...the sight of GP getting smacked by TFA author and one with a 4-digit UID to boot?
Ouch.
==
@sibling: For the record, Chrome was "beta" for long after its release to the world at large, and my missus' FB games (Cityville, Farmville, etc) often sport a "beta" tag on them. Sort of ruined the whole designation for those of us who know what they once meant.
As a bonus, your local high school may also have 'advisory committees' (the name varies), which consists of folks actually doing a given subject matter for a living. Their function is to provide input as to what the world at large actually uses, which in turn allows a teacher to give priority to certain lessons over others.
For example, a CompSci advisory committee would likely want the curriculum to emphasize currently used technologies over those which see little-to-no usage out in the real world.
Seriously, Dude? I wouldn't exactly let our A/P or HR departments start storing their docs on Dropbox just yet (and you can forget about the R&D kids doing that).
While I agree with your sentiment, I sincerely doubt it's funding that's the biggest issue.
You want to fix education? Here's the steps you'll need to take:
First, ditch the zillion middle-managers and "curriculum specialists" (the last school I taught had 300+ employees, and only 40-45 actual teachers), you'd see an immediate improvement in funding, and at the same time remove a lot of the bureaucracy that more often hinders a teacher than helps.
Next, dig through the mountain of idiotic and contradictory rules, and streamline them into a coherent, legible, and universally-applied code.
Third, allow teachers and the school administration (that survived the initial cut) to throw out students who refuse to behave, learn, etc. Basically, no more of the endless second chances... if a kid screws up x number of times at a certain severity, it's expulsion time. Make it clear to parents and faculty alike. If 'mommy's little angel' still wants to go to school, let him/her go to a private school at parental expense until (or if) he/she graduates.
Fourth, test teachers on a yearly basis for competency in the subject they're teaching. You'd be amazed at how many teachers do not know the subject, or know very little... you'd be further amazed at how vicious and vociferous teachers can get in those districts which do not test, whenever this subject is proposed.
Finally, insure that budget priority goes for the basics: Math, English (well, this is the US we're talking about, yes?), (hard) Sciences, History, etc. Also, cut out the indoctrination/make-work courses (those usually disguised under ambiguous names).
Do just these basic things, and you'd be surprised at how much extra money there happens to be afterwards.
Thanks to relativity / time dilation, you can get close w/o breaking it, and (at least to the passengers), it'll seem like a lot less time overall. Still more than four years to the nearest neighbor, but a lot less than the monster number of years it would take as we see it.
Actual approval of pharmaceuticals in Mexico is surprisingly well regulated.
I never said otherwise - what I did say was that Mexico has/sells pharmaceuticals that the *US* FDA may not have yet approved, or may have banned for some reason or other.
Also, there are only a handful of drugs that are not approved in US that are actually approved in Mexico, and I don't recall any of them is for the common stuff Americans would bother crossing the border for (e.g. CV disease, cancer, diabetes, ED, and possibly asthma).
You don't come close to invalidating anything I said, and confirming it further doesn't help any.
The real reason why Americans cross the border to buy medicines in Mexico (apart from the price) is because you don't need a prescription to get them.
...which in turn only reinforces my main point even further. Thanks!:)
Now imagine if the US and Mexico had one big ol' database where all buyers could have their medical records updated no matter which country the person is from, or buys the drugs in?
Do you typically cross a national border to buy a loaf of bread or visit your doctor? Why would you think you needed a global id used for border control and migrants if you don't cross a border, and how do you deal with the requirement for id and recordkeeping that already exist if you do?
Replace "loaf of bread" with "medicine", and you might have a clearer idea.
Proof: Folks in the US trot off to Mexico to purchase drugs that, while they may work to an extent, are not approved (or banned) by the FDA, and happen to be real cheap - it's amazing what people will do when they become desperate to find a cure for something, especially if the disease is progressive to the point of fatality. Others also trot off to Canada to buy drugs at prices far cheaper than they can get back home of equivalent qualities and strengths, thanks to a combination of pharma corporation regional/national pricing, and the bulk buying power that the entire Canadian government has with which to drive down prices.
Not so easy to do if the whole planet is under one giant bureaucracy with which to deny these purchases on a blanket basis, based on who you are and where you live.
Go to Juarez right now and you can tell the local pharmacist that you're American, Canadian, German, African, whatever... and he won't care (or in some cases even know). Go there in a world that adopts a global ID, and odds are perfect that there are treaties that will have sprung up to insure that the same pharmacist is required to see your global ID, and either accept or deny the transaction based on that "Address" portion of the ID. Or, worse, expect that the purchase can be made, but that the transaction gets recorded and sent back to your government/doctor/insurance/etc - when you get home there will likely be an invoice waiting there for the difference, a misdemeanor summons if the drug has been banned, or a notice from your HMO in either case saying that you've just been dropped.
Sure - you could do it illegally and whatnot, but expect the prices to rise accordingly.
...and this is only *one* aspect. Stretch your mind out to other commercial goods and services which, while ostensibly useful and/or valuable, tend to be regulated a bit heavy by the US Government and/or by industry (Tobacco, Alcohol, automobile specifications, etc).
So live your life to the extent that you can without crossing a border and you won't need either a passport or a global id used to cross borders.
Passports don't have the same kind of reach, nor do they have any sort of globally centralized and/or universally accessible database.
Some of your argument makes sense, in that some sort of identification is necessary - if you're accessing or using government-provided services (from roads to welfare, etc). OTOH, I'm not seeing any compelling argument for making this concept a global one, let alone a universally imposed one.
Judging by the commentary Ive read so far, GP is starting to sound pretty spot-on. It'd be like seeing commentary on Boson Higgs by folks whose entire knowledge of the subject came from the Discovery Channel, friendly bar discussions, and partial exposure to the subject while researching something else.:/
How does the church recommend bible reading? I was raised as a catholic and was never once encouraged to read the bible in church.
...err, really? How long ago was this? I ask because...
* there are *three* different biblical readings conducted during Mass. The first is usually from the Old Testament, the Second is usually from the New Testament outside the Gospels, and the Gospel Reading, which comes out of one of the first four books of the NT. They're among the first things that happen during Mass.
* the Missal (a book which lays out how Mass is said over a given year) contains *all* of the biblical readings in advance. You can read ahead or behind all you like, compare them to your own Bible at home, or whichever you like.
* You cannot avoid reading the bible in Catholic School. I had to spend a class period each day studying that thing (excepting Wednesdays, when we went to Mass instead).
* Most parishes have bible study groups.
* Bible study is usually required as part of Catechism these days.
As for Timothy 4:1-4, err, being a priest is a voluntary thing. If you still feel like serving but want a wife, be a Deacon - problem solved. In either case, giving up something voluntarily as a part of showing discipline, humility, or as a vocation of choice is not exactly the same as saying that the only way one gets to heaven is by giving things up.
Mathhew 6:7 is correct - but it has bupkis to do with the Rosary (that is, using a counting device for praying while meditating on certain aspects of Jesus' life in intervals - sort of like what one does with a mantra, but with beads and a cross at the end to tell you when you're done). The verse itself needs context, though... in full, it explains the vast difference between blathering out prayers loudly to make others think you're pious, and praying with a focused mind and heart.
As for the rest, did you or your mother even think to *ask*? It's not like the information is a state secret or anything...
Really?... Start here if you'd like. It illustrates internal debates beginning way back with St. Augustine, and continues today. Google can turn up thousands more.
Hell, The US Catholic Church can't even decidewhichtranslationtouse!...and note the last link, an informal guide to choosing. I'll expand the relevant bit:
"At Catholic Answers we are often asked which Bible version a person should choose. This is an important question about which Catholics need to be informed. Some have been given very little help about how to pick a Bible translation, but keeping in mind a few tips will make the decision much easier. There are two general philosophies translators use when they do their work: formal or complete equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence translations try to give as literal a translation of the original text as possible. Translators using this philosophy try to stick close to the originals, even preserving much of the original word order. Literal translations are an excellent resource for serious Bible study. Sometimes the meaning of a verse depends on subtle cues in the text; these cues are only preserved by literal translations. "
The only universal recommendation I could Google up is that literal translations are better than dynamic (pre-interpreted to make more readable) translations. So, err, for an organization that you purport to be all big on control, you'd think that they would not only have one translation, but that they would recommend one which was dynamic (that is, pre-interpreted), no?
As for the Index Libororum Prohibitorum, its purpose has changed dramatically over the years, and for the past and present centuries, holds little if any of what you're representing it as. You may want to actually look up what it really is (link provided for convenience).
The Sony rootkit was a violation against legitimate customers. This thing only affects the folks who snitch applications
See first point, latter sentence. Kinda hard to feel any sympathy for someone dumb enough to download a pirated app from an iffy source
While poisoning the well does tend to cast a bad rep over legit free software, odds are nearly perfect that folks downloading it already know that they're doing something they really shouldn't.
Honestly? what these guys did was tame, and kind of funny.
I was *very* active in the 3D/CG community a few years back, and even today, some of my commercial meshes are still being pirated about the place on occasion, in spite of having (unboned/unmapped) free versions, limited free 'preview' packages, and even a few "open source" packages, where folks could freely modify and redistribute the results. But ripping off the commercial goods? Leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I know of a lot of former colleagues who wanted to positively wreck some computers by dropping poisoned torrents into the pool - and those who wrote executable utilities could do it with perfect ease.
As you may well know, these guys (in TFA) could have done a whole hell of a lot worse, and left no trace or evidence that it was them. Instead, they did something embarrassing and funny, and made a gentle reminder to all that maybe you should actually buy the paid version instead of ripping it off.
The logic is simple enough - if enough people get burned, they'll stop ripping off and start buying. If the item has a free timed demo version, or a 'lite' version, then no one has an excuse to simply rip it off.
As for the morality of it? Meh - it could backfire on them (or maybe not... after all, what are *you* going to do about it? Call the cops? Launch a lawsuit based on the premise that the app you violated copyright on must always be safe? Hire a hitman?) OTOH, They didn't damage anything, and honestly, it got them some PR. If you got bit by it (not you in particular, the generic "you"), then be grateful. After all, the thing didn't immediately broadcast-email every photo on the chip to your entire contact list, brick the phone, or start surfing particularly vicious pop-up happy pr0n sites on your behalf at random times...
Priests aren't qualified to determine whether people are crazy. Psychologists and psychiatrists are.
This is most likely why they're working with the secular professionals to get up some sort of baseline determination - especially since most of the folks asking for an exorcism are (wait for it...) poor, and most likely don't have sufficient insurance (if any) to get this sort of thing checked out.
You forget - the order is determined by the victim and/or their families; it's not like the priests go around asking.
Personally, I see it as a good thing, since at least this way there can be an avenue where actual mental illnesses can be at least somewhat screened and referred to the correct secular professional.
(...as for the "doing politics" strawman, please... since when has stating one's position, or official church position on a moral issue suddenly "politics"?)
Some bits may be in order: Given the severe shortage of priests in many areas, and couple that with the average priest's schedule: doing confessions, ministering to the sick, visiting prisoners, administering their local parish staff (and those of parishes w/o a resident priest), attending meetings of numerous church groups (Right To Life, Knights of Columbus, etc), counseling/presiding in seminars and retreats, preparing (this year) for a large and impending change in how Mass is done (at least for the English-speaking Catholics)... oh, and actually saying Mass multiple times a week. Add to all of that the fact that the average age of these guys *at ordination* is 35 (retirement age is somewhere around 70, but that's been pushed up, IIRC).
Not exactly seeing them seizing an opportunity to fill an already cramped calendar...
Actually, that ain't how it works - what happens is a bit in reverse of what you posted.
Nowadays, priests have to actually weed out mental and physical illness as a factor, and find secular help for those who are simply ill. Making that diagnosis obviously requires the help of medical and psychiatric professionals, and this conference is likely examining those bits, among other things.
Occam's Razor kicks in at this point, yanno?
(not talking about you, mind - but...) Of course, that tends to deprive the Telegraph (and a sizable portion of Slashdot) the opportunity to indulge prejudices, from the looks of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Argument aside...
Ouch.
==
@sibling: For the record, Chrome was "beta" for long after its release to the world at large, and my missus' FB games (Cityville, Farmville, etc) often sport a "beta" tag on them. Sort of ruined the whole designation for those of us who know what they once meant.
They were promised a working MicroSD slot too. Have they enabled that yet?
Bah - why use a scalpel when a thermonuclear warhead is handy?
[root@universe ~]# rm -f `egrep -R [Pp]eople /*` ...as a bonus, there's no compile to warn said people of their impending doom.
Fear of outsiders which limits immigration and cross-breading
I don't blame them... Rye/Raisin/Sourdough? Yuck!
As a bonus, your local high school may also have 'advisory committees' (the name varies), which consists of folks actually doing a given subject matter for a living. Their function is to provide input as to what the world at large actually uses, which in turn allows a teacher to give priority to certain lessons over others.
For example, a CompSci advisory committee would likely want the curriculum to emphasize currently used technologies over those which see little-to-no usage out in the real world.
Seriously, Dude? I wouldn't exactly let our A/P or HR departments start storing their docs on Dropbox just yet (and you can forget about the R&D kids doing that).
While I agree with your sentiment, I sincerely doubt it's funding that's the biggest issue.
You want to fix education? Here's the steps you'll need to take:
First, ditch the zillion middle-managers and "curriculum specialists" (the last school I taught had 300+ employees, and only 40-45 actual teachers), you'd see an immediate improvement in funding, and at the same time remove a lot of the bureaucracy that more often hinders a teacher than helps.
Next, dig through the mountain of idiotic and contradictory rules, and streamline them into a coherent, legible, and universally-applied code.
Third, allow teachers and the school administration (that survived the initial cut) to throw out students who refuse to behave, learn, etc. Basically, no more of the endless second chances... if a kid screws up x number of times at a certain severity, it's expulsion time. Make it clear to parents and faculty alike. If 'mommy's little angel' still wants to go to school, let him/her go to a private school at parental expense until (or if) he/she graduates.
Fourth, test teachers on a yearly basis for competency in the subject they're teaching. You'd be amazed at how many teachers do not know the subject, or know very little... you'd be further amazed at how vicious and vociferous teachers can get in those districts which do not test, whenever this subject is proposed.
Finally, insure that budget priority goes for the basics: Math, English (well, this is the US we're talking about, yes?), (hard) Sciences, History, etc. Also, cut out the indoctrination/make-work courses (those usually disguised under ambiguous names).
Do just these basic things, and you'd be surprised at how much extra money there happens to be afterwards.
Thanks to relativity / time dilation, you can get close w/o breaking it, and (at least to the passengers), it'll seem like a lot less time overall. Still more than four years to the nearest neighbor, but a lot less than the monster number of years it would take as we see it.
Actual approval of pharmaceuticals in Mexico is surprisingly well regulated.
I never said otherwise - what I did say was that Mexico has/sells pharmaceuticals that the *US* FDA may not have yet approved, or may have banned for some reason or other.
Also, there are only a handful of drugs that are not approved in US that are actually approved in Mexico, and I don't recall any of them is for the common stuff Americans would bother crossing the border for (e.g. CV disease, cancer, diabetes, ED, and possibly asthma).
You don't come close to invalidating anything I said, and confirming it further doesn't help any.
The real reason why Americans cross the border to buy medicines in Mexico (apart from the price) is because you don't need a prescription to get them.
...which in turn only reinforces my main point even further. Thanks! :)
Now imagine if the US and Mexico had one big ol' database where all buyers could have their medical records updated no matter which country the person is from, or buys the drugs in?
Err, John of Patmos, not Peter. ;)
"No order for the ages"?
Or did you mean Non Novus Ordo Orbis?
(...yeah, knowing me, I prolly borked the grammar :) )
Do you typically cross a national border to buy a loaf of bread or visit your doctor? Why would you think you needed a global id used for border control and migrants if you don't cross a border, and how do you deal with the requirement for id and recordkeeping that already exist if you do?
Replace "loaf of bread" with "medicine", and you might have a clearer idea.
Proof: Folks in the US trot off to Mexico to purchase drugs that, while they may work to an extent, are not approved (or banned) by the FDA, and happen to be real cheap - it's amazing what people will do when they become desperate to find a cure for something, especially if the disease is progressive to the point of fatality. Others also trot off to Canada to buy drugs at prices far cheaper than they can get back home of equivalent qualities and strengths, thanks to a combination of pharma corporation regional/national pricing, and the bulk buying power that the entire Canadian government has with which to drive down prices.
Not so easy to do if the whole planet is under one giant bureaucracy with which to deny these purchases on a blanket basis, based on who you are and where you live.
Go to Juarez right now and you can tell the local pharmacist that you're American, Canadian, German, African, whatever... and he won't care (or in some cases even know). Go there in a world that adopts a global ID, and odds are perfect that there are treaties that will have sprung up to insure that the same pharmacist is required to see your global ID, and either accept or deny the transaction based on that "Address" portion of the ID. Or, worse, expect that the purchase can be made, but that the transaction gets recorded and sent back to your government/doctor/insurance/etc - when you get home there will likely be an invoice waiting there for the difference, a misdemeanor summons if the drug has been banned, or a notice from your HMO in either case saying that you've just been dropped.
Sure - you could do it illegally and whatnot, but expect the prices to rise accordingly.
So live your life to the extent that you can without crossing a border and you won't need either a passport or a global id used to cross borders.
Passports don't have the same kind of reach, nor do they have any sort of globally centralized and/or universally accessible database.
Some of your argument makes sense, in that some sort of identification is necessary - if you're accessing or using government-provided services (from roads to welfare, etc). OTOH, I'm not seeing any compelling argument for making this concept a global one, let alone a universally imposed one.
Judging by the commentary Ive read so far, GP is starting to sound pretty spot-on. It'd be like seeing commentary on Boson Higgs by folks whose entire knowledge of the subject came from the Discovery Channel, friendly bar discussions, and partial exposure to the subject while researching something else. :/
How does the church recommend bible reading? I was raised as a catholic and was never once encouraged to read the bible in church.
...err, really? How long ago was this? I ask because...
* there are *three* different biblical readings conducted during Mass. The first is usually from the Old Testament, the Second is usually from the New Testament outside the Gospels, and the Gospel Reading, which comes out of one of the first four books of the NT. They're among the first things that happen during Mass.
* the Missal (a book which lays out how Mass is said over a given year) contains *all* of the biblical readings in advance. You can read ahead or behind all you like, compare them to your own Bible at home, or whichever you like.
* You cannot avoid reading the bible in Catholic School. I had to spend a class period each day studying that thing (excepting Wednesdays, when we went to Mass instead).
* Most parishes have bible study groups.
* Bible study is usually required as part of Catechism these days.
As for Timothy 4:1-4, err, being a priest is a voluntary thing. If you still feel like serving but want a wife, be a Deacon - problem solved. In either case, giving up something voluntarily as a part of showing discipline, humility, or as a vocation of choice is not exactly the same as saying that the only way one gets to heaven is by giving things up.
Mathhew 6:7 is correct - but it has bupkis to do with the Rosary (that is, using a counting device for praying while meditating on certain aspects of Jesus' life in intervals - sort of like what one does with a mantra, but with beads and a cross at the end to tell you when you're done). The verse itself needs context, though... in full, it explains the vast difference between blathering out prayers loudly to make others think you're pious, and praying with a focused mind and heart.
As for the rest, did you or your mother even think to *ask*? It's not like the information is a state secret or anything...
Yup. The Pope, for example.
You mean the one that had his chief astronomer discuss the positive potential for alien life not too long ago?
They are just not encouraged to THINK about it.
Really?... Start here if you'd like. It illustrates internal debates beginning way back with St. Augustine, and continues today. Google can turn up thousands more.
Hell, The US Catholic Church can't even decide which translation to use! ...and note the last link, an informal guide to choosing. I'll expand the relevant bit:
"At Catholic Answers we are often asked which Bible version a person should choose. This is an important question about which Catholics need to be informed. Some have been given very little help about how to pick a Bible translation, but keeping in mind a few tips will make the decision much easier. There are two general philosophies translators use when they do their work: formal or complete equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence translations try to give as literal a translation of the original text as possible. Translators using this philosophy try to stick close to the originals, even preserving much of the original word order. Literal translations are an excellent resource for serious Bible study. Sometimes the meaning of a verse depends on subtle cues in the text; these cues are only preserved by literal translations. "
The only universal recommendation I could Google up is that literal translations are better than dynamic (pre-interpreted to make more readable) translations. So, err, for an organization that you purport to be all big on control, you'd think that they would not only have one translation, but that they would recommend one which was dynamic (that is, pre-interpreted), no?
As for the Index Libororum Prohibitorum, its purpose has changed dramatically over the years, and for the past and present centuries, holds little if any of what you're representing it as. You may want to actually look up what it really is (link provided for convenience).
Don't forget to count int the thousands...
Well, you could use a float - just mind the dot.
Man... that's been deprecated years ago. I think it was replaced by SAINT, then sort of petered off after that...
Linux has gotten pretty old when even SATAN says "get offa my lawn".
Depends on the TOS/EULA - that may be modified as well. ;)
Legally, they'd be liable for SMS fees at the worst I imagine.
Heh - would that be before or after they counter-sue for copyright infringement, and claim a couple hundred thousands bucks in damages?
It'd be like someone suing the RIAA for getting infected by a poisoned discography torrent.
Some problems with that line of thought:
I was *very* active in the 3D/CG community a few years back, and even today, some of my commercial meshes are still being pirated about the place on occasion, in spite of having (unboned/unmapped) free versions, limited free 'preview' packages, and even a few "open source" packages, where folks could freely modify and redistribute the results. But ripping off the commercial goods? Leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I know of a lot of former colleagues who wanted to positively wreck some computers by dropping poisoned torrents into the pool - and those who wrote executable utilities could do it with perfect ease.
As you may well know, these guys (in TFA) could have done a whole hell of a lot worse, and left no trace or evidence that it was them. Instead, they did something embarrassing and funny, and made a gentle reminder to all that maybe you should actually buy the paid version instead of ripping it off.
The logic is simple enough - if enough people get burned, they'll stop ripping off and start buying. If the item has a free timed demo version, or a 'lite' version, then no one has an excuse to simply rip it off.
As for the morality of it? Meh - it could backfire on them (or maybe not... after all, what are *you* going to do about it? Call the cops? Launch a lawsuit based on the premise that the app you violated copyright on must always be safe? Hire a hitman?) OTOH, They didn't damage anything, and honestly, it got them some PR. If you got bit by it (not you in particular, the generic "you"), then be grateful. After all, the thing didn't immediately broadcast-email every photo on the chip to your entire contact list, brick the phone, or start surfing particularly vicious pop-up happy pr0n sites on your behalf at random times...
Priests aren't qualified to determine whether people are crazy. Psychologists and psychiatrists are.
This is most likely why they're working with the secular professionals to get up some sort of baseline determination - especially since most of the folks asking for an exorcism are (wait for it...) poor, and most likely don't have sufficient insurance (if any) to get this sort of thing checked out.
You forget - the order is determined by the victim and/or their families; it's not like the priests go around asking.
Personally, I see it as a good thing, since at least this way there can be an avenue where actual mental illnesses can be at least somewhat screened and referred to the correct secular professional.
(...as for the "doing politics" strawman, please... since when has stating one's position, or official church position on a moral issue suddenly "politics"?)
Not quite...
Some bits may be in order: Given the severe shortage of priests in many areas, and couple that with the average priest's schedule: doing confessions, ministering to the sick, visiting prisoners, administering their local parish staff (and those of parishes w/o a resident priest), attending meetings of numerous church groups (Right To Life, Knights of Columbus, etc), counseling/presiding in seminars and retreats, preparing (this year) for a large and impending change in how Mass is done (at least for the English-speaking Catholics)... oh, and actually saying Mass multiple times a week. Add to all of that the fact that the average age of these guys *at ordination* is 35 (retirement age is somewhere around 70, but that's been pushed up, IIRC).
Not exactly seeing them seizing an opportunity to fill an already cramped calendar...
"Shaitan" is the Islamic pronunciation of that name (Don't have the Arabic characters handy - so that's the English equivalent).
It's usually translated as "the adversary" or "the accuser".
Yep. Still means the same thing, to an extent.
Actually, that ain't how it works - what happens is a bit in reverse of what you posted.
Nowadays, priests have to actually weed out mental and physical illness as a factor, and find secular help for those who are simply ill. Making that diagnosis obviously requires the help of medical and psychiatric professionals, and this conference is likely examining those bits, among other things.
Occam's Razor kicks in at this point, yanno?
(not talking about you, mind - but...)
Of course, that tends to deprive the Telegraph (and a sizable portion of Slashdot) the opportunity to indulge prejudices, from the looks of it.