That NASA decision-makers don't listen to technicians has already led to catastrophes, so it wouldn't exactly be anything new if the ISS crew now runs into problems. Great strategy to send a crew up there when measuring instruments have already failed, a crew that can't repair them because they don't have spare parts with them ...
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
The well-earning chemistry PhD at the chip shop next door will be delighted to hear that his years of study won't be counted as contribution years...
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
It is truly appalling in how blatant a manner Ministers Clement and Bulmahn are ignoring consumers' rejection of genetically modified food. How can a minister of a democratically elected government side so openly with an industry when consumers repeatedly and clearly reject this industry in surveys? The only German interests lie with Bayer - the remaining providers are foreign companies. And solely for this reason, not only is consumer will ignored, but for example organic food production is made more difficult (because the pollen from genetically modified plants are simply not stopped at field boundaries by some magic)? That's a great understanding of democracy from the ministers.
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
I understand that golf is offered as a leisure activity. A university golf course is apparently supposed to be built because of me. Golf as a minor subject in sports studies is also supposedly supposed to exist because of me. But as a major? Is that really the case, or did the Rheinische Post make a research error? In any case, I think a specialized sport as a major subject is completely absurd. What would a diploma in golf even be good for?
I found this at RP-Online: Wissenschaft in the original article.
Wow, that's serious. We've seen sandbox breakouts from time to time, but the fact that an unsigned Java applet can access the floppy drive is definitely a sign of insecurity that can reach critical proportions. That's quite a heavy blow to Java's security. But ultimately, it's not surprising: even though the virtual machine specification assumes the sandbox is secure, there are always implementations behind it that can have errors at the Java level or even at the actual machine level (in the implementation of the virtual machine itself).
And the fact that the computer had to be rebooted after the applet, and that access to physical media is possible, suggests that there's such a deep-rooted implementation problem here.
Technologies don't simply become secure through specification and claims...
You can find the original article at heise online news here: the original article.
The article addresses a few of the demographic lies of politics and contrasts them with reality. And notes: The unusual perception that politicians are concerned about long-term problems is probably just an illusion. One gets the impression that German politicians use demographic rhetoric to distract from their helplessness and failure in dealing with current problems. The original article can be found at Telepolis News.
Come on then, politicians and government officials: it's time to save taxpayers' money. Please read this.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Another well-researched article. While Google has not disclosed its algorithms, Google does not sell search result placements. The advertising that appears on Google based on search queries is clearly marked as such and visually completely separated from the search results. There's really nothing to criticize about that. Nevertheless, the article criticizes that selling search results would be a lucrative business for Google.
Do journalists even bother to research anything anymore?
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
I demand a speaking ban for stupid company bosses. He's already spouted this nonsense before and then thought he could offset it by providing 1 or 2 hours of educational programming (P1120). Ridiculous. Who would want someone like that to educate anyone? Quite apart from the fact that the idea that 1 to 2 hours of poor educational broadcasts could offset all television advertising by public broadcasters is completely absurd. I found the original article at RP-Online: Multimedia.
At heise online news you'll find the original article.
320 tons of uranium used in Iraq? Disgusting. War zones as final storage for nuclear waste.
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
And yet another patent the world doesn't need.
At heise online news you'll find the original article.
What nonsense. Where did they get this crap from? Are there only monkeys sitting at the keyboard at Spiegel? Do I now have to formally apologize to the monkeys?
(Jens already had a laugh about that too) At Spiegel Online: Netzwelt there's the original article.
I overlooked something at Heise. Thanks to the SWR for pointing it out in his blog. Without proper censorship, nothing will come of banana republic Germany. The censorship efforts of the Düsseldorf government president—completely ignorant of any facts, evidence, or technical background—are entering the next round, this time targeting search engines. It's also nice how the government president's spokesperson leaves it open whether action would also be taken against trademark violations. Lovely how they make it clear from the outset that this is absolutely not about protecting citizens, but about a pure demonstration of power by the government president responsible for media law in North Rhine-Westphalia, with the clear intention of implementing a general internet censorship system. So that opinions conform nicely with the district government. How they deal with critics and how they get administrative assistance from public prosecutors' offices in other federal states can be seen well in the proceedings against Alvar Freude. Of course, we all now trust the Düsseldorf district government to not abuse this censorship tool. And pigs can fly. At Der Schockwellenreiter I found the original article.
Well, that's quite a mess what happened with the Elfe. Something like this just shows once again that in Germany many people couldn't care less what they destroy, as long as they get their legal right. Completely irrelevant whether the behavior is excessive. Completely irrelevant whether they ruin their own reputation, like the company that's sending cease-and-desist letters to the Elfe (no, I won't link the company, that shouldn't get referrer traffic either). The only thing that matters is flexing your power muscles, no matter how ridiculous and pathetic the behavior is, no matter whether someone's livelihood is destroyed in the process, no matter whether you get anything out of it or not. Whether it's the neighbor's cherry tree, the mutt from across the street or just your own crappy homepage or domain. No matter how ridiculous and absurd, you have the law on your side, so just keep hammering away. Where this is leading us Nico asks: well, the last word will probably go to the same people who profit the most from all this madness: the lawyers. Because ultimately it will always end up with lawyers - whether it's because of court proceedings or legal advice. Ever heard the saying about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse? How is a workable legal situation ever supposed to emerge in the area of trademarks, brand rights and patent hysteria, as long as lawyers are making such good money off these things? As long as cease-and-desist letters in these areas can be used as actual extortion attempts, which many people are simply helpless against (because the whole thing is so convoluted and absurd)? At Nochn Blogg. you can find the original article.
Cool class. Great idea. So that the garbage still gets pushed by retail. And all just because it's about money again - what the consumer wants is irrelevant once more.
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
Great - where are we supposed to pay for everything else?
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
Things are really getting completely ridiculous now. Who else is in favor of muzzles for brainless politicians like these two? Shackles for school truants, it can hardly get more absurd. Geis and Schönbohm should be put in the public pillory, just like they apparently imagine it for school truants.
At RP-Online: Wissenschaft I found the original article.
Exactly!
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
I hope all these cowards from the Junge Union get a taste of their own medicine through their own stupidity. But as children of wealthy parents, it's easy to run your mouth. Putting the whole thing under the heading of intergenerational justice is really the last straw.
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
So. So our coffee is too strong for the British.
I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.
I'd like to have that in my desktop computer - when will the Power5 upgrade board for Apple's blue-white G3 be available?
Koch wants the coup and Merkel saves the republic. And pigs can fly. To whom besides me do these supposed discussions seem terribly staged and orchestrated?
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
Hey, things are still going round
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Looking at the key figures of the offering, one does indeed look rather bewildered: the price of EUR 11.90 per month includes only 500 MB. An (expensive) CD blank costs EUR 1 and holds 700 MB.
Apart from that, the costs are quite hefty when you consider typical disk usage patterns (the usual collector-and-hunter scenario of a typical user). Let me take my own notebook's hard drive as an example: 30 GB in use. If I subtract the operating system and installed applications, a good 20 GB remains. Of that, another 8 GB is music (all originals, so no comments here!), which I can also subtract - still leaves 12 GB. Of that, another 2 GB or so of accumulated downloads that don't necessarily need to be backed up. 10 GB remain that I can't quite categorize, so sorting through them would be more work than I'm comfortable with. A lot.
But I can't afford to pay for 10 GB per month at T-Com's prices: that's EUR 11.90 for the first 500 MB and then EUR 5.80 for every additional half GB, so a total of EUR 122.10 per month for the storage. Plus I still have to pay EUR 200 for the initial upload of all the data - and if I don't have a flat rate, I also pay the internet costs on top.
If I back up these 10 GB to multiple DVDs, I need 2-3 media (if you organize it yourself it's usually not optimal, so one medium more) - for a total of around EUR 10 for the media at expensive prices.
And the duration of the backup won't be any faster than uploading via the rather thin upstream channels of typical DSL connections. 128 KBit/sec is about 7.5 MB per minute, or about 450 MB per hour - so 22 hours for the backup over the line, if it's free and unoccupied and no disruptions occur.
And the argument about the lack of qualified staff for backup: if you want to back up the data with T-Com's solution over DSL, and you don't want the costs to eat you alive, and the whole thing needs to run overnight, an employee must select the data and prepare it for backup - gathering it in directories, or structuring the directories accordingly, etc. But that's already the biggest part of the work in any backup - figuring out which data should be backed up and how. The rest is just one click with today's backup solutions for end users and the necessary frequent changing of DVD or CD blanks (or MO or tape if the user prefers reasonably reliable backups).
Somehow I have the feeling that T-Com has calculated things a bit strangely here. Sounds similar to Apple's calculation with .Mac Backup. Except that Apple didn't want to back up mass data over the internet in the first place, but only settings and selected file areas; Apple's backup program backs up mass data like pictures and music locally to hard drives by default.
A usable backup solution on the internet would really be nice. But so far I haven't seen one that would have made sense for DSL users...
The original article is on heise online news at this link.
It's not the first bad decision by the SPD
At heise online news you can find the original article.
A general problem in networks: tools that allow session hijacking make it possible to position themselves between connections. The key point is that the connections are routed transparently through this program: the user doesn't notice it. This also works across switches - the corresponding programs steal the connection via ARP spoofing and then insert themselves in between. The only solution here is a consistent migration to protocols that work with mutual certificates and encryption - where both server and client ensure that they are communicating with the correct partner. But even here, attack vectors are still possible. Absolute security in networks where you have no control over the infrastructure does not exist.
By the way, the technology behind the attack is quite interesting: first, ARP spoofing is used to steal the connection. Then all connections are routed through the intermediate computer. In doing so, the computer presents itself to the server as the client, and vice versa. Encryption is therefore only useful if the protocol regularly performs checks using a shared secret and if the two partners identify themselves to each other using asymmetric methods. Still, the man-in-the-middle can often impersonate the other by using data from a transparently passed-through connection to replay it later (this can crack some encryption setups).
Ultimately, the problem can only be solved at the lowest level - securing connections at the lowest protocol level. Only when appropriate security mechanisms are in place at the IP level can we even hope to get this problem under control.
In the meantime, admins can provide some protection by using ARP watchers and monitoring programs to detect when such attacks occur. But this too is only a very shaky and unreliable tool, since the admin theoretically has to regularly review all protocols - and the signs are often only very minimal (such as the brief appearance of an unknown MAC address in the network).
At RP-Online: Multimedia I found the original article.
The man is really not embarrassed by anything. As if he hadn't already made himself the class clown during the last fun election campaign
I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.
Is Prozac the Cause of the Ozone Hole?
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
Well, we could also introduce official registration for entering video rental stores and sex shops, which would be similar to the demanded stricter controls for internet sex offers.
Not that I particularly want to defend the porn industry - after all, it is one of the main causes of the spam problem (after all, this is an area where the click-through rate is significantly higher than in all other advertising sectors - men really do think more with their pants than with their brains), but the demands to tighten age controls are really absurd: who is going to go to their post office or T-Punkt and present their ID there for registration for an X-Check-ID? Sure, the postal workers don't know what that is anyway. Obviously.
The real problem behind this is something else entirely: the inability of authorities and similar institutions to understand that the internet is simply not a regional event. Stricter age control laws will be just as impossible to enforce across borders on the internet as the already planned opening hours for erotic content on the internet.
Youth protection is something that cannot be enforced through this type of prohibition - only through education and enlightenment. Because with the increasing interconnectedness of the world, there will always be content that is illegal in one country but available from other countries. Even absurd attempts like those of the Düsseldorf government president will change nothing about that.
Either we finally accept this content and its distribution as a social problem and address it at that level (through education and enlightenment already in schools), or we criminalize the entire internet and tinker around with pointless and ineffective filtering attempts, waste money on these absurd projects, hand the state far too powerful censorship tools and rights, and make ourselves look ridiculous internationally.
The latter is the path that politicians are currently taking in Banana Republic Germany - it's also much easier, besides you get the necessary censorship rights for free anyway. Then you can also use them right away for politically unpopular opinions.
At heise online news there's the original article.
It's certainly much easier to criminalize children right away than to actually deal with the causes of school truancy.
After all, performance pressure is being put on children much earlier these days. If you don't learn anything, you're nothing, you're just worthless. So what are children supposed to do when they have problems in school? Those who perhaps can't cope with all the pressure? Let's just throw every struggling student into a reform institution, because after all, they'll eventually skip school out of frustration and despair, and eventually they'll become criminals.
Our school system is as inhumane as our entire society. And in doing so, we're sacrificing children on the altar of our materialism. We'll probably only realize that our own future is being destroyed a few generations from now, when it's too late...
I found the original article at RP-Online: Science.
A nice demonstration of how absurd the DMCA is: a manufacturer of voting systems wants to hide behind it and cover up its errors and manipulation possibilities for the voting systems. In the long run, I'm sure society's higher interest in voting machines will prevail—I wouldn't even credit the USA with letting this slide. But it points to a general problem with all the copyright tightening, patent demands, and user restrictions that have been increasingly demanded recently: the end user not only receives fewer usage rights, they also receive fewer control options. And it's made far too easy for manufacturers to hide behind various laws and cover up shoddy work, deliberate manipulation, and misuse of market power. Another reason to preferably use open source systems for critical systems.
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
|KK| An article about Mother Teresa and her role (or rather, lack thereof) in providing care for the needy and disaster victims in Calcutta and the great lie of her entire life.
In the end, only one conclusion remains here: the friendly smiling men and women of the church have only one interest: power. It's not about the welfare of people, it's not even about the welfare of their own followers, it's only about the power of the church. And Catholics will soon celebrate Mother Teresa's success in this field — the defense of the Catholic Church's power position — with her beatification.
That this constitutes idolatry according to their own teachings is apparently just as uninteresting as the fact that the public and their own people were lied to for decades.
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
Ugh. But that's not nice. Apple really shouldn't be making such mistakes anymore - they've noticed often enough by now that they run into problems with too-short testing phases for their devices (I'm just thinking of the exploding lithium batteries in the Powerbook 5300 devices).
At heise online news you can find the original article.
So the entire SCO anti-Linux campaign is now running on borrowed money. How stupid does a bank have to be to finance such nonsense? And how dumb does a company executive have to be to take such a ride? Linux will definitely outlast SCO - it's only a matter of time before SCO runs out of steam. There are no new products from SCO, no new system releases, and the alleged worldwide Unix market is simply not being contested with any SCO systems - it doesn't help that SCO still claims that Unix belongs to them (which by almost all relevant perspectives isn't true anyway, since they have neither the copyright nor the patents). But what fascinates me is the persistence with which they continue their kamikaze flight and the stupidity with which others climb aboard this kamikaze flight.
At heise online news there is the original article.
I think that's unfair: if someone starts such an absurd rip-off, they should at least be able to keep it going long enough for people to get properly worked up about the mess. Where will it end, Sodom and Gomorrah!
At heise online news there's the original article.
What bothered me about Mark Pilgrim's article, I wrote here. There are several things in the article that don't match what I would expect from a professional explanation of the Atom API on http://xml.com/. It's a shame, but it will probably contribute more to further division than to mutual acceptance between the two API camps. At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.
Quite amusing when a spy gets arrested for espionage. But well, if he also transports the classified documents in the wrong direction ...
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
Do they both have a pea-sized brain?
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
... was the inability of our Bundestag officials to conduct two votes without mixing up the ballot boxes.
Well - the thing is so big that they might as well have included the card reader with the drive in the first place. I mean, what's the point if the card reader is just as big as the iPod, and if the card reader needs extra batteries on top of that? Somehow not as great as it sounded. And the problems with the transfer didn't inspire confidence either - since when do you have to reformat a CF card if you deleted it while reading? Very dubious.
At iPoding there's the original article.
And the UN gave such a madman a mandate?
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
Anything else would be unacceptable either.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
And once again, a patent that the world absolutely does not need.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Cool. Security updates only once a month. That's how Windows security issues are addressed.
At heise online news there's the original article.
This is taking on highly absurd proportions these days. This is abuse of power in its most literal sense. This has nothing to do with rule of law anymore, it's the worst kind of state arbitrariness. Usually something like this only appears in reports by Amnesty International or the UN about so-called banana republics. Well, it seems we're not far from that anymore. Torture was already described as a viable means (P405). Recommended is the documentation on http://odem.org/ - there's a bit more information about it there. At heise online news there's the original article.
I'll say just one thing: Bananenrepublik At heise online news you can find the original article.
Hold on: the company has a contract with the federal government, but refuses to let parliamentarians (who are, after all, a not entirely insignificant part of the federal government that has the contract with Toll Collect) see the contract? Can it get more absurd? How much evidence does it take to show that more than just stupidity is at play here? And why doesn't the federal government, as the second party to the contract, simply make its copy available to Parliament? Given the sum of money involved, it surely can't be the case that the government is operating without public oversight by Parliament (and with an explicit refusal to allow such oversight!).
I found the original article at TAZ.
That promises a lot for the next tour. After all, Hamilton was fourth in the tour despite injuries, and Sevilla is no slouch either.
At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.
And in a flash, Rupert Murdoch could also secure broadcasting slots in Germany. Not exactly a pleasant thought. But probably almost predictable if you consider the connection between Saban and Murdoch (P1359). I found the original article at dotcomtod.