 4.095. Earlier when Win32s came out, it used a VBX (or whatever the device driver was called) that was unsupported by WINOS2 and IBM kept writing compatible device drivers to allow WIN32s apps to run. This ended with WIN32s ver 1.30 as at the time OS/2 only gave a process 512 MBs of address space and Microsoft hardwired some DLLs to load above 1GB. (It was possible to mix and match parts of WIN32s ver 1.25 and 1.30 to work around this). At this point IBM gave up the Win32s race.
OS/2 ver4 did include a subsystem to allow easy recompilation of WIN32 apps to OS/2 but it didn't really catch on as at that time Windows had clearly won the OS wars.
But yes, OS/2 could run multiple windows apps, each in its own process space and preemptively multitask them so they were less likely to run out of resources (DDE and the clipboard were shared) plus allow them to use the HPFS file system which was a much better file system the FAT which gave both DOS and Win apps an advantage.
Unluckily the Windows license also increased the price of OS/2 though they did come out with the redbox editions which used your existing Win3.x install.
Another huge factor was that the price of ram didn't decrease as predicted, likely due to uncompetitive measures by the ram manufacturers. Windows ran better in 4MBs (even 2MBs with Win3.0 in real mode) of ram then OS/2.

Bonus points when you execute the wrong person and the real murderer murders someone else so you can once again execute another wrong person. Rinse and repeat and you can kill a lot of people while feeling mortally superiour for legally murdering people. If you're really lucky society will tilt into full scale authoritarianism and you can kill people based on colour, race, religion or lots of other reasons and as it's all legal, you are still a law obeying upstanding citizen.

Is a pot smoker that much of a threat to society that they deserve locking up?
As for felons, the rest of the world solved that problem in the 19th and early 20th century by eliminating that class of person (excepting Nigeria). Only America practices segregation with ex-criminals by creating a whole new class of people without basic rights.

That's been happening as well. I understand that netflix_canada now actually has some good content, the media companies are trying to get into the streaming business and things like the CBC offer more and more streaming services.

Only CDs (and cassette tapes) in Canada so blank DVDs are cheaper then blank CDs. After they got the media levy on tapes and CDs the courts ruled that making personal copies of music is OK as we'd payed the levy and the media companies didn't try to get the levy expanded to DVDs (they did try for ipods and such)