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

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.

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:

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.)

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.

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.

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 Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one.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.

But again, what about the OS needs to change to accommodate that? WinXP can handle 2 TB hard drives just fine. And 16 GB of RAM is neither common nor a necessity for most users. Best Buy still sells plenty of computers with 4 GB of RAM.

Now what we do (and did) need is a good 64-bit operating system, and XP-64 never fit the bill. But what are the alternatives? Vista was a mess. Win7 is good on newer hardware, but only the OEM versions are sold anymore. Today there's a choice between sticking with XP, buying Win8, or taking a chance on an eBay copy of Win7. I did the latter for my wife's computer, but it's hard to recommend for the general public.

I'm not disagreeing that we need to move on. But Microsoft has spent most of the last decade screwing up their upgrade path. Maybe if they stopped wildly redesigning the UI every time they put out a new OS, more people would have upgraded by now.

Computers in 2004 weren't all that different from today's computers, though. The AMD64 instruction set was out and consumer-level 64-bit CPUs were available. PCI Express and Serial ATA were standardized the previous year. DDR2 was in use, and you can still buy that today! The biggest changes in PC hardware since 2004 have been multi-core CPUs (which XP handles just fine) and solid state disks, which aren't exactly a compatibility killer. There have been a lot of huge changes in the mobile space, but that has nothing to do with XP. Virtualization is a big deal for servers now, but there are plenty of applications where it's irrelevant.

As a gamer, I upgraded to Win7 for hardware support and newer versions of DirectX. Aside from that, I didn't see a compelling reason to do so. It's not like I could suddenly do anything new with my computer. I can understand why people wouldn't want to shell out tons of money to upgrade. And then there are embedded applications. Where I work we have a ~$20k oscilloscope that runs XP. We're certainly not going to throw *that* out.

Maybe checking the status of an oven (or oven timer?) over the net is useful, but there's no reason to allow the network to turn it on. Separate device control from device status at the hardware level, and you at least keep people's houses from burning down.

It's teaching a shortcut for doing arithmetic -- one that's easy to do in your head, in fact. The idea is to do the subtraction in pieces by getting to round numbers. So in the example, 15 - 7, you start by getting to 10 (15 - 5 = 10), then you have 2 more left from 7 so you subtract that too (10 - 2 = 8).

The end result gives you 15 - 5 - 2, but to write it that way you have to already know how to break up the 7. Doing it one equation at a time lets you apply the method to larger numbers.

Fluke isn't selling a style or a marketing image or any other form of consumer entertainment. They're selling high-quality multimeters. The style is to make their products look distinctive. The impounded products we're talking about here clone the style, but not the quality. It's the total opposite of media piracy or knock-off perfume, where the end product is identical.

No, you don't understand, this thing looks *exactly* like a Fluke. It's not just that they used the color yellow, it's that the shape and coloring are similar enough to be misleading. Without a clear view of the label at the top, a lot of people would think it was a Fluke. I applaud SparkFun for wanting to sell cheap multimeters, but I've seen plenty of other $15-30 multimeters and none of them looked like a grey market clones of an existing product line.

Are you sure we don't? I looked at some EPA data, and it seems like on our bad days (in August) we're up in the particulate range that Paris is in now. We also have a lot of trouble with ozone. I'm pretty sure LA's air quality is better than ours now, or at least was for several years.

I don't think comparing Houston to Mexico City or Beijing makes sense. They have a lot more people crammed into a smaller space with worse cars.

There is no center. The expansion happens everywhere at once. A mediocre but helpful analogy is to the surface of an expanding balloon. Imagine drawing a bunch of dots on the surface. As the balloon expands, every dot moves farther from every other dot. There is no center -- or rather, *every* point looks like a center.

(Note that in this analogy, the universe is the *surface* of the balloon only. The 3D expansion of the balloon has a center, but the 2D stretching of the surface does not. It's a bit confusing, which is why it's a mediocre analogy.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

He doesn't have to actually do it. All he has to do is project enough uncertainty to stop Russia from launching a first strike. That's enough for MAD.

Personally, if the missiles were in the air, I wouldn't actually retaliate, at least not massively. If the U.S. is already doomed, what benefit is there from killing 140 million Russians, almost none of whom had any say in the launch decision? We couldn't even enjoy watching Russia burn, since their missiles will arrive first. Maybe I'd launch a couple missiles at Moscow to try to decapitate their government.

Technically, *you* don't pay anything -- you're dead. The people receiving unearned income from your estate pay the taxes.

I've been going back and forth on this. I keep hearing it's really good, but I hate having to reinstall Origin for one game. I wish EA would stop holding their games hostage. But wishing for EA to be less greedy is pretty hopeless.

Currently at #1: Rush Limbaugh's self-insert U.S. history fanfic.

I swear to you I am not making this up.

Perhaps Randall should pass on publicizing this particular honor.