Not anymore: http://www.pollingreport.com/civil.htm

And even if opinions weren't rapidly shifting, there would still be the demographic factor to consider: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/11/05/support-for-same-sex-marriage-by-age-and-state/

Treating gays and lesbians as second-class citizens does them actual harm for literally no rational, empirical reason. This is a very straightforward issue, lacking even the economic arguments associated with slavery, women's lib, etc. It's been obvious for many years how the gay rights struggle is going to go and how it's going to look to future generations. Can you really blame DC et al for not wanting to funnel money to someone on the wrong side? Another few years and they might as well be soliciting comics from the Klan.

The tax cut comes from not taxing capital gains like normal income. For people in the highest income bracket (who get most of the capital gains), it's the difference between 39.6% and 20%. (In 2013 -- last year it was 35% and 15%). Since capital gains make up most of their income, that's a pretty substantial tax cut.

There's a paragraph near the end that suggests retaliation through widespread kidnapping:

Seems like that's important, but the AP didn't pay any attention to it...

Part-time jobs can be fine for people who don't live by themselves. See above re: stay-at-home parents, full-time students, etc. Houses are designed for multiple people to live in. (So are a lot of apartments.) The pay rate matters too. Full-time at minimum wage is the same amount of money as part-time at $15/hour.

You're equating performing a service for a fee with "mooching". Do you think that schoolteachers, fire fighters, and police officers are moochers? What about the people at the BLS who compiled that statistic you mentioned?

The idea that there's a huge and growing group of people who sit around collecting "handouts" and pushing for "socialism" is pure fantasy. It's right-wing propaganda designed to make you angry and scared enough to vote for their political candidates. Contrary to what you seem to think, poor people don't like being poor, and unemployment (with or without benefits) does not make people happy.

Not really.

First off, you're leaving out part-time workers (many millions of them), which gets you up over 50%.

Secondly, you're making the assumption that a person without a full-time job is just leeching off of the rest of society. This ignores stay-at-home parents and full-time students, for examples.

Thirdly, the assumption that a government job is equivalent to unemployment is silly. Government employees perform a service and we pay them for it. That the money flows through the IRS instead of some corporation's accounts receivable is irrelevant.

Well, 8 gigs of RAM is nice, I guess. The headset jack in the controller is a neat idea. Improving controller latency is wonderful -- I'm glad people are finally taking this seriously. But everything else just seems... irrelevant, somehow. Particularly the controller, which, like the Wii U, apparently wants me to look away from the game while I'm playing. It's got more motion controls -- yawn. And a "share" button? Give me a break. The constant spamming of "trophy" messages and the occasional DLC ads are distracting enough; now you want me to perform for a camera while my friends watch in real-time?

Then there's this bizarre emphasis on streaming games. Because when I spend $600 on a game console, what I'm really looking for is compressed video and more lag. It sounds like a joke, but then they talk about a client/server model where I can stream the game to a Vita or smart phone.

Maybe we're at the point where there's not much room for substantial improvement, or maybe I'm just getting old. But between DLC, day 1 patches, long installation times, and low frame rates, I find myself wishing consoles could take a step backwards. Remember when you could buy a game with virtually no major bugs because there was real quality control? Remember when the game you bought was the whole game, and not missing another $30 of optional bolted-on content? Remember when you turned on the console and the game started up in less than 15 seconds?

Technical specs don't mean much in the end. The real value of a console is its games. As always, the fate of the next generation is in the hands of developers. Let's hope they've learned some lessons.

You could always just wait. After a year or so the prices come down, the bugs are as fixed as they're gonna get, and word of mouth will tell you whether the game is worth the time. There's nothing that says you *have* to play the latest and greatest games the moment they come out.

There have been a few stories in the last year or two with analyses of stolen password databases. The overwhelming majority of the passwords were based around a few simple schemes like abc123, ABC123, 123456, etc. Wouldn't it be possible to simply not let users choose those passwords? If you know what the 10,000 most common passwords are, you can hook the list into your account creation routine and reject them. Seems like an big improvement for very little effort on the user or server end.

No, that's Discordianism.

It probably doesn't hurt that North Korea is right on their border. I'm sure they'd rather have their own client state there than an extension of U.S.-backed South Korea.

Modern warfare games tend to use Russians and Middle Easterners as villains. I can't think of a game in the last five years that had China as the main villain. Sometimes North Korea is used as a euphemism. I had assumed this was because game publishers wanted to sell to China's growing middle class, but if game consoles are banned that clearly doesn't work.

There are already lossless video codecs out there. Lagarith is a recent and popular one. The problem is that they only cut maybe 2/3 off your raw file size. Ten seconds of raw 1080p video is over a gigabyte. There's just too much information there -- you have to throw some away to get reasonable compression ratios. Waiting for lossless video to be as small as H.264 is like waiting for a 200MB download for a DVD-sized Linux ISO. Sadly, it's just not going to happen.

The best concrete example I've heard of why this situation is troublesome concerns an isolated, self-sufficient farm. Imagine the farmers build a machine to automate some of their work -- milking cows, collecting eggs, harvesting, cleaning, whatever. This is unambiguously a good thing. It means there's less work that needs to be done, so everyone gets more free time to use however they want. Survival just got easier. In the same vein, reducing the total amount of work needed to keep humanity fed, clothed, housed, and entertained ought to be a good thing. But it won't be until we can develop an economic system where less work and more leisure time doesn't come at such a high material and social cost.

I doubt we'll reach that point any time soon, though. There's still plenty of work to go around, and there are lots of other factors involved in the American middle class's problems.

I've heard the cost difference between Chinese vs. American manufacturing is about 15% for an iPhone (or presumably something like it). Don't have a good source for that, though.

There's a link in the article to Leprechauns and Laser Beams, which IMHO does a much better job of explaining things. As I understand it, negative temperatures don't just come from the entropy-based definition of temperature. You also need to be talking about a system whose energy content is capped. Normal materials don't do this -- you can keep adding energy (speeding up atoms) as long as you want. But if you have a group of atoms with exactly two energy states (high and low), once every atom is in the high-energy state you can't add more energy. Apparently, one example of this is a laser.

From an entropy point of view, the lowest energy and highest energy states have identical entropy (i.e. none -- one possible state). Entropy reaches a peak with half of the atoms in the high energy state, since this gives the largest number of possible atom state combinations.

Temperature is defined as the slope of the energy/entropy curve. The curve goes vertical at max entropy. If I understand right, at this point the temperature overflows like an integer variable, going from +inf to -inf and approaching zero from the negative end. (It's not really a continuous curve, but I don't know enough to guess at what difference that makes.)

So it sounds like the recent news about a negative-temperature gas was more about creating a new material with these sorts of quantum states. The negative temperature part caught the attention of the reporters (and the rest of us), but isn't the real scientific discovery. That's my reading of it, anyway.