Pollution To A New High

[RANT]
A new form of pollution is about to start.

Imagine that you backpacked for tens of miles into the wilderness to get away from civilization, you pitch your tent next to a lake and there is not another human around for miles. After dinner you lay by the shore of the lake to watch the stars… and then civilization hits you in the head with a 2 by 4.

When you look up you see hundred of thousands of tiny dots moving across the sky, an alien invasion?

No, just mega corporations vying your money.

You all have probably have heard of Elon Musk’s Starlink that is launching 30,000 to 40,000 satellites?

Callers across U.S. report mysterious lights across night sky
By Associated Press Nationwide
May. 08, 2021


PHILADELPHIA — A string of lights that lobbed across the night sky in parts of the U.S. on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday had some people wondering whether a fleet of UFOs was coming, but it had others — mostly amateur stargazers and professional astronomers — lamenting the industrialization of space.

The train of lights was actually a series of relatively low-flying satellites launched by Elon Musk's SpaceX as part of its Starlink internet service earlier this week. Callers swamped TV stations from Texas to Wisconsin reporting the lights and musing about UFOs.

An email to a spokesman for SpaceX was not returned Saturday, but astronomy experts said the number of lights in quick succession and their distance from Earth made them easily identifiable as Starlink satellites for those who are used to seeing them.

“The way you can tell they are Starlink satellites is they are like a string of pearls, these lights travelling in the same basic orbit, one right after the other," said Dr. Richard Fienberg, press officer for the American Astronomical Society.

Fienberg said the satellites that are being launched in large groups called constellations string together when they orbit, especially right after launching. The strings get smaller as time goes on.

But he is not the only billionaire with dreams of mega wealth in the sky,

Elon Musk’s Starlink vs. Its Competitors: A Race for Broader Internet
Starlink started offering its internet system for the beta testers. But how are its competitors trying to achieve success?
Medium
By CP Ventures
February 9, 2021


We all have heard it. Elon Musk is preparing to broaden the internet connectivity using a “mesh” of satellites traveling on the low Earth orbit. He has been recently sending many satellites to space to achieve this as quickly as possible. They recently started offering beta testers a Starlink service terminal that includes an antenna and router for $499 and $99 a month internet service accessible from anywhere.

But many other companies are trying to achieve the same goal of increasing internet connectivity. They all somewhat differ from Starlink in how they launch satellites and satellite technologies but try to achieve a similar end goal.
[…]
Companies Targeting Low Earth Orbit
In this section, we will take a look at companies focusing on developing satellites for low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO is defined as an Earth-centric orbit with an altitude of fewer than 1200 miles.

Some of the other companies according to the Medium article are…

• Amazon Project Kuiper
• OneWeb
• Telesat
• European Union Consortium Led By Airbus
• Hongyun, Hongyan, and Galaxy Space
• Kepler Communications

Now lets suppose that only half of them actually do launch satellites, so 3 times 35,000 satellites, that is 105,000 satellites and add Starlink 35,000 satellites that is a total of 140,000 satellites!

Why?

Why create a new form of pollution?

It is pollution you know, it is light pollution, it is space pollution and it will be a nightmare for astronomers, it will be a nightmare for manned spaces flights trying to weave their way around all those satellites.

Why? Just so billionaires and mega corporations can line their pockets with more money.

Do we really need the internet that bad that we create a whole new form of pollution? The billions that it will cost to launch the satellites and keep replacing them (Because Newton is still right, what goes up must come down. In Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites don’t stay up, the earth atmosphere slows them down until they can’t stay in orbit and crash back to earth) could be used to wire up isolated villages instead.

From now on no matter how far out in the wilderness you go when you look up at the stars you will see instead a hundred thousand satellites.
[/RANT]

About Me

Nerd/Geek Alert

I wasn’t very good in school; it bored me to death, all that rote memorization… science was what I excelled at. I squeaked by and graduated from high school and went to UConn to study Electrical Engineering.

Well I flunked out of UConn, my one “A” class was an engineering class, all the other classes I got C’s and D’s. But in that one class we had to write a program in FORTRAN IV. In that I wrote my first program in FROTRAN and it was to solve 3 unknowns using Cramer's was in '69, I still have my FORTRAN coding sheets and my FORTRAN text book.

And that brings me to the article that I want to talk about…

The Secret History of Women in Coding
Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?
The New York Times Magazine
By Clive Thompson
February 13, 2019

As a teenager in Maryland in the 1950s, Mary Allen Wilkes had no plans to become a software pioneer — she dreamed of being a litigator. One day in junior high in 1950, though, her geography teacher surprised her with a comment: “Mary Allen, when you grow up, you should be a computer programmer!” Wilkes had no idea what a programmer was; she wasn’t even sure what a computer was. Relatively few Americans were. The first digital computers had been built barely a decade earlier at universities and in government labs.

By the time she was graduating from Wellesley College in 1959, she knew her legal ambitions were out of reach. Her mentors all told her the same thing: Don’t even bother applying to law school. “They said: ‘Don’t do it. You may not get in. Or if you get in, you may not get out. And if you get out, you won’t get a job,’ ” she recalls. If she lucked out and got hired, it wouldn’t be to argue cases in front of a judge. More likely, she would be a law librarian, a legal secretary, someone processing trusts and estates.

But Wilkes remembered her junior high school teacher’s suggestion. In college, she heard that computers were supposed to be the key to the future. She knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a few of them. So on the day of her graduation, she had her parents drive her over to M.I.T. and marched into the school’s employment office. “Do you have any jobs for computer programmers?” she asked. They did, and they hired her.

So many of the first programmers were women and one of the most famous computer engineers was Admiral Grace Hopper.

The Eniac women were among the first coders to discover that software never works right the first time — and that a programmer’s main work, really, is to find and fix the bugs. Their innovations included some of software’s core concepts. Betty Snyder realized that if you wanted to debug a program that wasn’t running correctly, it would help to have a “break point,” a moment when you could stop a program midway through its run. To this day, break points are a key part of the debugging process.

“— and that a programmer’s main work, really, is to find and fix the bugs” but they were not called “bugs” then and that is where Admiral Hopper comes in…

According to the Jargon Files,

Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.

The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads “1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found”. This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense — and Hopper herself reports that the term bug was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.

So back to me story.

After flunking out of UConn I went to Waterbury State Technical College and got my ASEET (translation: Associate of Science Electrical Engineering Technology) and there I learned BASIC.

I then when to Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and that elusive BSEE slipped from my grasp again due to liberal arts classes and too much partying. But I switched to the School of Technology that didn’t require as much math and theory. There I built my first computer using an Intel 4004!

Out of college and at my third job one of the draftsman got an AIM65 a development single board computer which I wrote programs for in Assembly Language and using an on-board compiler. I used it as my alarm clock. I wrote a program in BASIC that used a temperature sensitive resister to measure outside temperature and a relay to turn on a radio. I brought it into work one day and my boss picked it up after walking across the room on a cold dry winter’s day… ZAP and that was the end of that.

At work one day back in the early eighties the owner asked me to write a program for a “Black” Apple II+ and a Magnavox LASER Disk Player, he wanted a program to retrieve drawings and photos. It was a simple program that allowed you to enter a part number and retrieve the drawing, a photo of the part and photo of the location it is used in a power plant. It also allowed to walk through the power plant like Google now does with “Street View.” I did a number of other BASIC programs mainly to interface with test equipment. I still have the “Black” Apple II+, the Magnavox 12 inch LASER Disk Player and the demo disk.

Later on I learned HTML IV and finally before they shut the plant I learned to program PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) When I was laid off from work when they closed the factory we were using PLCs in parallel processing, we had 4 electronic bays running in parallel and you could shut down one bay and still have redundant 2 out of 3 logic. In other words if two if the electronic bays detected a problem it would shut down the plant. I still have my textbooks from the class.

Then I retired and put all my electronic stuff down in the basement.

So back to the article.

The field rewarded aptitude: Applicants were often given a test (typically one involving pattern recognition), hired if they passed it and trained on the job, a process that made the field especially receptive to neophytes. “Know Nothing About Computers? Then We’ll Teach You (and Pay You While Doing So),” one British ad promised in 1965. In a 1957 recruiting pitch in the United States, IBM’s brochure titled “My Fair Ladies” specifically encouraged women to apply for coding jobs.
[…]
If we want to pinpoint a moment when women began to be forced out of programming, we can look at one year: 1984. A decade earlier, a study revealed that the numbers of men and women who expressed an interest in coding as a career were equal. Men were more likely to enroll in computer-science programs, but women’s participation rose steadily and rapidly through the late ’70s until, by the 1983-84 academic year, 37.1 percent of all students graduating with degrees in computer and information sciences were women. In only one decade, their participation rate more than doubled.

But then things went into reverse. From 1984 onward, the percentage dropped; by the time 2010 rolled around, it had been cut in half. Only 17.6 percent of the students graduating from computer-science and information-science programs were women.
[…]
One researcher was Allan Fisher, then the associate dean of the computer-science school at Carnegie Mellon University. The school established an undergraduate program in computer science in 1988, and after a few years of operation, Fisher noticed that the proportion of women in the major was consistently below 10 percent. In 1994, he hired Jane Margolis, a social scientist who is now a senior researcher in the U.C.L.A. School of Education and Information Studies, to figure out why. Over four years, from 1995 to 1999, she and her colleagues interviewed and tracked roughly 100 undergraduates, male and female, in Carnegie Mellon’s computer-science department; she and Fisher later published the findings in their 2002 book “Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing.”

What Margolis discovered was that the first-year students arriving at Carnegie Mellon with substantial experience were almost all male. They had received much more exposure to computers than girls had; for example, boys were more than twice as likely to have been given one as a gift by their parents. And if parents bought a computer for the family, they most often put it in a son’s room, not a daughter’s. Sons also tended to have what amounted to an “internship” relationship with fathers, working through Basic-language manuals with them, receiving encouragement from them; the same wasn’t true for daughters. “That was a very important part of our findings,” Margolis says. Nearly every female student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon told Margolis that her father had worked with her brother — “and they had to fight their way through to get some attention.”

So this brings me back to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) classes there has been a push to get women in to the STEM fields and I second that effort.

There is good money to be made in STEM; most of the current Silicon Valley billionaires are in the STEM fields and even if you don’t start up your own company there is good money in STEM.

When I was graduating with my MSW in 2011 my classmates were boasting about getting $40,000 to $50,000 jobs, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that a Nuclear Engineer fresh out of college was getting a starting pay in 2007 of  $60,000.

My education allowed me to retire comfortably at age 59. My advice to students graduating from high school is, it’s great to graduate from college with a liberal arts degree but they are a dime a dozen go for a STEM degree especially if you are women.

Facial Recognition, Or I See You

I remember about fifteen years ago at Fantasia Fair one of the trans people staying at the Bed and Breakfast was what I thought was paranoid about her picture taken saying that she was worried about facial recognition software identifying her; well it turns out she was ahead of her time.

But facial recognition software is now creating problems for trans people.

Some transgender drivers are being kicked off Uber’s app
CNBC
By Jaden Urbi
August 8, 2018

Uber has revolutionized the taxi industry with its easy-to-use service, but its current features lack options for transgender drivers to identify themselves correctly, which get some of them kicked off the app.

Transgender drivers across the country are finding their accounts either temporarily or permanently suspended due to an Uber security feature that requires drivers to take a selfie to verify their identity. If the photo doesn't come back as a match to other photos on file, it will get flagged.

Janey Webb began transitioning her gender around the time she started working for Uber in October 2017. Since then, her physical appearance has changed quite a bit. For another job that might not be a huge issue, but for Uber drivers a drastic change in appearance raises an algorithmic red flag.

But Uber is not alone in this problem; other applications are also creating problems for us.

Uber’s ‘Real-time ID Check’ doesn’t deal well with transgender drivers
The Next Web
By Tristan Greene
August 8, 2018

[…]
In this latest facial recognition SNAFU, originally reported by CNBC, Uber’s software (which runs on Microsoft’s Cognitive Services) flagged driver Janey Webb during a routine check. The company randomly requires drivers to take selfies periodically in order to prove they’re who they claim to be when they log in.
[…]
There’s certainly an argument to be made that knowing facial recognition technology is currently incapable of identifying people of color and trans individuals with the same accuracy as white cis-gendered people, yet still deploying it and requiring all employees to use it, is an act of malicious bigotry.

Because it’s not just Uber. Facial recognition technology is proliferating throughout the US. Police in Florida and Oregon recently trialed a system called Rekognition from Amazon, prompting Brian Brackeen, the CEO of facial recognition AI company Kairos, to tell TNW “I see a world where Amazon Rekognition could send more innocent African Americans to jail.”
[…]
The companies deploying facial recognition technology with total disregard for its technical limitations are, apparently, more interested in profits than civil rights. It wouldn’t be acceptable to sell a smart phone that doesn’t work for white women or open a company break room that gay men aren’t allowed to use. Why is it acceptable for any company to deploy identification software that doesn’t work for its transgender employees?

They got that right, “…are, apparently, more interested in profits than civil rights”

I think the woman at FanFair was ahead of her time, this could become a big problem for us. Not only by misidentifying us but also identifying trans people who are not out.

Little Did I Know

One day at work I was bored and surfing the web trying to look busy and for some reason or another I started looking up the old computers that I learned on. I started reading about the IBM 360 but while I was reading it work got in the way so I booked marked the page. That bookmark would lead to an amazing discovery.

Several months later I went back to it and as I was reading it, it dawned on me that the article was on Lynn Conway but the title of the bookmark said Robert Conway…?

Life, Engineered
How Lynn Conway reinvented her world and ours
Michigan Engineering – University of Michigan
Story by Nicole Casal Moore

On a two-lane Texas highway in January 1978, it hit Lynn Conway that she might be leading a revolution.

She was 40 years old, driving a gold, wood-paneled Dodge wagon from Cambridge to Palo Alto on a southern route to stay out of the snow. She passed much of the trip with the windows down, flipping through radio stations for Boston's latest anthem or a Gerry Rafferty saxophone riff.

The last two years had been a blur. Conway had been working for Xerox on a daring project that would democratize microchip design – break it out of the vaults of the big semiconductor firms so the "personal computers" these futurists envisioned might begin to take shape.

If we have our heroes, Lynn Conway is one of those heroes. Because of her what you are reading this was made possible. The article that I was reading back in the late 90s was about a revolutionary breakthrough in computers that was made in the early 70s by Lynn Conway.

When she transitioned she also began a new job,

…She started as a contract programmer and quickly ascended to Memorex and then to the high-profile Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. 

And from there…

But she didn't know how to make microchips. So she learned. Then she ignored most of what she absorbed. Conway and Mead felt that the process needed to be reimagined, standardized and simplified.
[…]
A textbook would take the new concepts straight to the next generation. The team began writing "Introduction to VLSI Systems" and self-published the early versions at Xerox.

"The book was a landmark," Chuck House, director of InnovaScapes Institute wrote in the IEEE special issue about Conway. "The paradigm shift that enabled Apple's and Microsoft's emergence had vital antecedents that have largely remained obscure. Conway's role there, while crucial, has often seemed behind the scenes to outside observers."

So the next time you pick up your smartphone you will know that a trans-woman made that possible.

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson: A fascinatingly disturbing thought

My Story Part 98 – We Have The Power

We have the power. We have the weapon. We have a weapon that only we can use. We have a weapon not of destruction, but of change. The weapon can only be used by us and no one else effectively. That weapon is our stories. A story of our efforts to live our lives, no one else can tell our stories and have the same impact that we have.

Last night and Monday night I went to two local colleges for what we call an “Outreach”. Monday night it was a part of the Stonewall Speakers and I was on a panel where we told our personal stories and answered questions from the class. Last night it was for a class that was researching a new dormitory policy for trans-students at a local Catholic women’s college, they want an open and affirming policy. Both classes were for students who are working for their bachelor in Social Work.

When we tell our stories, we bring the abstract to a personal level. We create allies who will speak up for us and also it is a lot harder to hate when you know the person, People can speak for us, but they cannot do it on a personal level, how can they explain what it is like to be discriminated. They cannot say what it felt like to be made fun of a fast food store. They can’t say what it was like to get fired from a job, they can only read statistics.

I have a problem when a non- trans person who knows nothing about being trans speakers for us. In the Huffington Post, Rebecca Juro wrote about that and said,

The first concern is also the most obvious. Given that Chaz Bono is a female-to-male transsexual man, one has to wonder why Ed Schultz invited a gay man and not an actual transgender person to appear on his show to speak on the topic. It's kind of like hosting a discussion on issues faced by African Americans with a white person presented as an expert, and makes just about as much sense.

I agree. When I go out and give an outreach, I always say that I am speaking about myself and my experiences. A non-trans person can only talk about second hand experiences or worst just what they have read about. She goes on to write,

Those who saw the segment and took it as accurate and representative of the reality of transgender lives would likely be led to believe that all transgender people are gay, that being transgender is just another form of homosexuality. The problem is that they would also be completely wrong.

That is the biggest misconception that I face when I do outreach, they all are surprised when I say I’m attracted women. It is something that takes time to explain that I am attracted to women as a woman.

I know many non-trans people who can do training about gender variant people, but still I believe that the very best outreach or training should have a trans-person do that training. It is like Rebecca Juro said “It's kind of like hosting a discussion on issues faced by African Americans with a white person presented as an expert, and makes just about as much sense.” Personal stories are the best teaching method, they have the greatest impact. The doctors refuse to treat me… I was thrown out of the restaurant… I was fired… Instead of 47% of trans-people are discriminate against in hospitals.

I know public speaking is not for everyone and I not saying we should all go out and speak. What I am saying is let us speak for ourselves. We can give the best answers to the questions that are asked.

LGBT Rights In Texas

If you are like me, you thought Texas was one of the worst places for a trans-person or a gay or lesbian person could live. They tried to ban marriage for trans-people. Texas want to require college to spend equally on LGBT and "family and traditional values." organization on campuses.

So I was surprised when I watched this ABC “What Would You Do” video…


I was disappointed that in New York, less than half spoke up.

HB6599 – An Act Concerning Discrimination

Last week the vote was delayed because of the prospect of a lengthy debate, instead of passing with little debate the Republicans said that they were going to offer a number of amendments. Some of them quite hideous…

Gender ID Bill Waits in Committee, Kissel Plans Amendments
CT News Junkie
by Hugh McQuaid
Mar 30, 201

The amendments came from concerns raised during a public hearing on March 21, he said. Kissel’s first amendment would ratchet up penalties for individuals who posed as transgender for criminal reasons.

While noting the scenario was probably an unlikely one, Kissel said that under his amendment someone convicted of a Class A misdemeanor who was determined to have posed as transgender solely for criminal reasons would instead be convicted of a Class D felony.

Sen. Kissel admitted that it would probably not happen; however, he is still going to tie up the committee with this amendment. So let me get this straight, if a man commits a sexual assault with a mask on he gets one sentence, but if he dresses as a woman he gets a stiffer sentence. I don’t know about you, but this does not make any sense to me and it seems that it is very bigoted and discriminatory.

The article goes on to say that,

Kissel’s other amendment also addressed a concern raised by Wolfgang at the hearing, mainly the effect having a transgender teacher could have on young school children. Under the amendment municipal boards of education would be given the option to temporarily reassign transgender teachers as they undergo transition.

How many school systems do you think would not transfer a teacher out of the class. If they didn’t they would be worrying that there would be complaints to they would err on the conservative side. What with that teach the student? That it is OK to discriminate against someone who is different. Is that the right message to send the children?

The bill is going up for a vote tomorrow, this time the committee budgeted more time for the bill. I will be there and I let you know how it turned out, hopefully no amendments will be added.

A Year In Review

Looking back over the year in blogs…

• January: President Obama issued an executive order banning employment discrimination based on gender identity for federal jobs.
• February: The U.S. Tax Court issued a decision that treatment for gender identity disorder qualifies as medical care under the Internal Revenue Code, and is therefore deductible.
• March: Housing and Urban Development announced that they are going to be studying discrimination against LGBT people in housing.
• April: I gave a workshop at UConn School of Social Work Field Instructors Training Seminar for social workers who are supervising interns. The workshop was call “Barriers Against Transgender Individuals”
• May: President Obama declares June 2010 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by fighting prejudice and discrimination in their own lives and everywhere it exists.
• June: The high point of the year, my nephew’s wedding in Asheville NC and the visiting the National Air and Space museum on the way down.
• July: I attended the Transforming New Hampshire conference.
• August: U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said California’s Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice.
• September: The big news this fall is the rise of the suicides by LGBT students. I also started my internship and fall semester.
• October: Reaching out to one person at a time. A very tender story
  
• November: We won some and we lost some. We gained big wins in San Francisco a transgender judge was elected to office, and in Ohio two ballot questions added gender identity and expression to Bowling Green anti-discrimination ordinance. However, in Iowa we lost, the judges who supported gay marriage were voted out of office.
• December: The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” ending the discharge of gays and lesbians from the military. However, transgender military personnel can still be discharged.

My Story Part 55 – The Internet

The internet changed everything. You can separate time into, BI and AI, before the internet and after the internet.

50 BI or 1959
I felt alone, I thought I was the only boy in the world that thought I should have been a girl. I was isolated. The first time that I thought that there were other kids out there that felt the same way was when I heard the song “Lola”, “Boys will be girls and girls would be boys”… I was not alone!

20 BI or 1979
I just bought my first computer, an Apple II+ with 64K of RAM and two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives and I could reach out to the world through a 300 BAUD dial-up modem. I used a network called Delphi. There wasn’t very much out there just mainly news and sports, and it was a long distance call to East Hartford for the nearest portal.

It you wanted to find out information about anything transgender (The word “transgender” was just being coined by Virginia Prince) you had to physically go to the library and look it up. However, there was very little information out there on the subject and what there was called us abnormal and Transvestic Fetishism. There were some support groups and they use to leave their business cards in the card file (a large file cabinet the held 3X5 index cards with the book information on them.), until the librarian found them and tore them up.

1 day BI or spring of 1999
We just got our own computers at work that were connected to the internet and my boss asked me to use this new fangled device to find a replacement transformer for a circuit board. I used one of those primitive search engines, I think it was called Lycos, and lo and behold what came up, but crossdressers. There were all these sites about crossdressers, transgender and transsexuals…Wow!

1 day AI or spring of 1999
I went home that night, bought a computer and ordered the internet.

11 AI
Where would we be without the internet? I found a community out there in the ether, I found the web sites of Melanie Phillips and Dr Becky, along with all the support groups. It was one of those support groups that I found on-line that I went to, Connecticut Outreach Society, which I eventually became the Executive Director, that gave me a sense of community. It was because of the blogs of other trans-people that I was able to summon the courage to go to the first meeting and it was through email that I contacted COS. It is because of the internet that I became an activist.

I now communicate with other trans-people from around the world and I can keep up to-date on events happening in and to the trans-community. With a click of a mouse I can find the current laws on trans-rights in England, with a click of a mouse I can find out that a transgender judge was elected in California.

The internet transformed isolated enclaves in to a community. Through the internet, a child can now communicate with other children from around the world and learn that they are not alone in the way they feel.

Breaking News - Federal Judge Stikes Down Prop. 8

Judge strikes down Prop. 8, allows gay marriage in California
Los Angeles Times
By Maura Dolan

A federal judge in San Francisco decided today that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure that banned same-sex unions.

U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

[Updated at 1:54 p.m.: "Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment," the judge wrote. "Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation."

Update: 10:00PM

Tip On Leaving Comments

In the last couple of days, I had a problem where I could not leave comments on blogs. They would not publish, I write the comment, enter the verification letters and click Publish" and nothing happen. What I wrote stayed in the box and wasn't posted.

The problem started when I tried to use a HTML tag for superscript for July 4^th and there was an error message saying that the tag was not allowed. From then on I could not posted any comments on any blogs (that is why I have not left comments on the blogs of people who posted on my blog).

I found how to correct the problem, you have to clear the cache but pressing "Shift" + reload page, How to Refresh your Blog Page in Browser.

How To Write Links In Comments

Have you ever wondered how they write links in comments on blogs? Well here is a quick and easy one step guide to writing a link…
<a href=”your URL goes here in the quotes”>The words that you want to describe the link here</a>

and if you want it to pop up in a new window, then add the phrase target="blank" like this...
<a href=”your URL goes here in the quotes” target="blank">The word that you want to describe the link here</a>

Wow! That was easy! Now I can write HTML code!

URL= is that “http” phrase that you see all the time in your browser window (i.e. http://dianacorner.blogspot.com/).