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"I believe if the idea of generally replacing marriage with individualized civil contracts were to become widespread, stipulations like the two you alluded to [religion and bigotry] would become common, and would be, especially in the second case, detestable."

It wouldn't matter, because the contract would be between the parties of the action, who, presumably , will be religious and/or bigoted regardless of what the law says. The contract between them will not affect others, unless one of the party happens to be one against whom the religious or bigoted viewpoint acts, which, I'd suppose, would be highly unusual.

Marriage is already contractual (thats why you have to sign a document with witnesses), it's just governed by legal precedent in areas where the marriage contract is mute. That is why a pre-nup trumps the usual division of property upon divorce (among an unlimited number of other things).

I kind of like the idea of using corporate law as a model for managing households, but the legal entity representing a party would have to remain a unary relationship. Hm.. Maybe. That actually has some interesting implications if you extend the idea into a augmented reality world.

A person's corporate sole could enter into a marriage agreement with another entity where that entity was not a corporate sole, but instead was a corporate facade that had legal authority to enter into binding contracts. That facade would agree to provide certain services, such as appearing to the other party as a single entity with a temporally uniform personality (to a degree that fits within cultural norms), and to take care of other such domestic business as is common in marriages. This meta-mate could in fact be a collection of other people who, through the technology available (augmented reality devices) appear to the other part as a consistent avatar and have access to all the details about what other agents of the meta-mate have done and said. Different agents could handle different aspects of the relationship.

Might make interesting short fiction. Hmm, I need to go visit oort-cloud.org, I have some writing to do.

t3knomanser:

"1) Marriage exists to produce, provide for, and raise children."

So says one view. It is just as easy to say that Marriage exists as a formalized commitment between adults to share resources, household duties and emotional commitments. Obviously, and as others have already stated, it is clearly not the case that Marriage exists to produce, provide for and raise children, as these things are all done outside of marriage as well as not done within marriage.

"2) The future of the State rests upon the production and proper training/indoctrination of children."

True enough. However, it is not the case that these purposes are dependent on marriage, nor is it true that these things cannot be done by same sex couples, singles or collectives.

"3) Ergo, the state has the power and responsibility to define marriage as between a man and woman, with the anticipation that most such couples will provide children for the state."

This does not follow from the first. It is a simple observation that children will be produced regardless of marital status, and that singles, couples and collectives, regardless of gender, are all capable of successfully raising children.

The state should have the power to ensure that children are not mentally or physically abused (to some degree, obviously 'raised by a single parent', 'born out of wedlock', and 'raised by same-sex couple' could, but ought not be defined as mental abuse), and that they are educated to some standard. The state should not define how these goals must be achieved, though it could make non-binding recommendations (sort of a 'best practices' document) and provide systems citizens could access to accomplish them, should they choose to (public schools, for example).

"This, of course, offers an Achilles's heel- that definition should allow polygamy. "

Only if you think that production of children is a goal. I propose that we call this the "Duggars" model of marriage (go ahead, google it).

I think that we can pretty safely assume, based on available evidence, that the state has absolutely no need to ensure that children will be created, rather it should ensure that those that are created are given a chance to succeed.

State Marriage != Religious Marriage.

Rename the state version to 'Civil Union' and require it to be an explicit contract outlining exactly what it covers.

Religious ideas of Marriage should neither be dictated by the state, nor protected by it, and state-recognized unions should be for legal purposes (division of property, taxation, probate, etc) and not be circumscribed by religious ideas of what marriage is.

Simple solution that the Christians will hate, because they think that there is only One True Way. Good thing judges can see beyond that.

These guys don't know what they are doing. Obviously this rig should be made of an enormous block of pyrolytic graphite. At least then you'd know what your 1,300 bucks was paying for.

It should also have a pocketed spiral turned into the side into which the bartender pours a jigger of your selected drink, which he then sets alight to provide the heat for shaping the ice.

The dude with big arms didn't have his arms 'literally explode'. He regularly injected steroids into his biceps, which evidently didn't cause him any problems out of the ordinary for 'roid users.

The 'exploding arms' bit was that he was extremely careless about using clean needles (he was feeling invincible for some reason) and as a result got a really nasty infection that he didn't bother getting treated for a while. Eventually the doctor had to cut out a huge chunk of bicep (he probably lost more bicep mass than most of us have...in both arms).

He still has enormous arms, but one is misshapen because of the scaring.

Screw that, why does the FBI hate America?

This does not seem to work well with cold skim milk. Which stands to reason as there isn't much fat to work with. I wonder if heavy cream would work well.

Seems to me that sex offenders (of the type of interest, not the sort that innocently pee on walls) are much like drug addicts. The process of recovery and avoiding relapse is similar.

I find it remarkable that the boiling, vitriolic hate for these people that is so common (and remarkably absent here) is so socially acceptable.

If we had such public, in-your-face hate for alcoholics, how successful would their daily fight to stay sober be? How much harder would it be for them to ask for help when they needed it?

This isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, you see, you haven't corrected for inflation. 999,978 2008 dollars is only about $15 in 1990 dollars.

While it is true that 90% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the population, that 10% actively spends only a fraction of that wealth. Someone who earns 100 thousand a year is going to spend most of it in one form or another. Someone who earns (is it possible to truly deserve?) ten million a year is not likely to spend a significant fraction of their yearly earnings.

The wealth that second guy holds (doesn't spend) isn't going to be sitting around in gold bars in a vault somewhere. It will be spent, but on things that hold or increase their value, like stocks. Even if it's just sitting in a bank account the bank is going to be loaning it out 10 times over for others to spend (see fractional reserve banking).

So just because the rich guy isn't spending they same way doesn't mean his money isn't active in the economy, he just doesn't EXpend as large a proportion of his money as the other guy.

If you haven't already, watch Paul Grignon's 47-minute animated presentation of "Money as Debt", available on Google video.

Some thought after understanding the system will help you to realize why fiat currency is necessary and also why it should be managed directly by the government and why no one should be allowed to practice fractional reserve lending.

Try the "Download Them All" extension for FireFox. All I had to do to download all the files was right click the page, select "DownloadThemAll..." from the context menu, then click OK. The extension automatically recognized the audio file links (and maybe the sequential numbers) and selected only those files from the available content.

That's two clicks to download the entire thing, direct to my mp3 player, using multiple download streams for each file to maximize bandwidth usage.

It's my favorite extension.

Two years? That's nothing, the Queen sat on the throne for 50 years.

I think that for testing perpetual motion machines we should come up with a higher stakes test. I say we build a reasonable sized lab, say 4m square, put in a wide selection of hand tools and whatever materials might be necessary to repair the device.

We then seal the device, the inventor, and a minimal supply of food into the box with an electric powered device that converts CO2 into oxygen. If the inventor can walk out on his own after we open the room in 12 weeks we'll take a closer look at the machine.

Looks like it could use a handrail to me.

Is this the fight we're supposed to see? :
http://www.charlieangus.net/houseitem.php?id=70

It sounds to me like it's a pretty typical case of people who are not part of the government trying to be heard and getting shut down by government reps because they are not playing the game according to the rules the government reps use in order to get things done.

I see it all the time, people want to be heard, and the government wants to hear them, but the government needs things to be done according to the existing conventions and rules of order. That's why we have professional lobbyists, they have taken the necessary time to find out how to go about being heard.

The legal system is the same way, there are certain ways things are done and if you expect to get anywhere at all you have to either commit to learning the system or hire someone who has.

It's inconvenient as heck, but if it were otherwise government would be like an internet discussion board, and that would be both inconvenient and pointless.

hm. Videos featuring erotically suggestive banana consumption could take an interesting turn.

So, let's say you are producing a war plane that is stuffed to the gills with electronics and you anticipate supplying this thing to a world market, mostly to countries that don't have the technical ability to make their own.

It's likely those customers won't have the inclination or ability to dig through the deep details of the hardware or software to figure out exactly what all of it does.

Anticipating that at some point in the 20 or 30 year lifespan of such hardware it might be directed against you or your allies, maybe you'd put some subtle back doors into it? Nothing obvious, just a little something that would ensure that you would always prevail when you come up against that hardware.

For an example of the evil subtly that could be injected into such a system, refer to the classic article "Ken Thompson and the Self-Referencing C Compiler"

Many ISPs service agreements include some sort of limit to how many computers you can use or who you can share the connection with. It is generally not acceptable to them for you to hook up your neighbors and share the cost (it cuts into their market).

Also, legally (as I understand it), the account holder is responsible for whatever happens on the connection. If your open wifi connection is used by some anonymous party to violate someones copyright, you bear the penalty, which could include getting sued.

Generally, the law favors corporations and lawyers, if they say 'here we have logs of your connection being used to violate our copyright' and your defense is 'but I run an open WiFi access point, it wasn't me!', you will lose.

I'm all for copyright reform, but if I'm going to have to pay a judgment or settlement, I at least want to be guilty!

Of course, if you are running a WiFi access point with simple encryption and it gets cracked, and then you get sued, well, you're probably still screwed, but you might get lucky if you can provide proof that your access point was secured at the time.

Yeah, right.

As an example of how this sort of stuff is slanted toward the corps, consider the mailbox rule. It is widely accepted legally that the US mail system is 100% reliable. If a party can show that they posted a document, and the document was not returned, then it is assumed that the addressee received the document, unless the addressee can prove that they did not receive the document.

It is sufficient for some agent of the corporation to sign an affidavit that the document was mailed and not returned. No other documentation is required. A private citizen, generally presumed to be more likely to lie, must provide proof that a document was mailed, such as a postal return receipt. There is essentially no way for a citizen to prove that they did not receive a document that the corp allegedly sent.

I lost a court case over this issue just recently, so it really sticks in my craw.

My point is that you're probably screwed either way, but if you claim to use some encryption, at least you've got a slim chance.

Burying charcoal in surface soil does not remove CO2 from our environment, CO2 is released when charcoal is made.

It isn't necessary to burn all of the carbon contained in the plant into CO2. The plants grow, using solar energy (that's your 'free lunch' right there, the solar input) to convert (for example) 1000lbs of atmospheric CO2 into the various carbon compounds making up the plant's structure.

We harvest the plant and burn it, yielding 400lbs of charcoal, about 80% of which is carbon. This is applied to the soil where it stays, reducing total atmospheric carbon by about 300lbs (which represents about 800lbs of CO2) and increasing soil productivity for subsequent crops (for soil that has not yet been treated).

It is important to consider the products of the combustion (wood gas), some of them are potent greenhouse gases (methane, carbon monoxide). These can either be simply flared off or used for heating.

In practice it isn't simple, there are many factors to consider and screwing any of them up can eliminate any gains. For example, if you have to truck in and out material for any distance you may well end up with a positive carbon balance because of fossil fuels used by the trucks.

Don't think of washing your hands after using the restroom so much as washing away all the germs that got on your hands from handling yourself.

Think of it as a practical time and location to wash off whatever you may have picked up in the hours prior to entering the restroom.

Don't touch your face and clean your keyboard, mouse and desk once in a while (see: biofilms).

Do they all come pre-opened like that?

The quoted summary has some inaccuracies. Terra Preta isn't the same thing as simple soil with charcoal. It is not fertilizer, nor is char, and the char is not broken down by microbes and plants for food.

Simply adding char to soil at rates from 4 to 20 tons per acre (sometimes up to 160 t/a) can increase crop productivity, in some cases up to 4 times. The char helps to improve soil conditions but is not consumed in the process. Research indicates that the char itself is fairly stable in the soil, lasting for hundreds to thousands of years. This is why it is useful as a way to sequester carbon, perhaps making it possible to produce carbon-negative biofuel (but not if you use fossil diesel to deliver the biofuel!)

Amazonian Terra Preta seems to be more than just soil with a high carbon content. There is speculation that the original formula for it's creation involved food scrap, human and/or animal waste and perhaps a particular balance of soil microbes.

You may visit the Terra Preta site hosted by bioenergylists.org for more details.

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/

There are also a couple of good books about Terra Preta soil and research. If you'd like to do some research of your own, be sure to report your results!