Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

If we split up we would have to go through the same process for custody and asset disposal & disbursements. It's a legally binding thing here.

Camel is a nasty tasting meat.

google should have used a different animal that is far tastier.

Wait, PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals....... right?

The three of us walking around as a happy family is a public statement of commitment, no? When we were at Walking with Dinosaurs yesterday morning, no one questioned any papers or marital status. In fact there were thousands of people there, certainly a more truly public statement than hand-picked relatives & friends who feel compelled to show up for a plate of free food and booze.

It would cost time and money for something none of us care about. We'd rather spend our money on winter family holidays or finish off the new kitchen or new pool deck or just put extra into our daughter's education fund (which is appreciable already).

Not arguing, just pointing out that people have different priorities.

So what you're saying is that everyone considers you married already, so effectively you are.

In essence, yes. The key is that the government recognizes it for taxation and other family matters. In our province here in .CA in 2014 marriage would be an expense with no payoff. We'd be better off blowing that money on lottery tickets.

Perhaps in your jurisdiction, not ours. We asked about it ages ago when we were dealing with our lawyer for our wills and our accountant for our income taxes.

Forgot to include this link: Common Law marriage in Canada

We're in Canada and considered common-law: there are no extra legal protections the paper offers. When we were drawing up our wills, our lawyer said as much. Our life insurance has each other as the beneficiary, our wills are the same. If we ever split up, it's off to the lawyers to divide up assets and work on custody.

When we file our yearly taxes we check off the relevant box for 'marital status' (or whatever it asks) for common-law partnerships and do income splitting to minimize the tax hit. Our accountant said there was no difference in having the paper or not for us. My lady is a professional and known as her own name. So. if we ever did get hitched, she would keep her name. No hyphenating, etc. Fine by me.

So what are the benefits? Neither of us see any.

Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.

We are not acting in a 'sales mode' after 10+ years, we clicked early on and are ourselves: no lies, no masks, no illusions.

Reading TFA was interesting as, according to that data, we are perfectly set other than the marriage question. We're both atheist, so for the religious question it doesn't apply though I guess saying "The three of us regularly go to the museum, watch sciency shows, etc." would count as attending a church. ;)

My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

Well, I suppose that it's possible that you might unplug your hard drive, put it in a cardboard box, and mail it to me, in response to a download request, but that's surely too unusual to care about.

Because the law defines making copies as a form of infringement, defines copies as material objects, and because we lack the ability to send a material object through the net, you cannot transmit an original copy of a work to me online. All you can do is give me the information I need to create a new copy on my end.

It's irrelevant whether you delete the file once I've downloaded it. The Copyright Act doesn't treat a copy followed by a deletion as not being copying. It doesn't matter in the least how many copies actually exist in the end, only what the provenance of the copies is. There is an essay called 'What colour are your bits?' which you may find helpful.

It is not, in any legally meaningful way, transferred anywhere.

Please take a look at this page, which discusses the outcome of the ReDigi case, and includes a copy of the opinion. ReDigi tried to sell used music files, going through the sort of copy and delete rigamarole as you suggest. They got shut down hard because it's utter nonsense as far as the legal system is concerned.

Perpetual Motion violates the laws of physics - can't be done, so any patent application is bogus, either wrong or fraudulent, not worth wasting time on.*

Cold Fusion might or might not be possible - the scientific community at large hasn't seen a valid description of the physics or chemistry, and without somebody understanding the science, it's extremely unlikely that they'll engineer a successful implementation by tinkering around, and unlikely that somebody who's keeping the science a "trade secret" has actually done real science, as opposed to waving their hands around in ways that seem pleasing to their scientifically untrained eye, and the mere fact that they haven't blown themselves up isn't proof that it works.

* ("Free energy" is a different case - it usually refers to quackery, but sometimes is used to refer to things like taking advantage of heat differences in the ocean or earth or other things that you might be able to engineer usefully into a long-term economically viable power source, but probably can't.)

Thanks for agreeing with me, then; it's not possible to argue fair use unless there already is prima facie infringement.

I've read too many articles like this recently to keep track of who said what, but one of them pointed out that women especially get attacked by trolls when they're starting to become well-known and people are listening to their opinions. Kathy Sierra, for instance, started the Head First line of programming books, which I found useful, and got enough sexist trolling that she left the business. It's happened to other authors I know as well. And of course there are the trolls who hate having women in gaming.