*sigh*

So now "between and man and a woman" is now "men paired with women." Even you can see those aren't the same thing.

But read up on it. You'll find that there have been Western institutions of pairing a man with multiple women. There have been institutions of pairbonding of men (specifically monks). There have been institutions of spouse ownership. You only have to go back a short way to find that the "traditional marriage" is a fairly recent invention. Again, read Coontz (yes, I know you won't, but she has a hell of a lot more documentation than I'm going to post here).

And hey, if we're going for "tradition," why not go whole-hog? Let's bring in all of the possible traditions. Widows must marry their brothers-in-law. Adulterers must be killed. Anyone who disgraces the family honor must be stoned. These are marriage traditions that go back thousands of years too.

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.

I'll see your Dyncorp, and raise you Dryco. Worry not. Wonder not.

Somewhere at home, I still have a page ripped from one of the early Byte magazines with an ad for a "Density Doubler" cassette interface for the TRS-80.

It also prominently featured the word "whopping" along with "virtually unlimited storage." I think it would put up to 300kb on a 30 minute tape, and also increased the baud rate to 1000 (the default was 500, unless I'm forgetting).

Those 87kb floppy disks looked small compared to that massive tape capacity!

Same problem here, different platforms. First computer was a TRS-80 with 4kb. Now even my phone has 32Gb, although if you want to get technical about it and talk only RAM, I'd have to go to my notebook which has 16Gb.

I still have a stack of (doubtless unreadable) 180kb and 360kb ssdd and dsdd hard-sectored 40-track floppies in the garage somewhere.

For the more enlightened of us self-important, hippie, too-cool-for-you douchebags, coffee breath is an *aphrodisiac*. Although I would concur that the crap at McBuck's doesn't rate.

I take it you've never encountered a vegan on a low blood sugar rampage, especially if they think you're a smug meat eater.

Those folks are positively *feral*. They'll rip your face off, although they will have the good grace not to eat it afterwards.

The wife took CERT training.

As a result, we've got several layers of preparation: a bug-out bag good for a few days, a bug-out crate that we could get in the car and that would last us a week or two, and smaller stashes in each of our cars. My car is AWD, and I have a winch, spare tire, and empty fuel containers in the back. We have cell phones, crank-operated cell-phone chargers, crank radios, and out of town contacts who will relay messages for us.

There's a generator in the garage with a siphon for gas, although it's never been used. We have a 2.2kW solar array on the roof, which can (with a few shunts) operate off-grid.

There're water purification devices (both electric and hand-pumped) in several kits, in addition to an 80 gallon rain barrel in the back yard.

Then there's the arsenal to defend all this stuff, including both firearms, claymore mines, and more analog stuff for later, like crossbows and trebuchets.

We've hidden caches of food, clothing, medicine, fuel, and ammunition throughout the nearby hills. I have a GPS and spare batteries in each bug-out kit with the coordinates written in waterproof ink on tin sheets.

(While the wife went to CERT training, I went to "How to Sell Your Startup to VCs" training, where I learned to be a pathological liar.)

Over the weekend, I got a lot of spurious charges on the credit card I use for my Linode account. Charges from several different countries, for various amounts that looked like automated "is this card valid?" type probes. The bank shut it down, but not before I got paged a bunch of times.

Then again, the odds are just as good that a waiter at some restaurant uploaded my number to some IRC channel to get back at me for my guest's order being too complicated or something.

And an especial win for those of us who are skilled in the arts of video editing and compositing...

How can you possibly cast an informed ballot before the first debate?

You don't serious think that the "debates" are actually debates, do you? If that's where you got your information about the candidates, you're going to be just as ignorant as the people basing their votes on TV News and other scripted sound bites.

Your only reasonable way of assessing a candidate is to look at a) voting records and/or legislation sponsorships as applicable, b) primary campaign funding sources, and c) all the other spin. This gives you some insight into what (if anything) they've done, who they're beholden to, and, lastly, what they want you to think they represent.

The problem with this study is that it's from the US-ian perspective that lumps several separate and unequal groups into one uncomfortable amalgam. "Conservatives" can be one or more of the following: a) fiscal conservatives (e.g., "Chamber of Commerce Republicans"), b) social conservatives (e.g., the "bring back the pre-60s culture" crowd), c) small-government conservatives (i.e., libertarians), or d) religious lunatics bent on theocracy.

Groups like "d" are going to be fundamentally anti-science, for obvious reasons. Others may or may not be anti-science; for example, libertarians are generally against "big science" funded by the government.

Note that "Liberals" also comprise a similar hodge-podge of groups with different beliefs (some of which share a knee-jerk anti-science response), but that's another topic.

So I get power off the grid when demand exceeds what the solar panels provide, but I push power onto the grid when I'm generating more than I use.

It sounds great, except for a few things:

1. the game is rigged so I can't actually make money by generating power, I can only zero my bill
2. I have an automatic shutdown, so if the grid is down, my power is off (safety, of course. We don't want to cook any linemen trying to fix the circuits). I could manually throw a disconnect and hook up my generator and get the benefit of both solar and generator, but the solar won't power the house in the absence of another power source.
3. I don't really have enough roof space to put up the number of panels that would meet my power needs, particularly in Winter. I can only fit a 2kW system, when I really need a 3kW system.

Yeah, it tells me my Mac-based Firefox doesn't "benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against structured exception handling overwrite attacks?"

Oddly, it thinks that I do derive benefit from "Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution" and
"Windows Operating System features that randomize the memory layout to make it harder for attackers to find their target."

Whatever, dude.