Their website is non-functional. Not encouraging :(

You dont know the person, and I lost track of him a few years ago, and ultimately anecdote is not evidence anyway. It's there solely to explain where my head is at when I say things that I know must sound strange to you. For whatever it's worth I knew him well for several years and he struck me as one of the most sincere people I have ever met. He planned to die a virgin and for all I know he has.

I look at something like the amendment 1 that just passed here in NC and here is what I think about. I imagine Dave is still around somewhere making a decent living, he's found his ideal life-partner, another celibate christian male, they bought a house and one of them got a job with insurance and they want to get covered. I'll say it, that's pretty darn wierd to me and I guess it always will be, but they arent hurting anyone, and the insurance is something being deducted from the paycheck, he's payed for it, why shouldnt he get it? Then on the other end of this wierd scale, we have meth addicted animals around here who form heterosexual couples and reproduce creating the most wretched and hopeless members of the next generation, children that have no chance and will certainly be a drain on society either through prison or hospital or more than likely both, but since at least they arent queer they get all the benefits possible and if one of them by some miracle got a job with health insurance you bet the other would be covered!

I really would like to think that in 2012 we have so many things that are far more important to be worrying about than domestic partnerships. Yet that proposition was the number one turn-out mechanism for the Republican party here this year. That just made me very sad.

Well I wouldnt say behaviour is determined by genetics - it's not that simple. Like racism and musical tastes, there is a genetic component that can be discerned but again it's not a simple cause and effect relationship but a much more complex one. For example, there is certainly a genetic component that gives us the ability to distinguish other human individuals visually which is extraordinarily fine-tuned and effective. That gene doesnt make us racists all by itself, but that extraordinary sensitivity to tiny variations in visual appearance is clearly an important part of the background needed to understand why racism occurs. Musical tastes as well, not directly controlled genetically to the point of a 'Bach gene' versus a 'Beethoven' gene but the genetics creates the hearing apparatus, the brain itself, and the specifics of those systems could easily predispose someone towards music with certain characteristics. I had a good friend who was a born again christian, and gay. The only way he could reconcile those two things was to be celibate. And he was. This points out the difference between behaviour and orientation. He could control his behaviour, but he could never control his orientation - he couldnt be attracted to females, or quit being attracted to males, the best he could do was simply to not act on his feelings. I agree there will be no purely genetic cause to the behaviour. But there does seem to be a genuine genetic driver for the orientation, and real reason to doubt that the Almighty would create someone with that orientation and then condemn them for it. And, regardless, suppose I am dead wrong on that. Policy-wise I would still be right. The Almighty certainly has no need of the state to enforce his will. It's shockingly common for people to argue otherwise, but it strikes me as actively sacrilegious to do so.

It is indeed the teleological view, but teleology itself is rather suspect.

'Would have been eliminated long ago' is actually rigorously deducible given a handful of premises. The genetic factor as I said seems more than adequately documented. Genes that are non-adaptive do not typically survive, they gradually become less common and then disappear. Nothing like that has happened or gives any sign of happening in this case - to the contrary. And once you start to think of how such a gene would work there is an obvious explanation for why.

Are you familiar with sickle-cell anemia? If you get the gene from both parents, it's a pretty serious illness. Very non-adaptive. But if you get the gene on just one side, it's so effective at stopping malaria, that the gene spread quickly and occurs at a very high rate throughout the malarial tropics.

Something similar seems to be going on with sexual orientation. If you look at a bunch of rats in an environment with plenty of room to expand, you wont see this, but if you cage them all up in close quarters it starts happening a lot.

Of course 'overpopulation' in general usage may be a somewhat fluid concept, but it has a fairly precise meaning in ethology in terms of available food supply and resources versus population usage. A 'gay gene' that isnt inherently self-defeating, one that could stick around and spread through the population, wouldnt be one that makes everyone that makes everyone that gets it gay. There is no survival advantage there, as you quite correctly notice. But a gene that combined with other factors (particularly ones that serve to diagnose overpopulation) to produce this effect in a percentage of offspring could actually be adaptive. Because the non-breeders thus produced contribute materially to the survival of their closest relatives.

"My personal experience of "trouble understanding His reasons" is that I have tried to elevate my will above His, and disaster has ensued."

Not only your personal experience, but I would argue the collective experience of "western civilization" to date.

I would love to see a US ISP take the same stances, but it's actually easier for them to do it in au, precisely because Hollywood is so used to treating y'all as 'secondary markets' to be abused, which fact tends to swing the nationalist vote in on the side of the angels. If Hollywood were located outside Sydney I am sure they would never have the balls to stand up to them.

I was not obfuscating, but explicating.

The "sex with a mare" gambit is a very old one. If you put your mind to it there is no limit to the disgusting things that people just might do if they were free to make their own choices. If you want to live in a free society there is no other way than to accept that someone, somewhere might do something disgusting. In reality, very few people are at all interested in sex with a mare and the handful that are are unlikely to be deterred by law anyway.

"What is clear, back to simple agricultural examples, is that the farmer planting his seed where it simply will not grow stands to reap folly."

Well here is what I mean by more complex. That's an obvious way to look at it, but that doesnt mean it's correct. It's common to view the purpose of the sex organs as being reproduction, and simple to follow that view to its conclusion that non-breeders are therefore somehow defective and unnatural. But if this view were correct then the behavior simply would not occur - it would have been eliminated long ago if it did not serve a natural purpose.

In fact this behavior is common to many species of mammals. It seems to be triggered by overpopulation, and once you see it from that lense it makes much more sense. In terms of propagating genes, it matters extraordinarily little whether one has offspring of ones own or simply assists with providing for the offspring of close relatives. Under conditions of over-population it can actually be a more effective reproduction strategy NOT to reproduce, but to improve conditions for the survival of ones nieces and nephews instead.

"Whether or not the Almighty, weighing in, is terribly impressed, I can't be certain."

There is tons of evidence that at least some gay people really were 'made that way.' My gut tells me the Almighty doesnt make mistakes, and if we have trouble understanding his reasons we need to look closer and re-examine our own assumptions.

I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say, but it sounds like a broad generalisation on an entire class of people based on anecdote. Even with very compelling anecdotes, that still makes for bad policy.

My neighbors seem to think that if a man is ever allowed to sign up another man on his health insurance and make a formal commitment to him, this will somehow result in other men that dont want to do this being forced to do so. It makes no rational sense whatsoever, it's nothing but inchoate fear speaking. But the really dangerous thing is that the fear has the potential to be somewhat self-fulfilling. By passing these laws against gays, they solidify the bad precedent of a state which discriminates based on lifestyle. Once such discrimination is stamped with approval, it's a relatively simple matter to switch which group is favoured and which despised.

I live in the country and I am from and of the country and I understand why my neighbors feel somewhat under siege. The cultural war is not an empty metaphor. But it's a mistake to try and 'win' that war in this way. Win a few votes, make some precedents - and then watch when we start losing votes and those precedents backfire. I call this counterproductive, at best.

The state should be scrupulously even-handed in its dealings with all peaceful and honest citizens, and if it cannot do so in a particular situation it should simply not be involved at all. We dont allow a state church, and we shouldnt allow the state to usurp the churches authority to define marriage in the first place.

It's easy to generalise like that, and easy to find some truth in it, but I still think the reality is much more complex. Both lefties and righties often seem to be quite rational on some subjects but completely irrational on others. Lefties tend to turn their brain off when exposed to the word 'gun' and it's hard to get them to turn it back on. But I live surrounded by people that do the exact same thing only the word is different. 'Gay' usually does the trick around here.

It's not the slightest bit ambiguous to anyone accustomed to reading literary English of that time period. The militia was understood in the sense of the members of the population ready and expected to pick up arms in times of emergency. "Well regulated" in this context simply means practiced - it isnt enough to pass out weapons and ammo on the eve of an emergency, a well-regulated militia is one that has their weapons and sufficient ammo to visit the range, to get and stay in practice with their weapons. The founders believed and explicitly state here that the security of a free state is dependent on the general population maintaining not only their formal right to bear arms, but the concrete reality of general possession and skill with said arms.

Keep in mind that the official story is he is NOT a suspect in the murder of the neighbor. Supposedly the cops in Belize just want to interview him as a witness. If there was any evidence to implicate him, dont you think they would file charges instead of issuing the equivelant of a material witness warrant?

No, if that was his logic he's just dense. Even though there are fundamentally distinct legal traditions with very different answers to certain questions, the vast majority of actions that are a crime in one jurisdiction will still constitute a crime in a different jurisdiction. Laws against theft and murder for instance are effectively universal, and with modern treaties even tertiary legislation such as copyright tends to be pretty darn uniform.

This old geezer remembers it a bit differently. He had a technically inferior product (a signature scanner of all things! not a good design) but it succeeded in large part due to buddies at MS breaking alternative approaches relentlessly, partly due to effective marketing, and perhaps partly due to questionable hiring practices as I recall. Nothing he did was innovative or praiseworthy from a technical standpoint, though perhaps from a marketing and business standpoint things are different.

What's truly shocking here is that you apparently have to 'download an open source app' to get a simple text editor. What a broken system! You would think basics like vi would come pre-installed with the OS in this day and age, they cant even get that right?!?

If they provided a way to narrow it down and see only the ones in your area, it would be very useful. Big ISPs are killing the internet and any sort of consumer guide that presents their information without that of smaller competitors is ultimately a disservice. That said, this information is very useful and interesting, and I would encourage them to continue posting it - just please make it more inclusive. My provider is a small customer-owned co-op and the service is extremely competitive - it would be helpful for that information to be available alongside ratings for the industry giants.

Yes, even assembly can still be considered source code

Nominating this for unintentional face-desk post of the day. Of course assembler isnt just 'considered' source code it is source code, or rather a language in which source code is written. Not sure what they are teaching (or smoking) in school these days but that made no sense at all. It's like saying 'the sky can still be considered blue.' Only sometimes the sky isnt blue, so even that analogy was too weak.