The corporate entity only "has rights" because it is a collection of people, and those people have rights.

Ecosystems aren't collections of people.

Is the implication here that "only people have rights," therefore ecosystems shouldn't? Correct me if mistaken. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that ecosystems have rights because corporations do.

This is indeed the status quo, but it's hardly immutable. Consider that 200 years ago neither women nor slaves were considered legal persons. Restating the status quo isn't an argument in its favor.

For me, rigorously tracking my caloric intake by weighting nearly everything I've eaten with a food scale and recording it in the Cronometer smart phone app has led to a 100 pound weight loss over the last year, and normalizing my blood pressure & triglycerides.

But, you know, at best ... just a useless database. Good grief.

However, if you cleaned up your diet too then that might've been the causal factor and not the tracking which is to nerds what prayer is to the pious.

Other statistics tell us that calorie deficit is the required and sufficient condition for weight loss.

Frequentist statistics do not apply directly to individual cases.

I do 3x3, mapped to <ctr>+<alt>+[1-9] on the keypad.

I'd prefer mega corporations staying out of social issues. Produce social value by making great products, not political advocacy.

This is an issue of direct relevance to many of those that work at Google. I think it's fine for corporations to take a stand on social issues that directly affect their employees.

If you parse the outer array as just "array of arrays" (as each element is an array), you're not "mixing". But if we're supposed to be parsing it as "arrays of arrays of _type_", then we are mixing.

I'm a person of faith, who takes his faith seriously, and who's faith teaches that homosexual conduct is immoral. I think this puts me in a distinct minority among the HN community, but in a possible-majority among the American population (with the mainstream orthodoxy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all teaching the same; and ~80+% of the U.S. self identifying as holding one of these faiths).

Given my faith, advocacy like this from Google, Apple, and other prominent tech companies really put me in a bind.

Their products have become such fixtures in my day to day life that I'm not sure how to get by without them, but by using their products and providing these companies with revenue, I feel like I'm contributing to a fund for someone to publicly proclaim: "You're faith is a sham; your God irrelevant; and, by the way, we think you are a vile, hateful, homophobic bigot".

I wish Apple, Google, etc. would all just focus on making insanely great products and not jump into the fray of divisive-by-definition social issues.

And, no, I'm not a "homophobe" or "bigot". I have friends who are gay; I don't hate them. I just think they engage in behavior that's immoral, just like others of my friends who sleep with each other outside of marriage, etc. I recognize my faith condemns such behavior - but I'd equally condemn anyone who insults, harasses, or otherwise harms someone just because that someone is gay.

And how does that in any way conflict with the support of gay rights?

The legalization of gay marriage in no way denies your right to morally condemn their behavior. It simply removes your ability to actively harm their lives by continuously denying them equality.

You do not have to approve of someone's behavior in order to support their right to do it.

In other words, your very claim that you are not homophobic, and that you would readily come to the aid of persecuted gay folk, should mean that Google's move is not objectionable. After all, Google is not trying to ban browbeating, but merely to assert the right for people to do as they wish, moral or otherwise.

I find it surprising (but cool) that Google takes a stand on a controversial issue here.

Think about it another way: if Google doesn't take a stand on other human rights issues, there is a huge scandal. For example if they were to reveal information about Chinese activists to the Chinese government. So why shouldn't they be expected to take a stand regarding other human rights issues, too?

I'm an agnostic atheist. At some point in my past I identified as "christian". At no point did I think gay marriage should be illegal nor did I think that gays were immoral.

Further, civil rights, interracial marriage (mine, for instance) and various other issues were deemed "socially unacceptable" by the majority of people in the US at some point in time. It wasn't majority voting that gave women the right to vote, removed segregation and created equal rights for all. It was a minority of people recognizing that this way of thinking was antiquated, crude and reprehensible.

The issue today is gay marriage and it falls in the same category as the above. Imagine looking back 50 years from now and seeing yourself on the complete wrong side of the debate. How stupid, and hopefully shameful, you'll feel.

BTW...I'm thankful the US is not a true democracy when I see what opinions the majority tend to hold. I am glad the leaders are not bound to do exactly as their constituents "want". As we as a human race advance in our thinking, some quicker than others, we need to shed the vestigial dogmas of our past...all of them.

Basic point #1: If forbidding people to marry others of the same sex is unkind, unjust, or whatever, then it doesn't become any less so when the person doing it says "my religion told me to do it".

Basic point #2: If forbidding people to marry others of the same sex is unkind, unjust, or whatever, then those who campaign against the prohibition don't need to -- and generally don't -- do it on the basis that the people on the other side are homophobes and bigots. This isn't about the character of the opponents of same-sex marriage, it's about their actions, and if your actions are unkind, unjust, etc., then once again they really don't become any less so merely because you're a nice person underneath.

Please don't confuse calling oneself Christian (or anything else) to advocating their Church's beliefs. Where I live, the people who describe themselves as Catholics (which is obviously much more specific than Christian) are 95% for using contraception, and more than 50% are pro-choice in both pregnancy interruption and euthanasia.

At some point in the future, science will probably identify the origin of homosexuality. (Given its prevalence in nature, consistent trigger rates, and the seemingly smooth continuum between hetero and homo, it's likely to run deep within our genetic makeup.) So if physical evidence is found for homosexuality, should your faith reconsider what it means to be "made in god's image"?