The Extreme Middle

Why is it always the extreme right or the extreme left making a fuss? What about the middle?

People only protest when they're upset. But they create this false sense that lots of people are upset and share their view because they're the only ones running around shouting. The majority of people in the middle just want to get on with their lives and know that everything requires compromise and that the people actually in charge will do their best to come up with good solutions.

I sometimes find it amusing to think about going to a protest with a sign along the lines of:
"I'm generally ok with everything."
"I'm angry that people are angry!"
"I trust my representative to make a good decision."
"None of this really matters."
"I'm just here cause I'm bored."

Rejecting the Cloud

Maybe this seems radical to you, and maybe it doesn't. To understand the reason the Cloud is a bad idea, we need to look at the short history of the web since the late 90's. The best example to look at is e-mail, but the same arguments apply to most Cloud applications. In those days, you got email access through POP and later IMAP. The service you were paying for was just a reliable email server and an account on it. Some free sites generated ad revenue by injecting text ads into the bottom of your emails (some still do). Since then, various web clients have come about. The main reason for the exodus to web clients was not that the web email clients had a better user-interface but because users could have the same user interface at any computer terminal. This is incredibly attractive to many users who do not care that much about their email client's features.

There are a number of problems with "Cloud" applications.

First, is that you cannot access the service unless you're online. You may argue that you're almost always online, but this is hardly true for mobile users. The fact is that a user should be able to access their data even when offline. This is the reason Google has their Gears project. There is another implication: you don't posses and own the data. You don't actually know if it's safe, being sold, or even managed securely. You just have to take it on faith that the service provider is doing their job. In some cases you may not even be able to extract your work or data in a usable way. What if the provider goes under, what if they are bought and the service is canceled? Not completely owning and possessing your work should be a major concern for users.

Second, the user gets an augmented version of the service. By this I mean that the service starts to be branded and enhanced by the provider. It gets integrated with the providers other features and starts delivering unique features. At first this seems like a good thing, a result of competition between providers. The reality is that this results in broken APIs and interoperability issues. These enhancements make it difficult for a user to leave a provider or to integrate a provider's features with their other work.

Third, the browser is a bad platform for these kinds of applications. The browser was never designed to be a host for dynamic applications of this complexity. Their are numerous development and usability issues in web development. Almost all web work involves hacks and workarounds to accommodate situations where browsers don't adhere to the web standards. The browser has been contorted to fill a role that your computer environment should have filled all along.

Defining Marriage

On a more serious note, one of the main issues surrounding gay marriage is a matter of semantics. Some people define marriage as strictly the union of a man and woman. Others interpret a broader meaning.

At first, this seems trivial, why not just broaden your interpretation? If a homosexual couple says: "We're married" then marriage has a broader meaning. The same word can be used in other scenarios as in the example from webster: "seafood marries with other flavors". So why restrict the usage of the legal world?

Well, there does have to be a legal definition somewhere. Otherwise, if the legal word and dictionary word were the same people could go around marrying inanimate objects and whatnot. So marriage does have to be defined somewhere in our legal framework and does need to specify who can marry whom.

So to appease those with a strict marriage definition legislatures created a sort of euphemism: "civil union". But if we have marriages and civil unions and both have the same legal consequences, what legal difference is there between them? The only difference I see is a label. And that label allows government official to discriminate. If both unions have the same legal purpose then they should be the same thing and labeled the same. Either we call unions between people marriages or civil unions.

Gay Marriage and the future of humanity

I've begun to wonder if humanity will ever change. Will we continue to argue over civil rights every time the world changes a little bit?

In the 20th century we argued over women's rights and racial rights. In the 21st we're arguing about homosexual's rights. I'll predict that in the later part of the 21st we'll argue about genetically modified human's rights, in the 22nd we will argue about robot rights and in the 23rd alien rights.

Now you're thinking I'm a crazy person who just wants hot alien robotic sex. Maybe...but I'm trying to make a point. And besides, the issue is not about sex. It's about love & marriage. Otherwise people would be up in arms about blow-up dolls.

In response to something like gay marriage, people against it often bring up the slippery slope argument. They ask what prevents someone from marrying their sister or a horse? Well, the first is actually genetically damaging. But if you weren't to have children one could argue for it, though it seems psychologically disturbing to me. The second (the horse) isn't sentient or able to communicate at the level necessary for meaningful love or marriage.

So, if the requirements for marriage are sentience and the ability to communicate then there's no reason people won't be marrying robots and aliens in the future. And there's no reason homosexuals shouldn't be able to marry now.