The "equal time" rule is that broadcast stations have to provide an equivalent opportunity for both sides of any issue to have access to the airwaves. If only one side is producing ads and buying time, then that's all that gets aired; the stations have no responsibility to make counterprogramming all on their own.

Precisely. In order to show the ads, someone has to pay for them.

And it could be that in your market, most of the people are already overwhelmingly against it, so the 'pro' people feel the need for heavier campaigning.

I don't know if it makes you feel better, but I have seen primarily No on Prop 8 adverts -- and the No campaign has raised a good deal more money than the Yes campaign.

Maybe I just need to start watching DIFFERENT CHANNELS.

Well, I saw your post the other day, and you already have abandoned all the good television. ;)

The bigger question is, howcome when we have a Democrat and a Republican are aired, third parties aren't a mandatory addition? The Democrats always ask "THIS is for the greater good" and the Republicans always respond "THAT is for the greater good" but under the rules as they exist, nobody has to propose "the greater good isn't what's important"?

Seems like a scam to me, saying that there are only two sides to every issue.

There was a lawsuit over that. They lost.

What toob said. They wanted to call it the "Defense of Marriage" act or some such, but Jerry Brown, currently California's Attorney General, brought it before the state Supreme Court and moved that the title describe the contents.

Not that anyone pays attention to the NAMES of these bills, really: everyone just calls it "Proposition 8".

Aw,skip it. Humans are still goofy, stupid, smelly primates and that won't change anytime soon so why do I bother to wonder? :p

If you look at the past several decades and the progress that civil rights in general have made, I see proof that people can change for the better. This is just one more fight that we can win with enough time and effort.

...

And if nothing else, the old fogeys who still cling to such outdated, outmoded ideas on what makes a person 'normal' are going to die off eventually. :)

Here's to victory through entropy.

I thought entropy was the thermodynamic rule that basically says you always lose?

That's an interesting point, hehe, because . . . well, OK, my wife has done research into dark energy and the cosmological constant. The idea that our universe is closed is under *deep* scrutiny. What it sorta looks like is that energy - a lot of energy - is being added to our universe constantly and it's getting bigger over time. The bigger our universe gets the faster energy gets added to it. Many physicists are thinking that the end of our universe will come not in heat death but a "big rip" where dark energy will break all the bonds - starting at the weaker forces like gravity but eventually destroying even the strong force. So, the very premise that "entropy always increases" is sorta wobbling even as we speak.

And, of course, even inside traditional thermo, our local system is far from closed. *points to Mr. Sun* The earth is a quite open system.

The universe could be open but also a compact manifold. That means the universe is gonna keep getting bigger but it will never be infinite.

Hey, do you know a lot about this kind of stuff too? I've been wondering... if the universe is expanding that creates a horizon, yes? Well all horizons emit energy, whether it is a frame of reference that is linearly accelerating, or the event horizon of a black hole. What if the boundary of our universe is emitting energy towards us? By boundary I mean that region of space that's accelerating in such a manner that no light could cross it.

My wife is the physicist, hehe, and she's not even working in the field anymore. I couldn't begin to answer the question if the universe has a "horizon" (and I think no one else can conclusively answer the question, either ). I was just sayin', y'know, that the oft-quoted second law of thermodynamics might be, well, wrong (or, more precisely, incomplete and not applicable as was suggested).

Right but she'd understand something like me saying "there's a sphere beyond which we could know nothing about the universe" and "that horizon is spewing energy towards us because of the Unruh effect".

Well, I think that you're using the term horizon, in this sense, wrong. The universe's horizon isn't a boundary, but the ultimate limits of perception. As you said, we just don't know anything beyond it - but that doesn't imply the existence of a physical boundary as being a statement about the limitations of our senses.

Actually there is a horizon of the universe beyond which light can not cross because the rapidly expanding nature of the universe means that it's moving away from us faster than the speed of light.

Oh, really? Would you care to demonstrate that? Offer some shred of proof that it exists?

I will tell you why I'm sorta skeptical here. When someone asks my wife what she does for a living and she says "mathematical physicist" there are two general reactions. The first and more common is for people to place what she does on this pedestal and veer away from the subject entirely. The second response is for people to start to assert that their favorite wild hypotheses are absolute fact and begin the discussion from that ground. My own education is epistemology and history of science, so this is absolutely fascinating to me how people will take abstruse cosmological arguments, simplify them to the point of meaninglessness and then project some pet hypothesis they have - and then refuse to acknowledge that the basis of their reasoning is an extremely controversial and unproven scientific theory whose truth value is quite nominal. I think that's what's going on here.

For instance, I think you're referring to the particle horizon of the observable universe or the event horizon of the universe. But there's a lot we don't know about the actual shape of the universe much less the non-observable entities into which it may or may not be expanding into, where that expansion comes from, where it's going, etc. To speak of this unobservable particle or event horizon as having specific characteristics is simply wild speculation. I mean, y'know, wilder than the wild speculation about the universe's event horizon, shape and destiny.

So, in my opinion, you're not asking a scientific question, but seem more interested in gaining validation for your speculation from a scientist.

For the record, I actually forwarded your question - verbatim - to my wife. She said, "I don't know enough to begin to answer that question." Like I said, she doesn't actually work in the cosmology field (if you want to know about double-diffusive convection and salt fingers in astronomical studies, she might be able to give a better answer, hehe), though she has written a computer simulation of galactic supercluster expansion taking into account dark energy. That's the extent of her work in the field. She has never worked to answer the question of "what is dark energy?" though I *do* know that she believes that no-one knows the causes of the increase in the rate of galactic expansion.

On the other hand, perhaps you've got a unique insight into a thorny question. You should write up a paper about it. ;)

I can try. Unfortunately I don't know enough about physics to actually put this knowledge to a test. All I can do, at this point, is speculate.

Actually I do know that Unruh Radiation occurs whenever there is a horizon, and in a black hole it is called Bekenstein-Hawking Radiation. It has been explained to me that if you are constantly accelerating then some events will never interact with you. There is a surface beyond which light from those events cannot interact, and this creates the observation of thermal radiation.

What I'm saying is that if expansion creates an actual horizon (which it should if cosmic acceleration causes light from other parts of the universe to then be unable to reach us due to faster-than-light velocity differences) there should be black-body radiation coming from that horizon.

Oh, and maybe I will just write a paper on it. Who knows? Maybe that cosmic microwave background radiation will turn out to be just this black-body radiation. It could even be the source of global warming! :P

"Chaos will always triumph over Order. It is the way of things."
-- Hexadecimal, ReBoot season three

Alphanumeric!

Here, here! Excellent point! I, myself, find myself time and again pointing out exactly how much progress has been made to dispel the idea that progress can't be made. The world is still deeply flawed, yes. There is much to do, yes. But it's so obviously a better place for so many people compared to fifty or a hundred (much less a thousand) years ago, and I think when we get despondent we should remember how far we've already come.