We're in Canada and considered common-law: there are no extra legal protections the paper offers. When we were drawing up our wills, our lawyer said as much. Our life insurance has each other as the beneficiary, our wills are the same. If we ever split up, it's off to the lawyers to divide up assets and work on custody.

When we file our yearly taxes we check off the relevant box for 'marital status' (or whatever it asks) for common-law partnerships and do income splitting to minimize the tax hit. Our accountant said there was no difference in having the paper or not for us. My lady is a professional and known as her own name. So. if we ever did get hitched, she would keep her name. No hyphenating, etc. Fine by me.

So what are the benefits? Neither of us see any.

Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.

We are not acting in a 'sales mode' after 10+ years, we clicked early on and are ourselves: no lies, no masks, no illusions.

Reading TFA was interesting as, according to that data, we are perfectly set other than the marriage question. We're both atheist, so for the religious question it doesn't apply though I guess saying "The three of us regularly go to the museum, watch sciency shows, etc." would count as attending a church. ;)

My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

Call me a conspiracy nut, or whatever you want; but I question what's going on here. Is there someone with a background that can explain?

A fecal transplant can be done with an enema, and my understanding is that it's quite effective. But some doctors aren't interested, preferring either to deliver the dose via a colonoscopy or endoscopy. My father had C. Diff last year, but began to get nauseated when they tried putting tubes up his nose. So the doctor was going to recommend as an alternative—and I swear this is true—that my father mix feces up in a blender with yogurt and eat it. WTF!

If you ask me, an enema can be done by a nurse, or even at home, for next to nothing. There's no money in that for the doctor, like there is with a colonoscopy, for instance. Now there's a little pill: meaning, that drug companies can get rich, rather than pharmacies selling enema kits for $15 a pop. Isn't that what's going on?

Am I wrong here? I'd love to have someone tell me—with documentation—that enemas are ineffective and that pills and medical procedures are actually the best way, but I'm skeptical. I think there's more economics behind these courses of treatment than there is medicine.

Recent versions of popular packages won't run without it? Recent versions don't get included in Debian. Suddenly, recent versions get tweaked by their maintainers so that they'll get included in Debian/Ubuntu.

In an ideal world, yes. I think what's more likely is that people will move to a distro that *does* include the packages they need, and it seems the distro maintainers believe this as well. Otherwise there would be a lot more pushback regarding systemd dependencies.

They have been proven to snoop, the cat is out of the bag, end of story.

And they've been proven to have no problem lying to Congress as well. "You didn't see it, so I didn't do it."

The relevant Dilbert.

While I generally agree with your assessment of the BBB, lots of other people don't understand that it's just a scheme to make money, and take what it says as gospel. Given that, lots of companies will still work to keep their BBB rating positive, and thus it can still be a (foam rubber) hammer to use against a company that's not living up to its word.

You should be buying a vm image, not a piece of hardware.

Unless you're trying to do something like put an IPMI port behind a firewall. A VM running on the machine to be protected won't be of much use there.

Except for perhaps going bankrupt defending yourself.

What's even more fun is if you do win, and then *they* BK on you. Then you're on the hook for more time and money trying to collect on a judgment that you quite possibly won't see a penny of.

Can you cite a single case of a libel case in America lost by a defendant, that spoke the truth, on a "technicality"?

Lost? Probably not many, because a lot (if not most) settle before it gets to that point. The problem is that a plaintiff with money can keep you buried under motion after motion, which costs a lot of time to answer, and that's time not spent on your business. Look at how much SCO cost IBM for their little adventure, even though SCO really didn't have any technical merits to their suit and it was mostly just an attempt to increase their share price. Sure, you can try to get the court to deal with a vexatious litigant, but there's no guarantee the judge will see things your way, and again, that's more of your time spent doing stuff that a lawyer could probably deal with more efficiently.

I'm not saying you're wrong for doing things pro se - actually, I admire that you made the effort to do it yourself. Just don't underestimate how much trouble someone with money can make if they really want to cause problems for you.

When has an act of war ever required a warrant?

but most of these guys jobs are simply going around and drilling the most convenient holes they can in your house to run new service (god forbid they might actually think about how ugly a cable would look coming out at waist height in the middle of a room...)

Or whether that hole happens to go through some power conduit. I'm sure he'll notice quickly enough though.

Not quite. I'm free to go into the middle of the town square and yell "TsuruchiBrian is a thief and punches kittens!", but you're just as free to bring legal action against me for saying it. Freedom of speech means the government is not allowed to curtail it, but there still can be legal consequences just the same.

We already had the right to form companies, build houses, live, work, and pursue happiness without requiring the blessing and forbearance of the federal government.

You've always had the right to go into business for yourself, but you don't have the right to saddle others with your debt. Unless you want to keep track of a signed contract for every shareholder that explicitly grants you the right to pawn a percentage of your debts off on them in exchange for their share purchase, you're going to need Big Brother's help to make that happen. Even ignoring the debt issues, there's no way to force the government to recognize your company as a separate legal entity capable of entering into contracts and such without their cooperation. It'd really suck to go into court, have the judge say, "I don't recognize this ad-hoc corporation as a legal entity, so the plaintiff's entire award will be paid by you, Mr. Stoploss."