Today's ruling about homosexual sodomy may be far broader than even the majority opinion opines. Instead of taking a narrow logic about equal protection and applying it to the law as being unfair discrimination as it only target homosexual relationships instead of both, the decision states a precedent that all persons have a right to be left alone in their private intimate dealings.

Tellingly, the opinion tries to state that this somehow doesn't implicate prostitution, bigamy, consensual incest, or homosexual marriage. However there seems to be no logical difference between those items that are critical to the personal sphere of relationships in the sodomy case and the aforementioned situations. The basis in fact seems to be that no law whose only basis is community morality can stand up to constitutional scrutiny.

I'm at a loss to come up with a rational basis that differentiates homosexual marriage or polygamy. I'm certainly more a supporter of the former and not the latter, but maybe my first impressions of polygamy being somehow unfair to the women involved is applying a moral judgment to a case without a clearly defined state interest.

Also today was a ruling that California couldn't retroactively remove the statute of limitations on certain sex crimes which has interesting implications for the PATRIOT act and its removal of the same limitations on past terrorist incidents.

Always nice to see some freedoms return.

Well, if anyone has checked by recently they have noticed that this site has been messed up.

The story is that it locked up one fine afternoon and I wrote it off to overheating as that had happened before. I then figured out that I had been hit with the IBM DeskStar problem. IBM's DeskStar line of hard drives was so unreliable that they sold the business to Hitachi. I opened the spare drive that I had laying around and it too was the exact same model. It should work for a few days, right? WRONG! It died by the next night. Further it turns out that after I bought new Maxtor drives I was still having problems so it actually was a combo of bad drives and a bad IDE controller on the motherboard.

People who know me know that ever couple of years I have the ability for about 5 days to break every piece of electronics I touch...

I've rebuilt my main server six or seven times. The real lame part was that I couldn't get a backup of the html directory off before the original drive finally gave up. I was able to get all email, home directories, and conf files though.

Luckily I found a backup from the end of last year and combined that with Google's cache to completely rebuild hoffmang.com. The only thing that is missing are a few comments. I actually have the text, I just have to figure out how to add them.

There is still some rebuilding of CarolinaPacific.org and Heather's Huzzah to do as well as re-publishing some photos in my online galleries, but I'm almost fully rebuilt. The only things permanently gone are a perl script and some data I was collecting in the interim.

A word of warning. This machine is an old Pentium II 233mhz box, so things may be a little slow around here until I complete the return process on the offending motherboard.

Sigh...