The Gristmill - talk about everything

The Obama administration has announced that it will not allow religious-affiliated hospitals, universities and other organizations to be exempt from the requirement to pay, via their health insurance plans, for employees to receive contraception with no copay. When the requirement was first announced, the administration included an exemption for churches. Christian churches (Catholic and others) immediately recognized the implications of how narrowly the exemptions were defined. Basically, churches are in, but other organizations affiliated with a specific religion are not.

Today, in a move that makes no sense under the American theory of copyright, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress can re-copyright works that have fallen into the public domain. An example of a particularly telling quote was this one, by Justice Ruth Ginsburg:

In aligning the United States with other nations bound by the Berne Convention, and thereby according equitable treatment to once disfavored foreign authors, Congress can hardly be charged with a design to move stealthily toward a regime of perpetual copyrights.

I really want to find great, positive things to say about stuff that goes on at Mass. Of course, there's the obvious. After all, it IS the Mass! But, as I'm sure everyone knows, I'm talking about the piddly stuff, the stuff that we people do and not the stuff that Jesus does. I guess it's comforting to know that what we do, no matter how dumb or annoying, cannot change or diminish the reality of the Mass, as long as the priest does his duty.

It can still be annoying though, so I'm going to indulge in a bit of a rant.

How many of you have been dreading, looking forward to, or just wondering about the new Mass? How many of you have been wondering why they're calling it the "new Mass"?

Actually, Samsung made two unforgivable design faux pas (yes, the plural is the same as the singular, but don't ask me how to pronounce it), but one is more unforgivable than the other.

Both are on the model QX411 laptop computer, which I recently bought and on which I'm running Ubuntu.

The first big design flaw--the one that's just pretty unforgivable--is that they sealed the battery in the laptop so that you can't yank it out to completely power down the computer when it crashes.

Facebook can be SO unnecessarily frustrating!

Let me pose a question: What's more important to secure, your car or your house?

Dr. Bernard Nathanson has passed away. Dr. Nathanson is the former abortionist who, after recording the now-famous "silent scream" sonogram video of an abortion, realized the horror of the practice and became an ally of the pro-life movement. Later, he was received into the Catholic Church. Dr. Nathanson's story is a powerful witness to the power of grace in many ways, and while many will focus on his conversion against abortion specifically, and the ways his story helps the pro-life cause, I believe one of the most compelling components of Dr.

The other weekend at Mass, Father made a plea for more people to volunteer as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion (EMHC's). As a part of his request, he mentioned that people complain about the Mass being too long at this particular parish, and that having more people to distribute Holy Communion could alone reduce Mass time by 5-10 minutes. He pointed out, of course, that we should not be in a rush to get Mass over with, but that the length of Mass can become a problem for young children (which it can).

What we need in genealogy software is data provenance tracking. I'm going to design such a system--actually a proposal for a standard and hopefully a reference implementation.

I'll call it "Hermes". As you know (or maybe don't know) Hermes was the "Messenger of the gods, god of commerce, thieves, travelers, sports, and border crossings."