1) When you buy a game that uses Steam, you need to have an internet connection to install and play the game; not a huge deal for most people, but a large problem if it isn't clearly stated.
2) You can't re-sell a steam-bought game, unlike games with the "check-if-you-have-the-disc"-style DRM (or no DRM at all, like GOG).
3) If Steam becomes the de-facto DRM standard, that means that there won't be as much competition. Competition is always a good thing and it means better prices, products, everything. It's the store's decision whether or not to support Steam-using games, and it's your decision where you buy them.
4) As said elsewhere, this is killing their business model and they aren't forced to sell games that use Steam.
Ack, remove the "%25" from the second link... and also, just a note, I use the https google search, hence the "https" in the link. You can just modify your own search keyword bookmark instead of copying mine.
You can add "site:slashdot.org " to it at the right place (before the %s, which is a variable for the search contents you type in) to search Slashdot. Example:
So now you can have "slash foo" (or whatever keyword you want) to get a Google search for pages on Slashdot that contain "foo". Works like a charm! Enjoy!
Just thought I'd give you some helpful awesomebar search advice:
If you right-click a search box for a website in Firefox, you'll see "Add a keyword for this search". You can select that, save it as a bookmark with a unique keyword (I just shove mine in a Keyword Searches folder in Unsorted Bookmarks), and it'll let you use that search box from the awesomebar! For example, if you save Google image search as "img", you can type "img kittens" and get a search for kittens on Google images. Or if you save Wikipedia as "wp", you can type "wp goatse" and get the Wikipedia page for goatse! I've completely replaced the search bar with this and it's very simple and useful. Cheers!
PS: OpenDNS is awesome; nice to see someone using it!
Is that what Tivo was doing? Presenting GPL code as their own?
Actually, Tivo wasn't violating the GPL at all; they exploited a loophole, which prompted the development of the GPLv3 with an "anti-tivoization" clause. Specifically, Tivoization prevents you from modifying GPL'd software on a device (or using your own) via hardware restrictions, like Tivo did with their set-top boxes (hence the name).
The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.
Um... exactly what does a display server have to do with GNOME or any other desktop environment? Last I checked, GTK was already ported/is being ported to Wayland anyways. What's the deal here? I call bogus summary/article.
So I can copyright a list of computer instructions (ie. a program), but not a list of cooking instructions? That's fucking brilliant.
The code you write could have been written multiple different ways to get the same or a similar effect. Multiple lines of code written a specific way that interact with something else in a specific way are copyrightable: small amounts of code, however, are not (like, 1-5, maybe 10 lines).
I'm in Indiana too, and where I voted there were electronic voting systems; no paper. Maybe it's different near Chicago compared to the rest of the state.
Gnutella, Limewire's network, is perfectly legal. Limewire was forced to "shut down" because of their advertising which supposedly "promoted illegal file-sharing". Frostwire or any other Gnutella client is perfectly legal.
Car analogy time: Say you buy a car. You can drive safely, or you can run people over; your choice. Just because you can run people over, however, doesn't mean that cars should be illegal. Same for file sharing and Firesheep. There are legitimate uses for tools like Firesheep such as security research, therefore it should remain legal. If it wasn't legal, then the people that use it for any purpose would be criminals, and nobody wants that.
Frostwire's still up. http://www.frostwire.com/. Limewire != Gnutella, which is decentralized and thus impossible to shut down completely.
On a related note, I can't believe how stupid this ruling is. It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works, which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this. What's next, making HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/the Internet illegal because it "encourages illegal file-sharing"? Give me a break! Some of the best legal to download music I've found was promoted by Frostwire! The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
...requiring students to "buy" online books? What the crap? You don't buy the book, you license it (which this video explains in a hilarious way). Students would have to use "approved" book readers to read these books. Students couldn't lend their books to other students. Students couldn't save money by buying used books. Students can't read these books without looking at a screen, and much less without a working computer (power outage, anyone?). This is by no means a good idea; maybe it would be for the book authors/publishers, but nobody else.
I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.
So what's that all about? Is it ready for the desktop yet? Will it upgrade nicely for the cousins I have persuaded to use Ubuntu, and whose schoolchildren are still puzzled?
This is the kernel. Direct your arguments to GNOME/KDE/Canonical and so on. The kernel is what the distributions themselves are based on. Personally, I'd recommend Fedora/Linux Mint any day over Ubuntu (especially Mint Debian Edition, which is a rolling release distribution, meaning no twice-yearly, buggy upgrades!) for family usage. Also, note that "ready for the desktop" is a very relative statement. To me, it's more than perfect, but to people that want to run MS Office, Photoshop, windows/mac only niche applications, the latest games and such all natively with smooth Flash playback, absolutely not, but you can't blame Linux for that, can you?
There's a difference. If the Mac app store leads to a lockdown like iOS where you can ONLY install apps via the App store
This is absurd. It's like saying drinking a glass of water leads to drowning.
Um, if you read his post, he was commenting about how it's not like how most Linux-based package managers work at all, since you aren't locked into those. Also, that's a bad analogy. Drinking water can lead to drowning in certain (yet very rare) physical circumstances, for the record. What the poster you should have responded to (which is a little higher up than this poster) said was that this makes us closer to the possibility of vendor lock-in, which might happen considering Apple's record with iOS. However, I think it's rather unlikely considering how other operating systems let you run "un-approved" code just fine and any person with a brain would just flock to those instead.
They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6.
Um, yeah. The first beta of Firefox Mobile is based on newer code than FF4b6, which came out a WHILE ago. Beta 7 hasn't been released yet because of a lot of crashes as well as it being considered the "feature freeze".
Because of the Catholic Church's political power, children in Africa who are not Catholic are not given proper, modern sexual education. Do you see how that works? Even if they wanted to learn how sexually transmitted diseases work, they are not given the opportunity to because of someone else's religion.
Citation needed. I've been to more than one catholic school/program before, and they all told me about STDs and things like that. Why wouldn't they allow independent African countries to have basic STD education (much less have more authority to)?
Hell, even if they just keep their children out of sex ed and never teach them what condoms are, they'll still affect other people - because if, for instance, you don't realize that oral or anal sex can lead to certain STDs just as much standard hetero sex, you might think you're safe because you've only blown some dudes when in fact you're spreading Herpes or HPV.
I know that. As I said, I was taught that by Catholic institutions. Just because they don't support condoms for religious reasons doesn't mean they don't talk about them.
"Approval" is not the same thing as "allowance". For example, many people in the drug de-criminalization effort seek to have drugs de-criminalized because it's not hurting anybody else if you only hurt yourself. It's a sinful thing to do, yes, but you can't force people to obey your moral standards by criminalizing the things you don't like.
I wouldn't give a shit if you just stayed in your little corner and believed in your sky fairy leprechaun zombie or whatever the fuck you believe in, but when you start negatively affecting public policy, harboring the most vile sort of criminals, and denying medical treatment to people who need it, then I cannot just agree to disagree.
Exactly when in anything that I said had ANYTHING to do with "public policy"?
. Assume for a second that sex was never meant to just be a pleasureful act, and was meant to represent the love of God Himself by allowing us to spread that love another generation by "becoming one" in the act of sexual intercourse.
Of course... we could also assume that the sun is blue.
Which has been proven false by obvious observation. This is completely different. The sun isn't an act like sex is.
Sex is a pleasurable act. Why would we assume God didn't intend it to be so?
Nowhere in anything that I said did I say, nor does the church say, that sex is supposed to have no pleasure whatsoever. Sex is supposed to have pleasure; it's a wonderful, pleasureful, but at the same time sacred act! Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" lectures, if you can find a book on them, explains this perfectly (you'd be happy to know that he says that attempting to have simultaneous orgasms is a, *GASP*, good thing to do because it shows generosity)!
That would presume we knew what God intended. Its much more reasonable to assume that either God made a mistake (whoops, forgot the onlywhilemarried flag) or that God had nothing to do with it.
And God can't make a mistake, if you believe the Catholic church's doctrines. Sex is an act much like doing harmful drugs for non-medicinal purposes: some of these substances can do great things when used medically, but mis-use only separates yourself from God by gradually forming a dependence on these substances instead of God Himself. Sex, while not as addictive (though some people are addicted to it), was never meant to be done solely for pleasure. Pleasure is a good thing and is meant to be there, but what the church says is that if you misuse sex for selfish purposes, then it's a sin and separates yourself further from God.
Please, before you insult the church, actually read up some more on its teachings and doctrines.
I know you're joking, but still, That's an exception that Mary accepted when it was presented to her because God found favor in her. That pregnancy was not caused by sexual means, but by spiritual means, and therefore it does not apply to this example.
or do they say "well I guess you're right, looks like there's no reason to believe a soul exists
You can logically prove that a soul doesn't physically exist in this world. However, the soul just so happens to be spiritual and cannot be represented by matter alone, therefore that conclusion is left up to whether or not you believe God exists (which the Catholic church does).
and we really should support birth control in order to make people's lives better"
Assume for a second that all life is sacred. Assume for a second that sex was never meant to just be a pleasureful act, and was meant to represent the love of God Himself by allowing us to spread that love another generation by "becoming one" in the act of sexual intercourse. If those assumptions are true, which this Catholic church believes, why would the Catholic church ever approve of birth control techniques? It goes against their religion, which you, if I am not mistaken, are not forced to be a part of. If you don't agree with their morals, stop complaining about them. Also, you fail to note that there is such a thing called "abstinence" which has been around ever since sexual intercourse was made in the first place and it is the only proven way to prevent pregnancy 100% of the time, especially considering that you are never required to have sex unless somebody forces you.
As for the catholic church molestation issues, the Church itself says that if you have deep-rooted, perverted sexual tendencies, you should seek help with those before you become a priest. There are only a few bad eggs in a giant basket of them here, figuratively speaking. The underlying principles that molestation is a grave sexual offense and that it severely separates yourself from God are still true in the Church's eyes; if Pope Benedict XVI truly is covering up these instances without a good reason (which I'm not sure is possible to have), then maybe we just have a bad pope on our hands.
tl;dr, It's their beliefs, not yours. Respect them for that please and stop claiming they're so backwards that they don't allow any fun. The problem isn't the church, it's you. Just because a church that you don't agree with and that you are not a part of doesn't approve of things that you want to fulfill your own selfish sexual desires, logically speaking, does NOT mean, in any way, that the Church is backwards; agree to disagree!
that tells Africans that condoms are bad despite the rampant AIDS epidemic
The problem is having sex in the first place, that and medical patents. Exactly what would condoms solve? They would help prevent AIDS, yes, but only because they help prevent pregnancy as well! Regardless whether or not you and I think condoms are useful, it's so annoying to hear people completely forgetting that there is a thing called abstinence in the world! If you have AIDS, what business do you have having sex until you're somehow able to be cured? Logically speaking, there is absolutely no use besides personal pleasure, which is completely unnecessary.
I bet I can find exponentially more people who've used religion as an excuse to kill, enslave, torture, kill some more, and guilt others into killing too.
Do kitchen knives cause stabbings? Do cars cause car accidents? Do computers cause bugs? If you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you will find that the Church does not approve of war at all except for purely defensive purposes. Just because some people in history use their twisted view of one religion or another for violence automatically means that all religion is bad because of extremists? Mao Zedong, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Vietnam War, Korean War, etc. were all instances where religion was not a driving force for war (except for killing people who participated in religion, which does not count). Atheists as well as members of every religion ever (virtually) have used religious beliefs for violence, but what matters are the underlying principles, not what people do because of them! Catholicism has a very pacifist stance, as does almost every denomination of Christianity. Just because some people mis-use the name of God for war does not logically mean, as I've said, that all religion is evil.
Among large parts of the Slashdot crowd, the fact that he's not an atheist is enough to disqualify his viewpoint from any kind of respect.
You, as well as whoever modded you up, is falling to the logical "genetic fallacy"; dismissing any arguments he has simply because of where it came from and his other beliefs and teachings. For example, I am a libertarian. I think that, because of my beliefs and reasoning, that most ideas from the other parties aren't quite correct. Should I just dismiss every single thing they say, then? Of course not! Likewise, I'm a Catholic; does that mean that things that fundamentalist churches, atheists, and even Buddhists/Hindu/Muslim types are always dismiss-able simply because of where the ideas and thoughts came from? Obviously not! They could be right, and if not, they could at least be going in the right direction. Stop hating on the Pope and actually consider the things he says, please.
Just so you know, the Catholic church welcomes scientific explanations for the origin of mankind besides "Creation Science", including the theory of Evolution, so long as that science is used in a non-misleading way (for example, Evolution is fine so long as you recognize that there was a God that started it in the first place, but superstitious "mind science" like New Age theories are obviously false, assuming that you believe all of the other Catholic doctrines). You're thinking of fundamentalist, Protestant churches and denominations which take a rather extreme biblical literacy approach (which the Catholic Church hasn't had for well over a thousand years).
Slashdot Mirror
This is slightly different:
1) When you buy a game that uses Steam, you need to have an internet connection to install and play the game; not a huge deal for most people, but a large problem if it isn't clearly stated.
2) You can't re-sell a steam-bought game, unlike games with the "check-if-you-have-the-disc"-style DRM (or no DRM at all, like GOG).
3) If Steam becomes the de-facto DRM standard, that means that there won't be as much competition. Competition is always a good thing and it means better prices, products, everything. It's the store's decision whether or not to support Steam-using games, and it's your decision where you buy them.
4) As said elsewhere, this is killing their business model and they aren't forced to sell games that use Steam.
Mod 'em up! +1 insightful!
Ack, remove the "%25" from the second link... and also, just a note, I use the https google search, hence the "https" in the link. You can just modify your own search keyword bookmark instead of copying mine.
I don't suppose there's an easy way to use some kind of shorthand for googling "site:slashdot.org foobar" , is there?
Actually, there is. After or while adding a keyword search, you can edit the search URL. For example, Google search, by default, looks like this:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%25s&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
You can add "site:slashdot.org " to it at the right place (before the %s, which is a variable for the search contents you type in) to search Slashdot. Example:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=site:slashdot.org%20%25s&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
So now you can have "slash foo" (or whatever keyword you want) to get a Google search for pages on Slashdot that contain "foo". Works like a charm! Enjoy!
Just thought I'd give you some helpful awesomebar search advice:
If you right-click a search box for a website in Firefox, you'll see "Add a keyword for this search". You can select that, save it as a bookmark with a unique keyword (I just shove mine in a Keyword Searches folder in Unsorted Bookmarks), and it'll let you use that search box from the awesomebar! For example, if you save Google image search as "img", you can type "img kittens" and get a search for kittens on Google images. Or if you save Wikipedia as "wp", you can type "wp goatse" and get the Wikipedia page for goatse! I've completely replaced the search bar with this and it's very simple and useful. Cheers!
PS: OpenDNS is awesome; nice to see someone using it!
Is that what Tivo was doing? Presenting GPL code as their own?
Actually, Tivo wasn't violating the GPL at all; they exploited a loophole, which prompted the development of the GPLv3 with an "anti-tivoization" clause. Specifically, Tivoization prevents you from modifying GPL'd software on a device (or using your own) via hardware restrictions, like Tivo did with their set-top boxes (hence the name).
The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.
Um... exactly what does a display server have to do with GNOME or any other desktop environment? Last I checked, GTK was already ported/is being ported to Wayland anyways. What's the deal here? I call bogus summary/article.
So I can copyright a list of computer instructions (ie. a program), but not a list of cooking instructions? That's fucking brilliant.
The code you write could have been written multiple different ways to get the same or a similar effect. Multiple lines of code written a specific way that interact with something else in a specific way are copyrightable: small amounts of code, however, are not (like, 1-5, maybe 10 lines).
I'm in Indiana too, and where I voted there were electronic voting systems; no paper. Maybe it's different near Chicago compared to the rest of the state.
Firesheep is as legal as Limewire... Oh wait.
Gnutella, Limewire's network, is perfectly legal. Limewire was forced to "shut down" because of their advertising which supposedly "promoted illegal file-sharing". Frostwire or any other Gnutella client is perfectly legal.
Car analogy time:
Say you buy a car. You can drive safely, or you can run people over; your choice. Just because you can run people over, however, doesn't mean that cars should be illegal. Same for file sharing and Firesheep. There are legitimate uses for tools like Firesheep such as security research, therefore it should remain legal. If it wasn't legal, then the people that use it for any purpose would be criminals, and nobody wants that.
Frostwire's still up. http://www.frostwire.com/. Limewire != Gnutella, which is decentralized and thus impossible to shut down completely.
On a related note, I can't believe how stupid this ruling is. It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works, which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this. What's next, making HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/the Internet illegal because it "encourages illegal file-sharing"? Give me a break! Some of the best legal to download music I've found was promoted by Frostwire! The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
...requiring students to "buy" online books? What the crap? You don't buy the book, you license it (which this video explains in a hilarious way). Students would have to use "approved" book readers to read these books. Students couldn't lend their books to other students. Students couldn't save money by buying used books. Students can't read these books without looking at a screen, and much less without a working computer (power outage, anyone?). This is by no means a good idea; maybe it would be for the book authors/publishers, but nobody else.
I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.
GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.
So what's that all about? Is it ready for the desktop yet? Will it upgrade nicely for the cousins I have persuaded to use Ubuntu, and whose schoolchildren are still puzzled?
This is the kernel. Direct your arguments to GNOME/KDE/Canonical and so on. The kernel is what the distributions themselves are based on. Personally, I'd recommend Fedora/Linux Mint any day over Ubuntu (especially Mint Debian Edition, which is a rolling release distribution, meaning no twice-yearly, buggy upgrades!) for family usage. Also, note that "ready for the desktop" is a very relative statement. To me, it's more than perfect, but to people that want to run MS Office, Photoshop, windows/mac only niche applications, the latest games and such all natively with smooth Flash playback, absolutely not, but you can't blame Linux for that, can you?
There's a difference. If the Mac app store leads to a lockdown like iOS where you can ONLY install apps via the App store
This is absurd. It's like saying drinking a glass of water leads to drowning.
Um, if you read his post, he was commenting about how it's not like how most Linux-based package managers work at all, since you aren't locked into those. Also, that's a bad analogy. Drinking water can lead to drowning in certain (yet very rare) physical circumstances, for the record. What the poster you should have responded to (which is a little higher up than this poster) said was that this makes us closer to the possibility of vendor lock-in, which might happen considering Apple's record with iOS. However, I think it's rather unlikely considering how other operating systems let you run "un-approved" code just fine and any person with a brain would just flock to those instead.
They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6.
Um, yeah. The first beta of Firefox Mobile is based on newer code than FF4b6, which came out a WHILE ago. Beta 7 hasn't been released yet because of a lot of crashes as well as it being considered the "feature freeze".
Because of the Catholic Church's political power, children in Africa who are not Catholic are not given proper, modern sexual education. Do you see how that works? Even if they wanted to learn how sexually transmitted diseases work, they are not given the opportunity to because of someone else's religion.
Citation needed. I've been to more than one catholic school/program before, and they all told me about STDs and things like that. Why wouldn't they allow independent African countries to have basic STD education (much less have more authority to)?
Hell, even if they just keep their children out of sex ed and never teach them what condoms are, they'll still affect other people - because if, for instance, you don't realize that oral or anal sex can lead to certain STDs just as much standard hetero sex, you might think you're safe because you've only blown some dudes when in fact you're spreading Herpes or HPV.
I know that. As I said, I was taught that by Catholic institutions. Just because they don't support condoms for religious reasons doesn't mean they don't talk about them.
"Approval" is not the same thing as "allowance". For example, many people in the drug de-criminalization effort seek to have drugs de-criminalized because it's not hurting anybody else if you only hurt yourself. It's a sinful thing to do, yes, but you can't force people to obey your moral standards by criminalizing the things you don't like.
I wouldn't give a shit if you just stayed in your little corner and believed in your sky fairy leprechaun zombie or whatever the fuck you believe in, but when you start negatively affecting public policy, harboring the most vile sort of criminals, and denying medical treatment to people who need it, then I cannot just agree to disagree.
Exactly when in anything that I said had ANYTHING to do with "public policy"?
Of course... we could also assume that the sun is blue.
Which has been proven false by obvious observation. This is completely different. The sun isn't an act like sex is.
Sex is a pleasurable act. Why would we assume God didn't intend it to be so?
Nowhere in anything that I said did I say, nor does the church say, that sex is supposed to have no pleasure whatsoever. Sex is supposed to have pleasure; it's a wonderful, pleasureful, but at the same time sacred act! Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" lectures, if you can find a book on them, explains this perfectly (you'd be happy to know that he says that attempting to have simultaneous orgasms is a, *GASP*, good thing to do because it shows generosity)!
That would presume we knew what God intended. Its much more reasonable to assume that either God made a mistake (whoops, forgot the onlywhilemarried flag) or that God had nothing to do with it.
And God can't make a mistake, if you believe the Catholic church's doctrines. Sex is an act much like doing harmful drugs for non-medicinal purposes: some of these substances can do great things when used medically, but mis-use only separates yourself from God by gradually forming a dependence on these substances instead of God Himself. Sex, while not as addictive (though some people are addicted to it), was never meant to be done solely for pleasure. Pleasure is a good thing and is meant to be there, but what the church says is that if you misuse sex for selfish purposes, then it's a sin and separates yourself further from God.
Please, before you insult the church, actually read up some more on its teachings and doctrines.
only proven way to prevent pregnancy 100% of the time
You sure about that? http://funnypictures.comedy.com/2009/11/20/abstinence-not-effective/
I know you're joking, but still, That's an exception that Mary accepted when it was presented to her because God found favor in her. That pregnancy was not caused by sexual means, but by spiritual means, and therefore it does not apply to this example.
or do they say "well I guess you're right, looks like there's no reason to believe a soul exists
You can logically prove that a soul doesn't physically exist in this world. However, the soul just so happens to be spiritual and cannot be represented by matter alone, therefore that conclusion is left up to whether or not you believe God exists (which the Catholic church does).
and we really should support birth control in order to make people's lives better"
Assume for a second that all life is sacred. Assume for a second that sex was never meant to just be a pleasureful act, and was meant to represent the love of God Himself by allowing us to spread that love another generation by "becoming one" in the act of sexual intercourse. If those assumptions are true, which this Catholic church believes, why would the Catholic church ever approve of birth control techniques? It goes against their religion, which you, if I am not mistaken, are not forced to be a part of. If you don't agree with their morals, stop complaining about them. Also, you fail to note that there is such a thing called "abstinence" which has been around ever since sexual intercourse was made in the first place and it is the only proven way to prevent pregnancy 100% of the time, especially considering that you are never required to have sex unless somebody forces you.
As for the catholic church molestation issues, the Church itself says that if you have deep-rooted, perverted sexual tendencies, you should seek help with those before you become a priest. There are only a few bad eggs in a giant basket of them here, figuratively speaking. The underlying principles that molestation is a grave sexual offense and that it severely separates yourself from God are still true in the Church's eyes; if Pope Benedict XVI truly is covering up these instances without a good reason (which I'm not sure is possible to have), then maybe we just have a bad pope on our hands.
tl;dr, It's their beliefs, not yours. Respect them for that please and stop claiming they're so backwards that they don't allow any fun. The problem isn't the church, it's you. Just because a church that you don't agree with and that you are not a part of doesn't approve of things that you want to fulfill your own selfish sexual desires, logically speaking, does NOT mean, in any way, that the Church is backwards; agree to disagree!
that tells Africans that condoms are bad despite the rampant AIDS epidemic
The problem is having sex in the first place, that and medical patents. Exactly what would condoms solve? They would help prevent AIDS, yes, but only because they help prevent pregnancy as well! Regardless whether or not you and I think condoms are useful, it's so annoying to hear people completely forgetting that there is a thing called abstinence in the world! If you have AIDS, what business do you have having sex until you're somehow able to be cured? Logically speaking, there is absolutely no use besides personal pleasure, which is completely unnecessary.
I bet I can find exponentially more people who've used religion as an excuse to kill, enslave, torture, kill some more, and guilt others into killing too.
Do kitchen knives cause stabbings? Do cars cause car accidents? Do computers cause bugs? If you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you will find that the Church does not approve of war at all except for purely defensive purposes. Just because some people in history use their twisted view of one religion or another for violence automatically means that all religion is bad because of extremists? Mao Zedong, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Vietnam War, Korean War, etc. were all instances where religion was not a driving force for war (except for killing people who participated in religion, which does not count). Atheists as well as members of every religion ever (virtually) have used religious beliefs for violence, but what matters are the underlying principles, not what people do because of them! Catholicism has a very pacifist stance, as does almost every denomination of Christianity. Just because some people mis-use the name of God for war does not logically mean, as I've said, that all religion is evil.
+1. I agree that this useless Pope bashing needs to stop. What are we, immature animals?
Among large parts of the Slashdot crowd, the fact that he's not an atheist is enough to disqualify his viewpoint from any kind of respect.
You, as well as whoever modded you up, is falling to the logical "genetic fallacy"; dismissing any arguments he has simply because of where it came from and his other beliefs and teachings. For example, I am a libertarian. I think that, because of my beliefs and reasoning, that most ideas from the other parties aren't quite correct. Should I just dismiss every single thing they say, then? Of course not! Likewise, I'm a Catholic; does that mean that things that fundamentalist churches, atheists, and even Buddhists/Hindu/Muslim types are always dismiss-able simply because of where the ideas and thoughts came from? Obviously not! They could be right, and if not, they could at least be going in the right direction. Stop hating on the Pope and actually consider the things he says, please.
Just so you know, the Catholic church welcomes scientific explanations for the origin of mankind besides "Creation Science", including the theory of Evolution, so long as that science is used in a non-misleading way (for example, Evolution is fine so long as you recognize that there was a God that started it in the first place, but superstitious "mind science" like New Age theories are obviously false, assuming that you believe all of the other Catholic doctrines). You're thinking of fundamentalist, Protestant churches and denominations which take a rather extreme biblical literacy approach (which the Catholic Church hasn't had for well over a thousand years).