This has been all over the media recently. The more you look into the scandal, the worse and more widespread you realize that it is.

In the last couple of years it has become clear that Roman Catholic priests have abused children in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom ... and that is not even the complete list. And those are only countries in Europe! Then add North America, South America and Oceania and you see how widespread the child abuse within the Catholic Church has been. (Source)

In Boston the local sexual abuse scandal was unravelled by the Boston Globe, whose reporters and the newspaper were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its public service by exposing the abuse scandal. One way to quantitatively try to grasp this local abuse case is by putting figures on it - the Boston Archdiocese paid a settlement to 552 alleged victims of abuse. 552 victims!! (Source)

In the end of March this year, the New York Times obtained documents kept secret by the Roman Catholic Church that show that the church miserably failed to act when they had identified a priest who had molested as many as 200 deaf boys. The documents from within the church shows (according to the NYT) that the Catholic church did discuss the matter of whether or not to dismiss the priest, but as their top priority was to protect the church from a scandal and not to protect the children from abuse, the identified child molester was instead of being diciplined moved to to another parish where he continued to work as a priest, working with children for the next 20 years. (Source)

Newsweek's Katie Paul has written an excellent commentary of the scandal, the recent media attention and the Vatican's response.

The whole case and cover-up is disgusting!

Update:

Pope Benedict XVI commented on the child sexual abuse scandal. He refers to it as 'petty gossip'. Petty gossip!? Britney Spears relationships are petty gossip! So is talk about who is dating who at school! Systematic sexual abuse of children is definately not!!! The Guardian has more details.

No one can possibly have missed that Greece is almost bankrupt.

But what the h-ll happened? According to BBC News Greece did benefit a lot from low interest rates as it joined the euro and used that opportunity to spend and borrow, a lot. Not so clever because what you loan, you eventually need to pay back. And payback time is now. Unfortunately at this moment the country has a jobless rate of above 10% and a debt burden of around 130% of GDP. And the country continues, as it almost always has been, to break the EU deficit rules by letting its budget deficit slip to about 13%, and reports state that it is probably even more.

So it's bailout time. The New York Times has an article on the situation and on the commitment of the euro members to help the poor country. But should they really? Has the country been good and tried to do things right? The answer to that must be no, the Wall Street Journal reports. It seems like Greece lied on their euro-zone application. It seems like Greece never, with one exception, met the committed goals on government deficit. It seems like they have spent their money like there was no tomorrow.

So what is the moral of this story? That a country can sink their economy, almost sink the EU and then just expect others to bail them out? The spender saved by the saver? Because that is what it looks like from the outside if the other euro countries pick up the bills. Or would it be better to let Greece default on its loans? That would probably drag the other PIGS countries with it, and maybe a few more. And that would probably be worse than doing the proper thing, to let Greece pick up the bills themselves.

A quote from John Maynard Keynes is in place at this time, "If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has". Can the EU afford to let Greece default?

The swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter argues on its opinion page a few days ago that Sweden should help Greece by joining the euro cooperation right now. There is only one proper reply to that, and that is, Are you mad? How would that help Greece? And how would that, in any way at all, benefit Sweden? In no way whatsoever! Let us instead use this moment to consider the good fortune of any country that is able to control its own interest rates when necessary.

But maybe I could, perhaps, give what WSJ writes another thought. That the problem is not the euro, the problem is that Greece was allowed to join..

BBC News

The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal

Dagens Nyheter

I had never been a real fan of Apple until the iPod was released a few years back. Before that my opinion was that only artsy people use Macs, people who only care about the cover and who can only use a computer if it has a graphical interface and only one mouse button. I was a dyed in the wool PC person and I was not afraid of a blinking terminal! I was at that time in the market for an mp3 player and got a Nano. I used it every day back and forth to work. I liked it, it was not an mp3 player, it was an iPod. There was and still is a difference, small but significant.

And then the Im a Mac, Im a PC commercials are just hilarious. Even if I am, or was, a PC.

I have used PC computers since I was about 7 years old. We had an Amstrad 8086 PC with two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives but no hard drive. Do you remember the 5.25 inch disks, the ones that were actually floppy? I learnt basic english at that age from Leisure Suite Larry and Kings Quest. And California Games. For those who were not around to play those great games, I can tell you that I played Larry in monochrome and that I had to type commands in order to get the avatar to do things. Like open door. Or, take ring. Or, drink beer. I also taught myself some Basic programming. Mom and I actually used to go to the library to lend books about programming.

Then the 90s came and with it the 386SX 25MHz to the household. With an extra 387 33MHz math co-processor basically turning it into a 386DX. In those days everything above 640KB internal memory was called extended memory. I do not remember if I had 2MB or 4MB of total RAM. And dad had brought me a Sound Blaster Pro from the USA which we installed in the PC. I remember specifically that it was a hassle to put the Sound Blaster into the computer as the motherboard flexed - a lot - when the card was forced into the slot. And then I remember that the IRQ setting was static and set by a jumper on the card. IRQ 7 if I remember correctly. Wolfenstein 3D was my absolute favorite game on the 386, I had never seen anything like it before.

I got a 486DX2 66MHz some time in the 90s. Doom had been released in 1993 and I first played it on my 386 (in the smallest possible field of view), so the 486 must have been brought into the family around 1994-5. Still running the Sound Blaster Pro and playing full screen Doom. Good times!

Then Quake was released in 1996. I tried to play it on the 486, with about as much success as playing Doom on the 386. With the smallest possible field of view it was possible. Quake meant that computer playing went into the 3rd dimension for real and with it came graphics acceleration. I had at this time started programming in C and was in high-school.

Sometime around here I got a Pentium. I do not remember that much from this Pentium period of computing and although Quake was quite amazing, the player experience did not improve that much as it did the moment you first saw Wolfenstein 3D.

Since then the computing timeline has been a blur for me. I learnt C programming, C++, write HTML code, got online in 1996 with a modem (of course), learnt to code for databases.

Between 2000 and 2010 I would say that computers have moved from being a hobby to becoming tools. The computer itself is no longer important. That is, I use the PC to sync my iPod and iPhone. I use it to write computer programs that I need. I use it to connect to the internet, to email, etc. The fascination of the computer itself has been replaced by a fascination of what can be done with it. It is all on the internet now.

That means that I am no longer bond to a specific brand of computer or technology/architecture. My emails are as reachable from my phone as they are from work or from at home. The same inbox, the same emails. The computer has become a transparent tool.

Today I am a happy owner of a MacBook. It is gorgeously white. It was packaged so neatly in the box when I got it that I was really impressed. And there is an air of quality around it. It runs BSD. I can write iPhone apps, I can code my own programs in a range of different languages supplied by default. I can do most, if not all, of the things that I did on my Linux laptop - and the Mac even has the nice and proper UNIX terminal that I expect to find in a proper computer. I have a trackpad that can handle up to four fingers simultaneously, two for scrolling up and down, three to go back and forth between pages in documents. Amazing.

Part of my point here is to consider why I have, a previously dyed in the wool PC user, bought a Mac?

I would say it is because the computer has become a tool, an utility. The actual hobby of computing has moved from into the abstract world beyond the hardware. The hardware does not matter anymore. Writing a program today anyway demands platform independence or else you are considered lazy.

And, absurdly, at the same time that the specific technology became a thing of the past, looks and packaging have become more important. The feel of the PC. How long it runs without crashing. How long it runs before I need to recharge it. Internet brought platform independence, platform independence moved the focus from the technology to the look and feel.

What this means to Windows and standard PCs manufacturers, I will leave as an exercise for Microsoft, DELL, HP, Lenovo and the likes to consider.

But a new era has truly begun...

"Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait...". The rest is history, per definition. Except all beyond now of course, that is per definition the future. Anyway...

It is a great song and it is also the theme song of my favorite sitcom - "The Big Bang Theory".

Enjoy The Big Bang Theory Theme by Barenaked Ladies!

Mozilla has even put a link on the main page asking users to test drive the new Firefox release before comes out of its beta phase. Well, I can not say no to that.. I tested 3.5 when it was a beta, and I was very surprised about the increase in performance compared to previous releases. So I do not want to miss out on an early peek at 3.6.

What I have found is that the easiest way to test Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu is to use Canonical's Launchpad.net web site. There is a Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Build Team that releases the latest builds from Mozilla as Ubuntu packages. Including the aforementioned 3.6 release, but also 3.7 (but I will leave testing 3.7 until it leaves alpha stage).

Go to the Personal package archive, click on Technical details about this PPA, select your Ubuntu version in the list. I use Karmic (9.10) which means I should use

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Go to System > Administration > Software Sources. Select tab Other Software. Click add and paste.

Then go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manage. Search for firefox-3.6 and install that package.

Run Firefox 3.6 beta from Applications > Internet > Namoroka Web Browser. Enjoy!

So, first off. I have only run it for a bit now and.. well, 3.5 someone? It is very similar to Firefox 3.5, atleast on the surface. I will continue to use the beta for my daily web business and will update this post when I discover something new.

Update Jan 9th, 2010: The computer has been through one update cycle in Ubuntu's Update Manager. It removed Firefox 3.5 from my computer and replaced it with Shiretoko 3.5 (Firefox 3.5 beta track) !! That means that I currently have no stable Firefox release installed on my laptop. My guess is that Launchpad.net has a daily build of Firefox 3.5 beta track that is more recent than the stable version, thus it replaced the stable version that I had installed with the beta. I don't know what to do at the moment. Either I will stay on beta or change the repositories and revert to stable - and miss out on Firefox 3.6 beta.

Uninstallation should be simple. Go into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Search for Firefox. Remove Firefox 3.6 completely. When removed, go to System > Administration > Software Sources. Remove the Launchpad.net PPA link. Run the Update Manager. I believe Shiretoko 3.5 will revert to Firefox 3.5 at that time.