The Unburdened Mind - "The majority of these individuals are not violent criminals; indeed, those that turn to crime are generally considered “unsuccessful psychopaths” due to their failure to blend into society. Those who do succeed can do so spectacularly. For instance, while it may sound like a cynical joke, it’s a fact that psychopaths have a clear advantage in fields such as law, business, and politics." - der Psychopath als evolutionäre Entwicklungsnische in der Zivilisation.
Linkblog - 19.12.2007 - 21.1.2008
Schäuble sharply criticizes constitutional judge Papier - Schäuble, who is planning a new aviation security law, told the newspaper Die Welt that constitutional judges are "not democratically legitimized" for "advice" on the design of such laws. Unlike the Federal Constitutional Court, the interior minister opined, without excluding human dignity: "All constitutionally protected areas end somewhere." In his opinion, where these limits lie is "a matter for the legislature." - Well, if you have such interior ministers, you don't need terrorists anymore. Can someone explain the Basic Law to Mr. Schäuble? And could the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution finally put Mr. Schäuble under observation? After all, he is the number one enemy of the constitution in Germany.
German Bundestag advocates for regional top-level domains - yes, no, of course. Because something.bayern is so much easier than something.bayern.de - which has been possible for a long time but hasn't been done because all the states basically dropped the ball and some of the idiots sold their domain to some shops. Sorry, but all the whining about "we just want our own pathetic and completely useless top-level domain" is really getting on my nerves. The people from the very last row in the Bundestag can finally act like big politicians because there's nothing more important than the fox tail for the DSL modem ...
Interior Ministry blocks release of Buback files - and of course, one immediately wonders what is in the files that they should not be given to their own federal prosecution service ... the refusal means that these files "would cause disadvantages to the well-being of the Federation or a German state". Hmm. Very interesting.
SPD: Decision for online search has been made - "I do, however, have the hope that the Constitutional Court will re-interpret the significance of the right to informational self-determination in the age of the internet. This is relevant for all security authorities." - I, on the other hand, have the hope that the Constitutional Court will verbally kick the proletharians in Berlin's ass.
EU-Abgeordneter: Provider sollen bei Urheberrechtsverstößen die Leitung kappen - even more prolethicians, who open their mouths without a spark of understanding and know-how. All this shouting for filtering solutions on the Internet, and then they arrogantly complain about the evil Chinese firewall and get upset about censorship in Islamic states - meanwhile, they themselves are busily working on the European Internet wall and the establishment of massive censorship apparatuses in Europe.
FireGPG - use GPG easily in Firefox ! - I don't know if I already had this, but still linking it here as a reminder for myself.
Macworld: Carl Zeiss presents video glasses for iPods - hmm, if someone now writes a hack for support in e.g. the Second Life client ...
Navy Wins Exemption From Bush to Continue Sonar Exercises in Calif. - "The White House has exempted the Navy from two major environmental laws in an effort to free the service from a federal court's decision limiting the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises." - die US-Regierung hält von ihren obersten Gerichten und deren Entscheidungen halt genausowenig wie unsere Regierung von unseren obersten Gerichten ...
Schäuble's new plans outrage the opposition - "The plan by Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble to further expand his already heavily controversial draft for an amendment to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) law and to finally abolish the eavesdropping protection for so-called professional confidentiality holders has led to outraged reactions from the Left and the Greens." - of course, outrage is cheap in the opposition. But does anyone believe that in the event of a possible change of government, the current opposition - if it were to participate in a new government - would strongly advocate for the repeal of any laws? The Union also liked to express outrage during its time in opposition, just like the SPD. Simple outrage is indeed very cheap, politically ... (especially when you are insignificant)
DreamHost Blog "Um, Whoops." - locked and fluffy blog posts don't come across so well when the "whoops" consists of accidentally charging 7.5 million US$ via credit cards and some of the customers are probably now struggling with overdrafts and the resulting problems ... Blöd 2.0?
Railway announces job cuts after agreement with GDL - of course, Mehdorn, the (in relation to the total number of employees at the railway) small number of train drivers who now possibly have a normal working week (yes, more than 40 hours a week is not normal, Henry Ford knew that) and adequate remuneration, they of course pose a great threat to the competitiveness of the state monopoly railway (whose competitors are mostly also financed by municipalities or regions, as hardly any purely private investors can be found in this area). I'm currently trying very hard to figure out where the hell the railway in Germany (and it does run there, and thanks to the tracks it's not necessarily all that far away from it) is under such great competitive pressure that it has to pay so much attention to its competitiveness, so as not to be threatened by the evil train drivers, but certainly this master strategist Mehdorn will be able to explain this to me in a coherent manner. Or he's just talking bullshit. I believe the latter.
USA want to establish international biometric database with allies - Echelon 2.0, particularly nice the hint also on suspects of minor offenses (hey, parking offenders and the suspicious wrong waste sorting - you are meant!) and particularly nice the unidentified fingerprints.
Airfoil 3 Spreads Music Streaming Beyond AirPort Express - I guess I should finally take a look at it. Saving cables sounds pretty good ...
Dryad - build digital trees based on parameter sets and visually navigate in "forests" of tree alternatives. And it's also available for OS X!
Struck refuses to apologize to Koch - the Union's whining about the verbal beating Koch received is cute. Most of the insults from the Union camp towards other politicians are much harsher. It's always the same, those who can dish it out the most can take it the least. It's a shame that Struck, like any good Social Democrat, will surely cave in sooner or later - because the hate preacher from Hesse really doesn't deserve an apology ...
Ver.di sacks official, NPD is pleased - anyone who wants to know what's wrong in our society should read this. Because a union that wants to fire an engaged anti-fascist - how does that go together with the idea of a union? Our society has such a hatred for the left and flirts so much with the right that you can actually feel sick. And this is not just the case in the new federal states ...
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work - also the reference to the 40-hour week and Henry Ford. But of course, our proletarians know everything better and therefore advocate the 42-hour week ...
Wilber loves Apple - since Photoshop Elements keeps crashing on me (and of course, I have no idea what the nonsense is supposed to mean), I've once again dealt with Gimp and Mac. Wilber loves Apple is a very well-made collection of Gimp for Mac, ready for drag-and-drop installation and, in my opinion, much better than the more well-known Gimp.App (for example, Wilber loves Apple finally shows all filters and scripts even when the German interface is set, which Gimp.App does not do).
Ruffles for "Existential Threatening" Warning File of the Insurance Industry - and another pot in which data is diligently collected so that some companies can steal themselves from the performance expected of them. And customers are diligently driven into the maw of potential customers with the privatization of parts of old-age provision and health insurance ...
Valued Lessons: Monads in Python (with nice syntax!) - interesting approach using Python 2.5 bidirectional generators.
At a Loss for Words - fascinating. Microsoft just removes support for old file formats from Office 2003 - with a service pack. Great idea. Have fun those who have archived their documents in Word or Excel format ... there are hardly better reasons to switch to open programs like OpenOffice, or?
Backscatterer.org, another antisocial and technically stupid blocklist - idiots at work. Once again, an antisocial and stupid wannabe expert tries to redefine the Internet according to his opinion. This time it's against sender callouts - a technique that helps quite well against spam because addresses can be checked for validity with it. And all with minimal effort for the mail servers - a small sequence of HELO, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO (which would come later in any case with every bounce) and then directly a QUIT - so no mail in the queue, but only a check based on SMTP. The argument that he has to deal with the verifiers in addition to the bounces is nonsense - because if the verify does not come, the bounces come from these failed mails, because not only the senders are in a much larger part garbage, also the recipients (of the mail traffic that we push, only the smallest part is actually valid in terms of emails). Turning off the verification only leads to a greater occurrence of bounces - and they are expensive, because they go into the mail queue, while the verifies do not go there. The argument about loops is also stupid - correct callbacks happen with an empty envelope-from, so the other server knows immediately that it does not need to perform verification (in principle, a bounce delivery is simulated, and loops are also prevented by the empty envelope-from). The purpose of the verification is to answer the question of whether you could send a bounce to the technical sender in case of doubt. If you can't do that, you can't accept a mail if you can't directly guarantee to check all the factors up front. This is a completely legitimate procedure and absolutely conformant with the RFCs. The operators of this list are only surpassed in stupidity by the mail administrators who enter such a list into their server as a blocklist. How stupid do you have to be for that? I know how stupid, because since today I know the first server that does this ...
base2 - a library that smooths out JavaScript differences between browsers.
Dean Edwards: IE7.js version 2.0 (beta) - new version of the brilliant JavaScript library that turns IE into a somewhat compliant browser.
Child pornography: Companies to evaluate hard drives - "In their investigations against child pornography in connection with the nationwide operation 'Heaven,' the Berlin police want to use internet specialists from external companies." - as if it were such a good idea to hand over private data (and every hard drive contains such data) to companies instead of having it examined by officials. What nonsense is this? Of course, the volume of data may overwhelm the officials - but one could have realized that beforehand. Now, however, to ultimately devalue all potential evidence by handing it over to entities outside the investigating authorities is quite a strange action.
Mars collision becomes more likely - just make sure it doesn't fall on top of Spirit or Opportunity!
Scratch Home imagine, program, share - a fun project to introduce children to programming in a graphical way. For my taste, it's too much based on the old Structogram technique, but still quite nice to look at. Additionally, it's nice that a Mac version is also available.
Adobe products communicate via dubious web address - Adobe is just a pigsty. This already started with the forced registration of the Creative Suite.
BGH: Raids against globalization critics were unlawful - it's becoming normal that the state doesn't care about its own laws ...
Django on Jython: Minding the Gap - wow. It's getting closer. And as a side effect, Jython will get closer to current Python. Cool!
HD Monitor Causes DRM Issues with Netflix - Netflix checks the output hardware and if it's too good, it prohibits playing files. And the kicker: if you follow the suggested troubleshooting path, rights for other files seem to be revoked (in the case of the OP then the rights for the movies purchased at Amazon). Great. DRM is garbage - and especially the one so often praised by the film industry, Microsoft's blob.
iCab is back - and uses WebKit. What I always found interesting about iCab were the very powerful filtering options. And of course it's nice that it's a real OS X program (unlike Firefox, which is still too bulky under OS X).
Is Australia building a Great Firewall? - "Youth protection sounds good. But what is presented as youth protection resembles the Great Firewall of China, which is widely criticized in the Western world."
GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - brilliant idea, simply a virtual file system for running applications and a file that represents the current window content. Copy the file and you have a snapshot. Ideal for scripted webcasts, for example.
OLPC Chief Technologist Starts Own Business - "She is starting her own company at the time when the XO will be delivered in large quantities," writes Jepsen on her website. "However, she will continue to provide OLPC with her products at cost price." Jepsen's first OLPC patent application was published on December 13, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. - yes, that's what the typical American charity scam looks like. She could have given the patents to the OLPC project so that it could generate support for the project from potential marketing (or simply use the patents as a guarantee of its own continued existence). But today, only personal profit counts. The fact that many opportunities are only possible through collaboration in a non-profit project, and that she has benefited from this, is certainly easy to ignore ...
Gmail Filesystem - since FUSE now also works with OSX, I should take a look at this again. 6 Gigabytes of external storage might not be such a bad idea after all.
Psychology Today: Dreams: Night School - interesting article about dreams and why we dream at all. The idea is that dreams are a training ground for the brain, where threats are recapitulated and the correct reactions to them are practiced. Dreams as a VR training ground for the real world.
Varnish - programmable reverse-Proxy for HTTP. Could be interesting for some projects - although I usually use Apache with ProxyPass to have a uniform layer (with optional caching) to the outside.
Australia to enforce a "rating system" on web, track users - Australia has now completely gone off the deep end. Age verification for 15+ content - so could the Internet be turned into an unsupervised children's playground. I mean, okay, Australia is a continent, but it has some island mentality somewhere. But that's really completely crazy.
David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars - a very interesting article by one of my favorite musicians, the former lead singer of the Talking Heads. Worth reading because he not only lists all the contract models that currently exist, but also names specific musicians and breaks them down with examples and calculations.
More on widgets: When one e-mail is enough to break a system. - JavaScript widgets (e.g. Mac Dashboard, or Google Desktop or Yahoo Widgets) have the same security issues as regular websites. And presumably, people pay even less attention to programming with widgets than with websites. We are probably heading towards a new wave of exploits ...
Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Docs - well, it works.
Surfing for 61.98 euros per hour - ouch. What some people come up with to relieve others of their money is really awful.
A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US - because Icelandic women are, of course, terribly dangerous terrorists.
Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report: "The 2004 Election Was Stolen… Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation" - after California, Ohio is now the second state to publish its own investigations into electronic voting machines, describing them as massively problematic. Incidentally, comparable systems were allowed for the state elections in Hesse. Because they are so easy to manipulate?
Creative Commons will bypass EU database protection rights - new versions specifically for Germany and EU law.
New setback for music industry's cease-and-desist lawyer - "In his judgment, Judge Schulz criticizes the fact that the Rasch law firm did not notice the transposition of numbers in the correspondence with the public prosecutor's office. He also read the riot act to the latter: The transfer of the personal data behind the IP address to the lawyer had been unlawful. The Code of Criminal Procedure would not allow such a transfer of personal information by the prosecutors."