The pharmaceutical industries have a lot of rules and procedures that need to be followed, to minimize risk to patients, and these rules are largely effective (sure, not completely, but killer drugs are pretty rare). The idea of 'release it now and fix it later' would never be tolerated in the pharmaceutical industry. Why can't the software industry aspire to similar safety standards? The idea that it is impossible to write perfectly secure code, where does that come from? Is that really true?

That's actually not a bad idea. Two SD cards in RAID-0...you get better performance, and they're basically useless unless they're together, so you can ship them separately for the extra layer of security. Of course, you'd still want your data encrypted, but it wouldn't hurt.

That's actually a wicked idea, crowdsourcing Photoshop skills (that many people don't have) in exchange for micropayments. Someone who knows even a little about Photoshop could make a few bucks, and all of us get better quality pictures.

Actually, the original Eee PC (the one with the Celeron processor), was surprisingly good at editing video. I was forced to use one for this when my desktop took a dive, and I was shocked at how fast it was. It wouldn't hold up to anything more modern, but I was able to get done what I needed to without spending hundreds of hours waiting (which was what I expected before I actually tried it).

Yes, actually, it happens just like that. The bully will choose a time when the teacher isn't looking, and by the time she sees something going on, it'll be the bullied person acting, not the bully.

Because you stabbed another kid and got kicked out? How much did your parents have to pay to put you in boarding school?

Escalating violence isn't an answer...the zero tolerance policies these days mean that retaliating will just get your kid expelled, and you'll be forced into the poorhouse trying to pay for a private education.

One of the characters looks and acts suspiciously like you...did they cast him after you said no?

For freedom to be complete, it has to include the freedom to choose not to be free.

how long it will take someone in the audience to get into his cell phone.

Now that was most definitely an ad hominem. How come Red Hat gets to protect their name and straight married couples can't?

Wow, combination straw man and ad hominem. I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

1) I'm not advocating any such thing. I said right in the beginning that I believe all the legal rights conferred to married straight couples be conferred to gay couples, with the sole and single exception being the ability to call it "marriage". As much as we might like things to be absolutely equal, the fact is that there are differences. We don't hear men protesting the gender inequality of not having been given vaginas in addition to their penises. Some words just aren't appropriate to be applied to circumstances other than the one tradition allows.

2) That's a larger issue that I am choosing to not consider, since it's sort of tangential to the topic at hand. You are probably right, there, but I've have to think about it more before I decided what my opinion would be there.

3) I'm not married, but if I was, I think I would still feel the same way. Me and my future wife will have a beautiful wedding and an amazing day, if and when that happens. Having gay marriages would diminish that day...we'd no longer be part of a tradition, rather going with something else, far removed from what we grew up with and what we believe now. Scroll up for my Champagne analogy to understand why.

Debase is the right term, sorry you don't like it. Go look it up sometime, it means more than you think it does.

Let me give you an analogy to illustrate my meaning...Champagne is a sparking wine, made from grapes from the Champagne region of France. Now, people all over the world grow grapes, and all over the world those grapes get made into all sorts of wine, some of them even sparkling wines. But only the ones from that specific part of France can legally be called Champagne. Why is that, you ask? Tradition. Now, what if the very talented winemakers from California wanted to be allowed to call their sparkling wines Champagne...they use the same grapes, the same techniques to make it, why shouldn't they have the same legal rights? But they don't, because of tradition. So the California growers have to call theirs "sparkling wine". If, somehow, the California growers did and end run around the law, then there would be Champagne from Champagne on the market as well as this fake Champagne from California, which debases the value of the original Champagne by it's mere existence.

Yes, I know wine bottles and people are different, but tradition is tradition.

Perhaps what is needed is for us to learn from history. I don't think separate but equal was ever intended to actually be equal...certainly not by the people who implemented it. It could have been implemented equally, but that wasn't what happened. Maybe if we took more care to ensure and defend equality, we could do it right this time.

Do you have a source for that statement? I've never heard of gay marriages in the Middle Ages...gay people, gay unions, possibly, but not "marriages". I like being proved wrong, though.