[citation needed].

Cetacea derives from the Latin for 'whale'. Its extant 2 branches are called "toothed whales" and "baleen whales", i.e. each branch is a class of whale and the encompassing order is therefore 'whales', so far as any living animal is concerned. Dolphins and porpoises come under "toothed whales", and are thus whales.

The poster you're replying to is either ignorant, or using some extremely non-mainstream zoological classification. Dolphins are one of the cetacea, the order of whales.

Cetacea is the order of *whales*. "Cetacea" derives from the greek for whale! So if porpoises and dolphins are cetacea, they are whales.

There are 2 branches within the order of whales, the toothed whales and the baleen whales. Toothed whales include porpoises, dolphins, etc. The baleen whales are the filter feeders, with baleen combs instead of teeth, such as the right whale, blue whale, humpback, etc.

Orcas are delphinidae, which *are* a part of the cetacean order. So they are very much technically whales, and it is quite correct to call them that.

Toothed whales are whales. That there are 2 branches in the whale family doesn't make one 'true' or the other 'false'.

Orcas are members of the dolphin family (delphinidae) of toothed whales (odontoceti), which means they belong to the order of whales (cetacea). I.e. orcas most definitely are whales. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcinus_orca).

Marriage is a civil institution that relates primarily to property. The US gov't has only been involved in marriage for a few hundred years because the US gov't has only existed for a few hundred years.

Yes churches and religious groups kept marriage records and performed ceremonies. "The state" has evolved over time and for quite a bit of it religious groups were part of the state. That had some flaws - go read some European history.

Marriage as a civil institution serves some very concrete situations. It handles various situations that arise for couples in terms of property rights, inheritance rights, child custody, immigration, criminal law, taxes, pensions, etc. There are problems that crop up for couples that are more complicated than if they came up (if they could come up) for individuals.

Laws relating to marriage are designed to address those situations. To provide couples with reasonable expectations that they can plan on and to simplify people's lives in terms of their interactions with the state.

The laws relating to marriage are generally there to make people's lives run more smoothly and therefore often get overlooked. But at times they crop up and when couples (both or individually) avail of them they understand the benefit those laws provide.

Gay couples can already get married in religious services in all 50 states. The debate about the religious institution of marriage is a debate each religious group can work through. Eventually all of them will recognise same sex marriage but that's up to their individual congregations so generally the point is moot for most of us.

This civil institution of marriage (it's like Java - it's a VM, it's a language, it's a beverage, it's an island!) is the issue that all citizens should be concerned about and it should respect the rights of each citizen and weigh the various concerns. You being "offended" is way lower on the scale than gay citizens having legal protections for their relationships just as straight citizens do.

This is plainly clear. And in the future - the not very distant future I might add - those who don't understand that will be viewed by decent society as hateful, anti-social bigots. Everyone's free to be a hateful, anti-social bigot, but the rest of us are also free to call that out and to shun such people. Everyone has a right to their opinion and to speak their mind. No one has a right to avoid the social consequences of doing so.

PDFs very much can be searchable, and cut & paste-able, etc.

This article is a perfect example of why Slashdot doesnt matter anymore. Its just not serious; its more like a very sophisitcated troll article, from its infantile renaming of Bitcoin to "Coin" to every other fallacious assertion, economic fallacy and Stockholm Syndrome belief in the State. Its an a-historical hysterical piece of fluff; and what is the point? Honest writing and article posting is still needed online, so why not be like Reddit and post stories honestly? Its more useful, makes more money and does a better job of informing. Of course, Reddit now uses Bitcoin tipping for moderation. This is the sort of innovation that is needed, not this tired, ancient model.

The only reason why I came here was I saw a llink on Twitter. Think about that.

Slashdot needs to change radically if it is to become important and useful again, otherwise, its going to continue to fade away into irrelevance.

That was how it ended up for Firewire - its higher-bandwidth meant it was still useful for niche applications. However, Firewire was developed to do the same job as USB - general purpose, serial, packetised bus for peripherals. The reason it failed was because Apple wanted a royalty on every implementation.

That's not at all my memory. Intel were including USB on motherboards, and so the ports were very prevalent. You're right there few peripherals initially, because Windows didn't support USB until Windows 95 OSR2 (late 96), and not usefully so until OSR2.1 (late 97). Apple were pushing their Firewire instead. USB featured famously in Bill Gates' launch demo of Windows 98 in April '98, when it BSODed when a USB peripheral was live-plugged in. However, USB support in '98 was otherwise pretty good.

That Apple changed course relatively quickly, and accepted USB had achieved market acceptance in a way that Firewire would not, does not change the fact that Apple before that were pushing Firewire to fill the same needs as, and *rather than*, USB, and that Apple hardware did NOT feature USB until *LONG* (2+) years after it was implemented by default on PC boards.

No, Apple developed IEEE 1394. Apple were quite resistant to USB initially.

It is definitely not the case at DUB or GLA, both of which certainly handle international traffic. DUB also handles some international transfer traffic - it actually has US Immigration there that you go through /before/ boarding a US bound flight.

If it really is generally the case, then I suspect you're confused about what "European" generally means (possibly you actually mean "Schengen" area). I'm still sceptical though. Can you provide a citation? :)

Amen to this, security at Schiphol is getting ridiculous and annoying. They took a bottle of water off us when we transferred, even though we had bought it airside at our departing airport. The immigration control to get to the Schengen area is also annoying - long queues. The Marchaussee check-point (customs/immigration) is slow, and the dumb phony-exploding-water security check there-after is often even slower - causing further slow-down at the Marchaussee check-point. :(

“All European international airports have an area behind customs declared 'neutral',”

I don't think this is true. Some big ones (Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle) maybe, but I don't think it's generally true.