At some point, it will become efficient to start harvesting all the copper in long distance communication cables and switching to fiber optic.

As an American-born software engineer, I don't mind hiring talent from overseas; finding competent engineers is difficult even with a whole planet to search. I just want the competition for jobs to be fair, and that means that employers shouldn't be able to depend on people working for cheap as long as they can be tantalized with a green card that never appears, or working long hours because they're worried about being sent back overseas if they don't burn the candle at both ends, or creating job descriptions that have requirements that only a foreign-born employee can fulfill but aren't actually needed for the job. When the rights of H-1B employees improve, my job security improves.

By the time I got married, I'd been to a few strip clubs, and I didn't find the performances at any of them particularly enticing. By my request, my bachelor party simply involved drinking, food, and pleasant conversation at the private room at a local pub. If there had been an old-fashioned burlesque show in town, I would have asked my best man to make sure that was on the agenda, but they're all too rare these days.

This reminds me of biblical literalism: the notion that you can pick a clause out of the Bible and interpret it to mean what you want it to mean, shorn of both the historical context in which it was originally written and the centuries of learned discourse about it since. Given how many of Bush’s base are biblical literalists, this will probably be convincing to them.

...is that no one is taking a First Amendment view of the whole mess. Marriage is a religious institution, defined differently by different faiths. When the government creates rules that are compatible with those of some faiths and not those of others, that’s de facto establishment and unconstitutional, at least by my non-lawyerly perspective. But there’s a fine argument for government support for long-term pair bonds between adults, so why not just campaign to leave the M-word to the churches and civil unions to the government? Plenty of people will still scream about giving even the legal trappings of marriage to homosexuals, but taking the sacred M-word out of play might bring a significant number of people into the equality camp.

I'm a Californian; I got married in 2003 and took my wife's last name (moving my last name to middle name position, which worked well since I didn't have one previously). I had no problems with the paperwork, and most of the functionaries dealing with it didn't even react to it as anything unusual. The main issue has been explaining to people that my middle name and last name aren't hyphenated together.

Aren't our representatives supposed to be able to think on their feet? If they can't handle "Better Know a District", how can we expect them to cope with the more subtle absurdities in their actual jobs?

When an album is available on CD, I prefer to own it on CD so I can rip it to lossless format if I so choose. But some albums get prohibitively expensive to obtain when they go out of print, and I'd rather own MP3s than not have one at all. The back catalogue is pretty good; they have Entheogenic's first album, for instance, but not the soundtrack to Katamari Damacy (only available in Japan) or obscure William Orbit tunes that were never released on CD.

You might want to take a look at Model Mugging, a self-defense course for women: http://www.modelmugging.org/ A number of my friends speak well of it.

Right now, what is termed to be a “free market” is anything but. By not accounting for environmental externalities, many industries are receiving de facto subsidies. Bottle them up and make them account for everything going in and out, not just on the road but in the air and river and groundwater, and then you’ll have a free market.

I’m not factoring race or gender into my calculations for voting. I’d love to see the glass ceiling thoroughly shattered, carted off to the recycling center, and turned into martini glasses we can use to toast the death of sexism and racism. I think that we’re more likely to see that accomplished in a world of freedom, peace, and prosperity, all of which have declined markedly under Bush 43. The people that would come crawling out of the woodwork to hate Clinton will probably do the same for Obama because of rumors spread about Obama’s upbringing or eyebrow waggles over his middle name. Pick the candidate that you think is best able to lead us toward that world.

Even if I weren't paying off debt on my home equity line from work we had done on the back yard last year, I have this funny thing called a "mortgage" that goes away faster when I make payments toward its principal.