Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Are people not allowed to have opinions? (Score 0) 1482

Why is marriage a "basic human right?" It's never been a basic human right.

It's been a basic human right for probably longer than you've been alive.

And the concept of a gay marriage never existed in the 6,000 years of recorded history until about 15 years ago.

It goes back much farther than that. Even in the modern United States, gay marriage is an old idea -- again, probably older than you are.

Comment Re:Are people not allowed to have opinions? (Score 2) 1482

When did marriage become a basic human right?

There are many possible answers to that:

1. It was always a basic human right.
2. Around the same time freedom of association became a basic human right.
3. Around the same time the idea of basic human rights developed.

As a matter of American law, it goes back at least as far as 1967 with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also mentions marriage:

Article 16.
        (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
        (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
        (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Why is the government involved pro or con with it to begin with?

By law and custom, marriage is a special relationship. It involves things like formalized joint property ownership, inheritance rights, power of attorney, and responsibility for and authority over children. Historically, marriage sometimes involved a legal union of two people into one person, with the woman's identity disappearing. (This is a bad thing and is no longer done in the U.S., but it was there.)

Why is it only limited to two people?

It may be possible to create a form of marriage that works for three people, but it's not necessarily straightforward. One example is automatic power of attorney when one partner is in the hospital and unable to make decisions. With a bilateral marriage, their spouse has full decision-making power. With a multilateral marriage, what do you do if two spouses disagree about treatment? I don't know if that's showstopping problem, but it doesn't exist in the context of gay marriage, which is functionally identical to straight marriage.

Comment Re:Spectrum Frequency (Score 1) 73

MIMO is a great technology, but it has two problems.

First is that there is a lot of equipment that is too small to implement MIMO (think phones, iPods and other, similarly-sized devices) because there is not enough room to put the requisite multiple antennas in place at a sufficient distance from each other to do the job. This may be curable with another advance in technology, but we don't have this one yet.

Second is the large amount of equipment in which it just isn't being implemented. Look at the shelves of a store (or pages of a webstore) and you will find a gajillion "N150" routers and cards. Naturally, these are the ones with the lowest prices on them, and therefore are the ones that get bought. Band congestion takes that 150 and turns it into a 36 or so, where if you had bought an "N300" or "N600" you might see 72 or 144 respectively.

Of course, this is less of a problem on 5 GHz because there is more spectrum, no channel overlap (unless you bonded your channels) and the signals don't carry as far.

Comment Re:Meanwhile, people are bailing from the IPCC (Score 2) 987

People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.

Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.

That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.

Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.

Slashdot Top Deals

The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!

Working...