Yahoo! News - Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street

I can't think of anything to say about this either. Except that fortunately I wasn't standing nearby.

Here's the original article.

833786 - Steps that can help protect against fake ('spoof') websites and malicious hyperlinks ...

Original quote from the knowledge base article: The most effective way to protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is simply not to click on them. Instead, you should manually enter the URL of the destination into the address bar. This way you can ensure that Internet Explorer uses the correct URL to get to the website you want. Enter the URL in the address bar and press [ENTER]. - Microsoft really nailed it. Sure, we all just stop clicking on hyperlinks, completely absurd idea. The best way to protect yourself from evil hyperlinks is to use a different browser than IE.

Here's the original article.

Chutzpah - the Blog for the Show

I also want a sister who is a lawyer

Here you can find the original article.

Dirk Olbertz :: Blog: Dealing with Public Criticism

And once again a company wants to take action against a blog hoster because allegedly something legally relevant is supposedly posted in a blog. I'm not going to summarize that for you, read the posts under the link yourself. It seems to me that a company is puffing itself up quite vigorously here. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Dirk that he gets through this unscathed.

However, I would say that a publication of the company name by Dirk would be useful - because only then is publicity also public. And only then can appropriate pressure be exerted. But probably the company already sees the mere mention of its name as something worth warning about...

Update: The Schockwellenreiter has more information.

Here's the original article.

Klassenmethoden mit Python 2.2

Class methods with Python 2.2

NeoOffice/J Home - OS X natives Open Office

T-DSL should become faster

I want more upstream at last!

At heise online news you can find the original article.

EU Council urges criminalization of minor copyright infringements

And once again politicians are harnessing themselves to the dirty carts of industry. This time it's the EU Council - even against the explicit wishes of the European Parliament. And then politicians wonder why European elections aren't taken seriously?

At heise online news you can find the original article.

MultiSync - A Synchronization Tool - general synchronization tool for various PDAs and Gnome

NETZEITUNG PEOPLE: Ex-member of Jethro Tull is now a woman

Um. Yeah. So. Um.

Somehow confusing when the keyboarder of one of the bands you've always enjoyed listening to is suddenly now the keyboardist

Here you can find the original article.

Once More on the IE Bug

Just a small example of what exactly happens. Let's take the following HTML code:

blubb

And the following stylesheet: h2 a { font-style : bold ; } h2 > a { font-style : italic ; } IE 6 would then set the link text blubb in bold in the above examples. Mozilla would use italic, since "h2 > a" is more specific than "h2 a". Ok, I admit it, I just wanted to point out the capabilities of the Python Desktop Server to highlight source code by syntax.

Public Image Unlimited

And PIL once stood for rebellion and protest for us. But in the end it's probably always just about the money ...

At Megawatt: The Last Latent Appliance Fetishist there's the original article.

Mystery of IE problem likely solved

Well, I had to solve it myself after all (and to be honest, VMware with Windows NT is a way to run IE 6 under Linux, but it really hurts - and it's incredibly slow).

What was it? Well, IE 6 doesn't support child selectors. That was it. I replaced the child selectors with descendant selectors, and it works. Child selectors express an exact and direct dependency: an A tag that sits directly inside an H2 tag is selected by the selector H2>A. Descendant selectors express a relative dependency: an A tag that sits somewhere inside an H2 tag is selected by H2 A. But there can certainly be more between H2 and A in the HTML code. A code like

Title

would not select the links with child selectors, but it would with descendant selectors.

In this case I could easily change it, since I generally want all links within the headings in white anyway, not just the direct links - so to speak my stylesheet wasn't correct, because if I had ever introduced a span or something, it would have broken.

Still, it's annoying when a browser simply doesn't implement a feature ... All defined selector forms are documented at the W3C. Bugs with IE regarding selectors can be found for example in this bug list.

Tax reform: Union doubts its own capabilities

The egg dance of the Union will put satirists out of work in the long run if this continues like this

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

MPs receive 1,950 euros more

And surely this provides many good reasons why the markup on a member of parliament's salary must be higher than the average monthly wage of a worker ...

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Syntax-highlighted code blocks for docutils - Source Highlighter für viele Sprachen als Python Modul

Bill Gates Predicts Successful Fight Against Spam

That's making me more scared than courageous now ...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Color management

A pretty nice introduction to color management and what it means. In typical Petteri style, a bit cheeky and humorous. My personal highlight: If you're shooting or converting to Adobe RGB. Adobe RGB pictures displayed on a non-colorspace-aware application or badly color-managed system will look wrong, wrong, wrong. The colors will be flat and gray. If you like them that way, fine -- but remember they'll come out bright and vivid if you send them to a competently run photo lab that prints from digital originals. To ensure flat and gray prints, use sRGB and make them flat and gray in your image editor instead.

Here's the original article.

Dark Chocolate with Surprising Side Effect

Ok, I'm going to buy heart medication later

At RP-Online: Science I found the original article.

End of Management

Interesting thoughts on the difference between manager and entrepreneur.

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Fast-Food Experiment

The man made sacrifices for his film: lived on McDonald's for an entire month. And the result? Liver damage.

Bon appétit.

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

French Culture Minister Calls for Laws Against Illegal Music Sharing

And I demand a law against stupid politicians who — ignoring the interests and rights of citizens — allow themselves to be harnessed to the wagon of whatever industrial interests.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Gerster sees himself as victim of a campaign

I'm just saying: black helicopters!

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

I need a CSS expert with IE 6 Win experience

Specifically, it's because of my current layout. As I was told in the comments, IE 6 on the PC is no longer displaying the headings. All other browsers I test with (Safari, Camino, Firebird, IE 5.2 Mac) display everything correctly. I don't have IE 6 for Windows (I don't have Windows to begin with), but surely someone out there has one and knows what I can do to get IE to display it properly. I'd like to keep the layout as it is and preferably not have to use too many perverse CSS hacks. But of course IE users should still be able to read something here – I'm not trying to be that mean to them, even though they do have to use the devil's operating system.

Linux Kernel on Windows

Perverted.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

01.24.04 - Spirit Condition Upgraded As Twin Rover Nears Mars

Wow. So the flash memory is causing Spirit to constantly reboot. When it uses RAM instead of flash memory, it works. I'm repeatedly amazed at the ways NASA technicians can analyze remote equipment and restore its function from a distance.

I found the original article at NASA: News Highlights.

Contax N Digital Review

That's a record, albeit a negative one: Luminous Landscape publishes a review of the Contax N Digital, which was discontinued in June of last year.

The test results are quite mixed, as they are with almost all other reviews of this camera. The main drawbacks are the AF system, power consumption, and image quality when using RAW format (noise and moiré) - however, image quality in TIFF or JPG is surprisingly said to be better.

Here's the original article.

John McCarthy - Homepage of Lisp inventor John McCarthy

Oswald Metzger has done it!

At Irene's there are matching links to the garbage from Metzger (who truly lives up to his name and wants to slaughter the welfare state), to a response in the Zirbel (with ideas for higher education reform and a critique of Metzger's drivel), to an appropriate link about the economy in National Socialism and a link to a brochure from the Federal Agency for Civic Education about the role of women in recent German history. For the sake of your blood pressure, I recommend reading the Zirbel response first, as the more heated Metzger statements are already torn apart there. The concentrated dose of Metzger's drivel could otherwise lead to more severe physical reactions ... An example: "After all, we all sense that our demographic development – the strike against childbearing that has been ongoing for more than 30 years and has now become self-reinforcing, affecting an entire generation of women (and the men involved) – is destroying the collective economic foundation of our society. The individual economic thinking of DINKs (double income, no kids) undermines, as a mass phenomenon, our social security systems, because ever fewer young active workers must finance ever more and ever older people in retirement with their economic output." - yes yes, the evil, childbearing-striking women are to blame. Somehow one almost expects nothing more now but the condemnation of contraception and babble about holes in condoms, and then you could propose Metzger as Pope ... At Irene // Antville there's the original article.

path Python module

Path Module

If you like to use Python frequently for shell scripts, this module will interest you. A module for very simple processing of directory names and filenames, which is much more elegant than os.path. Additionally, it combines the functions of the glob module and the shutil module.

What normally looks like this with os.path:

 # with os.path DIR = '/usr/home/guido/bin' for f in os.listdir(DIR):
if f.endswith('.py'): path = os.path.join(DIR, f) os.chmod(path, 0755) # Assume it's a file

Looks like this with the path module:

 # with path dir = path('/usr/home/guido/bin') for f in dir.files('*.py'): f.chmod(0755)

Here you can find the original article.

Post from the Experimental Laboratory

A farce of courts and corporate interests that weigh more heavily than the truth: Covenance manages to get two injunctions through court. On one hand, an injunction against video surveillance (an injunction that would at least be acceptable under the argument of employee privacy rights - animal welfare aside, employees have rights too) and one that simply establishes that the video footage shown in Frontal21 (broadcast from 9.12.2003 and from 16.12.2003) was illegally recorded and therefore may not be shown again. The latter is the point where my acceptance of the court ends: since when is press freedom suddenly worth nothing? When private individuals suffer from paparazzi harassment, the public interest is placed higher. But when a company operates one of the largest animal testing laboratories and demonstrably - the video footage exists and proves it - mistreats animals, is the company's interest greater than the public interest?

Absurd. Simply absurd. And one feels ashamed as a resident of Münster that both Covenant and the court ruling in Münster are...

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

At first I thought I was going mad.

Ok, if you want to have your mind blown, just follow the title link and check out the linked images there. Ouch. By the way, I'm disclaiming any responsibility for the aftereffects.

This here is really perverse.

Here you can find the original article.

Cheney: "Tackle ideologies of violence at the root"

Then he should start in his own store. Or is this constant talk of God, the mission to order the world, and the lying about weapons of mass destruction by the US administration not enough ideology of violence?

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Enough Water for a Manned Mars Mission

Water, water - I only hear water everywhere. And where's the beer? (but there are nice pictures!)

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Health insurance companies bid farewell to 13.6 percent

And we're all being fooled ...

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

MDR.DE: Starfotographer Helmut Newton Killed in Car Accident

His landscape photographs were more to my liking than his female nudes. But there was no denying that he was one of the great photographers of our time.

Here you can find the original article.

My first Mac....

... wasn't actually a Mac, but an emulator on the Atari ST. However, only for a very short time, it just wasn't fast enough. My first real Mac was a PowerBook 5300c, which I bought after my PC notebook had been causing quite a bit of trouble back then. The PC notebook has since been sold as scrap, but the PowerBook still works flawlessly. With MachTen I already had a Mach Kernel back then, even though it only ran as an application under OS Classic.

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.

Plastinator knew of execution victims

Let's see how much longer he can hold up; right now his entire fantasy world is falling apart around his ears again.

I found the original article at RP-Online: Wissenschaft.

Ranchero Software: Big Cat Scripts Plugin - Extend context menu with custom scripts (AppleScript and Shell)

SPD Politician: Increase in Solidarity Surcharge Possible

That's just great. Once again we're supposed to pay for the stupidities of the Union government at the time of reunification. And of course the solidarity surcharge is supposed to be used for it again.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Train travel is getting more expensive - record high price for the first time

Translation

That's great. So once again they're fiddling around, so that according to Mehdorn the unreasonable routes over 4 hours become more expensive. The shorter routes will admittedly become minimally cheaper in some cases, but remain more expensive than before the last price reform. Somehow I get the feeling that the railway doesn't work for itself but for the airlines, because with higher prices on long-distance routes the railway certainly won't roll up the market there, after all it already has the disadvantage of longer travel times (and no, dear Mr. Mehdorn, just because you now call an IC an ICE and charge more money for it doesn't automatically make it go faster!).

The only positive thing is the elimination of reservation fees for online bookings, but that still has the disadvantage of train binding even with BahnCard 50 - with counter purchases only the reservation is bound, not the card. And automatic machine sales require that the machines actually work ... (and that the route can even be booked via them)

So once again not a great achievement. Of course the railway management's idiotic decisions are never responsible for market failure, only the employees (who can then be laid off) or the customers (whom you apparently want to actively drive away as well).

Here's the original article.

Cardinal says gays are perverts but brothels are OK

|KK| In Belgium, the Cardinal seems to have lost his mind: "I am prepared to sign here in my blood that of all those who say they are lesbian or gay, at most five to 10 per cent are effectively lesbian or gay. All the rest are sexual perverts," said Cardinal Gustaaf Joos on Wednesday. "I demand you write this down. If they come to protest on my doorstep, I don't care. I'm just speaking out on what thousands of people are thinking but never get a chance to say," he told the Belgian soft-porn P-Magazine.

If that's not strong enough for you, here's another one: "Politics, democracy. Don't make me laugh. The right to vote, what is that all about? I find it strange that a snot-nosed 18-year-old has the same vote as a father of seven. One has no responsibilities whatsoever, the other provides tomorrow's citizens," he said.

Also interesting is his view on women, especially prostitutes: "If a man thinks he needs sex or is going to explode, it is better to find a prostitute than seduce or rape a girl. At least there are no innocent victims involved," he said.

You don't really need to comment on this crackpot anymore, the gross nonsense speaks for itself ...

Here's the original article.

DVD Industry Backs Down in DeCSS Legal Dispute

Finally!

At heise online news you can find the original article.

ESA - Mars Express - Mars Express sees its first water

Wow! That's really a speedy success for Mars Express!

Hier gibts den Originalartikel.

Gerolsteiner wants to remain a top team above all

A bit of my secret favorite for surprises in the next season. Sure, not the big names, but interesting riders in all areas with good motivation and often good performances. It could be that they'll make life difficult for one or another safe candidate. At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you'll find the original article.

Gerster apparently largely exonerated

Well, it seems he got lucky after all. Clement must be relieved, since he had really stuck his neck out with his support.

You can find the original article at WDR.de.

Halliburton Admits to Bribery in Iraq Contracts

Maybe some of the connections between US business and US administration will now get their comeuppance...

At tagesschau im Internet there's the original article.

Imaging Resource: Kanguru FC-RW - portable CD burner with integrated card reader

Trademark lawyer should profit from dubious websites

He says he has no fear about his reputation as a lawyer. - hello? The guy is a lawyer. He's a partner at von Gravenreuth. He works in trademark law. What kind of reputation could he possibly still lose? Maybe someone can explain that to me, I'm really curious about it ...

But whether von Gravenreuth still remembers his own cases that he conducted, in which he wanted to hold everyone liable for any alleged form of trademark infringement? Now suddenly of course nobody is responsible for the actions of clients. Such a remarkable change of heart, especially now that he's indirectly affected himself ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

New Colors

Maybe nobody notices if they use my RSS feed, but for the others I've freed Hugo from this toxic green

I have no idea if I like these colors now, but at least you don't get spontaneous eye cancer anymore.

What I still don't like: titles can't be distinguished whether they link or not. But I have no idea how to do that cleverly - with colors? Or with icons? I'm just not sure about it yet.