By redefining marriage, in turn the effect is telling religions that they must redefine themselves. Are you really going to claim that all religions, many with histories extending back for millennia, must all redefine themselves? All the Jewish variants, the Christian and assorted protestant faiths, the Muslim believers, the native American nations with their beliefs, they must all redefine their religions for the convenience of the US government?

I don't care whether or not churches redefine themselves. I make no demand on them whatsoever. They can do whatever they please within the bounds of the law because it does not affect me. I even respect their right to grant the marriage sacrament only to straight couples, though I would personally prefer that such discrimination not be legal for an organization which is able to claim significant tax privileges.

My point in my first post was that if a religious organization wants a sacrament of union that doesn't share a name with a civil status that can be conferred on homosexual couples then the churches can rename their sacrament. That's all.

Maybe I got a little carried away by telling religious groups to suck it up but it makes so unhappy to hear about people who oppose gay marriage and homosexuality in general, or think that homosexuality is a choice, or a sign of moral decay, or a result of sexual trauma. Many of the staunchest critics of homosexuality push their views in the context of an organized religion, which tends to make me think poorly of organized religions in general since I can find no logical reason to be opposed to homosexuality.

I decided to spend 5 minutes looking into the precedence issue and found a random online source about the history of marriage which seems to suggest that civil marriage predates religious marriage in Rome anyway. This may persuade some (if civil marriage does truly predate religious marriage), but religious and civil origins or marriage are both millennia past and don't matter much in my opinion.

The word marriage is heavily entrenched in law and contract as a civil status. Religion may have used the term first (I don't actually know, nor do I care) but it's a legal word now and religious institutions should suck it up. It would probably even be expensive for the government to change the name of marriage to civil union.

If religious institutions don't like sharing a word for marriage because gays are finally allowed to get married in a subset of states then religions should invent a new term which refers solely to their religions sacrament (maybe "religious union"? "no-gays-allowed union"?) because they are the ones who have a problem, not us.

Religious people who oppose homosexuality are fleeing in vain from the march of history, because the march towards equal rights will not stop despite the loud but few voices against homosexuality. If religions can get on board we'll get equal rites too.

I have to wonder what the killer app is for flexible chips? Wearable electronics is always mentioned in this sort of press release, but we have Google Glass already which doesn't require flexible chips. Flexible circuit boards are already in wide use, sometimes with rigid areas to reinforce specific areas that don't need to flex. What applications truly require a flexible integrated circuit?

Flexible displays make sense for flexible integrated circuits but I'm still a bit skeptical about that because it seems like the sort of thing which would get damaged really easily. Unless flexible displays end up being used primarily for conforming to non-flat rigid surfaces but that seems like a pretty limited application still.

Maybe I'm not thinking ambitiously enough but I just don't see flexible integrated circuits meriting the buzz that they get.

GP never said it couldn't be... you're deliberately missing the obvious point that 12 can be divided into by thirds and quarters with integer results while 10 cannot.

A base 10 unit system is better because (and only because) base 10 is our primary number system. A meter is better than a foot because (and only because) it is the more popular international standard. We could scale Imperial unis with base-10 SI prefixes if we wanted to, and some people do.

I would tend to argue that Imperial units tend to be more natural since things like inches, feet, tablespoons, teaspoons, gallons, and miles came out of practical usage rather than a top-down choice of a base unit standard and subsequent base-10 scaling by SI prefixes. But I also readily admit that I may be wrong and merely biased since I grew up with Imperial units.

I cannot imagine having to eat the same thing every day,

Funnily enough nobody is forcing you. You are clearly not the target for this product, but so far about 20,000 other people are.

I am one of the pre-orderers of Soylent. Why? I enjoy tasty and varied food but I don't always have the time or money to eat the way I'd like to eat, so I end up spending more money than I'd like on restaurants/takeout or eating really unhealthy food like Cup Noodles. Soylent appears to be a relatively affordable way to get a fast and nutritious meal replacement. While I try it out I will probably replace lunch and/or dinner with Soylent since for me these tend to be the most inconvenient meals. Other pre-orderers seem to view it differently and see food as more of a hastle that Soylent will help them avoid, but to each their own.

You might ask why Soylent and not an existing meal replacement drink? *shrug* For me at least it's really down to supporting Rob's stated vision for the project. I haven't done detailed research on how or if Soylent is different from existing products but I do know that his goal is different and going for total food replacement is probably a higher standard than instant breakfast drinks or diet drinks, which may mean something or nothing. I just ordered one of the lower tiers to try it out and if I like it I'll buy more, assuming the product continues to be produced.

It's a good feature, but an important feature of any UI is discoverability since most people don't read manuals anymore. Buttons are easy to discover and manipulate. It took me about 2 months to discover the single-handed map zoom gesture. I also think it requires slightly more brainpower to use while driving which is when you really want an easy to use single handed map zoom function.

Don't even get me started other poor discoverability and fiddly gesture features in Android Kit Kat that replace the older more discoverable features like the fiddly camera settings tree, and swipe to reject/accept calls which has no indication of which direction is which until you start swiping. Some of these changes may predate KitKat, I was happily sitting on Android version 2.something for a couple of years, but I'm not as happy with the new version.

I doubt they really have 25,000 members, that's probably the number of people who have signed up on their forums at one point or another. Active membership is surely much smaller.

I know it's a supply and demand problem, but an overabundance of supply for internships in certain fields shouldn't allow companies to accept unpaid interns. This can make it very hard for people without significant financial support from their family to enter these fields.

Engineering students in the US have pretty good internship opportunities which are frequently paid well over minimum wage and if they like you it can lead to job offers and help young engineers build their professional network.

That other industries might not even pay their interns seems very wrong to me. Companies aren't in the business of training interns for charity so the company must derive some benefit, therefore the interns should be paid at least minimum wage. Even if the work output is low the company can use internships as a recruitment and assessment method for hiring new full-time workers.

MOVPE/MOCVD growth methods are not inherently limited to small chips that are centimeters in size. Researchers might be growing smaller samples during R&D because of limited reactor sizes, and the expense and difficulty of handling large wafers. Once the technology is demonstrated on small wafers the design can be scaled up for growth on larger wafers.

Commercial MOCVD reactors may grow on dozens of small wafers simultaneously in a single chamber, and the wafer sizes can also be increased. Commercial LEDs are grown by MOCVD on 6" wafers, maybe even 8" by now I'm not sure.

The paper that I have next to my toilet doesn't have anything written on it...

What you say would be true for a low alititude orbit.

According to Tom Murphy's analysis: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ a satellite in geosynchronous orbit is so far enough away that it is only shaded for a very short period of time per day, and then only when it is near the equinox so that the earth is directly between the sun and the satellite, resulting in about 0.7% shaded time on average.

Or course at the end of the day the economics still don't seem to work out for solar power unless launch costs drop dramatically.

I've been having the same problem using Chrome on Windows, so that's not going to fix it yet.

The gist of your example is about a person using the 5th amendment to successfully avoid prosecution for what is considered a crime in their jurisdiction. This is possible if the person is so careful that the only incriminating evidence is their testimony or encrypted data. You happen to use the example of somebody breaking a law that you consider unjust. However this isn't a good argument since it can equally well apply to a careful person breaking a law that you consider just such as the laws against murder.

The 5th amendment is still a good thing but your argument doesn't really do anything to support it. Your post is really just complaining about certain laws against certain sexual activities that exist in some jurisdictions.

I might even go so far as to say that your argument actually describes a necessary drawback of the 5th Amendment which allows a very careful person to get away with a crime. But this drawback is more than balanced out by the important societal benefits that the 5th Amendment brings to the guilty and innocent alike.