Look at what the Catholic Church believes, and then what its followers try to get laws passed regarding. The Catholic Church forbids fornication, divorce (only a very small subset of all divorces would qualify for a Catholic anulment), and homosexuality. Catholics routinely try to pass laws impacting the rights of homosexuals. They absolutely do not routinely try to pass laws outlawing fornication or divorce. This is a case where, regardless of what the supposed official theological position is, the Church has made gays a target and other sins less important.
Re:You know what they say about popularity...
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I don't see how fast food burgers have anything to do with Catholicism. If you're a practicing Catholic and you don't recognize the authority of the Pope, isn't that kind of like being a practicing Muslim that doesn't believe in the Koran or a practicing Buddhist that follows some path that isn't Buddha's eight-fold path?
You might be a Catholic but disagree with the Pope in a few specific issues - maybe some obscure theological point, maybe in something simple like the correct age for First Communion, maybe for something like treatment of homosexuals. But if you don't recognize the Pope's authority at all, why are you Catholic?
Thanks for trying to distract us from the main argument. Do you see anyone here suggesting that pedophiles in public schools should be ignored, or released without prosecution, or are morally acceptable?
The Church doesn't just claim authority granted by secular appointment (like election to a school board or getting hired by a school district), they claim authority from God. It is a terrible evil when someone in a position of authority by secular appointment abuses children, and that person should be prosecuted. But it is a worse evil when someone claiming to be a representative of divinity does the same, and absolutely unconscionable that someone higher in the religious hierarchy would do anything other than report the activities to legal authorities.
When my children's school principal starts telling them that he has an ancient divinely inspired book and 2000 years of sacred tradition that should inform everyone how God wants them to live, then I'll consider his claim to moral authority on par with the Catholic Church. Until then, the Church's claim is effectively infinitely stronger (by claiming authority from divinity instead of just secular appointments) - which makes their involvement in a pedophile problem infinitely worse.
I must have read a different wikipedia than you did, "Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions"
I'm not saying the religion should be suppressed or outlawed. I understand freedom of speech and freedom of religion and I support them. I just happen to disagree with some principles the Catholic Church holds in very high regard, so I would prefer if the Catholic Church changed its positions or lost members. I was responding to the Anonymous Coward's statement "Why did liberal atheist's care so much what the Pope thinks". We care because what the Pope thinks influences world politics.
Because Benedix XVII and John Paul II and Francis are telling their 1.2 billion followers to vote and lobby and donate money for legal changes to outlaw abortions, contraception (or at least public funding for contraception), and gay rights.
I don't care what the Catholics believe. I care that they're trying to make me follow their rules.
Which country do you live in? In the United States - and plenty other countries - the Catholics are encouraged to vote for policies that outlaw abortion, outlaw contraception or at least outlaw public funding for contraception, outlaw marriage for homosexuals, and outlaw adoption rights for homosexuals.
If the Catholics just believed that Catholics were not to have abortions, Catholics were not to have homosexual marriage, and Catholic homosexuals were not to adopt children, there would be no problem.
Which is why they encourage Catholics to vote so that gays can't have legally recognized marriages or adopt children. Whereas, for example, Catholics are not encouraged to vote so that fornicators or non-Catholics can't have marriages or adopt children. Because fornicators and non-Catholics are equally damned, but evidently less fun to target with your special discrimination.
A girl living with her boyfriend and taking their illegitimate children in a Catholic Church won't get a tenth the special preaching as an openly gay couple attending the same Church. Don't pretend it's love for the sinner and hate for the sin.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back into my corner of the damned and return to work.
Oh yeah? When did the public school teacher pedophiles get a colossal religious organization to devote its efforts to moving them between schools so they could continue to victimize children?
Pope John Paul 2 effectively picked the specific religious views of his successor by filling the voting pool with people that agreed with him on every major issue. Most of those people are still in the College of Cardinals and I would guess (but did not check) that Pope Benedict only added to it.
So the Catholic Church will remain conservative for a very long time. This should not surprise anyone that has been paying attention - this institution took four centuries to recognize that Galileo was right.
I think that's a stretch. I'm a dissatisfied Ubuntu user and right now I am switching back and forth between my Aptosid and Fedora partitions as alternatives.
I thought HURD itself is not in a state where the GNU developers recommend it for production use. That puts a GNU/Hurd release from Debian a ways off, doesn't it?
Xubuntu and Kubuntu are only good if the Ubuntu core they're built upon is good. The Ubuntu core will only be good as long as Ubuntu itself has a strong community. So moving Ubuntu users from Ubuntu to K/X-ubuntu weakens the very foundation those versions are built upon.
I think it's a model that only works if the offshoots have a smaller following than the core.
As opposed to companies like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and Microsoft, where in theory you are the customer, but they treat you just as badly as Facebook does anyway.
For most Debian derivatives, that's the case. But for Linux Mint, the recommended upgrade path is a fresh install: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 From that page: "In a 'fresh' upgrade you use the liveCD of the new release to perform a new installation and to overwrite your existing partitions.... This is the recommended way to upgrade Linux Mint". You can do apt-get dist-upgrade, but it's not supported.
I wrote this elsewhere in the discussion, but I think Mint is an excellent choice for tech tinkerers and open source enthusiasts, but not a good choice for people who are willing to try Linux but don't want to play around much. The problem is that for Mint, the recommended upgrade method is to back up your data and do a fresh install: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 If you don't mind running Linux Mint 12 or 14 forever, that's not a problem. But if you want the newest versions of Firefox and Chromium and your music player and so forth, you'll need to upgrade and outside us nerds most people find the idea of doing a complete reinstall at least once a year to be a burden.
I am not against choice or freedom in the free software community. I think those are wonderful things. But I would like to see one distribution get widespread adoption. I believe OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, and Mageia, PCLinuxOS, and dozens of other distributions are excellent, but for a newbie it's probably more helpful if the great majority of Linux users are using one particular version (provided that version doesn't suck). Then it's easier for the newbie to decide which version to try, easier to find documentation, easier to find other people in the local community and their social circles that also use it, etc... I really think Ubuntu did a great job filling that flagship role while GNOME 2 was their primary desktop.
Unity, despite its nice features, has a few UI features I find awkward to use and it especially hurt Ubuntu by being very buggy in its first two releases. Now instead of being the flagship Linux distribution for people new to Linux, I think Ubuntu is merely one choice among many. The ability to choose is good, but having one clear leader would - again, in my opinion - spur wider adoption.
Maybe I am thinking too much here, but I worry about the future for Xubuntu and Kubuntu and anything else built around the Ubuntu core. As long as Ubuntu itself has a large, healthy community with a lot of contributors (or Canonical has the money and interest in funding lots of contributors), Ubuntu offshoots will stay healthy along with it because they benefit from all of the packages, bug fixes, documentation, and so forth that go into core Ubuntu. But if Ubuntu really starts losing community members to other distributions, then future releases for Xubuntu might find that they're built around a core that's not as well engineered and doccumented as the core it has today.
Mint is great until you want a new version. Then they recommend that you download the next.iso, burn it to disk, back up your files, reboot, and reinstall everything. They've replaced the Ubuntu problem of a less than optimal desktop with the problem of a work-intensive upgrade process.
I think the solution would be something that handles both problems - a good Linux desktop and an easy upgrade process. When I get bored I'll take some of the other relatively popular distributions for a spin to see if any fit the bill - OpenSuse? Fedora? Mageia?
Well, what if you're trying to convince your less technical friends to try Linux? You are not likely to say, "I recommend Ubuntu. Install that, and as soon as it's installed replace the default graphical user interface layout Unity with something else, like XFCE." Most likely, you'll recommend a version of Linux that has a desktop layout you think they would find easy to understand, useful, and visually pleasing as the default.
I don't hate Unity. I think it's decent, just not good enough for me to recommend it to a newbie over XFCE, KDE, or Cinnamon.
I don't want to downplay the complexity of the systems you're describing, but having everything open source is a huge help. So, I'm not convinced Linux has gone that far in the wrong direction. If a lot of people are annoyed by dbus, or network manager, or polkit, or systemd they can write libraries that help or command line wrappers that help, and get them distributed right alongside the original projects.
PowerShell is good and Chocolatey.org makes it even more useful, but as long as the core of Microsoft is not open source and not free (as in speech and beer), it's still behind.
I've seen the attitude that Linux should be left to the elites plenty of times, but never among Ubuntu users. Ubuntu was built from day one for widespread adoption, the elitists would gravitate towards a version that is harder to install and use. I agree that discussing this is a red herring.
I'm saddened by this development because I did see Ubuntu as the flagship for end user -focused Ubuntu. I prefer to use Linux distributions I can recommend to friends that work outside the tech industry, and this was my go-to choice. I like Linux Mint, but their version upgrade advice is to back up your data and install each new release from DVD or USB. That's fine for a tinkerer like me, but not something I'd suggest for a friend who just wants their computer to work. What should I look at next, for a combination of friendly to newbies and still useful for experienced users? Fedora? OpenSuse? Mageia?
For a plain HTML5 website, you should be able to run it well or well enough on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Meego, Tizen, Ubuntu, WebOS and anything else you care to try.
Where the Mozilla folks are innovating is to make HTML5 APIs, as an open standard, for having the browser interact with the accelerometer, make calls, take pictures, send and receive SMS messages, take videos, and add and remove (HTML5) applications. If this gets widely adopted, then HTML5 applications can supplant native applications for most smart phone functions. Then you could run the same application on any mobile phone OS with a decent browser, and vendor lock-in becomes much harder.
Of course we've seen that native applications still beat HTML5 in many cases. But Mozilla is countering that in a few ways - on the feature side, by innovating on HTML5 features. On the performance side, the major players in the browser wars are in a performance battle, and that will only help the speed and efficiency of HTML5. Plus in the case of Firefox OS, there is no layer between the browser and the core operating system. The browser is the UI layer, so (supposedly) that helps performance and memory efficiency.
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Look at what the Catholic Church believes, and then what its followers try to get laws passed regarding. The Catholic Church forbids fornication, divorce (only a very small subset of all divorces would qualify for a Catholic anulment), and homosexuality. Catholics routinely try to pass laws impacting the rights of homosexuals. They absolutely do not routinely try to pass laws outlawing fornication or divorce. This is a case where, regardless of what the supposed official theological position is, the Church has made gays a target and other sins less important.
I don't see how fast food burgers have anything to do with Catholicism. If you're a practicing Catholic and you don't recognize the authority of the Pope, isn't that kind of like being a practicing Muslim that doesn't believe in the Koran or a practicing Buddhist that follows some path that isn't Buddha's eight-fold path?
You might be a Catholic but disagree with the Pope in a few specific issues - maybe some obscure theological point, maybe in something simple like the correct age for First Communion, maybe for something like treatment of homosexuals. But if you don't recognize the Pope's authority at all, why are you Catholic?
Thanks for trying to distract us from the main argument. Do you see anyone here suggesting that pedophiles in public schools should be ignored, or released without prosecution, or are morally acceptable?
The Church doesn't just claim authority granted by secular appointment (like election to a school board or getting hired by a school district), they claim authority from God. It is a terrible evil when someone in a position of authority by secular appointment abuses children, and that person should be prosecuted. But it is a worse evil when someone claiming to be a representative of divinity does the same, and absolutely unconscionable that someone higher in the religious hierarchy would do anything other than report the activities to legal authorities.
When my children's school principal starts telling them that he has an ancient divinely inspired book and 2000 years of sacred tradition that should inform everyone how God wants them to live, then I'll consider his claim to moral authority on par with the Catholic Church. Until then, the Church's claim is effectively infinitely stronger (by claiming authority from divinity instead of just secular appointments) - which makes their involvement in a pedophile problem infinitely worse.
I must have read a different wikipedia than you did, "Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions"
The Church allowed teaching of Heliocentrism as a theory, but Galileo was nevertheless convicted of heresy based on making too strong a case for Heliocentrism: http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node52.html
I'm not saying the religion should be suppressed or outlawed. I understand freedom of speech and freedom of religion and I support them. I just happen to disagree with some principles the Catholic Church holds in very high regard, so I would prefer if the Catholic Church changed its positions or lost members. I was responding to the Anonymous Coward's statement "Why did liberal atheist's care so much what the Pope thinks". We care because what the Pope thinks influences world politics.
Because Benedix XVII and John Paul II and Francis are telling their 1.2 billion followers to vote and lobby and donate money for legal changes to outlaw abortions, contraception (or at least public funding for contraception), and gay rights.
I don't care what the Catholics believe. I care that they're trying to make me follow their rules.
Which country do you live in? In the United States - and plenty other countries - the Catholics are encouraged to vote for policies that outlaw abortion, outlaw contraception or at least outlaw public funding for contraception, outlaw marriage for homosexuals, and outlaw adoption rights for homosexuals.
If the Catholics just believed that Catholics were not to have abortions, Catholics were not to have homosexual marriage, and Catholic homosexuals were not to adopt children, there would be no problem.
Which is why they encourage Catholics to vote so that gays can't have legally recognized marriages or adopt children. Whereas, for example, Catholics are not encouraged to vote so that fornicators or non-Catholics can't have marriages or adopt children. Because fornicators and non-Catholics are equally damned, but evidently less fun to target with your special discrimination.
A girl living with her boyfriend and taking their illegitimate children in a Catholic Church won't get a tenth the special preaching as an openly gay couple attending the same Church. Don't pretend it's love for the sinner and hate for the sin.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back into my corner of the damned and return to work.
Catholics do, and there are a billion of those.
Oh yeah? When did the public school teacher pedophiles get a colossal religious organization to devote its efforts to moving them between schools so they could continue to victimize children?
Pope John Paul 2 effectively picked the specific religious views of his successor by filling the voting pool with people that agreed with him on every major issue. Most of those people are still in the College of Cardinals and I would guess (but did not check) that Pope Benedict only added to it.
So the Catholic Church will remain conservative for a very long time. This should not surprise anyone that has been paying attention - this institution took four centuries to recognize that Galileo was right.
I think that's a stretch. I'm a dissatisfied Ubuntu user and right now I am switching back and forth between my Aptosid and Fedora partitions as alternatives.
I thought HURD itself is not in a state where the GNU developers recommend it for production use. That puts a GNU/Hurd release from Debian a ways off, doesn't it?
Xubuntu and Kubuntu are only good if the Ubuntu core they're built upon is good. The Ubuntu core will only be good as long as Ubuntu itself has a strong community. So moving Ubuntu users from Ubuntu to K/X-ubuntu weakens the very foundation those versions are built upon.
I think it's a model that only works if the offshoots have a smaller following than the core.
As opposed to companies like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and Microsoft, where in theory you are the customer, but they treat you just as badly as Facebook does anyway.
For most Debian derivatives, that's the case. But for Linux Mint, the recommended upgrade path is a fresh install: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 From that page: "In a 'fresh' upgrade you use the liveCD of the new release to perform a new installation and to overwrite your existing partitions. ... This is the recommended way to upgrade Linux Mint". You can do apt-get dist-upgrade, but it's not supported.
I wrote this elsewhere in the discussion, but I think Mint is an excellent choice for tech tinkerers and open source enthusiasts, but not a good choice for people who are willing to try Linux but don't want to play around much. The problem is that for Mint, the recommended upgrade method is to back up your data and do a fresh install: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 If you don't mind running Linux Mint 12 or 14 forever, that's not a problem. But if you want the newest versions of Firefox and Chromium and your music player and so forth, you'll need to upgrade and outside us nerds most people find the idea of doing a complete reinstall at least once a year to be a burden.
I am not against choice or freedom in the free software community. I think those are wonderful things. But I would like to see one distribution get widespread adoption. I believe OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, and Mageia, PCLinuxOS, and dozens of other distributions are excellent, but for a newbie it's probably more helpful if the great majority of Linux users are using one particular version (provided that version doesn't suck). Then it's easier for the newbie to decide which version to try, easier to find documentation, easier to find other people in the local community and their social circles that also use it, etc... I really think Ubuntu did a great job filling that flagship role while GNOME 2 was their primary desktop.
Unity, despite its nice features, has a few UI features I find awkward to use and it especially hurt Ubuntu by being very buggy in its first two releases. Now instead of being the flagship Linux distribution for people new to Linux, I think Ubuntu is merely one choice among many. The ability to choose is good, but having one clear leader would - again, in my opinion - spur wider adoption.
Nice. :)
Maybe I am thinking too much here, but I worry about the future for Xubuntu and Kubuntu and anything else built around the Ubuntu core. As long as Ubuntu itself has a large, healthy community with a lot of contributors (or Canonical has the money and interest in funding lots of contributors), Ubuntu offshoots will stay healthy along with it because they benefit from all of the packages, bug fixes, documentation, and so forth that go into core Ubuntu. But if Ubuntu really starts losing community members to other distributions, then future releases for Xubuntu might find that they're built around a core that's not as well engineered and doccumented as the core it has today.
Mint is great until you want a new version. Then they recommend that you download the next .iso, burn it to disk, back up your files, reboot, and reinstall everything. They've replaced the Ubuntu problem of a less than optimal desktop with the problem of a work-intensive upgrade process.
I think the solution would be something that handles both problems - a good Linux desktop and an easy upgrade process. When I get bored I'll take some of the other relatively popular distributions for a spin to see if any fit the bill - OpenSuse? Fedora? Mageia?
Well, what if you're trying to convince your less technical friends to try Linux? You are not likely to say, "I recommend Ubuntu. Install that, and as soon as it's installed replace the default graphical user interface layout Unity with something else, like XFCE." Most likely, you'll recommend a version of Linux that has a desktop layout you think they would find easy to understand, useful, and visually pleasing as the default.
I don't hate Unity. I think it's decent, just not good enough for me to recommend it to a newbie over XFCE, KDE, or Cinnamon.
I don't want to downplay the complexity of the systems you're describing, but having everything open source is a huge help. So, I'm not convinced Linux has gone that far in the wrong direction. If a lot of people are annoyed by dbus, or network manager, or polkit, or systemd they can write libraries that help or command line wrappers that help, and get them distributed right alongside the original projects.
PowerShell is good and Chocolatey.org makes it even more useful, but as long as the core of Microsoft is not open source and not free (as in speech and beer), it's still behind.
I've seen the attitude that Linux should be left to the elites plenty of times, but never among Ubuntu users. Ubuntu was built from day one for widespread adoption, the elitists would gravitate towards a version that is harder to install and use. I agree that discussing this is a red herring.
I'm saddened by this development because I did see Ubuntu as the flagship for end user -focused Ubuntu. I prefer to use Linux distributions I can recommend to friends that work outside the tech industry, and this was my go-to choice. I like Linux Mint, but their version upgrade advice is to back up your data and install each new release from DVD or USB. That's fine for a tinkerer like me, but not something I'd suggest for a friend who just wants their computer to work. What should I look at next, for a combination of friendly to newbies and still useful for experienced users? Fedora? OpenSuse? Mageia?
For a plain HTML5 website, you should be able to run it well or well enough on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Meego, Tizen, Ubuntu, WebOS and anything else you care to try.
Where the Mozilla folks are innovating is to make HTML5 APIs, as an open standard, for having the browser interact with the accelerometer, make calls, take pictures, send and receive SMS messages, take videos, and add and remove (HTML5) applications. If this gets widely adopted, then HTML5 applications can supplant native applications for most smart phone functions. Then you could run the same application on any mobile phone OS with a decent browser, and vendor lock-in becomes much harder.
Of course we've seen that native applications still beat HTML5 in many cases. But Mozilla is countering that in a few ways - on the feature side, by innovating on HTML5 features. On the performance side, the major players in the browser wars are in a performance battle, and that will only help the speed and efficiency of HTML5. Plus in the case of Firefox OS, there is no layer between the browser and the core operating system. The browser is the UI layer, so (supposedly) that helps performance and memory efficiency.