Opera Mini: Free HTML browser for mobile phones launches worldwide - Golem.de - definitely better than the primitive built-in browsers. However, of course - due to Java - not necessarily the fastest.
Great, NRW is bringing back headnotes:
According to the plans of the North Rhine-Westphalian state government, teachers should evaluate the "work and social behavior" of students, and this should be mandatory for all classes up to and including the tenth grade. Points such as "willingness to learn and perform" and "readiness to take responsibility and independence" should be graded with classic school grades from "very good" to "insufficient." However, characteristics such as "endurance and resilience" and "cooperativeness and team spirit" should also be mentioned in the report card, as well as special school and extracurricular commitment such as voluntary work in youth groups.
So that students are as well-behaved as possible in school. You engage politically, but unfortunately in a different direction than your teachers? Doesn't matter, you'll just get a bad grade in social behavior. What, you won't get a job later because no one wants you? Doesn't matter, there are already hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, you can just throw you in there. You don't want to engage in church groups or similar because all these groups in your town are just cross fanatics anyway? Doesn't matter, bad grades in extracurricular commitment certainly won't be a problem in job hunting. What, you have problems with your classmates and are excluded by them, for example because they don't like your skin color or nose shape? You're just not cooperative enough and not a team player.
There are good reasons why these dreadful headnotes have been abolished. Social behavior is simply not gradable - even less so than knowledge or performance (here, the concentration on a few key moments in the school year is already a problem - real knowledge is not evaluated, but performance at the time of the exams).
But of course, they are incredibly practical if you want to breed compliant yes-men. "Child, just don't cause any trouble at school, the grade for social behavior can decide your later job" - I can already hear some parents "straightening out" their children. Left-wing youth group? No way, job-threatening. Slip-ups in life? Catastrophe, can only be smoothed out with years of brown-nosing the teacher.
Oh yes, we are getting the best school system in Germany in NRW. The question is just for whom the school system should be the best - probably not for the students.
Let's see how long the ruling against T-Online's data storage will last:
The effect of the Darmstadt ruling may be short-lived. Because the EU Parliament decided in December to log all internet and telephone connections in advance, there will also be a corresponding law in Germany. However, it is questionable whether the so-called data retention is compatible with the Basic Law.
Basic Law? What Basic Law? Does that still matter to any politician? We don't have a constitutionally compliant budget, the customs authority's surveillance activities have been extended despite a contrary ruling, and what else has undermined the Basic Law recently. What is a little data retention in comparison?
