Months before the first ads would run on Proposition 8, San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer reached out to a group he knew well, Mormons.

The June letter from Niederauer drew in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and proved to be a critical move in building a multi-religious coalition.

But it started long before that, note the KofC contribution on Jan 30, 2008. (From the S.F. Chronicle list of contributors for and against Prop 8 )

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How dare they make us pay for Windows, they squeal. Users of bootleg versions of Windows in China are now getting the Black Screen of Death and a warning to make their copy legal.

Same thing happened to me a few years back. One of my computers had, um, a copy of XP that must have fallen off the back of a truck or something. After a while, it told me to make it legal or suffer the consequences. The price was quite reasonable. Which is what Microsoft is doing in China now too, offering low-cost upgrades.

“China’s not really very important to our business right now,” Steve [Ballmer] said in Australia last week. “I’d like it to be but it’s not because of the high rate of piracy of intellectual property. We need some IP reform in China for it to be important to our financial results.”

I only have one piece of cracked software now, a text editor that costs $19.95, a price I would happily pay but their website is gone and thus there’s no way to register it. So I googled for a registration code - and found one on a pirate site.

Whenever possible, I use open source. WordPress. The GIMP image editor. OpenOffice. There’s lots of great open source software out there. But with commercial software, it’s just easier to pay for it rather than run the risk of having it stop working. And it’s the right thing to do.

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Treehugger details seven electric motorcycles including the awesome Killacycle which is already the fastest electric vehicle on the planet.

That’s Eva Håkansson with the Killacycle. She’s a -

Hardcore “EV geek” with a green heart and passion for power and speed.

Owner of the electric motorcycle ElectroCat and part of the KillaCycle racing team.

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The states are sized to match their population, not acreage.

On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Map by Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, who has more maps.

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Deutsche Bank: GM stock will go to zero. Yes, zero. Regardless of whether there is a bailout.

AIG gets bailed out again. Or is this just more plundering?

The case for Larry Summers. He Gets Stuff Done and is extremely smart.

Two trillion in mystery loans by the Fed. Bloomberg sues to learn recipients.

Circuit City files for bk. This is the same company that fired its top sales people in a shoot-self-in-foot attempt to save money. IOW. Too stupid to live.

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These new cells are just as efficient as the rigid ones, and take less silicon to manufacture, something which could ultimately drop costs.

More from ScienCentral

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The Constitution requires separation of Church and State. Until we distinguish between the religious sacrament of marriage, which the State has no place regulating or even recognizing, and the social contract of marriage, which the State has every right to regulate, this issue will never be resolved.

Any religion has the right to not allow certain people to marry within its ceremonies. But that does not allow them to say that their beliefs must be imposed upon the civil marriage ceremony recognized by the state. Civil and religious marriage are entirely different institutions.

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This is precisely what the country needs. Renewable energy creating new jobs.

In the Rust Belt town of Newton, Iowa, the recently closed Maytag plant is now being used to build concrete towers for wind turbines. Another factory is building the massive turbine blades.

Jobs are coming back. Iowa has been called the “Saudi Arabia of wind energy.” In ten years, their economy could be booming. Let’s hope so. This is a double win. Renewable energy for the country and jobs in areas that desperately need them.

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