By getting hung up on a word, he can pretend like his outrage is about that word instead of just religious bigotry. It's about MARRIAGE, damn it, not my hate of gays, my LOVE OF MARRIAGE WITHOUT GAYS MESSING IT UP. HGRHRHRHRH!!!

So? Get over it. Your faith, nor any other faith, is the steward of marriage. Your being offended means absolutely fuck all when it's leveraged as a crutch to deny people equal treatment under the law. Now I know you claim that you have no problem with all persons receiving equal treatment under the law. I don't have to believe you, because even if you did believe that, you are still adamantly chosen to support a viewpoint that precisely guarantees unequal treatment. To the extent that you advocate two entirely conflicted and incompatible notions simultaneously, there is fundamentally no reason to assume any sincerity in your claim.

Lawsuits or chapel weddings? Parade of horribles, and complete bullshit of the first order. How many lawsuits are there when non-christians demand Catholic chapel weddings, and how do those go over? Your intellectual dishonesty is stunning.

Unfortunately, this is nonsense and here's why: There were 1400+ pieces of federal legislation that would have to have been piecemeal amended to include the same benefits for civil unions as well as married couple to bring same-sex civil unions into line with marriage on the FEDERAL level alone. On top of that, there needed to be changes in virtually every states' laws to bring CU parity. On top of that, there would still need to be additional legislation for states to recognize each others' CUs. On TOP OF THAT, was the matter of actual discriminatory toward same-sex relations with respect to marriage and legal recognition. Your claim that ANY of this would have been remotely accomplishable several years ago by simply accepting civil unions in place of marriage is laughably, laughably naive. Settling for civil unions crosses one hurdle, but erects literally THOUSANDS more, whereas fighting for and winning marriage crosses 2,000 hurdles at once.

This has nothing to do with the government "calling" or "defining" marriage in any particular way. Those are rhetorical false equivalences that merely distract from the core issue at hand: equal treatment under the law. Your proposed solution does NOTHING to achieve that goal. Way to belittle our truly discriminatory legal framework by continuing to be ignorant of the fundamental issue. Your "physical objects" analogy is profoundly stupid. There is not, nor was there ever, a feasible pathway for bringing any sense of equality between civil unions and marriage as legally recognized institutions.

I'd do this, going as far as to purchase a separate router, if there was an easy way to create a secondary network discrete from my home connection, and that had bandwidth shaping to it so that it could never use more than, say, 5-10% of my available bandwidth. I have no qualms with a passerby checking their email or getting google maps directions, but I don't want security issues, and I don't want my own downloading/netflix compromised by their activity. Is there a cheap/easy way of doing this that doesn't require too much hacking?

You're right that they make a lot of "frozen dairy dessert," but it seems that the dividing principle is non-icecream toppings. Look at the flavors that are still icecream, and those that are FDD, and you'll see that the FDD flavors are full of flavor ribbons, cookie bits, and other snacky bits. I'll bet a huge deciding factor in their reformulation is that their FDD is easier to work with while adding these types of flavorings, since traditional ice cream must be assembled in a two-step process to add in solid ingredients.

The term Milkshake is regulated, such that you can only put in a limited number of ingredients. It has to consist almost entirely of milk and icecream. Many prepared frozen shake drinks contain non-dairy fats, stabilizers, thickeners, etc so that it can have the desired flavor and texture when put through a shake machine. Actual milkshakes won't have the thick/smooth texture we expect unless they are made recently from icecream which also has retained it's desired texture. This is more difficult than formulating a pre-mix batter which has the flavor and texture of a milkshake when chilled.

Beef is full of protein and fats, which provide enough binding to hold ground meat together after a couple minutes. Try it yourself with some chuck and a food processor.

While I understand that the world *does* revolve around you and your device, once you are shipping more than one or two of them, you have to start considering packaging more carefully. Better packaging allows you to ship more units in less space, reducing cost and carbon footprint. Apple's high-end packaging is not only about protecting the product, but is engineered to work into their supply chain management as well - an area in which Apple is silently a world leader. This efficiency is good for the business and good for the customer. Apple's dedication to over-engineering drives innovation in this space, and motivates improvement among competitors. It's a good thing that Apple isn't as thoughtless as you are about product design, and specifically package design, because it ultimately leads to cost savings, reliable and green shipping, whether or not you buy Apple products.

Apple engineers their packaging to be recyclable, sturdy, and compact, and are pioneers in minimal packaging. They use more expensive packaging because it lets them use less materials, pack more units per shipping crate, and reduce their carbon footprint. When I see other consumer electronics' companies packaging, I'm astonished by how flimsy, oversized, and non-functional it is compared to Apples, how much space and material is wasted. Apple has done more to move toward your platonic ideal than pretty much any other electronics company to date. It's profoundly telling that you cannot properly recognize the thing that you purportedly want. This isn't a flame, just pointing out how wrong you are.

Apple has 30+ years in the consumer electronics field, and Google has, what, a phone, a netbook, and now a tablet? They'll learn fast, but they've got three decades of catchup to do before they can hang with the world's undisputed champion of shiny-making and pretty-boxing.

I don't know why solar isn't being used, but on the burning of natural gas, it sounds like the purpose of a compressed air reservoir is that it can generate large amounts of power on demand, so it acts like a large battery that helps to ease peak demand spikes. From the article:

According to Apex’ website, compressed air energy storage (CAES) is unique in its ability to efficiently store and redeploy energy on a large scale in order to provide low-cost energy and enhance grid reliability.

Makes it sound more like a giant on-demand battery, which is why it would be preferable to leaving the energy in natural gas, which cannot be converted into usable electricity as rapidly. It's obviously less efficient, but natural gas perhaps simply cannot generate the output they need.

Actually, prominent evolutionary biologist Ken Miller rigorously debunked all of Behe's "challenges" to evolution, from irreducible complexity, the bacterial flagellum, and so forth. Absolutely rigorously debunked. Notably, NONE of Behe's arguments were actual flaws in evolution, but merely appeals to ignorance - arguing that particular observations were inconsistent with evolution without any proof as to why.

Here it is! Here is your precise misunderstanding. The fact that you cannot prove Intelligent Design is PRECISELY why it is not a scientific theory. A theory in science is a framework of knowledge that harmonizes an observable, testable body of empirical results. The key here is you must start with observations, testing, and consistent results. Once you have developed a body of results, you can harmonize those into a theory that explains the whole.

Take for example Germ Theory, which is the framework for understanding the operation of microscopic organisms that enter our bodies causing illness and infection. It is based on observations of the bodies immune system, microscopy, bacterial cultures. Those observations are tested with medical research, treatments, drugs and antigens. From those tests, we derived consistent results that have withstood rigorous scrutiny. After all of that, we were able to formulate Germ Theory.

Evolution Theory has taken an analogous path. We observed comparative biology, anatomy, genetic drift, embryology, and from those observations, we fashioned experiments on heredity, phenotype expression, population changes, and many more, resulting in repeatable, consistent results. From these scientific facts, we fashioned Evolution Theory to explain the mechanisms of observable scientific facts we had previously discovered.

The fact that you cannot observe, test, quantify, ID is exactly why it is not a theory. There are no observations of intelligent design. From those nonexistent observations, there are no tests of intelligent design. From those nonexistent tests of intelligent design, there are no consistent, repeatable results, or facts, of intelligent design. Without those facts, there can be no theory. As you can see, Intelligent Design is many, many, many, many steps away from constituting a theory. It is not slightly deficient, but iteratively deficient, having not the precursors, or even the precursors to the precursors, of a scientific theory.

You do not get to use that word. You clearly do not understand what science is.

This is not remotely true. But even if it were, how can you fashion "an argument they understand," when they have fundamentally rejected logic? In such cases, it cannot be said that you are advancing an argument, merely regurgitating something that religious adherents have already assumed to be true, that is also consistent with global warming. That's not an argument, but mere rhetoric.

How can you justify teaching creationism in cosmology? Assertions that cannot be tested, proven, or falsified have no place in science. What we know about cosmology is based on observation, experimentation, and testable data related to the universe's formation. Creationism, on the other hand, is as inapplicable as Shakespeare's plays, or the number of virgins promised by Allah when entering heaven.

As an unprovable assertion, creationism falls strictly outside of the realm of logic, and even fails to satisfy the most basic tenets of philosophy. Creationism has no bearing on the limits of human knowledge, falling far beyond the boundary of what is knowable. It's like studying the coastal region of the eastern seaboard by probing the surface of Mars.