A Gallup poll in May 2013 put support for gay marriage at 53% of Americans, and opposition at 45%.
A Pew poll also in May 2013 puts it at 52% support and 42% opposed.
A Post-ABC News poll in March 2013 puts it at 58% support and only 36% opposition.
USA Today in July 2013 puts it at 55% support 40% opposed.

Furthermore, long term polling trends show that acceptance of gay marriage has been rising at a rather steady 2.4% per year. For comparison, long term polling showed acceptance of interracial rose at just 1% per year. Acceptance of gay marriage is rising nearly two and a half times as fast as interracial marriage was accepted. Gay marriage is overwhelmingly seen as a civil rights issue by those under 35, with opposition primarily residing among senior citizens. Gay marriage proponents are literally burrying the core opposition as more and more of them are simply dying of old age.

The battles will drag on for a while, but the war is effectively over.

Gay marriage will be officially recognized nation wide in juts a few years, and any lingering gay marriage opponents will rapidly be dismissed as just as bigoted and just as irrelevant as the lingering interracial marriage opponents. I hope you enjoy Klan meetings. Pretty soon that's going to be the only place anyone is going to sympathetically listen to your persecution complex whinging.

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So freedom of expression implies that I have to pay for others to express themselves? No thanks, that's not how it works.

Pay for it? No.

Actively ignore it (as opposed to having some mythical "right" not to hear the likes of Fred Phelps spewing his crazy)? Yes.

As long as we as a society accept that people have the right to pick whatever fucked up religious beliefs they want, then we as a society have to deal with the consequences of real live modern humans expressing all the petty tribal prejudices of the past few thousand years, simple as that. Racism, misogyny, suicide bombers, birth control as a goddamned (no pun intended) presidential-race-changing issue... The crazy comes as a package deal, you don't get to pick and chose from God's Law (and spare me the "why don't you obey all of Leviticus" rhetoric, we already agree completely on that).

So yes, those calling Card out as a hypocrite on this do indeed express intolerance. He sincerely believes that his personal storm-god objects to homosexuality. You (and I) happen to believe that consenting adults should have the right to do whatever the hell they want with each other. Both of those express nothing but an opinion, with the one no more valid than the other. We would argue that we have the "right" to choose. He would argue that yes, we do, but one of those ways gives you a complimentary handbasket for your trip downstairs.

See the movie or don't, but we'd all do better to leave the politics out of whether or not we enjoy the movie.

The major source of violent crime for the past couple of generations has been bad drug policy.

Actually, try tetraethyl lead.

Bad drug policy certainly takes its share of blame for our exploding prison population thanks to massive incarceration of nonviolent "criminals", for destroying lives and families rather than promoting treatment, for costing billions at the same time it made virtually all local PDs dependent on the sweet, sweet teat of civil asset forfeiture. But actual violence? That has a much simpler explanation, known since Roman times.

Purges are an excellent idea, comrade.

"In Soviet Russia" jokes aside, I hate to tell you this, but the KGB would have given Vlad Kryuchkov's left nut to have anywhere near the "Total Information Awareness" at the NSA's disposal today.

The US intelligence agencies have a better reputation than their Soviet or Nazi Germany era counterparts for one and one reason only - They prefer to go high-tech rather than break kneecaps. And make no mistake, while I drastically prefer keeping my kneecaps intact, their goals count as no more or less noble than the legendary atrocities of their predecessors.

You didn't go far enough with #7. Not just no practical difference, we'll have no difference at all, because the executive branch will simply ignore the ruling, the same way Holder regularly does, and Reno and Ashcroft did before him (DOJ != Judiciary) ; The same way the FDA does when it doesn't "like" court orders to make certain drugs available without discrimination. The same way the entire intelligence community has done for years (*cough* guns to contras funded by running the international drug trade and all pardoned by former CIA directer Bush-the-Elder *cough*).

And we worry about some phone call tracking? We have an outright rogue government, not even pretending to give a shit about its citizens anymore, and we really care about the latest distraction over whether Snowden counts as a hero or a traitor?

However, there will be cases that deal with actual state secrets. For those, we need a court set up to deal with that sort of thing

No. We need a lack of state secrets. We need an open, transparent government that actually acts in the interests of its people rather than its CEOs. We need a court set up to try every breach of public trust as a capital offense.

We need an asteroid.

Sorry, I do not see the machine gun nests set up around the American border

Not looking very hard...


with the intent to KEEP PEOPLE IN

A fence can keep people in or out. Just a matter of which way most people want to go. When the banking system really goes down in flames in the next decade, when SS collapses from all those little "loans" we've taken against it, when the welfare state starts requiring over a 100% tax rate on those actually earning a living to sustain itself - You can bet your ass that, just like US oil pipelines today, the direction those guns face will do a 180.

If you're worried about USB or any other device access you've already lost. Anyone who can SEE the screen can snap a pic of the screen. Or a few hundred screen pics. And even if you strip everyone naked as they enter the building, and you scan them for hidden devices hidden inside body orifices, the fundamental issue is that information can be carried out in someone's memory, and that person is capable of talking.

Compartmentalizing who can access what may limit the range of what any particular insider can release, and reduce the number of insiders able to release any particular thing, but fundamentally people need to see the information to do their job.

Threat of prosecution can keep people's moths shut to some extent, but if you're engaging in illegal or immoral activity then sooner or later some insider is likely to decide to "do the right thing" even if it means huge self sacrifice.

As others have indicated, maintain goodwill and loyalty. At a minimum maintain some level of respectability for organization, and some level of respect for your employees. That is the *only* thing that can protect you against the threat of a self-sacrificing insider trying to "do the right thing".

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How quaint, assuming that U.S. laws and U.S. Law Enforcement still stay within U.S. borders.

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Extra flies when you're fucking a horse.

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QR Codes are 2-D barcodes. Each QR square can support 4k of (capitals-only) alphanumeric text, or nearly 3k of binary data. It has built-in support for error correction and spanning data across multiple QR Code blocks. And of course binary data can be encrypted.

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Can you spell out why that is socially desirable?

Because some people don't approve of robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

Simple as that.

True, but it's a really lousy way to write a news headline. "Study finds no reduction in prosocial behavior from playing violent videogames" would be a far less contorted headline. Heck, standard headline style would be to go with something more generalized and vastly clearer: "Study finds no harm from violent videogames".

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It's one of the big errors that scifi movies have with lasers in space combat (the other error being that laser pulses move slow enough to be seen

But combine those two errors, and we have a bit less of an error - Simply one of nomenclature rather than physics.

Pulses of light like we see in the movies would would more likely come from some sort of particle beam. It would travel slower than the speed of light, and most likely radiate energy during its trip (thus making it visible from the side).


Of course, I don't particularly expect that Hollywood grasps either point, they just like cool glowy weapons that also happen to make noise.