Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 3:17 am

They work on my laptop though.

Sashi · Post by **Sashi** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 3:53 am

Certain CD/DVD drives have firmware that supports the copy protection.

Kind of like how you can make a DVD player that just ... doesn't pay attention to region codes.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:59 pm

To see if it's a copy protection issue, see if your DVD player will read burned audio CDs and older audio CDs pre-DRM.

If it still has problems, update.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Mar 06, 2011 6:48 am

It's spring here. It's been a high of seventy pretty much all this week, grass and trees are turning insanely green. It's all really beautiful and the pollen is coming thick and how the fuck do people deal with it?

It's only been in the past year or so that I've had allergies.

I don't sneeze (much). I don't get itchy eyes or any of that. I just produce lots and lots of congestion. And cough more or less constantly.

I'm almost certain it's pollen. At work, I'm fine. The air conditioning evidently filters that shit out.

But if I get outside or I'm not luxuriating in recycled chilled air, I'm miserable.

I've been trying cough drops and Zirtec. They help. Some. But not enough.

So how do people deal with this shit?

Dr_Noface · Post by **Dr_Noface** » Sun Mar 06, 2011 4:28 pm

If its that serious, get yourself to an allergist. It may be too late in the season this year, but next year you can take a series of shots (once a week) prior to allergy season that will significantly alleviate your suffering.

Hopefully, you have some form of insurance, the shots alone will run you around $300 dollars (in Canada at least).

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Sun Mar 06, 2011 11:16 pm

Alergies huh?

<badmedicaladvice> I hear good things about hookworms... </badmedicaladvice>

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 3:32 am

Someone is asking for any precedent for gay marriage.

Specifically, he is asking about cultures in the past who have allowed it. I pointed out several modern day nations, but he completely ignored them saying that they are just outliers. I realize that I can just forget the argument but I have also become curious.

The only data i can find is that the "theodosian code" is the earliest law that made gay marriage illegal. But this doesn't necessarily imply that there existed legal tenets prior to this that said that gay marriages were legal.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 3:44 am

It's not actually codified into law, but the Ancient Greeks were very much supportive of homosexual relations.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:41 am

Who allowed gay marriage? That's fricken hilarious. Marriage is older than law or religion by a very large margin, and was largely a process of an old man paying a younger man to take his hungry-ass daughter off his hands.

Early laws just covered the obligations of the various participants, that the guy getting paid couldn't just abandon the burden he'd taken on and such. Seriously, they were codifying old rules about what was to be done with young women, why would they even care about homosexuals?

Marriage law's become a set of limited rights now though, as people treat women as a prize rather than a burden (a fairly modern idea). Gay folk want those same rights acknowledged in law.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:44 am

This isn't a question of legality or morality. I'm just trying to find some historical legal precedence.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 6:44 am

As far as "marriage" goes, it doesn't have consistent meaning. You have:

Common-Law Marriage. No ceremony or registration takes place, but domestic partners live together and share things for a period of time. This was of course, the first marriage.
Ceremonial Marriage. No legal registration takes place, but people have some sort of symbolic joining ceremony. This was the second kind of marriage.
Civil Marriage. Whether or not any religious ceremony takes place, people become registered and legally bound together. This is much younger than the other versions because it required record keeping and government.

Now if you want to find the oldest common-law homosexual marriages or oldest ceremonial same sex marriages, you can't. Because those are so fucking old that they predate writing. If you want to find the oldest civil marriage, then you go to the big empires: Rome and China. Becaus both of them had gay married people at various times. China had gay married men in the Zhou Dynasty. Is that old enough for your friend?

I'm fairly sure that homosexual domestic partnerships did not destroy Chinese culture in 700 BCE.

-Username17

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 8:09 am

I never really understood the homophobes. If they love women they should like homosexuals - every gay man is one less rival for them.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 8:20 am

Fuchs wrote:I never really understood the homophobes. If they love women they should like homosexuals - every gay man is one less rival for them.

I'm not convinced this is true. Right now, out gay men outnumber Lesbians by a lot, but there are a TON of bisexual women. And many of them prefer same-sex relationships. So ultimately, teh Gay might well remove more women from the het pool than men.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 3:45 pm

Cynic wrote:Someone is asking for any precedent for gay marriage.

There might be some out there, but it's going to be very hard to find. If you look at the European mindset towards marriage as a "civil" function is not what we think of it today.

In achient Rome, the civil function was the placing of one person under another. In a cum manu union the wife legally and ritually became a member of her husband's family. In a sine manu union the wife legally and ritually remained a member of her father's family, standing under the control of her father's potestas.

By the time you get to the Medieval period, marriage is mostly a religious function controlled by the Church. (Previously it was a religious function not controlled by the Church.) The "civil" part to the whole thing was the whole notion of bastards and the complex inheritance systems that the feudal system required. This was especially true with royalty; having a proper marriage was essencial for getting their heir to take over after they were gone.

So we go from a system of legal ownership of one person by another to a method for seletcting rules of inheritance. There is really so good solid reason for same sex couples to even want any of these types of legal trappings. It is only when governments started placing civil benefits upon married couples apart from a state of semi-slavery to legal inheritance checking as well as making laws so that couples who did not have such papers were restricted in their associations that you see marriage being promoted as a "right" and desirable by those who could not yet get one.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:10 pm

tzor wrote: In achient Rome, the civil function was the placing of one person under another. In a cum manu union the wife legally and ritually became a member of her husband's family. In a sine manu union the wife legally and ritually remained a member of her father's family, standing under the control of her father's potestas.

This is true. Which is why gay marriages in Rome were between a man and a slave who was also a man. Like when Emperor Nero did it.

Two free men couldn't marry each other because they were of equal status. They had entirely different systems for free men who simply wanted to live in the same house and have sex with each other.

-Username17

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:14 pm

Frank,

I want what you're saying to be true, but this is a serious [citation needed].

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:42 pm

Orion wrote:Frank,

I want what you're saying to be true, but this is a serious [citation needed].

Same-sex marriage history seems to give a reference to what Frank is talking about but there is some serious double talk on the wiki page.

The Vigilante · Post by **The Vigilante** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 12:31 am

I tried searching but couldn't come up with any result, and I didn't want to start a new thread just for this so I'm posting this here :

I remember reading here about some guy who wrote a program to optimize unit lists for some wargaming tournament. It was all about how the lists, while valid, were against the conventions, stuff like fleets entirely made out of transports and so on. I'd be grateful if anyone could help me find it.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 2:18 am

it was a sea battle of some sort type of wargame. Instead of getting giant ships, the computer decided to just zerg rush enemies with thousands of mook units and overwhelmed them.

Jilocasin · Post by **Jilocasin** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 2:27 am

The Vigilante wrote:I tried searching but couldn't come up with any result, and I didn't want to start a new thread just for this so I'm posting this here :

I remember reading here about some guy who wrote a program to optimize unit lists for some wargaming tournament. It was all about how the lists, while valid, were against the conventions, stuff like fleets entirely made out of transports and so on. I'd be grateful if anyone could help me find it.

Couldn't find it on here, but I think this is the original article. Just scroll down a bit until you find the part about Doug Lenat and Eurisko.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 3:48 am

Fuchs wrote:I never really understood the homophobes. If they love women they should like homosexuals - every gay man is one less rival for them.

This reminds me of something a history/social studies teacher said,

"When you are anti-ANYTHING, you are pushing for your opinion to be imposed on the rights of other people."

Homophobes are not just straight, they are against homosexuals and even the idea of people being homosexuals.

It was something to think about when you're 16/17.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 4:22 pm

Fuchs wrote:I never really understood the homophobes. If they love women they should like homosexuals - every gay man is one less rival for them.

First of all, there is a slight problem with the term "homophobe." There is a strong portion of the general anti-homosexual agenda as being fundamentally opposed to the very idea of homosexuality. Note my use of the word "fundamentally." These people literally want to wipe it from the face of the earth. These people are very dangerous. However, the Supreme Court recently decalred that they have the right to in your face fuck up greving parents of veteras killed in action as a "first admendment right."

Then there is a larger group that suffers from what I call the "yuck" problem. This is harder to explain, so let me use a personal example. I happen to be alergic to peanuts. But also I happen to find the smell of peanuts nauseuating. So I might personally not mind if people eat peanuts in the privacy of their own homes; but in public? Where I can smell it? And if peanut butter eaters want the same rights as us jelly eaters ... that's fighting words. Don't even get me started about them just start eating peanuts in the middle of a closed confined airplane.

Now that might sound stupid, but most "yuck" things are somewhat stupid. There are a lot of people who are massively opposed to nudity in art even though it is far from pornographic. (In fact there are studies that graphically altered nudity ... designed to really remove the details of the naughty parts might actually cause more long term problems than they purport to solve.) There are a lot of people who constantly want to sanitize history to remove the parts of history that they might find offensive today.

These people tend to be mostly the "out of sight - out of mind" type of people. In the case of homosexual marriage, if it was already going on, they probably wouldn't even notice. But since the fight is up in the open, they see it and react accordingly ... YUCK.

This gets even more confusing because the terminology is bound tighter than a Gordian knot. Seriously, why does sex come into play anywhere in the legal benefits of civil marriage? Hospital visitation rights, property rights, civil rights, have nothing to do with who you are shagging. In fact if you take it to an extreeme, let's say non gender centered polygamious civil contracts, then why can't the entire convent of nuns get hospital rights, property rights, insurance rights, etc? So they are celibate, so what! Some might say "that's not marriage" and they are right; civil marriage isn't really marriage, according to the tennents of a large number of religious and non religious customs (the fact that it currently does mirror the current Protestant view of marriage is only a minor consoliation). But some people don't get that and thus they are strongly against it because they feel that this somehow attacks their moral views.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 5:07 pm

I actually would be pro letting Nunneries and Monasteries enter into civil contracts that give them the same hospital, property, insurance, inheritance rights as other things. Same with just regular polygamous marriages. I don't even have a problem with the Mormon Sister/Wife thing, as long as all people involved are 18+.

We should get the government out of the "marriage" business. Allow people to enter into binding civil contracts for habitation and group rights, and let the people who want to also be married do so with what ever Religious Service makes them fraking happy.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 5:54 pm

Wow, Tzor, credit where credit's due, your post is interesting, on-topic, and not bigoted. High five. I don't understand your reference to digitally censored nudity "causing problems." What do you mean by that? (Also, are you saying you wanted Westboro Baptist to lose the case? I mean, I certainly sympathize, but I can't agree.)

Sabs, you'd need single-payer healthcare before any kind of group marriage could be possible. Otherwise, one person with a corporate job could charge his employer for up to N health plans, where N is the size of his poly clan. No good. Also, while I appreciate the principle, I can't agree with letting go of marriage. Liberals have fought for and received all kinds of protections and rights for spouses. Everyone hates divorce law, but divorced women used to be desperately poor back in the day.

If civil marriage were gone and everyone wrote their own contracts, women in the red states would get fucked over badly.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 5:57 pm

Must be nice to work for a Corporation that actually pays for Health Care. Mine acts more like a broker. They have a plan, but they don't contribute to it. We have to pay the full share. And @ $360 every 2 weeks for a Family plan, I don't see why it couldn't have more than 2 adults on it.