I think what we can say is that marriage has been between a man and a woman for thousands of years.

You think wrong. Marriage has been a quite varied institution even within the narrow stricture of "Western" culture over the past few thousand years. A good starting point if you want to learn is Stephanie Coontz's book. But there is a great deal of actual research on the subject, which would be well worth your time to look into.

It has nothing to do with political correctness to point any of this out. It's simple fact.

States started with the marriage licenses to prevent brothers and sisters from marrying each other.

Incorrect. Marriage licensing, historically, is directly related to inheritance.

Agreed. If the chinese are going to the moon you can expect them to stay there permanently, claim ownership, and begin sending back resources (rare-earth metals necessary for many manufactured goods).

Science is a process, not a field of study or a result.

That process can be applied to anything where you want to find a fact.

Sounds very similar to what we developed. Parallel evolution? Or just creative re-use of obsolete Portmasters?

When we got more powerful hardware for the SSH bastion host, I wrote a set of daemons and scripts which would maintain one 'screen' session for each console port. At startup it would enable logging, make a 'telnet' connection, and then disconnect the session and leave it idle. When a user wanted to access a port, they'd run a menu tool (setuid launcher and Perl, iirc) that would give them a list of sessions to which they were entitled access, and also show the status of each screen session -- alive, dead, or in use by somebody else. When you attached to a screen, the script would send a 'title update' escape sequence, so with PuTTY your terminal titlebar shows what device you were attached to, no more pasting into the wrong window!

The main reason for using screen was that when you attached to an existing session, you didn't just get a blank prompt like 'tip' or telnet, you were dropped into a session with the latest output on the screen and scrollback available to go back hundreds of lines. So if you were trying to connect to a Cisco router that had just frozen, instead of seeing nothing, you saw the panic message it had last emitted. Also gave an audit log of everything executed on every console, going back basically forever.

Saved the company $$$$$$ with this build, between not spending money on half-ass Digi appliances and faster diagnosis and recovery when devices went braindead (especially in lights-out remote data centers). By the time I was downsized out of the corp, we had 3-4 deployments across multiple cities/countries.

We did the same, but isolated all portmasters on a standalone switch, as the product line has been dead for years and the security in the product was pretty minimal even when Livingston and then Lucent was actually supporting the Portmaster. I think this guy is more asking about the software to handle the connections/auth/logging/etc rather than asking about a hardware solution?

You don't really think the majority of the funds in your bank account sit in a random bank vault do you?

Of course you don't need DRM. You don't produce content with value.

Producers of content with value want DRM.

If your search engine doesn't apply "smart", in what order do you suggest it to return its results?

Free Google hint: try the verbatim search option - you get the smart ordering minus the smart word guesses.

Works -> world. Damned auto-correction.

+1 to that.

Even when we can improve our tech and evolve our tools, there's something to be said about taking the slow route. In nature, evolution creates generalist species that can survive to works cataclysms, when specialised species that were "better" for the old environment perish en masse.

I think we know how to build such better tools for specific uses, but we have no clue about how to create "generalist", all-purpose resilient tools. Understanding those may very well require a major breakthrough or two in our knowledge of evolution. Its likely that we'll be able to build them before we know how we did it.

we already know the most obvious tricks it developed at the lowest level, and almost nothing at the intermediate levels

There, fixed that for you

the difference is that we can improve the process itself by applying recursion to it, which is why all our technologies go through a period of exponential improvement, while evolution's process remains the same old linear technique and doesn't change

Fair enough to that too. It's clear that evolution has worked so far through brute force and random environment changes, and humans can generate directed evolutionary environments to accelerate the process. Although humans applying their wetware to solve specific problems can be seen as nature itself applying a "recursive ability so as to improve its own methods", from a certain point of view. ;-)

Evolution is slow. Evolution goes by trial and error rather than absolutely optimized engineering design and QA, and doesn't have any kind of recursive ability so as to improve its own methods.

On the contrary, evolution's QA is performed at all levels, while human QA usualy only deals with the upper functional layer. Nature's products are recursively made from 100% reusable, self-healing parts. Where are the equivalent robots that fix themselves at a molecular level? Different processes, different advantages.

While human tools can outperform nature for a specialized purpose, evolution produces more robust and general-purpose entities, that can easily adapt to new conditions. We don't have anything like that with human engineering (yet). While we can generate our own accelerated evolution processes, nature has a huge head start.

FinCEN and FINTRAC has been around for a long time and tracks most large transactions in any monetary form. Lawyers, bankers, and even folks like real-estate agents are reporting entities.

I don't see why this is a problem for me using a credit card.

Credit card companies (well, retailers) take on the risk of fraud themselves. When you see a charge you didn't make, you call up Mastercard and let them know. A few days and an affidavit later and the charges are reversed.

If this was a bank issuing a debit card I would be concerned. Getting debit charges reversed is nearly impossible IME.