He sounds “good” due to the lack of negative backlash from this action. His gamble worked and so we applaud his chutzpah. If it had failed (as many of Bush’s gambits did) there would have been hell to pay. Even with the success of the mission, he gets crap from ~half the country for his prosecution of it. Similar to the administration’s response/action with regard to Libya. Or the crap he took when he took Mubarak’s side early in the Egyptian conflict (a lost gamble).

Just a cheeky follow-up, I think the structure of the union should be based on how many people are involved in decision making for the union, not how many penises are present. I pretty much feel that since we already have rules for two person legal unions and those rules are largely unaffected by the sexual organs of the participants, it’s a low-risk change.

Not a slip up. We already have the infrastructure to handle parties of two. Adding another person creates a lot of new situations that we don’t currently have processes to deal with. The added complexity in a legal relationship between three (or more) people is a great deal more than is perhaps obvious.

When I say freedom, I mean the freedom to have the same protections under the law that come with heterosexual marriage. The right to jointly own property without creating a business entity. The right to not have wills contested by one partner’s family. The right to immediate acceptance as “next of kin”. The freedom to adopt and raise kids. There are lots of protections that aren’t there for gay unions. Even in places where they have set down legislative rules in a separate-but-equal kind of way (civil unions), gays often find out that, in practice, hospitals and others just disregard them.

Funny, I guess the “Its only a name…” one is a neutral. When I first was picking which one to choose I thought that the “it’s only a name” thing was trying to dismiss the religious right’s objection to marriage being applied to same-sex unions. Anybody else have that misconception (because, if Occams made the poll, Occams interpretation of said poll is correct). I wonder if it is actually 13 for, 10 against and 10 neutral, due to others misreading the intent of that option (as a kind of duplicate for “Why not?”).

As the dad, I was pretty ready for the breastfeeding phase to end for a couple of reasons. The two I will cop to are:

• child could start having a reason to bond with me, too (I could engage in some feeding activities… as my wife was completely against any bottle feeding).

• Um, certain anatomical parts could go back to being utilized for less child-centric activites.

A couple of things: Families may be damaged, but that’s really up to them. I have a gay sibling who regularly and openly attacks (I use that word with caution, but really it’s the only accurate description… “criticize” wouldn’t do it justice) it. I’m not saying he doesn’t have legitimate beefs, but he would be an ideal example of a person who the LDS has interest in isolating/shunning/whatever. No one in my family has ever been asked to disavow or shun or do anything negative to him. It’s just not an issue. That being said, I know members who act differently in the same situation. It’s just a call that the families make, perhaps with a cultural pressure to avoid discussion about it by disengaging with the “problem” individual.

I don’t think Brandon is saying that the things listed in that link don’t exist, only that this idea of the LDS church being very police-state like is inaccurate. When I read your posts, I get the image of big-brother-esque reporting and punishment. And it isn’t like that. Well, maybe except at BYU, but that is a whole different and creepy world. One which Brandon and I, as former students of Texas A&M, aren’t well versed in.

And then this link says that at the same time, Symbian is the top dog. (Dec, 2011).

And here, it’s Android in the number 1 spot (in the U.S.). (July 11, 2011).

These charts and numbers often don’t tell you what they are measuring… the World? The U.S.? The Democratic Republic of the Congo? That’s why charts can be so misleading, I guess.

There appears to be damning evidence for both sides; be it Google’s internal documents recognizing the possible copyright issue during the development of Android or Oracle’s admission that Oracle management decided it wanted to compete with Android prior to deciding to sue Google or even conflicting testimony from two former CEOs of Sun, the previous owner of Java intellectual property.

Come on, Occams. That’s why the limit is six hours… that’s the time limit for dead attraction. So, sexually attractive after they have been dead for less than six hours. =-)

According to a report from Alarabiya.net, Egypt is currently debating several bills to move the country toward a more fundamentalist version of Islamic rule. One law will legalize marriage of girls starting from age 14 and another, strangely (at least to this westerner), allows a husband to engage in intercourse with his wife for up to six hours after her death (clearly a cause worth fighting for). Yet another is looking to strip women of divorce rights in the country.

When I moved to Utah 7 months ago, I realized that it was going to be a weird place to live (even for a Texan). So I guess it should be no surprise that amidst serious discussion about the state budget deficit and how to pay for education, Medicaid and other such weighty costs, the Utah Legislature decided to spend time passing a bill to make the Browning M1911 the state firearm of Utah.

A colleague of mine sent me a link to a little flash-based website called Boxcar2D.com. It wasn’t long before pretty much everyone on my five person team had the simulation running in the background on their PCs. After determining that letting it run unfettered wouldn’t affect our bandwidth reports to management, a few of us decided to just let it run all night.

It is a fairly cool simulation that lets you pick a few parameters for the evolution of a simple two dimensional car that has to traverse a randomly generated (and increasingly difficult) track. The best performers out of each generation (20 car types) are sent to the next generation with the most beneficial traits passed on.

Java developers are up in arms today due to the news that Apache has resigned it position on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee.

According to ASF’s news release, they feel Oracle has created a contradictory Java SE 7 specification request and license. Apache says that this will severely inhibit independent implementations’ distribution. The biggest red flag to Apache is that they feel the new Java SE 7 spec will prohibit the distribution of independent open source implementations of the spec.