That crazy scumbag (pope) is at it again.

Due to impeding exams, I lack the time for frequent updates, but this topic hit a nerve:

Welcome to a new episode of "let's blame secular society for our misdeeds".

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

That old asshole Ratzinger is trying, once again, to shift the fault for the continued abuse of children by priests to society, as per usual.

We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen

 Maybe the fact that catholic officials, including YOU have been busy covering it up?

Benedict also said, however, that the scandal must be seen in a broader social context, in which child pornography is seemingly considered normal by society and drug use and sexual tourism are on the rise.

He said that as recently as as the 1970s, pedophilia wasn't considered an absolute evil but rather part of a spectrum of behaviors that people refused to judge in the name of tolerance and relativism. 

 Wait a second, what? What kind of fucked up straw-man is that please? Can you please point me to one fucking society that considers child pornography normal? Does he not realize that sexual tourism exactly happens because western society does try to fight child abuse, so the perverts are forced to go to places with less strict law enforcement?

The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times

Or painting them as worthless sheep at the mercy of a cosmic tyrant.

"In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children," the pope said. "It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than.' Nothing is good or bad in itself."

"The effects of such theories are evident today," he said.

Yeah, some people (perverts themselves) did indeed ponder such ideas in the 70ties, which got completely rejected by society. This is just the typical method of trying to construct a relation when there is none. No western society find child abuse good, normal or tolerable by any stretch of the imagination. Stop lying.

Sheesh, this old shitbag is disgusting me to no end.

Rockmelt - a social networking focused browser

             Image via CrunchBaseRockMelt is a google chrome fork that focuses on social networking and has integrated twitter and facebook, as well as RSS support. It currently is in the beta phase and I was lucky enough to get accepted as a tester.


So far (after about a day using it), I can say that I find the concept pretty solid, so I'd like to share my first impressions.

RockMelt looks fairly similar to the standard google browser, with but there are a few major changes. It has 2 sidebars, so called "edges" on each side of the screen. The left edge displays your friends, either simply sorted by online status, or you can select which ones to show. The right edge houses RSS feeds, as well as apps that monitor your google mail inbox and facebook wall, among others.

Image by gallagher.michaelsean via FlickrThe address bar is your usual chrome omnibar, but they added a second search bar to the right of it, that searches google, as well as your facebook friends and twitter. The cool thing about this bar is that it show
search results listed in a small popup and preloads them into your cache, so that when you click on one, the website open immediately, which is rather neat. Between these two bars is a "share" button that allows you to share websites to your facebook wall quickly.

So far, you can install pretty much all chrome extensions into RockMelt, though not all function properly. Luckily. Crucial extensions such as "ad block" and "autopager" do work for me.

RockMelt promises to enhance your social networking capacities and it definitely delivers. There are still a few things that need to be worked on (and surely will) in terms of bugs and I found that the right edge deals poorly with overflow (in other words: not at all) and it lacks google reader support; but all in all, it seems to become a great browser and I can only encourage everyone to check it out if he gets the chance to do so!

Nasa found microbes that can live off arsenic

Unfortunately not from outer space, though. Still, very cool.

                      Image via Wikipedia

As NASA announced today, they found bacteria in Mono Lake, a lake with water that's essentially just one poisonous soup, that have managed to incorporate arsenic instead of phosphate into their bio systems (even 

replacing it in their DNA). Thus, they strive in this otherwise very deadly environment.

This is a really newsworthy discovery, for it supports the notion that life is not absolutely dependant on those substances that most ordinary life-forms (including humans) use to sustain themselves, but may arise, or adapt to all sorts of environments. It really widens the scope of possible worlds to search for life!

It also goes straight in the face of creotards, demonstrating once again that evolution works like a breeze.

Christians not to be ashamed for one day

So, a certain Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey will launch a "not ashamed day", a day on which Christians should demonstrably not be ashamed for their faith. I, actually, totally support this.

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI think Christians ought to have a day off from being ashamed for holding irrational, childish beliefs. For being members of a religion that has brought unimaginable suffering to the world, in the past and nowadays, for being bible thumping, hate-mongering idiots and at least for not actively speaking out against such p
eople. They're just humans,too and no one can bear being ashamed all year long, right?

Of course that's not what the good Lord meant, but what he damn well should have meant if he had the least bit of decency.

So what does he really mean?

The day, organised by Christian Concern, will kick off a campaign to urge Christians to "wear their faith with pride".

What the hell is there to be proud of? Faith is irrational belief, belief without evidence, or despite evidence to the contrary. There's nothing to be proud about.

Lord Carey said hostility towards the religion came from a combination of "well-meaning" political correctness, multiculturalism and "overt opposition to Christianity".

Obviously, it couldn't be because there was actually something wrong with Christianity, right?

 This rich legacy is under attack. In spite of having contributed so much to our civilisation [...]

Like genocide, racism, the dark ages, theocracy, bigotry, hatred, the spread of HIV and famine in Africa, or, since this is particularly about Britain: countless deaths in the fights among Christian denomination in Northern Ireland.

and providing its foundation, the Christian faith is in danger of being stealthily and subtly brushed aside.

Not this crap again! Modern western society has developed in spite of Christian influences and only after secularism kicked in did things actually turn to the better for everyone. I am sick of faith heads pretending that their religion is the foundation of it; and on a subtle side note: the one's brushing Christian faith aside, obviously, are the Christians.

He cited cards bearing "season's greetings" messages, school nativity plays being "watered down" and local councils switching on "winter lights" in place of Christmas decorations.

Right, since unless you're a Christian, you aren't allowed to have a fun holiday, right? People just stop being hypocritical about the fact that they really don't give a damn about Christianity on Christmas.

The campaign highlights a series of cases involving Christians who have claimed discrimination.

I'm going to make a prediction here: These are really cases of Christian oversensitivity.

These include Nadia Eweida, a British Airways worker from London, and Shirley Chaplin, an NHS nurse from Kenn, Exeter, who both lost high-profile discrimination claims over wearing crosses at work.

Ms Chaplin lost a discrimination claim against her employers, in which she had argued the cross "ban" prevented her from expressing her religious beliefs.

Bingo! She obviously got discriminated against because she is a Christian, not because she refused to adhere her damn employers clothing standards, right. Muslim employees should be allowed to wear a burka,too!

Christian Concern has also highlighted the fact that Catholic adoption agencies no longer have the right to refuse gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.

And it features the case of Gary McFarlane, who was sacked as a Relate Counsellor for refusing to give sex therapy to gay couples.

The hypocrisy in this is almost too much to bear. "They're discriminating against us because we're not allowed to discriminate against the gays!".

Luckily, the article also allows one of those evil atheists to utter his opinion:
                                         Image via Wikipedia

However, Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said the initiative was the "culmination of the ongoing campaign run by a handful of Christian zealots to create the impression that Christianity is somehow being deliberately undermined by the authorities.

I agree.

And in light of this campaign, I actually now do think that Christians ought to be ashamed all year long.

Christopher Hitchens interviewed

This is part one of an interview with Christopher Hitchens about his cancer diagnosis and his life.

After watching this, I have an even higher opinion of him than I already had. He's really grown to be one of my (few) heroes. He sticks to his principles and to what he's done and said throughout his career. You may not agree with him on every subject (I certainly don't), but you've got to give him credit for that.

Also, the way he's facing his impeding death is admirable. He claims not to be afraid and I am tempted to believe him. I hope that when it's my turn, I will show similar courage.

Power balance scam

So these highly popular power balance bracelets have failed double blind tests and it can be shown that the company selling them uses very simple tricks to make people think they work (that is, they never do "tests" with the bracelet first, thus the subject is warmed up and knows what's coming when the bracelet comes into play).

Obviously the company and it's well payed marketing tools deny what the study has found. No surprise there.

What I do find surprising, not for the first time, is that we need a damn scientific study to expose such a thing as a scam. Honestly, is our species really that retarded? A piece of rubber with a "hologram" is supposed to make you better at sports. Really?

This goes to show that we really ought to teach our kids more clear thinking and skepticism. This is not rocket science. People should not fall for such obvious crap.

Netbook operating system

So a little while ago, I bought an ASUS eee pc 1005px for studying. It really turned out to be a neat little device. It looks great, is quiet, but reasonably powerful (in netbook terms), yet very light and has excellent battery life. The trackpad and keyboard feel very good and I even prefer them over those on my notebook. I instantly fell in love with it.

There was just on big problem: Windows 7

Image via Wikipedia

Honestly, I think 7 was a major upgrade to previous Windows versions on desktops. But whoever had the idea that it also belongs on netbooks is a fucking moron. It's sluggish and slow and takes ages to boot. Who wants that? On a mobile device such as a netbook, I want a fast operating system tailored to operate on it. It need not offer fancy graphical effects and much in terms of software apart from a webbrowser, word processing and social applications such as an email client and instant messaging.


So I went on to search the perfect netbook operating system. Let me tell you straight ahead: I did not find it. But I found some interesting options and one that was already remarkably close to it.

Image by Andrew Currie via FlickrThe first thing I tried was Ubuntu maverick merkaat netbook remix with it's then just recently released Unity interface. This wasn't the first time I used Ubuntu and I was familiar with previous versions, so my expectations were high (given I think Ubuntu is a really nice OS). Boy, this was a major let-down.

They really made a big fuzz about this new interface, praising the new vertical application dock you see on the image to the left and proclaimed that Ubuntu Unity was perfect for netbooks. What I found was that the dock is slow and awkward to handle. What's worse is that there is no way to customize it at all (the gnome panel on the top is locked,too) and you can not hide it. I mean, are you kidding me? Netbooks typically only provide a screen resolution of 1024x786. On pretty much every website I got horizontal scroll bars with this thing. It's just silly. I really can't figure out how they though this would work and didn't spot this very obvious flaw beforehand (actually, I guess they never bothered to boot Ubuntu maverick on a netbook).

I then switched over to the tradintional gnome desktop and heavily modified it to my needs. That seemed to be a fairly good solution, but I just ended up with a normal Ubuntu and nothing specifically made for netbooks.

Image by Andrew Currie via Flickr

So after a while of using Ubuntu, I wen back to searching. I found MeeGo, an OS made for mobile devices, that offered different interfaces for mobile phones, netbooks and more. It is really a nice system and I did actually like it. It looks very different from traditional systems, very much suited for netbooks (or tablets), has social networking integrated into it, as well as instant messaging etc.

The problem was that it didn't run properly on my netbook and the wireless refused to work. MeeGo is still fairly young and it seems my device just isn't fully supported yet. I will keep an eye on future releases and maybe if they turn out to work properly, I will definitely give it a (longer) try. For now, there were just way too many bugs for me to keep it.

I also found out about the upcoming google chrome OS and the whole idea of a cloud operating system sounded really nice to me. While searching the web for more information, I stumbled across jolicloud, which is just that.

Image via Wikipedia

Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu and used a modified version of Ubuntu's netbook remix in earlier versions. The current version, though, features a very unique interface, written in html5. Yes, hml5. It actually runs in a google chrome window. It's stunningly fast, slim and really perfect for netbooks. You get a nice appstore, a social stream (that I don't find very useful at the moment, for you can only see what apps people like and nothing else), an overlay for the file system that has cloud storages build into it (though in the preview version I use, these are still very buggy. Hopefully, the soon to be released final version will fix that) and access to a settings tab.

What's  really interesting is that many apps from the store are basically just links to websites that open in new chrome windows without any of the chrome interface visible. Unlike google chrome OS, though, you are not only limited to such applications, but can also choose from locally installed ones, such as open office. Your login is shared over all devices you run jolicloud on and apps will be synchronized between them automatically.

Unlike MeeGo, or Ubuntu netbook remix, jolicloud does not restrict you a lot. If you need to, you have access to all of the underlying ubuntu functionality, which I found really useful.

So yeah, I am right now very much in love with jolicloud and am looking forward to future version (as I mentioned, version 1.1 is soon to be released) and would encourage everyone to take a look. If you happen to know of any other promising OS for netbooks, drop me a message.