A GThing Science Project

What's worse than pointlessly whiling away your life sitting at a red light in the middle of the night? Sitting at another one right after the first one finally turns green.

You sit there at the red light, looking ahead you can see every other light on the street is green. There are no other cars - it's the middle of the night. There are no cars waiting on the side streets for their turn to go, no pedestrians pushing buttons to activate cross walks. As soon as this light you're stuck at turns green, you're home free.

Only, you're not, because just as soon as your light turns green, the one at the very next block turns red. Rinse and repeat - stop and go traffic when you're the only one on the road, all night long until you finally arrive at your destination.

This experience could be equated to trying to brush your teeth while getting punched in the face every five seconds. Just as soon as you get started you have to stop, and it hurts every time.

Eisenhower, the guy who pioneered the first pope-mobile-like plexiglass bubble from which to be admired by his adoring fans as he was cruising around in his limousine, knew a thing or two about energy and transportation. He thought sitting at a red light in the middle of the night was a waste of energy. He hated red lights so much he made the interstate highway system, a place free from red lights where you can drive as fast as you want and never ever stop (as long as you keep it under 65, Dale.).

The city where I grew up, Denver, has a pretty good handle on things. The planners there seem to realize that stop lights are only necessary for part of the day and that when they are no necessary they can be flashing yellow on the main thoroughfare and red on the side streets. During the day, the lights are timed so that, if you drive the speed limit, you can hit all consecutively green lights.

Here in Utah it is the opposite. Lights run with long long cycles at 3am, and during the day the lights are timed to make you stop as many times as humanly possible. At least, that's what it seem like. I think the Salt Lake City planners wanted their city to be known as a fun place, but didn't quite get what a "red light district" was supposed to entail exactly.

Sometimes you will be sitting at an intersection where every light in every direction is red for minutes at a time. I don't know if there is some traffic control center where people are just messing with us, or if the damn things are malfunctioning. Neither thought is very comforting.

The problem is that here in Utah if you were to make an intersection flash yellow, people would not know what to do at all. It would be mass chaos. People would slam their breaks on, their heads exploding and their brains splattered all over the inside of their windshields. We still haven't figured out stop signs, surely blinking lights would be way too much.

Still, I think even this obstacle could be overcome with a few educational billboards (Utahns LOVE billboards) and generous applications of my horn.

So how bout it, Utah? Can we get some blinking yellow lights at night and some properly timed light sequences during the day? Then we can get to work on a proper red light district.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me a hundred time, we'll still keep giving you chances. 

Sony has a long history of doing wrong by their customers, the apologizing for it, then doing it again.  It's sad, really.  A lot of grew up in an era when Sony represented technology and awesomeness.  Sony was the Apple of the 80's, and the Walkman was their iPod. 

The sad thing is that since the Walkman, Sony has not managed to come up with anything really ground breaking or compelling.  They keep trying, but they keep failing - miserably.  Here's a history of Sony apologies and screw ups:

First there was betamax, which Sony invented.  It was a superior format to VHS in almost every way so it should not have been hard to get adoption.  But because Sony cares more about money and restrictive licensing than they do about costumers and actually being successful, it fell flat on its face.  If you had a betamax player, you were a sucker.

Then there was minidisc, my first real experience with Sony.  They had already apologized for how bad they miffed it with betamax and had promised to do better with minidisc.  I bought a minidisc player and even picked up a Yamaha MD8 multi-track data minidisc recorder (I dropped $1200 on it in high school).

It was sad that neither on the consumer side or on the pro (semi-pro, really) side of things Sony failed to deliver.  Their music software, required to use your minidisc player, was riddled with bugs and restrictive DRM.  They promised updates that never came, restricted licensing of their technology, and soon the format I had invested so much in was dead in the water, just like betamax.  I was the sucker.

So I vowed that I would never buy another Sony product again.  They just didn't seem to care about costumers, innovation, quality, or anything really, other than making tons of money.  They didn't seem to realize that if you do all those first things, the money will follow. 

About 10 years later I broke my Sony boycott to buy a Sony Reader.  Surprisingly, I had a great experience with it and enjoyed it very much.  Their software still sucked - really bad - but by this time there were 3rd party solutions that could do much better.  Overall, I thought the Reader was good - better even than the Kindle and other alternatives because of its openness.  You must really suck if Sony is doing it better than you.

After my good experience with the Reader I thought Sony had turned a new corner, so I slowly waded into their sea of products.  I bought a PS3 and received a PSP for Christmas. 

The PS3 is a pretty decent gaming machine, but falls short in other areas.  It tries to be a home media solution, but doesn't have wide format support or decent navigation abilities.  It's pretty weak, really.  Every update they come out with adds stupid features that encourage you to spend more money rather than addressing the most basic issues.

Speaking of updates, they just released one that completely removed a major feature from their systems.  They removed the option to install other OSes - one of the main reasons I bought a PS3 over the alternatives.  They simply removed it, no questions, no options.  If you were running another OS it was deleted and there was jack you could do about it.  Sony responded to criticism by saying "STFU and bend over, we don't care about you."

The update was worse for me.  I installed it and it physically bricked my entire system.  I can't even turn it on any more.  Apparently they used such crappy solder to put the thing together that it litterally melts itself to the point it doesn't work anymore.  This isn't even an isolated problem, either - it's completely widespread.  Sony doesn't care about this either - they'll just tell you to buy a new console or pay $250 to have it repaired.

I tried to get my PS3 repaired at first, but I realized that I don't even want it.  My Mac Mini is a vastly more capable media server for my TV, and I didn't even play games all that much on the PS3. 

There are lots of other problems I have had with Sony and their products, but for the sake of brevity I won't go into any more detail.  The bottom line is they don't give a damn about their costumers.  Suffice it to say that I will be re-instating my personal Sony boycott and will always recommend my friends and family away from Sony products. 

Here's a neat, bulleted list of things I'd rather do than buy another Sony product for as long as I live:

• Stick a red hot soldering iron in my eye
• Peal the skin off my entire head starting with my eyelid
• Get on a plane with a bunch of rapid terrorists
• Bite my fingernails off, one by one
• Pull out each one of my chest hairs with a rusty pair of pliers
• Sit on hot coals
• Be buried alive
• Buy a Microsoft product

I just sent the following letter to QWest. I'll let you know if I ever receive a response.

Today I received a flyer from Qwest stating that you were now offering fiber optic internet in my neighborhood with speeds up to 20mbps. Naturally, as a mouth breathing internet nerd I was ecstatic. I recently had to move out of my old neighborhood where I had 50/50mbps fiber optic and it was like living in sweet digital nirvana. Now I'm suffering with Comcrapst "16mpbs" - and I put that in quotes because they have some kind of different, slower, definition of 16mpbs than the rest of reality uses.

Anyway, I called up, credit card in hand to sign up for this new wonderland of digital goodness we call fiber. Turns out you guys were actually offering 40mbit connections in my area! This is like hearing someone you know won the lottery, and then finding out that person is actually you!

Unfortunately I found out the 40mbit connection costs some exorbitant amount of money - I have to sign over my first born and bring the Qwest gods the head of a rare goat only found on a specific mountain in the Himalayas or something. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention. Anyway, I can handle the 20mbit connection advertised on the flyer for $45/mo. I can handle $45 a month and no goats have to be hurt in the process.

What I found out next shocked me to my very core (jelly filled! mmmm!). The 20mbit connection actually costs $68/mo ... or $75/mo depending on which part of the conversation we're talking about. Every time I asked it seemed to get more expensive. To get the good deal for $45/mo I have to sign up for a phone line.

A phone line?!?! Really!?!?!? What year is this? Who has phone lines anymore? What am I, a cave man? It's like saying "Yea, you can get an internet connection from us but only if you purchase our sharpened stone for scrawling hunting stories on the walls of caves!" It's madness!

Why would you force me to bundle a new service that modern humans would want with something surely from the cro-magnon era that only grandmas and people in 3rd world countries use. And all of this AFTER your salesman tried to sell me cell phone service. Why would I want something that requires archaic copper wiring in my house when I could have something that works anywhere in the country for the same price (plus brain cancer, possibly, but I don't like living in the future!).

Oh, and remember that sweet, sweet nectar of the gods internet connection I told you I had that was 50/50mbit fiber? Well, it was awesome, and it was only $50/mo (no lie). That's like 3x cheaper than yours and I don't have to find a flight to the Himalayas.

So the point of all this is to say that I would love to have your faster Internet, but I can't convince my room mates to pay more for something they don't care about, and none of them even knew what a land line was. One of them said "a land line? Is that how dinosaurs hunted for prey or something?" I don't know, room mate guy, I don't know.

So, all I'm saying is, come up with a different bundle. Preferably something that bundles the internet service with something that people under 30 have at least vaguely heard of and might even want (like, I don't know, TV service or nightly pizza delivery or something). Then, I would love to suckle and the sweet digital teet of Qwest high speed fiber optic internets.

Sometimes I hear people complaining about how De Beers or someone has a world monopoly on diamonds and how horrible it is. "Diamonds are actually quite common," they say, "if the price wasn't artificially inflated they would be so cheap!"

Maybe that's true, but here's my point: who cares?

So pretend someone breaks up the De Beers cartel and floods the country with cheap diamonds. Kids are getting free diamonds in their cereal boxes and now all those fake rolexes are coming with real diamonds instead of fake plastic ones. So what are you going to do? Now that diamonds are cheap you're going to buy up a bunch and diamond stud your tennis shoes?

The reason I don't care about how much diamonds are is because they're stupid and useless. It's like if someone had a world monopoly on dog crap. The fact that they have a monopoly doesn't make me suddenly care about the availability of canine excrement.

The only reason I will ever ever buy a diamond is if (heaven forbid) I marry someone someday. But why do we give women diamonds when we get engaged? It's to show that we're willing to spend a bunch of money on useless crap for them. "Hey look how much I love you, I just spent two grand on the most worthless thing ever! But I did it for YOU!" Dog crap could have the same effect except it doesn't look pretty and you wouldn't want to put it on your finger unless you're some kind of sicko (in which case congratulations finding someone willing to marry you.)

So if the price of diamonds suddenly came down, the only effect it would have is making girls think you're cheap if you buy them one. They would just want some other stupid pointless crap instead. So you've solved the problem of diamonds being so expensive, but you've really just created a new problem - not to mention the fact that there was never really a problem to begin with so really you just reacted to nothing and ended up getting yourself in a mess.

Not as if you could single handedly control the price of diamonds, but I think you get my point.

So the fact that diamonds are pointless and stupid AND expensive is fine. If a girl wants some pointless expensive crap that's fine - I'm sure she'll have to endure lots of stupid pointless crap that a guy wants to (big screen TVs and big trucks and whatnot). The point is "show me how much you love me by how much money you're willing to flush down the toilet while simultaneously giving me a pointless thing that is shiny and I can show off my friends." Fine. A diamond serves thats purpose perfectly and it wouldn't be able to if it cost what it was actually worth.

I recently had the pleasure of placing an order through PrintPlace.com. If by "pleasure" you mean "hassle" and by "placing an order" you mean "trying to place an order several times but failing." For some reason they really just didn't want to take my money. After a week of dealing with their incompetent staff I just went somewhere else.

I stuck it out for A WEEK which is more then I'd imagine anyone else would give them to get their crap together.

Today I got an email from them. "Thank you for your recent order! Please fill out this survey!"

Don't mind if I do! Here's what I wrote when it asked me why I wouldn't be recommending PrintPlace to my friends:

There are a few reasons I am not likely to recommend printplace to a friend:

Your site sucks in Safari. It's very buggy and kept deleting my orders before I could pay for them. You're a print shop that works with graphic designers. Surely a healthy number of those designers have Macs and Safari? Have you checked your analytics lately? I did start using Firefox but one of your reps told me at one point only Internet Explorer worked well. Ouch!

Your site completely broke for like an hour on my 5th attempt to process my order. I accidently hit the "submit coupon code" button instead of submit order. It's at the bottom of all the other options on the order form so I just hit it while half looking thinking it was the submit order button. It actually took down your entire order processing capability. Pretty embarrassing for you guys. You're running on ASP .NET though, so it's no wonder.

It is not easy to enter all the orders either because there is no quantity option. For example, I can't just say 1000 business cards with these settings x4. There is also no way to combine shipping so I have to pay a separate shipping fee for each set of business cards. Maybe you should get passionate about learning how to use boxes?

I called your customer support because I couldn't process my order. I kept getting an AVS mismatch despite verifying my address and being able to use the same card with the same address on several other sites. Support sent me some forms to fill out and told me I would get a call back. By the next week I gave up on hearing from anybody and went and tried to process the order again. I was met with yet another brilliant AVS mismatch.

So the second guy I talked to - Issac I think his name was. Said he would contact billing and call the bank and try to put the order through. He did finally call me back the next afternoon and said they couldn't put the order through because the bank would not confirm or deny that our address was correct (what?!?).

I've done Internet retail so I know the risks of overriding an AVS mismatch and just running the card (which you can do, you know). Two seconds of logic looking at my situation would reveal that I was ordering personalized business cards with the name and address of the card holder on them. So of all the things you could do with a stolen CC#, why in pluperfect hell would you go order business cards for the card holder? Of course it was a legit order!

This is why I like dealing with PEOPLE WITH BRAINS and not PROCEDURES.

So throughout this time I had to keep recreating my order every time, or tell the order to someone over the phone or whatever. It still wouldn't save my cart even though I was using Firefox now and everyone assured me that's what the problem was. I guess maybe I should go buy a Windows computer so I can use your website next time.

After about a week of trying to place an order through you guys for 4000 business cards, I gave up and went over to gotprint.com who not only beat your price (on better paper with combined shipping!) but gladly excepted the money I was trying to give them without any problems. I couldn't force feed you guys money if I wanted to.

So for a place that is "passionate about printing", it might do you some good to get passionate about accepting your customer's money and making sure your website doesn't suck so bad.

So I filled out their little survey and hit submit. Guess what I saw:

Well I'm not surprised. Anyway, if you need to exchange money for goods and printing services, check out gotprint.com. They were cheaper and appear to offer a superior product. I don't know if they have retarded people working for them or not because I never had to call them and find out!

"Net Neutrality" is a term describing the policy of treating all traffic as equal on the Internet (basically). This means that if your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is net neutral, they will deliver all websites to you on the same connection at the same speed. You can get Joe Blow's blog and Microsoft's website using the same connection.

Some people, including a lot of ISP's don't like this idea. They want to give everyone crappy access and make corporations and individuals pay for the right to have their content delivered on "premium" lines. This benefits exactly nobody - except the ISPs who can now give you crappy service and make a bunch of money from people willing to pay to make it better. The only thing that will change for you and I is that most of the Internet will become really, really slow.

Let's compare this to radio. As we all know, radio today is super awesome and unique everywhere you go. You hear the best content no matter what city you're in. You can listen to the same clear channel station with the same stupid jingle in Denver, Salt Lake, Atlanta, New York, or anywhere else you go. Essentially the whole operation is controlled by one group and watered down for the least common denominator.

If Joe Blow wants to start a radio station, he will need to apply for a frequency, pay millions of dollars for licensing, wait several years, cut through red tape for several more years, then probably get sued for some insignificant thing by clear channel or someone else in an effort to maintain their control over the airwaves. The radio is controlled by corporate interests because they're the only ones who can afford to buy the frequencies from the government. It is not used as a medium for benefitting mankind in any way, it is used to line someone's pocketbook.

Who's fault is it? You could say it is the FCC's fault for making it so difficult for people to participate in something that should belong to them. It's their fault for bending to the will of corporations who would seek to take away our natural resources (yes, radio is a natural resource) for their own benefit.

In comparing radio to the Internet, we can see the the Internet now is still in its youngest days. It is almost like the wild west where just about anything goes. People can speak freely about anything and are given the same voice as anyone else.

I found it interesting to see in the last election the dichotomy between opinions on the Internet and opinions expressed by the mainstream media. The mainstream media would only talk about certain candidates while the Internet, where people's voices can be heard, talked about everyone. Where mainstream polls put people like Ron Paul so low they weren't even worth mentioning, Internet polls showed him with support as high as 80% of people polled.

Of course the Internet is still only used by some, and as a resource for political and world news pales in comparison with mainstream media. However, the tables will someday turn when the generation now in elementary schools is running the country, the Internet will be as or more important than what we see on TV. It is the one opportunity we have to take back the flow of information from the corporations and give it back to the people. It absolutely must be protected!

So how will a tiered internet (the opposite of net neutrality) hurt us? It will turn the Internet into another radio. It will set the barrier to entry so high that only the corporations and people in control will be able to use it to its full potential. The rest of us will become noise in the background, little 10 foot FM transmitters capable only of transmitting our MP3 players to our car stereos. The power of the Internet as a truly democratic platform will be squelched and the status quo will be maintained.

Imagine a world where a candidate like Ron Paul can have equal press simply because he has the support of the people. Where we can hear the news that we really care about instead of the latest Brittany Spears updates. This is the world that the Internet makes possible and its the world that a lot of people are very interested in taking away.

Disclaimer: This article isn't about Ron Paul, I only use him as an example of an idea that is very popular but just so happens to never get mentioned by the mainstream media.

I can't believe how bad Windows 7 is. Sorry Microsoft, I felt sorry for you when you came out with that horrible assault on intelligence you called Vista, but Windows 7 has shown me that this was not a simple mistake or wayward design, but a deep rooted problem that will never be purged from your operating system until it epically fails in a burning pile of rubble and won't be worth fixing anyway.

Windows is a huge compulsive failure machine.

Fire everyone that has ever worked for you and hire a team of retarded orangutans to throw their feces at a wall. Whatever they come up with will be better than the crap you are working on over there in Redmond.

I wanted to take some screenshots of some of the most idiotic configuration screens I've ever seen this side of a circa 1980 VCR, but I am having trouble even going into the half of my house that contains my Windows 7 machine without going into fits of compulsive vomiting and brain hemorrhaging. I will describe them to you instead.

It used to be that when you opened up the control panel and clicked on say, the network preferences, you would be presented with a window allowing you to configure your network. For example, you could see what network adapters you have in your computer and the status of each of them. This window provided a good starting off point for making changes or troubleshooting (something you spend a LOT of time doing with Windows in general).

This window has been replaced by a picture of your computer with a line drawn over and connecting to "The Internet." Yes, Microsoft believes you are a caveman who has just climbed out of the primordial ooze and is now pawing at this wondrous light box full of so many fascinating images and blinking lights. They are communicating with us in simple shapes. I can imagine Microsoft engineers themselves starring at this screen scratching their heads, trying to keep their own minds from exploding as they strain themselves to whole new planes of brain horsepower to grasp the concept of a computer being connected to the Internet.

The "network and sharing center" as they call it reminds me of so many images scrawled by pre-humans on ancient cave walls. I don't know whether to smack somebody or pat them on the back and say "good job, buddy" before putting them on the short bus.

Want to find that familiar "Network Connections" window? Don't worry because when you click on this hieroglyphic image you are taken to a Finder window showing the contents of your computer. Awesome! Thanks guys, that's exactly why I opened the network preferences, so I could perform a task that has absolutely nothing to do with networking! If you want the window that is actually useful, you have to remember the exact name of it from Windows XP, hope it's the same in Windows 7, and search for it with the little search box.

Microsoft has targeted the absolute lowest common denominator of the human race with their design. Fortunately, their Windows design team is already full of these people. Every simple task that any mouth breathing mucktard should already know how to do is explained in minute detail with many many shiny windows and information boxes, but once you want to do anything worthwhile you have to sit there and search and search and search until you can find the hidden preference pane somewhere. I'm sorry, Microsoft, I don't understand babytalk.

It won't matter if anyone from Microsoft ever reads this. Even if they take it to heart. They'll read it, send it around as a memo, have meetings upon meetings and project my rant onto their boardroom walls. After years of discussion about how to address these problems they will finally make a breakthrough - an advanced concept - "the next level of computing!" they'll say. We will get a talking paperclip or some stupid animated guy named "Microsoft Bob" to talk us through how to set up a samba share or whatever the task may be. Dozens of new Wizards will be made to guide me through the process.

Here's a car analogy, because everyone loves those:

"Hi, I'm Clippy, I've noticed that you're sitting in the driver seat of your car! This probably means you want to drive it! Is that right? Yes, No, or Cancel?"

"Great, you've decided to drive your car! The first thing you will need to do is turn it on. Located in the glove compartment you will find a big shiny red button that says 'START!' Press this button while simultaneously slamming your head against the trunk of the car!"

"Great! Now that you have you car started, you probably want to accelerate it! Now is a great time to look at the 18 pedals located at your feet. I will now explain what each pedal does one by one. When you're ready to continue, go lock yourself in the trunk of the car and start howling life a Wolf!"

"I see you're accelerating at dangerous speeds towards a playground full of children. Would you like to use the brake? Microsoft car needs to install new software to do this - please insert "Microsoft Car Ultimate Super Premium Plus Plus Extravaganza Extra Extra Optional Super Expensive Premium Upgrade Disc!!1! into the CD player and slam your head against the horn to continue!"

I'd really like to keep going, but I have an appointment to slit my wrists and slowly bleed out onto the keyboard of my computer in an attempted suicide offering to Windows 7 . If it finds my offering favorable, it might let me set up a shared network folder!

In all seriousness, Windows 7 is the worst operating system that has ever been made ever. I hate it more than mornings. I hate it more than the RIAA. I hate it more than genocide. I hate it with such a deep seething hatred that not even a life of professional counseling will begin to tap into the depths of my hate for Windows 7.

Microsoft has proven that they are really good at two things: Turning your computer into crap, and buying other people's awesome stuff and turning it into crap too.

I came up with a new joke today:

Q. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to make a decent operating system?

A. It's a trick question, idiot! No amount of engineers or money from Microsoft could ever result in a decent operating system. In fact, for every dollar thrown into the furnace they call Windows, the suck factor goes up exponentially.

It's not a very funny joke, but at least it's true. The alternate ending is to to pull out a gun and shoot yourself in the head. It's optional depending on your commitment to hating useless crap.

Part of me is actually glad that Windows 7 sucks so bad. Microsoft's usual deal is to release one decent operating system every other major release. Seriously:

MSDOS: Awesome

Windows 1.0: WTF?

Windows 3.1: Awesome

Windows 95: WTF?

Windows 98: Not too shabby

Windows ME: ZOMG WTFZOR??!!1?!?

Windows XP: Surprisingly good

Windows Vista: ALERT BLOODRED ZOMG HOLY WTFZOR EPIC FAIL

Windows 7: Awwwww.... hey there little guy! Are you lost?

Microsoft is already losing consumer confidence and market-share faster than a 2 dollar hooker aborts babies. The reason I'm glad is that people are finally recognizing that they don't have to deal with crap to use a computer. Microsoft is going down big time. Vista was the beginning, and Windows 7 is the nail in the coffin.

The more you tighten your grip on the computer world, the more market share will slip through your fingers.

More and more people will flee Microsoft like rats from a sinking ship. It will be beautiful. That brings me to my favorite part:

Dealing with someone who is just coming off Windows (yes, I'm speaking of it as if it were an illicit drug) is an amazing thing to watch. They stare at the desktop of OS X and you can see all the little gears turning inside their head. "Okay, I want to connect to the Internet," you can almost hear them thinking, "if I was a computer, what would be the most convoluted way to make this happen?" They begin furiously clicking on preference panes and Apple logos going from screen to screen. Then you do the big reveal: "Look, you're already connected to the Internet!"

They gasp in unbelief; "But I didn't tell the computer if I was at my home or at my office! I didn't set up my intranet preferences! I didn't configure my 3 software firewalls to allow connections to the web browser! Where are al the warnings and questions?" It's a beautiful thing to get to be the one to say "forget everything Microsoft taught you about using a computer. From now on just do what seems intuitive and it will work 90% of the time." A tear comes to their eye and they grab you in an embrace and whisper "I never knew... All these years I..."

"It's okay. Everything is okay now."

Dear Microsoft fanboys: Don't bother leaving comments. I will only give you a big smile, pat you on your head, and tell you how cute you are. Don't miss the shortbus!

It is amazing to me how many people misunderstand national doctrines like the first amendment and the separation of church and state.

Roseanne bar (who actually used to be a Mormon herself, believe it or not) recently posted on her blog:

we citizens gay and straight pay for the police and the firemen that protect the property of the mormon church, which spans entire blocks of los angeles and orange county. let's stop doing this until this backward hateful racist and homophobic organization which allows child and plural marriage organization called the mormon church steps up and becomes american, and starts to respect the laws of freedom that this country was based on!!! the church is going down over prop 8..this is my prophecy!!! [sic]

Ignoring for a moment her poor writing skills (I would think her shift key is broken except she does sprinkle capital letters every once in a while throughout her blog) and misunderstanding of the LDS church, let's focus on her claim that the church is not respecting the "laws of freedom that this country was based on." I saw this claim echoed elsewhere, such as on Daily Kos:

It seems the LDS does [sic] not understand there is a separation between church and state (and they well should given their history).

Does anyone really believe that an organization should not have a right to weigh in on a political position simply because they have tax exempt status as a faith-based organization? The first amendment is granted to all Americans and protects either side of the debate. In this case, both sides felt very strongly that they were in the right and that the other side wanted to trample on their rights.

Should we limit free speech based on how offensive some people might find it? While Hollywood and the media in general push more and more increasingly perverse material, they yell at others whose political ideas differ from theirs and claim that their opinions are offensive.

Maybe they are offensive, but a country which would silence people who come in strongly on one side of a controversial issue may not have allowed the discussion on gay marriage in the first place.

Let me say it again: such a place may not have allowed arguments in favor of gay marriage to begin with.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people whose opinions we despise, then we do not believe in the freedom of expression.

The people of California already made their voices heard on this subject and said that they did not want gay marriage in their state. Then, four judges decided that they were smarter than the people and that they should allow gay marriage after all. The will of four people outweighed the majority of the entire state of California.

Nobody can claim gay marriage was intended as a guarantee under California's constitution. It wasn't written that way and it had never even been a serious question until recent history!

So four judges usurp control of California law. This is not a democracy. A democracy is a place where majority rules. A place where minority rules is called an Oligarchy. It is counter to everything this country was founded on. If you want a place where minority rules, you would do better in some other country. To reverse the decision of California's Oligarchy will require a democratic process. Seems a bit unfair, right?

Now we have people picketing outside of places of worship in California because they supported proposition 8. The fact that this is their right does not erase the fact that they appear to be completely blind to their own hypocrisy. They are crying for investigations into the tax exempt status of the LDS church while ignoring the many faith based organizations that supported their side of the argument.

The protestors want their cake and to eat it too - they say any faith based organizations that supported prop 8 should have their tax exempt statuses stripped while nobody complained when they were getting money from churches on the other side of the fence.

If you don't believe me, look at these tons of churches listed as supporting opposition to proposition 8 on the noonprop8.com website.

So I guess a church is only acting illegally if their opinion isn't the same as mine?

This is nothing short of a direct and disgusting abuse of speech rights. You cannot enjoy the umbrella of the first amendment while denying it to others. Anyone who reads the first amendment and thinks it should not apply to faith based organizations needs to learn how to read. Imagine where we'd be if the government were to step in and start telling church leaders of any religion what they can and can't preach to their people. We fought wars over this. It's not a complicated thing.

These protestors want religion out of public discourse. They want separation of faith from influencing state matters. Yet they want the state to come in and dictate what they're allowed to believe in. It's really despicable when you think about it. A perversion imagined by those attacking the very thing that allows them to sit in luxury and attack things.

Think about this: should state employees be entitled to religious opinions when the state is paying their wage? Under the protestors inane re-imagining of the separation of church and state doctrine, the answer seems to be no.

Please, before commenting remember that this article is not about the rights and wrongs of gay marriage. It is about the horrible and hypocritical way in which gay marriage's supporters have gone about promoting it.

The form of energy we use to get from A to B is not the problem. Whether it's electric, internal combustion, nuclear powered, or peddle cars, we're missing the point. Using electric cars is is like treating skin cancer with a band aid.

The real problem is how we design our cities.

Ever since auto manufacturer's decided that everyone needs to have a car, and that they need to drive those cars everywhere, cities have been designed around the concept. Literally everything is deigned with only the slightest thought of where people will walk.

Go to your local mall. Try walking from the street, through the parking lot, into the mall. There probably isn't any place designed for you to walk. You're walking where the cars go, and battling them for space as you make your journey.

We gave our entire country to the auto industry, and now we're dependent on oil, pollute in excessive amounts, and design our cities so that they only way to get around is to own a car.

It didn't used to be like this. Here's a graph showing historical per-capita vehicle ownership.

Compare that graph with this one of obesity rates from 1960 to 2000:

I'm not saying that driving cars is making us fat, but I am saying that people used to walk a lot more. It used to be okay to walk two blocks to go to the corner store, but now we don't give hoping in the car a second thought.

Think about it - which of these two places would you rather live?

One place has lasting value, one place does not.

I saw an old photograph of downtown Provo and was surprised to see trolley tracks right down Center Street. Salt Lake City used to have one of the most impressive public transit systems in the country. Then the car came and made it all unnecessary. Now we all get to stay in our own little air-conditioned bubble as we move about the city.

So the solution for our energy crisis is not to come up with new innovative ways of powering a car (although that's okay too), it's to start designing our cities like they used to be designed. Remove our dependence on cars and the energy crisis solves itself.

Think of the effect that this would have not only on energy, but on pollution, obesity, social interaction, and an overall sense of community? This is the way the world should be.

One of the most awesome things about Netflix is that you are allowed to have User Profiles. In my case, that means my room mate Dean can "give" me one of the three slots he has available for renting movies. I have my own account, ratings, profile, friends, etc.

Netflix just announced they will be removing this feature. Not only are they removing it, but they're deleting my profile too. All the ratings I have taken considerable time to make will be deleted. My queue will disappear. They actually suggested printing out my queue and re-entering all the movies into the master account. Wow, really? Netflicks couldn't even be bothered with the hours-long project of creating a migration tool.

"Please remember that suggestion emails are not sent to Netflix Customer Service"