Category: Life

I don’t easily dismiss the bigotry expressed by the Pope. I’m going to post some snippets from two of his speeches this month. One was entitled For the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, the other was his Christmas address.

I found his wording particularly irresponsible, but I don’t think there’s any need to express my frustration here. The reason I’m posting this at all is because I think there’s value in knowing what people who influence legislative decisions and policy believe. As far as Ontario goes, the Vatican wields quite a bit of power, more than I think people give credit.

Highlights: Abortion is a crime against life, marriage equality is a threat to world peace, the existence of families with two moms and a kid constitutes an attack, and queer parents who adopt are selfish.

On Abortion

“Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.”

“…killing of a defenceless and innocent being…”

“Those who insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things the liberalization of abortion…”

“…expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life.”

On Marriage Equality

“There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage…”

“…since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.”

On Queer Families

“…the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper.”

On Adoption

“…the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being.”

On Gender Identity

“These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality.”

“The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.”

“…being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God.”

“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.”

I hung out with a friend yesterday. He had talked about this game called “Journey” he had played for the PS3, which had recently been declared IGN’s Game of the Year. Then he let me do a playthrough (thanks JT!)

What a game. You are a faceless character, starting off in a barren desert, with a clear goal – get to the top of the mountain in the distance. This is communicated to you without uttering a word. In fact, the game features no text.

Along your journey, you’ll encounter others like you. These aren’t AI characters, but other people at their PS3’s. They’ll plop in and out of existence, communicating through blips and aiding each other along. The way this game is set up, it isn’t possible to have your experience impinged by the presence of others.

The game is stunning. The individual beads of sand shine and flow around you. You are treated to beautifully realized landscapes. The clever play with the camera enhances the experience to provide vistas like that below.

The orchestral music dynamically and organically comes in and out, holding the simple narrative together. Great work. The game is short; I finished it in under three hours. But what you have is a game that is absolutely satisfying.

If you have a PS3 and haven’t played this, I strongly recommend it. It’s the perfect children’s video game: no violence, no complex story line. Just a sweet journey. For adults, the appeal isn’t lessened one bit. Check it out.

Saw another article opposing net neutrality. They described it as “the idea that bandwidth should always be free to whichever sender wants to use it”. Before I talk about net neutrality, let’s cover a bit about how things work.

Right now, if you want to access the net, you pay an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Rogers. The more data you send/receive, the more Rogers will charge you.

Rogers on its own cannot get your data around the world. So they pay another company that’s in the business of connecting networks together. Rogers is charged by their usage, a cost that’s passed onto you. This other company will have agreements with others like it and perhaps undersea cable operators. Whatever it costs them, that gets filtered down, and ends up on your bill.

Now on the other side of the world, whoever gets your data would have paid their ISP for the traffic used, and their Internet backbone, etc. Everyone that’s part of the chain gets a cut.

However, companies like Rogers have pushed this idea that the companies at the other end of the chain should pay them too. So if I surf to Netflix, Netflix should pay Rogers. They claim that they ought to be compensated for the heavy traffic a few individual sites incur. If the sites didn’t pay them, Rogers wouldn’t block them, but make them slower.

There’s two things wrong with this. The first is that Rogers is already compensated for receiving that traffic. Customers pay Rogers not only to send data, but to receive data as well. That all gets factored into their monthly totals that they’re billed for. Rogers would be charging twice for receiving data.

The other thing that’s wrong with this is that the Internet is data agnostic. You pay by how much traffic you send/receive, not by where the destination happens to be. Whether it’s 2 GB of data from site A as compared to site B doesn’t make any difference for Rogers in terms of their own operational costs. Rogers wouldn’t even know that your traffic was to/from Netflix by looking at the data itself. They’d have perform an extra step and query the DNS records for Netflix to see if the IP addresses matched.

In other words, the technical justifications behind these fees are bogus. This is a money grab by companies like Rogers, who see an opportunity to double bill. It makes fiscal sense from their end to push this, as it would signify greater profits. However, wider adoption of such policies would have significant ramifications for how the Internet works.

The user would be the first casualty, as Rogers would purposefully degrade their Internet connection (the one they paid for) whenever they interacted with a site that didn’t capitulate. The sites too would lose out, because not only would they have to continue to pay for the traffic they’d use, but would now have every single ISP on the planet also try to bill them. The Tier-1 networks, meanwhile, which actually make the Internet happen wouldn’t see an extra cent. Everyone would be worse off, except for the likes of Rogers.

Net Neutrality posits an opposition to such a model. It doesn’t say that bandwidth ought to be free but rather a recognition that double billing in the manner suggested is untenable.