just because you're in a relationship

Well, they weren't "just in a relationship." They were married, with all the legal and moral implications of that institution. Comments like parent's are a signal of the extent to which marriage as a social institution has been de-institutionalized. A married couple was legally perceived to be one 'legal person.' That conceit has been challenged an undermined progressively to the point where we get absurd cases such as the above where a cheating wife can sue her (second) husband out of spite/vengeance for having discovered her betrayal of the marriage oath.

Social conservatives rage at the imminent acceptance of gay marriage when in reality they should be ringing the tocsins over the unmourned death of the entire institution of marriage.

I am now back in love with Symbian^3

You love Symbian because you're from the Third World.

All this outcry has done little except prove the exceedingly dubious moral fibre of very powerful elected political figures the world over.

Please, that had been proven long ago.

What this actually proves is that if you set up an organization that acts like a foreign intelligence agency, other intelligence agencies will start to treat you like one.

The strategies/tactics of Napoleon and the writings of Jomini are more or less required material for officers. Given the amount of innovation they introduced it's not surprising that the terms they invented are still used. While the French are naturally the butt of jokes given their pathetic showings since Napoleon, I suspect most officers have a reverence for Napoleon that goes beyond contemporary political squabbling.

I was given Surely You're Joking... as a graduation gift (by my Spanish teacher, oddly enough) after finishing the 8th grade. This book is a life-changer. It teaches you how human and fun a public figure can be, especially in a field as ostensibly esoteric and abstract as theoretical physics. Playing jokes at Los Alamos while building the nuclear bomb, playing bongos in a samba band, taking up nude portraiture, learning how to pick up women in bars--the stories are enough to convince anyone that being a scientist isn't going to be boring.

Apple does too: go to the "Apple Menu > Mac OS X Software..." which takes you to http://www.apple.com/downloads/

AFAIK that's been there since the very earliest releases of OS X. The Mac App Store seems to be more or less an upgrade to this webpage.

You forgot to include:

• Handle the update mechanism You don't have to worry about building update checking into your apps and nagging your users into automatically checking for and installing updates. The App Store will check and notify the users. This is probably a win for the whole ecosystem, since it will improve security and reduce the amount of things developers have to worry about
• Handle the installation process No more worrying about setting up an installer (using the OS X one or using a third-party installer), or using a .dmg and instructing users to drag the app to the Applications folder. In the video, the app downloaded and installed itself with no unzipping, disk mounting, or installer. Makes it super simple for both the developer and the user.

The cold hard fact is that we had surplusses [sic] for years until the day Bush passed that tax cut.

The cold hard fact is that Clinton and the republican congress left us with a projected budget surplus. That's an awesome bipartisan accomplishment for a government that hadn't run a budget surplus in decades. But it wasn't an actual budget surplus. It was an all-things-being-equal-if-existing-trends-continue future budget surplus.

What that projection didn't take into account was the popping of the dot com bubble and the 9/11 attacks, neither of which were foreseen and both of which individually would have done serious damage to budgetary projections.

The bubble had already burst by the time Bush took office and passing those tax cuts was a foolhardy response, attempting to grow out of a downturn. 9/11 further tanked the economy and tax receipts.

The the cold hard fact is isn't "gee if Bush hadn't passed those tax cuts everything would be hunky dory." In fact, even with those tax receipts we'd still have a massive unprecedented deficit. It's that the budget projections were just that, projections, and they didn't anticipate either a bubble collapse or the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.

Congress has been unwilling to stop the growth in federal spending, despite the fact that it has outstripped our tax receipts for decades now. Runaway spending is the long-term structural problem: taxes go up and down, but spending never goes down. A policy of regularly raising taxes to cover our collective bipartisan inability to say no to new spending, to say no to entitlement growth, and to say no to wars of choice is the 'Neverland' policy.

Low taxes are not responsible for the deficit. An inability to control spending is responsible for the deficit.

"English 50 Cent"

Wouldn't that be 50 Pence?

I've seen Pudge post a number of times.

Sociologist known as David Harvey

Yes, if by 'sociologist' you mean unreconstructed Marxist. I took classes with one of his peers and have seen Harvey speak in person two or three times. Merely referring to him as a 'sociologist' is like calling Ayn Rand an 'economic thinker'--seriously misleading by omission.

Pro tip: Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have the same god.

Pro tip: there is no god.

Make sure to nuke it when it's a full moon, otherwise we might not get the whole thing.

Neither major party in the US wants to censor the kind of thing this bill is about.

Yeah, if they couldn't libel each other, the two parties would have to start talking about facts, and that would pretty much be the end of the U.S. party system. This is a matter of survival!