Ann Elisabeth was diligent and identified the Bulgarian twin spammers - who are likely responsible for a large part of blog spam.
Archive 25.4.2005 - 24.5.2005
Michael Hampton examines what nofollow has really brought: Nofollow revisited. If you're still using the raw version of WordPress: NoNoFollow install and disable nofollow.
And the rip-off continues
The Internet will become subject to fees! - because a PC is the same as a TV or radio. Probably only in the broken minds of politicians, but unfortunately they decide where things are going. And so the GEZ can freely help themselves in the next area and implement their Gestapo methods.
US Department of Justice puts nationwide sex offender registry online - some news just leaves you speechless ...
Elections in NRW
Well, a change in government is quite a normal democratic thing. If the Union had come up with something like a program and statements, they would have had to fight to win - then I could even understand the whole thing. Okay, I still think it's crap, but I could understand how it happened. But to lose to that blowhard Rüttgers - sorry, but you really can't sink any lower. The blowhard hasn't presented a single concept that would actually do any good - cut coal subsidies? Great idea, we don't have enough unemployed people in NRW already. Tuition fees? Great idea, then students who can't afford to study anymore will also be pushed into the job market, and students who have to work for the fees will then fight with one-euro jobbers for the positions. Great future - at least the most populous federal state won't be on the brink of the abyss anymore. At least not after Rüttgers gave it the final push...
And just once - just one single time - I would like to experience a politician being honest after the election. Not that disgusting grin and acting as if you've set a record in the hundred-meter dash - it's about our future, you jerks!
Instead, they will now waffle again, everyone delivers explanations why it has to be this way and is right or wrong - but of course only the voter is to blame, never the politicians. Disgusting. Actually, one should refuse to turn on the TV and watch/read/listen to any news weeks before and after the election - just to not see these smug faces (by the way, it doesn't matter which party, they are all blissfully united on this point) and not to hear their selfish and voter-contemptuous attempts at explanation.
By the way, Müntefering has announced early federal elections in the fall - either he wants to finally give us voters the rest of the grinning faces, or the SPD is doing what it does best again: shirking responsibility. You can then blame everything on the voter again, who didn't understand anything - instead of thinking about your own inhuman politics for once...
Shitty day. I have a bad cold, a bad mood, and Rüttgers wins the election. Rüttgers - the dumbest piece of bread in the Union puddle! Oha. Poor NRW.
Contributions will not decrease again
Survey: Health insurance funds' financial situation worsening again - we're all being fooled. By politicians who promise to lower contribution rates and naturally can't. By funds that are supposed to represent our interests but naturally don't. By doctors who promise cooperation in cost reduction but naturally don't want to give up their income (*). By pharmacists who are supposed to serve as a trusted source for patients but have long since lost that trust.
Of course, the contribution reduction for employers - there's always money for that. Only the patients, they have to pay for all of this again. Funds, doctors, and pharmacists, on the other hand, sit on their vested interests and refuse to contribute even minimally to a reduction that would also affect their income.
Funds then do great things like the family doctor model and the in-house pharmacy model - but it doesn't help if the doctors simply refuse to participate (which happens here in Münster quite often). Correct billing of the practice fee is also rarely experienced - if a prescription is simply picked up, without the doctor providing even a bit of service (except for his signature), if the medication has been taken for years - doesn't matter, the practice fee is quickly taken again.
Quality control of doctors? No show - they refuse, that would be too much influence for the patient. So they continue to hide behind the allegedly free choice of doctor - which has long since become laughable only through the emigration of specialists from the associations of statutory health insurance physicians. In some specialties, as a statutory health insurance patient, you only have a chance in the hospital to meet a really qualified doctor - outside you only find quacks ...
At the same time, more and more politicians and functionaries of the various associations are talking about patients taking more responsibility and having to bear more of the costs. Of course, we are supposed to trust the doctors in consultation. We are supposed to trust the pharmacists in choosing the drug manufacturer. We are supposed to trust the funds in billing. How are we supposed to take on more responsibility in such a situation that is based on trust without control? What does taking responsibility mean in this context at all - it's not about responsibility, it's solely about cost shifting. And risk shifting: What, your complaints have worsened because you stopped the treatment too early because of the costs? Your own fault, why do you do such a thing. If patients are asked to take more responsibility, they must also be given the means to do so in the form of possibilities of influence and controls. Otherwise, these are just empty phrases.
Doctors receive preferential treatment from the pharmaceutical industry and then obediently prescribe their results - it's so conveniently practical and comfortable and you benefit from it. The funds sit there and deal more with their own bureaucracy and their own security than with keeping an eye on the doctors and ensuring that this very connection to the pharmaceutical industry does not get out of hand. The pharmacists fight for the preservation of their privileges and go against any alternative form of drug supply and argue with their consulting services - which, however, de facto often no longer exist, if in a pharmacy only one or two trained pharmacists work, the rest are at best better drugstore clerks ... (and the main turnover in pharmacies is made with care products, gummy bears and all kinds of obscure nonsense - hey, why should one trust people who offer homeopathic nonsense and "advise"?)
And the pharmaceutical industry? They are the laughing fifth in the background. Decent profit margins, of course, reduce jobs, because the margins have to increase. In principle, monopolies through absurd patent policy (I recall the nitrogen patent from Linde - which fortunately was overturned) and an increasingly opaque approval bureaucracy. Of course, medicines must be tested before approval - but what the current tests really bring, one has seen in various cases recently (Lipobay, Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors - just to name two cases).
What is needed is a much more radical restructuring of the health system, a restructuring designed to enable the patient to actually take responsibility, because he is given the information he needs for this and because he is given advisory facilities that support him in this.
Separation of the billing system and the control function in the funds - the control function is not sufficiently exercised by them anyway, it belongs to independent institutions financed by mandatory contributions from those involved in the health system (doctors, pharmacists, pharmaceutical industry and proportionally health insurance contributions).
The billing procedures should be handled by independent accounting offices for patients and doctors, which should only finance themselves through their billing services - this is already common practice in the economy, where billing services are outsourced to separate companies that are then financed by shares in the cost savings of the parties involved.
More transparency in the pharmaceutical industry - research results must be released if a company wants to obtain approval for medicines. Many research institutions are partly state-financed anyway or are close to universities through their state affiliation. A transparent testing guideline for medicines must be introduced - one that scientists and physicians can understand and in which these people are involved, so that problems can be detected earlier - and cannot be concealed by the company (as was the case with Vioxx).
At the same time, effective cost control for medicines must be introduced - the justifications with research costs are not sufficient here, the whole thing must be traceable. If you add up the alleged research costs of the pharmaceutical industry from various medicines, you eventually reach the point where the gross domestic product is generated alone in the research institutions of the pharmaceutical industry. Here, there must be much greater transparency in order to effectively prevent price gouging for medicines.
And the pharmacists? Sorry, but they simply have to think about what role they still have. This would include that they take their consulting services seriously again and concentrate on what their task would be: the application advice for medicines and the advice on the use of non-prescription medicines. However, a specialist saleswoman with a drugstore education cannot provide this. Justifying one's own existence with a sales monopoly for medicines is certainly not enough. And reading the package leaflet is not enough either.
(*) Here, of course, doctors in hospitals are excluded - their job is then pretty much the last in the health industry and decent working hours cannot be spoken of for them.
Write blog books, but not understand RSS
That's the summary of Don's complaint about RSS readers. Sorry, but at this point, it's really getting on my nerves (Don isn't the first, just the loudest on this topic): if you provide an RSS feed, you have to accept at least one thing: that people will use it. If you're so cheap and don't offer a full-text feed, but at the same time are too lazy to write an excerpt for an article, then you can't complain that people judge you after the first few sentences - you only give them the first few sentences to see.
No, it's ridiculous to expect everyone to only read blogs in their original form on the website. Yes, this means, for example, that the layout of blogs is lost because you can't see it in the RSS reader. Yes, that's definitely a good thing - especially with various far-right blogs or blogs with stupid color choices with insufficient contrast between text and background.
If a user with an RSS reader doesn't manage to entice me to read an article (if it's not fully included in the feed, then also on the website) with their entries, they've done something wrong with their RSS feed. Period.
Insulting users with RSS readers is a rarely stupid action for someone who always claims to understand blogs in discussions and always mocks other bloggers - be it because of their tech obsession, their arrogance, or whatever else displeases the gentleman ...
Dive Into Greasemonkey is a free online book by Mark Pilgrim about programming userscripts for Greasemonkey. With these userscripts, you can change websites when they are displayed using JavaScript - for example, cut out firmly integrated advertising blocks, rewrite links with affiliate IDs so that your own is used, simply repair strange HTML so that you can actually do something with the website, or all kinds of other fun things.
FramerD is an object database (ok, a Framestore - but it's something similar) with an integrated DB server, CGI interface, and Scheme scripting language. Ideal for building knowledge databases, as FramerD is optimized for the pointer-heavy structures involved. But also very exciting, as you get a Scheme with server and ODB. I definitely have to play with it, especially since it should also compile on OS X (though it doesn't work for me right now). And it is licensed under GPL. And for the snake charmers among the monkey programmers, there is also an experimental Python library for accessing FramerD...
Found at Tim Pritlove: Lehmanns has a new releases blog with descriptions: New at Lehmanns. Nice. It's my favorite bookstore anyway (even though I mainly deal with their mail order department and occasionally with stands at trade fairs).
Jubel-Äum or something
Chaoswind hit a round number here: this is the 1000th comment on this blog. I mean, I'm already surprised that I have made over 4600 posts here myself, but that people write comments here and that there are even 1000 of them (ok, I wrote part of them), I find that even more astonishing.
Paypal sends phishing emails
Paypal sends phishing emails - they just don't get it. I'm annoyed by eBay's, PayPal's, and the whole pack of banks' quite stupid attitude towards phishing anyway - why don't they finally use signed emails? The whole issue would be very easy to resolve: an email from eBay that is not signed with the correct key: into the trash.
But the fact that PayPal is so stupid as to send phishing emails itself - or emails that look just like the usual phishing attacks - is really quite stupid.
Ackermann on the Capitalism Debate
Embarrassing Ackermann finds the criticism and debate of capitalism. Presumably because he holds one of the honorable seats in the target area. The planned massive job cuts despite profits, on the other hand, are of course not embarrassing but completely justified. Says Ackermann. He is just not ashamed of anything ...
Das Keyboard - UberGeeks Only
Das Keyboard is a keyboard completely without labeling. Actually ideal - my keyboard layouts never match the labels anyway (since I use ergonomic PC keyboards on a Mac). Too bad they don't have an ergonomic version ...
Fire department cuts up wrong car - ok, the owner was also quite stupid: car parked without a license plate on a fire station lot next to a row of junk cars. But it will probably be paid for by the insurance, so luck in misfortune ...
CamlServ is a web server in OCaml. I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but it could be interesting - OCaml is a language of the ML family (or the ML-like languages) with various very interesting extensions (e.g. a powerful object system). Unfortunately, the project does not seem to be very active anymore - last release from 2003 ...
Quartus Forth 2.0.0 is the new version of native-code Forth for the Palm platform. I've played around with it (and its predecessor PilotForth) for a long time - I'm just an old Forth fan.
yadis: yet another distributed identity system is a specification for a distributed identity system. Let's take a closer look.
End of a Potato Variety: Soon No More Linda
From as early as January, but since I'm currently cooking potatoes, it reminded me again: The End of a Potato Variety: Soon No More Linda. About the attempt by the previous patent holder to restrict the availability of the potato variety Linda to avoid competition - a good example of what patents and free market really mean: ultimately only monopolistic tendencies and monopolistic consolidations.
Does anyone really believe that potatoes and algorithms are so different that such activities will not occur in the IT industry when implementing software patents? Who is the winner in such a situation - the customer for whom a potato variety disappears, the small farmer or greengrocer who can no longer supply a well-known product to their customers, or the large corporation that holds the patent? Actually, the patent would have expired, actually, real competition could now begin. Actually ...
By the way, the loss of the potato variety Linda is more than annoying - it was one of the few varieties I like and that also survived Jutta ...
Free Pascal 2.0 is out
Free Pascal is a Turbo Pascal and Delphi compatible Pascal compiler. The new version supports significantly more CPUs and platforms - including Mac OS X. And for Panther there is also an XCode integration. Finally, a Pascal that works for the Mac. Not that I would do much with it today - but somehow Pascal was a part of my programming history (after all, I took care of the Gateway software Erwinsgate for the MausNet, which was written in Turbo Pascal, for a long time).
May seems to be the month of vintage languages for me.
Software patents in real application
Who wants to see the full horror of software patents in real application: search for the patents DE69901832 (German patent) or EP1081612 (European patent) in the patent database (unfortunately, there are no permanent links to patents in this patent database - why not? Stupid software).
A truly great invention: the identification of a session in a web application is not transported in the path part of a URI, in a cookie, or a URI parameter, but in the hostname (wildcard A-record makes it possible). A patent has been granted for something like this - although there are supposedly no pure software patents in Germany. Where exactly is the definition of technicity in this patent? The connection to a tangible device? This is a pure algorithm patent.
If you read through the description and claims, you get the chills: in the description, it is written that extracting the encoding from the path part would be complex and require a lot of computing power - probably this is supposed to be the reason for patentability, so to speak, more efficient access to information. And in the claim, nothing else is described than the use of HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts in combination with a wildcard A-record (or many A-record entries that point to the same IP), so that the session can be extracted from the hostname (which is sent as a header). A truly great intellectual achievement - presumably the entire creative height of it lies in the formulation of the patent application, but certainly not in the actual algorithm or the encoding ...
The patent office simply patents any nonsense that is submitted. There seems to be no control at all - anyone who wants to do something against a patent must first laboriously apply for and enforce the deletion of the patent. If the patentability of algorithms is further facilitated, we will find even more such absurdities. Because if the patent office is already overwhelmed today to carry out these basic checks on general patentability, it will certainly get worse with the new regulation. And this is supposed to bring economic growth? Probably only for patent lawyers ...
Found in the dead-tree version of the current Linux Magazine on page 102.
about brain farts
Various business associations also suffer from swollen heads: Working on Whit Monday again. We are supposed to work more so they can fleece us more. The fact that in reality German public holidays are not actually that many compared to the rest of Europe (among other things through clever solutions in Belgium, where public holidays that fall on Sundays are made up on the following weekday) is completely irrelevant. The fact that this year and last year there were significantly fewer public holidays due to employer-friendly dates is also irrelevant. The fact that, for example, last year was no better despite having significantly fewer public holidays than previous years is completely irrelevant.
The main thing is to open your mouth and make some noise ...
Unlikely positive
The Süddeutsche explains how relative frequencies can provoke false conclusions and how the presentation of statistical results and the choice of reference size influence decisions (and obscure truths).
Found via Plazeboalarm, which describes itself as a watchblog against quackery. If the links continue to be this good, it will definitely be quite interesting ...
OpenCOBOL - a COBOL compiler
OpenCOBOL is a Cobol compiler that compiles Cobol to C and then lets gcc loose on it. Yes, I confess, 10 years of my professional career were wasted on Cobol.
Key theft on Hyperthreading systems - cool. I mean, sure, shit, it's a security hole. But that's really cool. Using Hyperthreading and cache timing to steal data from the second pseudo-processor right from under its nose - you have to come up with something like that first.
Bill Gates Brain Fart
Bill Gates: The iPod doesn't stand a chance. The internet is unimportant. Nobody needs Java. 640 KB is enough for every user. Windows is the safest operating system. The PowerPC chip is unimportant. Users want Bob, the social interface. Unix doesn't matter.
The man has a real problem
Ping TopicExchange from WordPress
Phillip Pearson has written a WP-plugin that simplifies simple pinging of TopicExchange. TopicExchange is essentially just a list of trackback targets with its own wiki for each trackback target. The idea is to provide a simple group blogging function that users can access through their own blogs.
XDS Modula-2 / Oberon-2 Compiler
The XDS Compiler is a whole family of extremely good compilers for Modula-2 and Oberon-2. I know them from my DOS days, I worked a lot with them - they used to be purely commercial, now they are freeware (but not Free Software or Open Source - Free as in Free Beer, not Free Speech). There are native compilers for Windows and Linux 86 and - my personal favorite - XDS/C Compiler, which compiles Modula-2 and Oberon-2 into surprisingly readable C. Unfortunately, the XDS/C Compiler is only available for Windows and Linux 86 - an OS X version would be nice, but is unfortunately not available.
Police State Hesse
»Guilty as charged« are two left-wing activists. Never mind that one was slapped by the mayor of Giessen - the mayor's word is simply taken at face value. Never mind if the police seem to be lying when they talk about attacks by one of the two activists - police officers can't lie, so they must have told the truth. And all the counter-witnesses are simply not credible. It's great when the judiciary, as an allegedly independent pillar of our constitution, meekly falls in line behind (or in front of?) the executive. It seems that beating down protests and sending protesters to prison through court proceedings is back in fashion ...
Problems with the Newsfeed in WordPress
WordPress 1.5 has issues with the newsfeed - the date gets smashed there. Perun's blog has a bit more info on it and also a solution right away. In wp-rss.php there is the same problem with the mysql2date call, but only one call. Well, you can fix it right away.
Back in Town
So, back home again - despite horrendous traffic on the train this weekend. No idea why, but at every station hordes of people got on - all carriages were bursting at the seams. Fortunately, we had a reservation ...
When I've gotten through the mountain of things to do, I'll certainly put a few pictures online.
Pictures from Flensburg
The promised pictures I have put on my picture gallery (meanwhile - 2007 - out). In any case, a small selection of the pictures - the whole 208 I did not want to inflict on you.
Update: I have put a selection of the pictures (not all 200 - but over a hundred) on viele-bunte-bilder.de (also since 2007 out). There you can also watch a slideshow in the browser.
Since both are out, you can't see anything anymore. Maybe I will put it somewhere else sometime. Or maybe not.
Schily will Anti-Terror-Gesetze unbegrenzt verlängern
Schily will Anti-Terror-Gesetze unbegrenzt verlängern
Sparkline PHP Graphing Library provides small, compact graphics that fit well into text - ideal for example to better visualize trend data.
Vacation!
So, tomorrow we're off to Flensburg. Taking photos, lounging around, checking out Flensburg, watching the Rum Regatta. Let's see if the weather gives us a chance - the forecasts sound more like frostbite and water damage.
In the meantime, I'll just let the blog keep drifting along. Check out the old clutter - there's plenty. Or alternatively, check out more interesting blogs or watch the wallpaper dry ...
Hitchhiker's Guide as a Film
According to Industrial Technology & Witchcraft absolute crap. Too bad. Okay, I'll probably still check it out soon, but somehow the books deserve better. Well, Disney - what can you expect ...
And another negative review.
Zabel wins Henninger Turm
Absolutely sovereign. Only in the photo with Scharping does he look somehow tortured.
Former Bush Minister Veneman becomes Unicef Chief
Ex-Bush Minister Veneman becomes Unicef Chief - yes great, now everything is being destroyed by all the pandering. It doesn't matter if Unicef soon campaigns against contraception at the behest of the new boss and engages in other nonsense, and projects are stopped just because they don't suit a staunchly conservative Bushite - let's just sacrifice children on the altar of political maneuvers ...
RBL operators are either sociopaths or incompetent
Or both. Sorry, but you can't categorize something like this any other way. If any providers now filter for rfc-ignorant.org, emails may be bounced or sent to the spam folder - just because the operator of rfc-ignorant.org doesn't like the whois from DeNIC. By the way, the mail RFCs do not contain any indication (and certainly no mandatory condition) that a whois service must exist for a domain. So much for the technical competence of the operator of this idiotic list ...
It's bad enough that as a mail admin you have to deal with spam, trojans, viruses and similar nonsense - and the gigantic mountains of traffic that result. More and more often you also have to deal with completely brainless block list operators and similarly stupid mail admins who implement these block lists (and possibly even bounce emails because of the listing!).
And when you point this nonsense out to them, the standard line is: "RBL filtering has almost eliminated all my spam". Great. The fact that the email medium is more damaged by such incompetent fools than by the spam itself is of no concern to them. Let's just break everything, every idiot can be a mail admin today. It's disgusting.
(Found via fh).
Apple users in parliaments complain about discrimination - I can well imagine the nonsense of the responsible IT people. Of course, for network security, you clearly rely on Microsoft products ...
Firefox gets SVG support - finally a first independent SVG implementation and above all a broad platform for this format.
Genetic Engineering - It's Not Just About the Sausage
Bundesrat rejects GMO law - the Union wants us to eat GenFood and what the consequences are and whether, for example, organic farming near Gen-fields is no longer possible (because farmers cannot meet the strict requirements, since genetically modified plants do spread after all), they couldn't care less. The fact that most farmers don't value Genshit at all is also irrelevant. The fact that in the end only the big corporations win and are interested in the whole genetic technology - because they can strangle farmers and squeeze them even more - is probably not irrelevant. Because somewhere the donation millions must come from ...
Genetically modified foods serve the combination (forced combination!) of seeds and fertilizers or crop protection products and the patent protection of the use of the seeds. It directly attacks the classic traditional way of working of farmers - for example, the use of fruit for the next sowing is usually not possible (because infertile) or prohibited (by contract). There is no biological reason in Germany - neither do we have to endure extreme climatic conditions nor particularly catastrophic pest attacks. It is solely about the maximization of the companies that produce the genetically modified seeds.
If you then look at who is behind it, something else becomes apparent: another point is the elimination of the classic production sites for seeds - many of the genetic engineering companies are more associated with the pharmaceutical or chemical industry than with classical agriculture (although there are also black sheep among the seed producers - but these also belong more to the industry). Here, industry is simply moving into an area it could not serve before and wants to break into - ultimately with coercive means.
With genetically modified seeds, not only are foods produced whose consumption is rejected by the majority of consumers - an entire economic sector is also being strangled or possibly even destroyed. At least severely damaged.
Agriculture, through its structures with cooperatives, associations, interest groups and political lobbying, has a fairly large power and influence on its fate - so far. But now the bad guys want to play along, whose goal is exactly the takeover of this - previously self-managed - power.
Of course, the Union - which has repeatedly revealed itself to be industry-dependent - hitches itself to the cart. And of course, our industry chancellor performs this balancing act and Minister Künast has to present a law that is already watered down to the extreme - and even that is rejected in the council (which has a Union majority).
KDE developers annoyed with Apple - because they once again don't understand how to work in a team and send patches to an upstream project. Collaboration between companies and open source projects is still problematic - companies simply have a completely different agenda than the OS project.
New Leica Lens
Leica has a brand new lens. A 75/2 APO Asph. - looks really very cute. Nice and compact, built-in lens hood (which you can finally lock so it doesn't push in) and of course the usual Leica quality. Unfortunately, the purchase resistance with just over 2000 Euros is then a bit large. But especially for owners of the classic 0.72x viewfinder magnification, this is of course an interesting lens: it offers the 75mm focal length with a still focusable wide-open aperture and is significantly lighter and smaller than the 75/1.4. Why bother with the 75/1.4 behemoth if you can't use the f/1.4 aperture on the camera anyway because the focusing accuracy of the rangefinder isn't sufficient...
The crazy thing is: I hadn't heard any rumors about the device beforehand (ok, I only rarely read the Leica Users Group anymore - but none of the photo sites had anything either) and Leica doesn't have anything on the websites. But the thing is already in the store (no, I didn't buy it - the purchase resistance...).
Apparently, Leica wants to renovate some of the old gems - first the 90/4 Macro, then the 50/1.4 and now a 75/2. Quite impressive - of course, due to Cosina and the Voigtländer lenses, it's important that Leica shows some activity, but still, you don't just pull new lens designs out of your sleeve - there's a lot of work involved.
Fortunately, my Leica equipment is very close to perfect condition (50/2.8 and 90/4 collapsibles - I'm only missing the macro adapter for the 90mm and possibly, in the long run, a 35/2) and I'm therefore not really at risk of Leica temptation at the moment.
Da Vinci Crock
Lewis Perdue claims that parts of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" were copied from his book "Da Vinci Legacy" and has set up a blog describing, for example, the publisher's reaction to the allegations in the lawsuit: Da Vinci Crock
Normally, such things are quickly and discreetly settled (no, not what you think - through payments, of course!), but with a megaseller like "The Da Vinci Code," the publisher naturally makes a fuss.
And now I'm wondering whether to give the whole thing the category "Law" or "Entertainment" or whether I need a category "Blogsoap."
(I found the whole thing at photomatt)
To the right of the Union is the Union
Already read about this in various places (Uhus Webdroppings, Schockwellenreiter), but "Instant Nirvana" sums it up best: Fascists. Oh yes, Schleswig Holstein is heading towards a glorious future if such politicians have a place in the Union there...
"There must be no party to our right" a Bavarian once declared - no problem, the Union simply overtakes DVU, Republicans, and NPD on the far right. Foreigners are out, now the long-term unemployed are being hounded. Of course, everyone knows at least one welfare fraudster who works on the side, they're all just lazy people who need to be motivated and, if necessary, locked up in a virtual prison and monitored, the scum. At least some Union politicians - and unfortunately more and more in the SPD - see the world this way.
Are there actually hiring requirements regarding contempt for humanity, brainlessness, and corruption for politicians? The word "politician" is only an insult for such representatives.
Update: The original author and Hessian Justice Minister naturally meant something completely different. So he says, or his press spokesman:
Wagner's quote should therefore be understood to mean that the ankle monitor also offers "long-term unemployed individuals sentenced to probation and treated addicts" the chance to return to a regular daily routine and be placed in a job, says Fuhrmann.
Of course. Let's just believe him now. Or? Achne, he's from Hesse - from Hetzer-Koch's brown swamp of donations and cronyism.
Microsoft: everything stolen
Longhorn with Glass Effects, Desktop Search and PDF Alternative - while the interface and desktop search are clearly feature theft from OS X Tiger, the Microsoft alternative to PDF is as unnecessary as a goiter. Yes, I know that PDF is also a proprietary format - but unlike any ideas from Microsoft, it works, does exactly what it was designed for and doesn't have mountains of security holes. I don't think I necessarily want document formats whose use is dependent on Microsoft software ...
Somehow, the various Longhorn presentations and ramblings from Microsoft are becoming increasingly embarrassing. Don't they have any original ideas anymore? Even the command line in the start bar sounds more like a copy of LaunchBar or QuickSilver on the Mac ...
Playing with new Theme
I finally decided to work with a new theme, or rather, to change the existing theme. It was the classic Kubrick with a custom background image, now it's "flexible Kubrick" - basically still Kubrick in terms of layout, but I've removed the rounded corners and shadows and switched the entire layout to em as a measure - no more fixed pixel widths, but instead font-relative specifications. Let's see, maybe I'll make the theme available later.
As a result, the layout should now adapt to the user's basic font settings and generally work more gracefully with corresponding changes. However, it is still not a liquid layout, but static - just with a flexible base size.
By the way, I solved the problem with the header graphic in a very classic way: the excavator is simply cut out and placed in front of a transparent background and saved as a GIF. Combined with the right background color, the result is quite usable in my opinion. And when the size of the page changes (e.g. by increasing the base font), the image grows in width with it.
If you notice anything strange, please let me know. I know it's not a layout-technical revolution. But I'm not capable of that anyway. I just wanted to try out what an em-based layout can look like and needed something to try it out on.
Demoted ...
... that Google: my PyDS-Homepage always had a PageRank of 7 before, now only 6. Tsk. Such a thing. Somehow I now have the feeling that something has been taken away from me - I just don't know exactly what yet.