because, as noted earlier, 3>2. Equal protection is an issue where two groups that are equally situated are treated differently. For marriage, there is no difference between a gay couple and a heterosexual couple. There is a difference between a couple and a larger group, however.

The litigant needn't be the entire group. Marriage is a fundamental right, subject to various restrictions, such as consent and consanguinity. Yesterday, one of the restrictions, at least in some places, was that the genders of two of the spouses couldn't be the same. Today, it's fine nationwide if they're the same.

The restriction to look at now is whether the marital status of each spouse in the marriage at hand is single. Today it has to be. But there's not a good reason for it. (As already mentioned, administrative convenience is not a good reason). So why can't Alice, who is married to Bob, now also marry Carol? Bob isn't marrying Carol; the A-C marriage would be between two people only. You're treating Alice differently merely because she is already married.

It's also not a fundamental right, as polygamy is not part of the traditions and collective conscience of society, except for Mormons.

Marriage is a fundamental right and is extremely broad. Restrictions on marriage, such as requiring the spouses to be of opposite genders, or of the same race, or of the same religion, or of compatible castes, etc. are not inherently part of marriage and are certainly not part of the fundamental right of marriage.

Also, today's events make it clear that tradition is irrelevant; polygamy is practiced today among many groups, and has a long history back into antiquity. Same sex marriage was known in the past but was far more rare.

Compared to Zimbabwe?

It will certainly be a massive pain in the ass. But administrative inconvenience is not an adequate justification for denying people their fundamental rights or equal protection of the law. It'll take a while, but just as this took a while, but in time polyamororous marriages will be legally recognized.

You realize that all of Africa is smaller then China in terms of population and much more corrupt?

After China and India build a middle class offshoring is more or less done. The remaining shit holes are too small and corrupt to be worth the effort.

Most smaller nations (e.g the Baltic states) will be 'first world' before China, certainly before India.

The first 3 rules are 'no puftas'.

I have a brand new T-series and while the keyboard is mediocre, the truly awful part is the spring loaded touchpad. You can't just use the trackpoint either because the buttons are built into the bouncy touchpad which has a terrible time registering clicks.

Does this mean we can hold off on the glorious workers revolution?

A big part of the 2 million was spent on securing the fields so idiots wouldn't burn them down.

That cost is right on the eco nuts.

All very good points, but let's consider that colonization may involve a bit of compromise. Maybe in the best case we continue to need respirators and good shelters. Is that unacceptable? Doesn't mean it's not useful to increase the surface temperature, release certain gases, start some form of food production.

The stability and accessibility of Mars remains very important at our present stage of technology. We aren't going to wait for terraforming to complete before we start colonizing. It's a major advantage if the process is easy to monitor and interact with, if resources are easy to extract (mining), and equipment failure is less of a concern (no caustic substances at 500C).

In the end, it's probably better to get more practical experience at terraforming something else before we start on our #1 target anyway.

Why? All they did was stop Gore from employing cherry-picking and capricious unequal-protection-under-the-law methods to spin a manual count his way, something a politicized Florida court was trying to help him do. Putting a stop to that is exactly the sort of thing the SC is supposed to do, because that sort of behavior at the state court level is counter-constitutional.

This current ruling is, you're right, deeply flawed. Because it's very clear that the language in question was deliberate, and that the one-party legislative action that rammed the law through didn't contemplate the prospect of a number of states standing up to them and refusing to play ball. As Gruber pointed out, the wording of the law was intentionally meant to strong-arm the states, to essentially extort their participation in the absurd manifestation of that legislative train wreck. This was an opportunity to trash it and start over with a law that wasn't based on lies, sold with lies, and which resulted in essentially the opposite of everything its con-artist cheerleaders promised.

The norm for big software companies seems to be: you have some number of open reqs for your team, and you're eager to fill them (both to get the work done, and because the might vanish). So you work your pipeline as best you can, interview anyone who passes a phone screen, and hire anyone who passes the interview. At most places I've worked, we end making an offer to about 1 in 20 people we phone screen (about 1 in 3 who we bring in); where I am now we make an offer to about 1 in 5 we bring in, and they don't always accept of course, so that's maybe 50 people who look good enough to phone screen to hire 1. You're much more likely to have too few qualified candidates than too many. Normally, if you end up with an extra guy you'd like to make an offer to, another team will be delighted to take him.

None of my games that came on floppies are still playable. About half the games I have bought on CD/DVD over the years are gone or don't work now (I seem to move every few years, and long-distance moves don't always go well).

Heck, I've bought MOO2 three times now, once on physical media, once from some now-gone download, and once from GOG. Now that it's on GOG I'm very happy. (The games I'm most frustrated with are Fantasy General and Space general, as my media doesn't seem to work and no one has them for download - GOG has some of the Panzer General games, but not these sequels).

Meanwhile, I've bought hundreds of games on Steam, and all but a handful still work (some depended too heavily on GameSpy). Maybe Steam will itself vanish one day, but the risk of that seems lower than the risk of a box being lost the next time I move, or simply no longer having an OS or emulator that I can get to work with older games.

That's certainly true, on both counts. Has nothing o do with physical media though - if the game is written to need a server even in single player mode it's crap no matter how you buy it. But fuck EA in any case.

Now you know one of the prices you are paying for legal protections. Legal protections are a good thing. Good things cost you. Knowing what good things cost you can help you decide how many good things you can afford.

Just imagine what happens if you lose or damage your physical media. That's happened to me about 20x as often as the download servers being unavailable - and the servers came back. Especially for older games, where I'm happy to pay again for someone to port it to a modern platform (GOG FTW).

Buying anything with "always on DRM" is foolish of course, but you get that with physical media as well.