If you can't anonymously donate to a political campaign, your voice can't be heard!

Um, wait . . .

Fair enough. Apology accepted.

I will point out, though, that the majors are major because of proselytizing, and the minors are minors often because they do not. It's not that they're anachronisms (though the Druze and Zoroastrians certainly have long histories), but that their choice of interacting with the outside world necessarily limits their ability to become a major religion.

I'm not Jewish. I'm pointing out that your assertion that all religions "without exception" go for completely indoctrination when there are many that do not. Even your apology seems to be trying to hold your original view while barely admitting only a single caveat. The Druze and Zoroastrians are other examples of religions that do not actively seek to incorporate outsiders (and sometimes refuse to accept those that independently wish to join), and who will even often hide their religious affiliation from those they do not know. Other religions remain small not because they were or are oppressed, but simply because they don't feel the need to expand. Your absolutist view on religion is colored based on a few large ones and does not match the real world.

The content of contracts is legally regulated. You cannot, for example, sell yourself or your children into slavery. Any asset-entanglement contract such as you suggest would involve time with an attorney, possibly adding a not-inconsequential cost and adding to the potential burden to the courts down the line, as well as probably requiring a section of law to deal with such contracts when they are drawn up for terms of marriage, thus requiring the presence of marriage law anyway.

Further, rights accorded to spouses go far beyond simple asset sharing. There are hospital visitation rights, powers of attorney, and inheritance priorities, things that *can* be set by contract but are accorded a default status in marriage law based on traditions that go back centuries. While some of these powers were traditionally held by the males of the family (control over the wife, possessions going to eldest son, etc.), they've been balanced as females have been handed the same powers over time.

Imagine if you get word that your spouse was suddenly hospitalized and you race there, only to be prohibited from entering the room until you can produce your notarized contract that says you're allowed by your spouse to go in, something which you cannot find despite tearing apart your domicile while hoping you'll be there when your spouse awakens, and your original attorney is no longer available. Later, your spouse is on life support, effectively brain-dead, and you know your spouse wouldn't want to continue living like that *but you never got that legally attached to the contract*. You have to wait for the body to finally give out, days, weeks, or months later, and in the meantime, hospital bills are stacking up that you may have to pay, adding to the emotional burden. And then after your spouse dies, whatever possessions are left over go to...who? You can't find your contract, thereby having no way of proving asset entanglement.

For decades, the Supreme Court has required that the state show a compelling interest when it places limits on marriage. This came about most significantly in the anti-miscegenation cases of the 1940s through 1960s, culminating in Loving v. Virginia, and numerous others where the courts have placed limits on how the state can limit marriage, but it has never gone so far as to say that the state has no interest in the marriage of people within its jurisdiction.

Indeed, it has said the opposite, that the state does have a compelling interest in marriage, that marriage is one of the very foundations of our society in that it encourages the procreation of offspring necessary to perpetuate the society, and that the state may take reasonable steps to thus encourage marriage or, in relatively rare cases, to block marriage, such as when untreated diseases are present that may be spread to an unwitting partner. However, it has also placed significant limits on the state's powers over marriage, recognizing, among other things, that marriage need not lead to procreation to be valid.

The state does have an interest in providing a default framework for something that is so ingrained in our society that judges spend entire careers overseeing cases involving it. That framework, though it should exist, should be the minimum required to allow the institution to exist without unduly burdening those partaking in it.

There's not much going on in the way of Jewish proselytizing, and most Jews, including senior members of the more restrictive sects, don't want it to happen at all.

Build ships which vaccuum up jellyfish, puree them, and use the proteins as feed stock for 3D printing of food. The stingers can get filtered out, or just left into the low-grade product used in prisons and orphanages.

I'm sure that Red Lobster can come up with some clever marketing term for this stuff. After the actual lobsters, cod, and king crabs die off they'll have plenty of motivation.

Interesting Geek-culture historical note: In the 1973 movie "Soylent Green," the titular product is supposed to be made from krill scooped from the oceans. The underlying horror of the movie isn't that the crackers are made of dead people, but that the ocean ecosystem has collapsed due to pollution. The movie also has Edward G. Robinson bitching about how the greenhouse effect has made it hot and damp year-round.

I've had a new phone see the battery drained completely because I forgot to put it in airplane mode and left it in my pack. It would get warm (much warmer than when in airplane mode), which I have always presumed was because the radio power was cranked up to max while it tried to find a usable tower.

I agree with you on needing some common sense, but the rules didn't allow for it, and the flight crew has little choice but to enforce the rules. It's one thing if they have some plausible deniability like being able to claim they didn't see the one passenger, but allowing everyone to use their devices will inevitably get out and the FAA would look into it, probably fining the airline and thereby getting the crew in trouble.

Keeping people from getting up is a different story. Pilots don't always get that warning of when they'll be able and expected to move. In that situation, an aircraft ahead of them might decide to return to the gate to refuel or disembark passengers. In that case, the entire line will move up, and the pilot gets only as much notice as the number of visible aircraft ahead that might be moving (which in heavy rain may only be a few planes). He's not going to call back to the cabin to make sure everyone is sitting down before releasing the brakes and spooling the engine.

It's not a Boolean AND, it's distributive, as in 'the installation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft and the operation of an amateur station must be approved by the master of the ship or pilot in command of the aircraft.' Whether it's physically installed to the aircraft or not, you need the pilot-in-command's permission to operate it, something that you're certainly not going to get on a commercial aircraft.

I don't recall if I saw this scene in the theater, during "Jedi's" initial run, or in preview clips shown on TV, but:

There's a scene in Return of the Jedi in which Luke goes mano a mano with a storm trooper riding one of those cycles used to zip around Endor.

Luke knocks the guy's helmet off, revealing a dark haired guy with a rather skinny face.

I do know that this brief reveal was cut out of the sky cycle chase as it was shown on the Laserdisc.

Could it be on this new find?

I've been in IT for coming about 18 years, working with end-users to one degree or another the entire time, and I've never met anyone who didn't understand that the apps they used under Citrix, RDP, or VNC were running remotely and just being drawn locally. They may have been frustrated that they couldn't access local resources (this can be good or bad), but few if any of them thought the programs were installed locally.

It should be dead simple for most people to use a remote desktop capability without much thought on how to set it up because most people are not interested in anything other than the apps appearing on their screen. Microsoft has refined this well enough that it's used in enterprise environments large and small with enough auto-configuration that it will adapt to the local capabilities but can be overridden by a power user if so desired. Anyone who wants to see Microsoft's dominance at least challenged should accept that this is the way it needs to be.

I understand that X does its job well. But there are those who believe that the system in place does not do it well enough. Wayland's devs are in that group and are trying to address it. What concerns me is the group of people who refuse to accept that it should be done any other way and actively try to shoot down alternatives, even before they've had any real chance to use it. That contradicts the foundation of the open source community.

I agree that we have an existing solution, but to claim that there's no reason to replace it is to claim that no one can come up with something better. I agree that it's well-supported, that it can perform well, and that VNC is a hack. But I'm not sure that it's true that it's well-understood, especially given that people are far more likely to handle remote desktops with VNC than with X, even in environments where people largely use Linux instead of Windows. That prevalence of VNC over X suggests to me a serious gap in understanding of the community at large.

This leads me to think that while X is still a good solution, it may not be the best solution, and that's why I'm watching Wayland with curiosity.

They have definitely attempted to tackle it at a technical level. Part of installing Blizzard games is giving consent for it to look for cheating programs. Support for macro keys such as found on Logitech keyboards has been broken numerous times (and I think is broken right now) as they allow a keyboard macro to perform exactly one action that would be performed as a player clicking a button. It can be a keypress combination (such as Alt-Shift-4 or whatever you have it mapped to), but especially for combat, they don't want that one keypress doing a string of actions, especially not timed.

They've also been going after bots since well before their peak player count. I've seen news of lawsuits going back for at least six or seven years.

WoW is certainly in decline (if they could upgrade the entire game's graphics to be like Pandaria, it might draw a few people in or back, but the cost probably exceeds the potential income) and they need something to take over, but these enforcement actions aren't new by any means.

If they detect it, they can disable or delete the account using it. That doesn't completely stop its use, but it does mean that a lot of effort has been for naught for that player.

. . . and suddenly masks will be deemed a threat to Free Enterprise, and wearing one will put you on a terrorism watch list.

Anyway, you'd better wear gloves too, because shopping cart handles will eventually have DNA sensors and galvanic skin response detectors.