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Here's a picture taken by Mars Express that shows the center of the Gusev Crater, the crosshair marking the landing site of Spirit.

But I dunno, the crosshair makes it kinda look like a bombing run... hmmmmm...

The USA is a free country. Still. Quite. Well, relatively. As long as you're not Arabian or muslim or otherwise suspicious.

But of course, none of us is, so we don't have to worry. Do we?

The U.S. tilt towards Iraq began under the Carter administration, after the fall of the Shah.

I'm guessing that France and Germany have at least as much to worry about what Saddam might say about their support as the U.S. does.

The Coffee Cam was bought by the German magazine SPIEGEL-ONLINE, and was put up on their page for a while. They still have it in their virtual museum

Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?

"Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?" Yep. It's all been downhill since then.

The German Magazine "Der Spiegel" bought the Coffee Machine (yes, its the real one!) and has it online now for a year or two, don't know exactly. Here it is:

Coffee Cam

Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?

interestingly, her release from prison was seen as a reaction to Germany's Chancellor Schroder's visit to China in the German media ...
eg der Spiegel (sorry, german ;)

As the article and summary both mention, the release comes a week before the Premiere's visit to the US. An article in Der Spiegel claims, however, that the release was primarily motivated by the visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

An AP version of the story mentions Schroeders visit (which the Reuters story linked to by the summary does not), but does not go as far as claiming as Der Spiegel does that "[the release] is a gift for Schroeder" (my translation). That particular quote is attributed to Frank Lu of the Information Center for Democracy and Human Rights, a Hong Kong-based watchdog group that is a primary source for both the AP and Spiegel articles.

Having mood-affecting menstruation and giving birth to children plus being more rational and emotional? No, thank you. *gulpgulpgulp*

BTW: I recently read that 15yo males have 10% more(44%) experience with being wasted than 15yo girls(34%) do.
German link.

This man has no ideas. He doesn't even have hair!

Let's not listen.

I am not going to play armchair economist, I'm not nearly qualified enough to decide what is the most equitable tax system (and odds are, 99.9% of posters to this thread aren't either). We all want the same things: incentive to work, a healthy and growing middle class, and the wealthy unburdened by government handcuffs. We all want a fair system that encourages growth across all sectors.

If we're going to analyze the tax structure, let's read some REAL economists perspectives.

Taking seriously a talk radio host's arguments on the tax structure is not unlike believing that Congressman who just learned how to send an email should make uninformed rulings on cyber security (DMCA anyone?). There are a few very well respected economists (Nobel Prize winners among them) who are railing against Bush's tax cuts.

Krugman
Ackerloff

For what it's worth, I paid three times in taxes what some of the millionaire CA Gubernatorial candidates paid last year, and I'm no millionaire. I'm in a middle class tax bracket (and fighting like a dog not to slip). And I own a small business which created three jobs last year. How's that fair again?

Well guess what, we dont.

Well guess what, we dont.

Well guess what, we dont.

"I sense an action movie in the making..."
Arnold Schwarzenegger IS Otzi. Btw, his hometown is not so far from the place wher Otzi was found.
First picture from the film:
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,285228,00.jpg

In Germany they found tissue samples on the bike of a young victim of a murder which led to a suspect who was already convicted for several sexual assaults. But the suspect was in a high security prison cell at the time of the murder. Here is the article (unfortunately German, maybe the fish can help..).

I don't want to dismiss the idea of DNA evidence, to the contrary, I think it is a very valuable tool in the search for justice and truth. But DNA evidence is not the only thing one should rely on in a criminal conviction if all the other evidence conflicts with it.

Well, I had no hopes he might have listened to wat I had to say anyway.

Different educational systems stress different fields of learning. The Europeans spent centuries invading either each other or forcing third world countries into colonial slavery -- of course this sort of geography was traditionally important to them, if only for national prestige. Also, with the exception of Russia, Europe is a collection of very small countries, mostly not larger than a good sized U.S. state, and so you tend to run out of cities, states, and rivers to memorize rather more quickly. Americans for the most part stayed at home, or at least didn't establish colonies. If you have 50 states and a bunch of fun places in neighboring Canada, that's quite a lot. Apart from that, Europeans have a hard time understanding that European geography is about as interesting to Americans as Japanese geography to the Europeans -- just ask one of these smart-ass Europeans to name the principle Japanese islands. Or, to the original poster Waikerie: Could you find Kyushu on a map? Yeah, right.

Another thing Europeans like to bitch about is that Americans don't know the name of their Chancellor / Prime Minister / whatever. Every time a German does this to me, I ask him to name the prime minister of the Netherlands, which they routinely fail at. Note this is a neighboring country and one that Germans visit in great numbers to buy drugs. The prime minister of Poland or, for that matter, Denmark, is completely beyond their grasp. Germans also regularly fail when asked to name the countries that have borders with Germany -- they usually get confused south of Poland, and seem unable to tell Slovenia and Slovakia apart.

To be fair, the Germans are starting to realize that their educational system is not as good as they keep telling themselves. The international PISA study put a big dent in their ego, and just today, the news magazine "Der Spiegel" has an article about how German universities are as expensive as anywhere else, but their quality of education is terrible.

So the next time some European here at Slashdot starts making those Anti-American remarks, don't moderate them as funny, moderate them as troll. Lack of education is never funny, even in cases where it is true, and people who use glass as a construction material shouldn't be throwing heavy silicoid compounds in any case.

In Germany: Yes. Such a thing exists and is common.

That is, if you print something about a person, and the person you write about thinks that there are factual errors, that person can request a Gegendarstellung ("reply") in order to present their version of the facts and you are required to print it. You are also entitled to print your comment on this Gegendarstellung with it.

For example, in the very well respected german magazine "Der Spiegel" (The Mirror) you will often find articles of some kind of investigative journalism. Sometimes the people being reported on request a Gegendarstellung, often saying that "I was never involved in ..., and in fact have never seen ... before. It is not true that ...".

In many cases you will find a comment by Der Spiegel below, where they present again their version of the facts ("Der Spiegel still stands by its story. We have evidence showing ... together with ... and we have papers that actually incriminate ... which we believe are genuine").

Don't get your hopes up. Munich is run by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens; it was they that decided to choose Linux in spite of Ballmer's pressure.

But the glorious Free State of Bavaria, where Munich is located, is run by the Christian Socialists (which, in spite of the name, is a rather far-right party -- think of them as the Redneck Party of Bavaria minus the gun racks). No way are they going to allow that long-hair hippy OS take hold...so the Bavarian government is trying to force a "review" of the Linux decision and has put it on hold.

Source: Spiegel.de. (Sorry, you'll have to use the Fish.)

Apparently Microsoft made the right donations in the right places. *sigh*

'Course, I'm surprised no one has bothered mentioning to the neo-nationalist CSU idiots in Bavaria that Linux is about as German an operating system as it gets (SuSE, KDE, etc.). At least much more "native" than Microsoft.

Cheers,

Ethelred

A company is developing a plasma taser that sends an electric shock through a charged aerosol cloud that it sprays towards the victim. See Yahoo for English article, or Spiegel for German article with picture. All under the heading of non-leathal weapons.

I'll second that one: In fact, an older article by Der Spiegel on this has the rebate at 15 percent and made fun of the ruling Socialist party in Munich for being that easy to buy out. Their title on the 21th of May: Microsoft kauft München -- "Microsoft buys Munich". Der Spiegel is the 600 pound -- uh, make that the 300 kilogram gorilla in the German press. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if this sort of reporting didn't change a few politicians' minds.

He just can't get goats off his mind

According to this report in German, the capsule came down almost 500km (300 Miles) outside it's planned target area, and it took two hours to locate it.

The astronauts climbed out of the capsule themselves and waved to the people looking for them when they finally turned up. That could have easily have gone very horribly wrong - imagine them coming down on the side of a steep mountain-face.

Summarized from an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, 07/04/2003 p. 188:
The utility company MVV Energie AG along with a company called Power Plus Communications AG have been offering power line internet access to their customers in Mannheim, Germany. They claim it is up to 15 times faster than ISDN. Only 3600 customers have been signed up so far, but they claim to be expanding to 5 new cities this year. The technology they're using is by an Israeli company called Mainnet. It uses spread spectrum transmission to overcome interference from appliances on the line. The system seems to work well, but it is interfereing with radio signals. They're having difficulty meeting German and European limits on interference.
The original article is available in German here.

It also reports that Al D reporters have now been banned from reporting from the New York Stock exchange because of 'other priorities' (words of NYSE VP).

The article further features a Reuters (US owned) press photo of a dead Iraki soldier. Its world-wide dissemination, including to US media, was never protested, while pictures of dead US soldiers were reason enough for very public protests against Al D...

spiegel.de is reporting one of the sites they got was the US National Security Agency's press server.

The story on Salon was a collection of foreign news reports, each shortened to four or five paragraphs. Curiously enough that particular story has been removed and replaced with one from the United Arab Emirates which is considerably more volatile. Also from the list is Der Spiegel's opinion piece on US Imperialism (roughly summarized as the bigger they are, the harder they fall.)

A recent report in German magazin DER SPIEGEL indicates that hip bone operations performed by "robodoc" surgeons still have a high rate of failure.

Robodoc is only an example, the report's main focus is that US regulations for medical procedures require more safety testing than German regulations. As a result, German clinics are a testbed for new, untested technology from abroad, sometimes with chilling results.

German clinics already use Robodoc for hip bone operations on a quasi-regular basis (the report estimates 10000 operations in Germany so far) while the same procedure still hasn't been in approved in the US by the FDA since 1993.

The report quotes critics who see a blind faith in technology, patients are told that Robodoc is far more exact than any human operator, while there are still a number of embarassing failures.

Bundeswehr verbannt Microsoft-Programme (in German)

An English version can be found at The Register.

The Bundeswehr has since denied the report, according to winplanet.com.

Give the first story, then the denial, I think the most you can say about Andrew is that he should have researched that story a bit more carefully. Certainly you can't say he's a nutjob.

More precisely, this article: Durchschlagende Wucht.

At the bottom there also is a link to the corresponding Spiegel TV video. It's called Die Rückkehr der Kartoffelkanone (Return of the potato gun / cannon), so that indicates already that this kind of weapon isn't exactly new. But that shall not keep everyone here from making fun of Germans! ;-)

More precisely, this article: Durchschlagende Wucht.

At the bottom there also is a link to the corresponding Spiegel TV video. It's called Die Rückkehr der Kartoffelkanone (Return of the potato gun / cannon), so that indicates already that this kind of weapon isn't exactly new. But that shall not keep everyone here from making fun of Germans! ;-)

No. The article is basically nothing but BS and sensationalism. I live in Germany and this is not the "latest craze". Apparently the timesonline author read an article in the german magazine "Der Spiegel", which is titled as "The return of the potato bazookas". This is only in the news because somewhere somebody got hurt by such a thing. Then the British author turned into it into "latest craze". Great. Michael Jahn

No, german kids have always been building things that go boom, as did kids all over the world. It is the german magazine DER SPIEGEL which discovered the topic and decided to make it an issue just now. Seems to fit with the overall mood, US going to war in Irak and weapons inspections and all.

Kristian

the story calling it "craze" is somewhat overrated. At every time in the last 50 years, kids have built something that goes boom. I think that is the same in every other country.

I live here and i haven't seen or heard of a single "Kartoffelkanone" prior to the article and the photos of the SPIEGEL magazine.

At least it's an interesting method of delivering mashed potatoes.

Yours, Martin

here is a link to the article in German from "Der Spiegel":
The article

.iq is the country domain for Iraq. See the official list.

The Spiegel Almanach entry for Iraq has Al-Jumhuriya al-Iraqiya as the country's offical name (in Arab, I guess). So .iq seems to be a good choice.

Actualy German experiments with manned rockets in WWII came very close to that. The only things left to tell a story were a hand and a foot, though.

German news magazine Der Spiegel has an article on the same topic, with a bit more background information. Also in German.

Europe (I live in Germany [cnn.com]) has MAJOR problems [spiegel.de] (German news site, but just browse the pics) with the weather. Only Germany has estimated damages of something around 50 billion dollars only caused by this flood after heavy rainfalls.

Weather is NOT just a question if you can have a BBQ on weekend.

Please ask your president to sign the Kyoto contracts, thanks.

I know, this is not about copyrights but about trademarks, so mod me OT.

There is a VERY interesting case in Germany (yes, this is in europe): a company held a trademark of the name 'explorer' without having a product or anything. They made microsoft to pay (only) around $/Euro 90.000 and sued a couple of companies for abusing their trademark (i.e. the publisher heinz heise verlag for selling cd's with their magazines with a software called FTPExplorer on it).

The Oberlandesgericht of Cologne now canceled this trademark (translated by google) because it never was used for serious reasons but only to make money by sueing other companies.

Exactly the same thing happened (transleted by uhm... you know.) to a patent that covered the creation of human and animal embryos. After they realized what they did, the simply removed the patent after a LOUD shout out of politicians, medics and uh, guys like me.

Until now, the scientists can only specify the Asteroid's position on February 1st 2019 within an error margin of several million kilometers. (Translation by me).

That gives us a chance of less than one in a million of getting hit. So I guess it's a bit too early to take the next spaceship to mars and never look back.

Kavau

OTOH Apple often doesn't pay for being in a movie, the production company buys or rents the Macs or uses machines they already have. Sometimes Apple isn't even asked (as can be seen - or not, thanks to the auto-translation - in this this (auto-translated) article / original article in German about ads withs Macs in Germany) if Macs can be used.

I wonder if the manufacturer of the glass could use the transparent aluminum that was just invented to make an almost-transparent model, which would be easier to market than a glass-with-a-bunch-of-wires-in-it ...?

A German Member of Parliament replied to Microsoft Germany's letter.

Original (German)

Google translation

Spend your money for stale stuff instead for
the bleeding edge. Why risk your bucks when others will do it for you?

Beeing too bureaucratic to be inventive,
simply reuse the old stuff others had
invented years before (and have discarded it
in the meantime).

Advertise your 'conservative' attitude to
those who march in front of you. Hopefully
this might blur the fact that you are two
steps behind.

Annotation: If you following the online
site of DER SPIEGEL, you'll soon find out that
they are notorious sinners against the
spirit of the Web by not offering links to
those sites, which are the current subjects
of their stories. Why? Fear to lose eyeballs
to the endless wilderness of the Web? Ignorance?


But who needs to be a leader, when you have
enough money to buy an used coffee machine...

"Guten Tag", Zeit zum aufwachen ihr Schnarcher
darkstar.frop.org

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