"This year, however, proponents of same-sex marriage have found encouragement in both the California Supreme Court decision and in a subsequent order by Gov. David A. Paterson of New York, instructing agencies in his state to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere. The California court has also rebuffed several challenges to its May 15 decision, made by two conservative legal groups and by Republican attorneys general who fear that the California marriages will lead to legal challenges brought in their own states." - Bret Taylor
The current UK administration defused the issue of same sex unions by the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2005 linked to an across the board change of relevant laws to provide parity with married couples - with the exception of those with religiious objections (who should really know better) this has gone smoothly and been introduced across the UK. Its not called a marriage but has all the advantages (and responsibilities!) of the mixed sex varaint. - Jican
It makes me very happy to see gay folks entering the light in California. I'm also very amused at how frustrating it must be to the Right. Well, I guess in a few years one of us will be proven right. Either a small percentage of the population of California will be happily married and gay or the country will lay in smouldering ruins and people will be having sex with box turtles. - Tad Donaghe
Tad: I feel a box turtle urge coming on! Hah. - Robert Scoble
@Tad - I had box turtles as pets when I was kid. Never considered that activity with them though... - Hutch Carpenter
"It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife." - Rick Santorum (Idiot) ex-Senator from Virginia - Tad Donaghe
Dude in the pic with "Bruce Willis" is freakin HYOOOGE! I wonder how many opponents of gay marriage have been pwned by his hand...LOL - Rahsheen Porter
Whoa, don't push Santorum on us Virginians! hehe - Jody Carbone
Oh crap - sorry to pollute Virginia with Santorum! Oops. I wouldn't wish that on anyone... - Tad Donaghe
I hope it "sticks". My boyfriend and I are waiting until after November. To have the rug pulled from under us after enjoying a few months of wedded bliss would be too much for the heart to bear. - Jason Menayan
Congrats to all the new couples, with wishes for many happy years. - Chris Baskind
In my home town in Austria, we had a case of a black man and a white woman wanting to marry, they ended up being refused by the marriage registrar. Of course, we also haven't got gay marriage legalized here. The US have problems, but in some cases, law is way more progressive than in Europe. - sebmos
@Phil: LOL! This has certainly been a momentous (and good) development. But it would be nice to see these kinds of decisions made through the legislative process. The fact that this decided in the courts will make the outcome more contentious than it would have been had the population been forced to have a legitimate conversation about the issue. The more bigoted corners of our society now have a victim card to play - and play it they shall... - Forrest Cox
@Forrest: The genius of our system of government lies in its checks and balances. In particular, an unfettered democracy would be subject to the problem of the "tyranny of the majority". Fortunately this is offset by our Constitution and our courts, whose job is to ensure that individual rights are not trampled on, no matter how unpopular that individual may be, for whatever reason. Any bigots playing the victim card are ignorant of basic civics. - Ruchira S. Datta
@Ruchira I agree. The Cali court is playing exactly its Constitutional role, and it's essentially a conservative and Federalist approach to reconciling changing societal mores and the demands of a minority. As I've commented elsewhere, we are winning this argument, and we're doing it state by state, rather than through a Federal fiat, which simply is not feasible at this time. All good things... - Rick Powell
The color is unexpected, as though the pig is wearing a pink vest. - niniane
I had a pot belly pig as a pet for a while as a child, pigs don't actually like to be dirty, however they only have sweat glands on their snout and feet so they need to keep their bodies somewhat wet in order to stay cool. If given the choice a pig would prefer a clean pool of water, however mud is more accessible and works quite well for them. That aside, I don't care if this is photoshopped - it is super cute! - Rachel L Fisher
cool，how long does it take?seems drawing a western girl more simplier than an Asian one. - kelvin
This took about 1.5 hours. It was easier because I was working from a black & white photograph. I find Caucasian faces easier to draw than Asian faces because the features tend to be more pronounced / less flat -- more shadows and highlights to work with. - Jess Lee
I've been pretending that I could learn to draw. Even dabbling at doodling. Your portrait reminds me that it takes talent which you obviously have in spades. Great job. - Seek Ground
New on ff. It’s funny but I’m following Jess. Who is she and why should I miss her? O wait, I follow niniane too? o hai, dis iz so random. A friend of niniane misses jess, and I don’t actually follow that person, but I can see that? - Zelnox
No, no, never. I have also never (ever) bumped into the CEO on the first week of a new job and said "I'm sorry, but are you who I think I am?" - Kevin Fox
No, but I think I recall accidentally calling one of my grade school teachers 'Mom' when she was nagging me about not having my assignment done. - April Buchheit
i end all my business calls with "i love you" - hunter walk
i think this is totally acceptable if the business partner agreed to give you money. Love is probably the right emotion there so why not express it. - peter
My old boss used to take calls from his fiance all the time, and in the space of a few cubes, we would have to hear all the lovey-dovey "sweetie" this and "honey" that. After one sucrose-infected call, I leaned over to our Director of Ops and said, "Must be a reseller". - Louis Gray
It's when your e-mail traffic starts to go to zero that you worry about your self-worth. I know some good mailing lists you can subscribe to. - Louis Gray
How do you tackle 330 emails per day in any meaningful way? (Meaningful as in: progressing towards a better solution than before interacting with a given email). - Philipp Lenssen
9 years ago when I started at TiVo, one of the selling points from my friend Kyrie over leaving SGI was a lot less daily mail. Ha! Your first few months on a job you'll always get less mail. Just you watch Kevin: In a couple of months you'll be getting 500 FriendFeed mails a day. - Stephen Mack
But... have your total RSS feed items gone up? What about the number of status updates on FriendFeed? There are trade-offs, I assume. - Louis Gray
Actually, my feed reading has gone down as well. I made a conscious effort a few months ago to pare down my feeds. I probably read half as many posts as I used to, but I still get about 80% of the content because I've reduced the number of redundant posts. - Kevin Fox
You could also try not using any feed reader at all. That's what I do (with the exception of blogoscoped.com/google/ and the helpful tips by readers who DO use feed readers) - Philipp Lenssen
Well, it turns out that if you chew your chocolate really well, you can actually burn more calories than you are consuming. Trust me. - Rich Bragg
I'm pretty skeptical of this. It doesn't say anything about possible changes in diet due to the increased self-esteem of thinking they are exercising all the time - Chris White
I was under the impression that purely psychological therapies having objective physical effects was already established, such as guided imagery and immune system cells. see http://www.breastcancer.org/tr... - Karl Rosaen
I'd be happy to subject the finding itself to skepticism, but is the distinction the critic makes about subjective/objective effects of placebos even coherent? Even if it was, aren't all the classic demonstrations of placebo curing of illnesses, which, you know, are examples of objective phenomena? - j1m
Yes, this is probably true. But I have no doubt that the mind/brain can influence the body's natural ability to fight sickness. I just think there are more variables in this scenerio. It's also kind of counter-productive if it incents people to eat twinkies and skip going to the gym as long as they "think healthy." - Chris White
niniane, just pay your friends to dupe you, Bulworth-style. - j1m
I suppose that political punditry is mostly entertainment, but where do you get accurate information/commentary? Newspapers? Political markets? - Jim Norris
I wonder what fraction of proposals are turned down? Some article was claiming that a large fraction of divorced men (much larger than divorced women) were surprised when she asked for a divorce. Which indicates that guys are clueless (big shocker there), which might indicate that guys might also propose to a girl who's actually about to dump him or at least not receptive to the proposal. On the other hand, when you're about to propose, it's not really the same "taking for granted" scenario that probably leads to most surprise divorces. - ⓞnor
i wonder what other life decisions would be easier if facilitated by elephant. maybe if companies would deliver job offers by elephant recipients would be more inclined to take them. - Larry Greenfield
maybe receiving a pink slip via elephant would soften the blow? - ƃuɐʞ
I hear friendfeed job offers are delivered by elephant. - j1m
Elephants are her favorite animal too! Awwwwww :) This is 100 times better than the stupid iPhone proposal. - niniane
"This was -- is -- the most important moment in American history. The man who could have dispersed this feckless Congress and obtained for himself and his soldiers rewards worthy of their courage was renouncing absolute power. By this visible, incontrovertible act, Washington did more to affirm America's government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers." - Paul Buchheit
Wow, Washington kicked ass in so many ways. I was impressed reading another story about him before, where his soldiers wanted to defect and he convinced them to stay by revealing how he had gone half-blind in the service of his country. I think he almost cried then too. He seems to cry a lot. But hey, whatever works. - niniane
What has always fascinated me is how much he doubted himself, yet still was a remarkable leader (read 1776 if you haven't, good book). I always found him more "human" than many leaders of the past because of the amount of humility he showed in his correspondence. - Bret Taylor
"[Pownce] Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog." - j1m
Integer rounding should be a standard part of every beauty contest. - Paul Buchheit
She ended up taking the infamous blog post down (though it's still in Google's cache; [leah rounding]), but it's really quite bad. Another one for the can-blogging-hurt-you discussions... - ⓞnor
Jess could probably win the online beauty contest hands down, but it's hard for me to see how such a contest could conceivably help one's career. It seems even more fraught with potential problems than, say, blogging. - ƃuɐʞ
Dan, by that you mean everybody else also wondered if there was a better way to round floats than using strings, but they just had the good sense not to ask about it? - j1m
No, I don't mean anything in particular. I'm actually conflicted about whether to point and laugh, or think "there but for the grace of God", or reflect on the things I might consider myself good enough at to dispense sage advice about (as Leah does on programming careers) but actually suck miserably at. (Note to self: never give relationship advice again!) - ⓞnor
1. Jess doesn't need a MapReduce to win. 2. Dan, don't stop dispensing relationship advice! - niniane
dan, don't lose heart. there are people who always write good code but no one *always* gives good relationship advice. - ƃuɐʞ
Dan, it wouldn't have occurred to me to compare the 2, for one thing because you're not a marriage counselor. But I guess the real story here is that you consider yourself a sage advisor about relationships. - j1m
You're right, it's a bad analogy. (And what would the equivalently bad relationship advice be? To stick with someone abusive, because maybe they'll change?) Also: MapReduce is a *terrible* way to spam a web poll! - ⓞnor
It is! I wasn't serious about it, or that Jess would need to spam a web poll. - Frederick Akalin
Odd, Leah left that entry up until at least a few days ago. Maybe she got another surge of ridicule from this article? - Frederick Akalin
Yeah, I assume being mentioned on Valleywag finally pushed her over the edge. - ⓞnor
I now think she deserves respect for having tried and for having to live publically with the consequences. It can't be great to have so many posts ridiculing you via Alexa charts and code samples. At least she lived out loud instead of never trying. - niniane
More, or less, respect than someone who is a better programmer and/or whose company succeeded, but didn't blog about it much? - ⓞnor
Less respect for her skills, but potentially more respect for her self-esteem and perseverance (depending on how she is handling the ridicule). If she's locking herself in her room crying over it, then less respect for tenacity too, but more sympathy. - niniane
