Great idea: you don't have children because your life planning makes children simply impossible (e.g., because of financial constraints, or because work doesn't allow for a normal relationship)? Or because your partner is past the age when she should have children (or you're past the age when you should father children) and the risk to the child would be too great? Or because you or your partner is infertile? Perhaps the blood type of you and your life partner is also incompatible, so that child and mother would be exposed to great danger? Perhaps one of you is HIV positive or affected by another serious illness that would be passed on to the newborn? Or perhaps you're gay and therefore can't have children and are classified as unsuitable for adoption because of your homosexuality? No problem, there's only basic pension, so you're screwed in old age. Beautiful new world of discrimination. When will it be demanded that such people should kill themselves in a socially acceptable manner upon retirement?
The CSU should urgently remove the extremely dishonest S in the middle of the party name.
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
An interesting interview with the former British environment minister about the effects of cultivating genetically modified plants on the environment. Michael Meacher's conclusion is by the way very negative for GM plants.
The original article can be found at Spiegel Online: Science at this link.
Cryptography bans. Great idea. Criminals will certainly all comply with them. How stupid does a politician have to be to believe something like that? Yes, I know, as stupid as some politicians on the interior committee, but how stupid is that really? Paving-stone stupid? Bread-in-puddle stupid?

Crypto bans only criminalize the perfectly sensible legal use of the technology, nothing more. What follows from this is a presumption of guilt based solely on the use of a technique - he encrypts, so he must be hiding something evil. The fact that maybe it's simply about preventing everyone from reading along (and sorry, but I wouldn't trust the agencies that could read along with deposited keys any further than I could throw them), that no longer matters when cryptography without key escrow is banned.
The state's constant demand to believe it's allowed to read everything anyway is completely divorced from reality. This whole eavesdropping mania brings nothing except a restriction of our rights and high costs.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Yep. Got back from Hamburg at 23:10, got off the train and down in the station in front of the station bookstore there's a horde of people listening intently to some guy tell stories until 0:00 because that's when the Harry Potter sale starts - they even had the food shop next door open specially. On the way home then saw a Harry Potter party at a small corner pub with witch costumes. Weird.
And I've had the 5th book lying around in the corner (the English edition) the whole time and haven't even started reading it...
At No Retreat, No Surrender there's the original article.
Not cool. Now the Python Package Index is being spammed - in this case, a financial advisor registered himself as a package on PyPI - the downside of an open architecture. Maybe it would be better if projects had to request a project key first and could only send updates with it - that would have prevented spam from the start, but would have required more work upfront since these keys would need to be manually approved for the whole thing to make sense. Let's see how PyPI tackles the problem.
I found the original article at Artima Python Buzz.
It's getting absolutely insane what SCO is demanding now. Why should IBM have to disclose all possible documents and personnel data based on nothing but wild claims without any evidence whatsoever? I can't really imagine that something like this could go through — even in the US legal system. It would be about time for IBM to come down on this with the legal hammer.
Simply buying SCO would definitely be the most boring solution to the problem anyway. I want to see SCO blood!
At heise online news there's the original article.
In the dumb department: Belkin is forcing their own customers through a firmware upgrade for their WiFi router to redirect occasionally to ad pages for a Belkin product (which can be disabled, but is enabled by default). Marketing by Idiots.
The original article is at Gizmodo here.
I agree that Hohmann deserves to be fired. But since when does Stoiber (CSU) decide on expulsions from the CDU? Am I confused or is it Stoiber? And what does Merkel have to say about it now?

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