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Same system here. A soccer star had to pay 540.000 Euros for driving without a valid license:
http://www.spiegel.de/auto/akt...
(sorry, German link only)

hmm I Googled that (hadn't heard about it) and found this article.
Apparently a number of banks no longer serve American securities investors. So you are right in that if you want to evade taxes you now do need to smuggle out cash again like in the old days.

I don't think you'll have an issue getting a normal checking account. So for your everyday transactions there is no need to deal 'in piles of cash' You can pay by credit and debit card like the rest of us...
The article even states so: "Customers with normal checking or savings accounts in Germany are not affected, however."

But I'm glad someone is sticking up for the tax evaders.

also uses DPI (packet injection) and is supposed to be the state-of-the-art full-spectrum intelligence platform: it will allow one to intercept an email, alter and forward it unknown to either the addressor or addressee, with a new meeting time and place, and then dispatch either an extreme rendition, or kill team, to the rendezvous point. Ain't life grand?

https://www.wikileaks.org/spyf...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.allgov.com/news/us-...
http://securityaffairs.co/word...

You don't think that the number of people with competitive broadband depends heavily on the definition of "broadband"?

No, I think you got the dependency and the definition wrong.

Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD and 25Mbps for UHD. If we want to stick to a single stream at SD, it's great, though.

The argument for government support for broadband for the home is that people need it for education and jobs. For that, a single SD stream is sufficient, and for that, almost all Americans have multiple providers.

Your definition of broadband means that you are effectively arguing that the US government should engage in a massive regulatory scheme so that pampered upper middle class folks and their kids can retreat nightly to watching separate UHD video on their subsidized Internet connections, and that is just wrong. Even if you accept the notion of positive rights, there is no rational policy objective served by that, and it effectively ends up taxing poorer people to give already well off people a nice entertainment option.

Furthermore, many of those subsidize broadband, so it's actually a lot more expensive than it seems.

It's these kinds of vague, hand-wavy assertions that drive me nuts. This stuff is just numbers, and it's knowable. Which countries and how much?

No, it's not "knowable" because money is fungible. Subsidies occur in the form of cheap loans, and loan guarantees, easements, contractual commitments that don't show up as debt, R&D contracts related to infrastructure, free provision of "public" television, and many other forms. A lot of infrastructure was handed to companies in places like Germany as part of privatization of national telecoms. But there are more obvious forms too: Germany used a massive surtax on income in order to deploy a fibre network throughout the country in the 1990s (a lousy investment).

They have to keep their equipment and services competitive with whatever a new competitor might bring online, but they can keep their prices at monopoly levels until that competitor actually does come online.

Yes, that's what I said.

The fact that Comcast has to keep up efficiency doesn't result in all that much benefit the end user if it all ends up in monopoly profits.

It ends up in enormous benefit to the end user compared to a government monopoly, because with a government monopoly, the user ends up paying monopoly prices and receives outdated service. That was the norm with US and European national telecoms until they got privatized. In both places, you couldn't even legally connect an analog modem to the phone lines. The Internet didn't take off on either continent until they were privatized.

Note that, ironically, Germans are making "grass is greener" arguments about the US:

USA, Japan, Schweiz - in vielen LÃndern ist das Internet schneller als bei uns. Millionen Haushalte in Deutschland haben gar keinen Zugriff auf einen ausreichend schnellen Zugang, um die datenintensiven Netzanwendungen der Gegenwart zu nutzen.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt...

I think some workers get free beers in Germany and definitely are allowed to drink it during lunch:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.german-way.com/hist...

Elsewhere: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
But I suppose that's Carlsberg after all ;).

FIPS may not be a joke, but most government networks are, especially, but not limited to, those outside of the DOD and IC. They are (in large part), administered by people who follow proscribed procedures, not people who understand what they're doing or why. While some "rogue" administrators will implement best practices beyond those they're required to do, they are the exception, not the rule -- especially admins who actually understand what they're doing rather than overestimating their own competence, which is its own problem. One need only look at the recent public government network compromises to see the consequences of these security procedures, and then apply the iceberg principle -- for every compromise that's seen, there are almost certainly many more that go unseen.

And of course, all the best technical precautions in the world can't protect you from social engineering, insider threats, and/or 0-day exploits. If we've learned nothing else in the past year or two, it's that the deck is stacked very highly in favor of attackers, especially targeted attacks by determined state actors.

Given the above, and the high-profile targets that government networks represent, I would be surprised if most, if not all of them, have been compromised. We like to make a lot of noise about China attacking us, but we almost never mention the country known for the "best" malicious software, which is Russia. Google "Turla," or "Uroboros," for example, and they're hardly mentioned in popular media, let alone in official statements. I suspect that the Russians are either as good as us at avoiding detection, that we just don't want to rattle any sabres by mentioning them publicly, or a little of both.

I think Kaspersky was spot on when he said: "this war can't be won; it only has perpetrators and victims. Out there, all we can do is prevent everything from spinning out of control. Only two things could solve this [permanently], and both of them are undesirable: to ban computers -- or people."

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

"All Greeks own many houses".
"All Greek fish sold are from Thailand"!
"All Greeks own yachts"?!
"You get thrown out of buses"?!?!
... and of course, all Greeks will steal from you, cheat on you, etc, etc
That's the most complete collection of negative comments I've ever read online, kudos to you for collecting them.
However, compiling a list of negative press releases (like the 3000 blind people, which was a great scandal here as well) and putting some anecdotal self experience, is far from describing the truth. Enough with the "greek sterotypes", even the German don't believe them
I'm not sure what kind of spoiled rich Greek friends you have, that can obviously spend enough to travel abroad and play basketball and whatever, but I assure you that the *vast* majority of people here are struggling with 30% true unemployment and 500 Euros wages. Old people are suffering with a 50%-70% cut in their pension. Disabled people where stripped off their benefits overnight. Gas and heating prices went up 50%. Electricity went up at least 20%. All these along with a 30%-50% increase in taxation *of the poor* (and 0% increase for the rich). This is the actual austerity, and not some bull*hit about people "forced to cut down on spending". Just take a look at the numbers of people immigrating, committing a suicide, dying of heart attacks etc over the last 4 years. Do you really think these where people frustrated for losing one of their yachts?

The true problem of austerity was not that people where "forced to cut down on spending". It's that the state was forced to cut down on spending and find revenue by means of heavy and irrational taxation (insane actually). This had the obvious impact of putting the economy in a deep depression, thus leading the state into having to borrow again, leading to more heavy austerity measures etc. So we've ended up now with an economy 30% smaller, unemployment went from 10% to 30%, people have lost their jobs, their houses, their hopes, their lives and what for? , only this time it's not the private sector that holds it (european banks), but they have traded this with European state loans (see: european people's money). The new government doesn't promise it will "continue the policy of spending". It has promised (and we'll see if it manages that) that it will revert insane austerity measures. For example, cutting the basic wage from 750 Euros to 580 Euros was a measure that not even the employers wanted: They knew that this would drive the economy even more deep into recession.

So, please, check your facts before posting condemns about a whole race, just because you got cheated and had a fight with a bus employee on a crowded island in a crowded season.
I could write much more, about how German businesses funded corruption in Greece, How Germany benefits from the Greek crisis, etc, but it's pointless; You people will always believe that it's "the Greeks' absent mindedness" that is to blame about the crisis, that they had it coming, and that it will never happen to your country. Good luck.
Ah, and by the way, during my trips worldwide I've met literally hundreds of people who h

"All Greeks own many houses".
"All Greek fish sold are from Thailand"!
"All Greeks own yachts"?!
"You get thrown out of buses"?!?!
... and of course, all Greeks will steal from you, cheat on you, etc, etc
That's the most complete collection of negative comments I've ever read online, kudos to you for collecting them.
However, compiling a list of negative press releases (like the 3000 blind people, which was a great scandal here as well) and putting some anecdotal self experience, is far from describing the truth. Enough with the "greek sterotypes", even the German don't believe them
I'm not sure what kind of spoiled rich Greek friends you have, that can obviously spend enough to travel abroad and play basketball and whatever, but I assure you that the *vast* majority of people here are struggling with 30% true unemployment and 500 Euros wages. Old people are suffering with a 50%-70% cut in their pension. Disabled people where stripped off their benefits overnight. Gas and heating prices went up 50%. Electricity went up at least 20%. All these along with a 30%-50% increase in taxation *of the poor* (and 0% increase for the rich). This is the actual austerity, and not some bull*hit about people "forced to cut down on spending". Just take a look at the numbers of people immigrating, committing a suicide, dying of heart attacks etc over the last 4 years. Do you really think these where people frustrated for losing one of their yachts?

The true problem of austerity was not that people where "forced to cut down on spending". It's that the state was forced to cut down on spending and find revenue by means of heavy and irrational taxation (insane actually). This had the obvious impact of putting the economy in a deep depression, thus leading the state into having to borrow again, leading to more heavy austerity measures etc. So we've ended up now with an economy 30% smaller, unemployment went from 10% to 30%, people have lost their jobs, their houses, their hopes, their lives and what for? , only this time it's not the private sector that holds it (european banks), but they have traded this with European state loans (see: european people's money). The new government doesn't promise it will "continue the policy of spending". It has promised (and we'll see if it manages that) that it will revert insane austerity measures. For example, cutting the basic wage from 750 Euros to 580 Euros was a measure that not even the employers wanted: They knew that this would drive the economy even more deep into recession.

So, please, check your facts before posting condemns about a whole race, just because you got cheated and had a fight with a bus employee on a crowded island in a crowded season.
I could write much more, about how German businesses funded corruption in Greece, How Germany benefits from the Greek crisis, etc, but it's pointless; You people will always believe that it's "the Greeks' absent mindedness" that is to blame about the crisis, that they had it coming, and that it will never happen to your country. Good luck.
Ah, and by the way, during my trips worldwide I've met literally hundreds of people who h

Ok, Let's focus on these answers that you have wider selection sets to make a mental image over than just people you know.

That would be 1-5, and 10.

1)
You say that you have never heard a female pilot over the intercom. How strongly does this paint the image that pilots are all male? (Or, how shocked would you be to hear a female pilot informing you of mid-air turbulence?) Would you say this would be encouraging for women to become pilots?

According to the Airline Pilots Association, only 5% of commercial aircraft pilots are female.
CNN has a story that tries to address some of the issues that might be involved in why there is a huge disparity there as well. Some of the reasons given are less likely to apply, given the statistical increase in women choosing careers over family in recent decades, so take some of the answers with a grain of salt.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL...

2)
Prior to the 1980s, only 19% of flight attendants were male. In 2007 that number had risen to 26%. Some attribute this to progressive social policies that encouraged males to take up "less manly" careers, as many stories in that time period discussed issues such as daycares operated by male caregivers, and other "controversial" subjects, which helped push back against the perception that flight attendant is a female job.

http://www.prb.org/Publication...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
(A german article from Speigel circa 2012 concerning efforts in Germany to recruit more male childcare workers.)

http://www.boston.com/communit...
(An Op-Ed concerning the "Controversial" practice of leaving children in a male care-giver's custody, circa 2009)

Exactly how much impact the "Softening" of social reactions to males entering "Traditionally Female" occupations has had on the uptick in males serving as flight attendants is not known, and probably cannot be well known, but I would expect that it is at least partially attributable, as the societal reaction towards a male entering such a career has relaxed somewhat in recent decades.

3)
According to the bureau of labor statistics, 51% of gas station employees are female. Granted, this value contains retail positions. The occupation of "Attendant" as it relates to gas stations typically involves this retail counter interaction these days, but the more historical view is of the guy outside who helped you at full service stations (a thing of the past, I know), which more parallels with automotive repair. The same statistics breakdown has 9.3% worksforce as female in automotive repair. Sadly, they don't give trend data, just snapshot data.

Depending on your perception of what "Gas station attendant" is, there is either a very slight lead for women in the industry, or a major lead by men in the industry.

4)
Labor statistics for "Retail Trade" have female participation (overall) listed at 48.3%. In various sub-categories, women dominate sales, while in others, men lead. Most hover in the 40-60%, with some leaning one way, and some to the other. Sales seems to be something that does not, intrinsically, have a gender bias, excepting in specailty products tailored or marketed to a specific gender.

5)
Labor statistics for "Administration of human resources" cites a 69% statistic for females. That's nearly 50% greater liklihood of your HR director being female over being male.

10)
Scientific research and development cites a 47% statistic.
Again, very close to 50% split.

There's other interesting data in there, concerning computer equipment manufacture-- 29% industry wide are female.

FALSE, the most recent is dated June 2012:

http://www.spiegel.de/media/me...

Pages 20, 21.

Which once again proves that you anti-Tor trolls are either idiots or liars.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

The map you can no longer get from the UN
http://online.wsj.com/public/r...

But hey I see why you post AC on this.

OpenSSH is not buggy and has good security already. You must be thinking of the OpenSSL.

I guess you missed the news stories about NSA owning SSH and having great successes decrypting SSH traffic.

Have fun going over these:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-documents-attacks-on-vpn-ssl-tls-ssh-tor-a-1010525.html

The waron drugs is a colossal failure,

Oh, I totally agree. Just pointing out that a little caution is in order. Doing the opposite of something that failed does not necessarily gaurantee success.

And Portugal isn't exactly a golden model.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

"We haven't found some miracle cure," Goulão says. Still, taking stock after nearly 12 years, his conclusion is, "Decriminalization hasn't made the problem worse."

Wait till your infrastructure dies because the FBI or some other three letter agency is poking around in your systems trying to install a backdoor or exploit.

Seems like you missed the news on that.

Last May, as part of Glenn Greenwald's book, the NSA's process of supply-chain interdiction was exposed. They would intercept shipments of Cisco hardware, install the back doors, replace factory seals, and put it back into the shipping chain. One story. And another.

Cisco's response was somewhat curious. It wasn't outrage. It wasn't a lawsuit. It wasn't an emotional response. It was a calm, publicly released letter addressed to President Obama about trust and confidence. Nowhere in their public statements do they say anything about surprise, or about lack of knowledge that it was happening, or that they were not complicit.

Nope, it is an open letter asking the government to restore trust and confidence. It reads like the company was asking "please don't let these secrets go public again."

It is widely believed -- and documented -- that government agencies have already inserted various backdoors into Cisco corporate security products. It is also likely that the companies know full well about their products being intercepted and modified by the government, and that Cisco and others are helping the various agencies by tagging the products to be modified.

The agent responsible for what happens in these pages could be a good start to slutshaming these assholes.

http://www.spiegel.de/media/me...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Read that. All of it. And then come back and tell me what their mission statement is.

Source?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

"So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We're facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn't happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year."

The referenced article this quote was taken from:

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Another important topic the climate scientist mentions:

"Temperature increases are also very much dependent on clouds, which can both amplify and mitigate the greenhouse effect. For as long as I've been working in this field, for over 30 years, there has unfortunately been very little progress made in the simulation of clouds."

Keep this in mind the next time you hear, "The science is settled."

"It was a mistake by an individual"

And the individual's supervisor and the person who trained the individual and the person who devised the individual's test after the training and the person who checked that the test was suitable and the person that did the risk assessment for the work the individual was doing and the person who checked the risk assessment for the work.

There are methods for making sure accidents don't happen, if those methods aren't followed then a lot of people are responsible.

You'd think they could get this stuff right after half a century of dealing with waste.

Could be worse... The Mafia's Deadly Garbage: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal

What we have right now is a perfect storm of multiple factors.

1. US aggressive foreign policy against Russia, Venezuela and now IS. This is seen in situation in Georgia, Ukraine et al against Russia and with Cuba against Venezuela and is an extremely important tool. Timing of fracking's peak in US is a little too perfect to have been intentionally arranged, but it's certainly helpful to the extreme and is receiving significant political support from military wing of governing forces in the country.

2. Gulf state interests against IS. Essentially all Gulf states, from Saudi Arabia to Iran have been threatened by IS both directly and indirectly. IS gains overwhelming amount of income from oil trade:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
This is likely the real reason why OPEC doesn't cut the quotas. They see a chance to starve IS, and in absence of any better means to do so they go for it. Even traditionally anti-Saudi and anti-US Iran is on board here with IS's main message being anti-Shiite to the extreme threatening their allied shiite-lead Iraq

3. Corporate interests across many countries, including Western countries and some large importing developing countries like China and India. These have invested in significant amount of current and future production of carbohydrates including oil and natural gas to ensure access in the short and medium turn, and combat over long term security is being covertly fought out in South China Sea, Arctic, Mediterranean basin, Black Sea and several other important regions. But in short term everyone has abundant supplies secured and in medium term we have fracking projects across both Americas and Europe being pushed through while Russia is pushing for diversification to East Asian states like China, South-Korea, Japan and India giving them significant energy security boost. Brazil's growing economy is likewise more or less energy secure with largely successful massive shift to domestically sourced ethanol and access to Venezuelan oil. This inevitably drives the price down as the risk factor in the futures diminishes.

4. Fear in oil producing countries of becoming irrelevant for the next decade or two if hydraulic fracturing becomes more commonplace in Northern America, Europe and East Asian states. Right now much of their internal stability depends on stable output and sales and essentially the "current world order" where they produce and sell oil and rich countries buy oil and sell them products produced with that energy. Should rich and upcoming developing countries like China, India and Brazil become completely independent of their oil production for ten to twenty years that hydraulic fracturing can extract oil for before available oil runs out, they would simply go bankrupt and become easy pickings for said rich countries to take over as we have seen being done in the past.
This fear is likely another factor in why OPEC doesn't dare to reduce extraction quotas, through a lesser one than threat of IS.

None of these factors alone would account for a significant reduction in oil price, but all of them together are causing the current free fall.

Got any reliable citations for those sources, or is it just the nebulous "some"? I mean, some sources say the NSA has brainwave scanners and can tell what you're thinking from a van outside your house. But those guys are nuts.

I believe those sources are this week's Der Spiegel article citing the NSA themselves.

Got any reliable citations for those sources, or is it just the nebulous "some"? I mean, some sources say the NSA has brainwave scanners and can tell what you're thinking from a van outside your house. But those guys are nuts.

I believe those sources are this week's Der Spiegel article citing the NSA themselves.

Read the Spiegel article and learn the security methods that might still work. Using these methods, secure all your communication all the time. If everyone does that, then the NSA has to hire more people to sort away the chaff. The more people they hire, the greater the likelihood that they again hire someone with a conscience.

Method 2. Live two lives, one that's fake and boring, and another that's secret and furtive. Hide the limited second life amongst the chatter of the first. This method will work better if everyone with boring lives are securing all their communication all the time.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

"Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed."

In other words: This shows that there isn't a real danger that this security theater is protecting us from.

No, that just shows that the Intent, Capability, and Opportunity haven't yet aligned to result in an incident or attack... that you know of. Absence of an attack isn't the same as absence of a threat. And you're kidding yourself if you think there aren't terrorists in Germany, or flying through it, that wouldn't attack the airport, planes, or other places in Germany specifically or Europe in general.

Attacks on Frankfurt Airport, Ramstein Planned: Three Islamist Terror Suspects Arrested in Germany - September 05, 2007

Germany Sends 240 Cops to Arrest Nine ISIS Suspects in Cologne - November 12th 2014

The sad irony. http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Really Why? what content on Slashdot justify's the need for encrypted content? I really don't get this huge push for SSL everywhere. give me SSL when I need it, I don't want SSL for accessing a forum or a news site or just generally browsing the web.

Exactly. What's the benefit?

There's a time and place for encryption, and Slashdot ain't it.

Some folks at Belgacom may disagree.

Remember, SSL/TLS doesn't just protect the privacy of communications, it also protects the integrity of those communications and makes it much more difficult for an adversary to modify the traffic to insert hostile content.

Frig, don't know where that url came from; can't leave the computer alone for a minute. http://www.spiegel.de/internat... is the correct one.

Renewable energy in Germany is increasing, so... bullshit much?

Right. That must be why Germany is abandoning it's 2020 CO2 goals.

Or maybe why Rising German Coal Use Imperils European Emissions Deal

In my opinion, the most obvious and interesting theory [maxkeiser.com] is that Putin's plane was near the same air space close to the same time as MH17 ...

Your sense of what is "obvious" might be a bit off.

Web evidence points to pro-Russia rebels in downing of MH17 (+video)

Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, claimed responsibility on a popular Russian social-networking site for the downing of what he thought was a Ukrainian military transport plane shortly before reports that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 had crashed near the rebel held Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

MH17 disaster: Social media posts, phone recording used to blame Russian separatists

Social media posts by pro-Russian insurgents - most of them hastily removed - suggest the rebels thought they had shot down a Ukrainian army plane before realising in horror that it was in fact a packed Malaysian airliner.

Ukraine and MH17: Who are the separatists?

On Thursday evening a Russian social media page linked to the rebels announced they had knocked down a Ukrainian An-26, adding, “We warned them – don’t fly ‘in our sky’”. The post – which was accompanied by distant video-shots of smoke rising after an apparent crash – was later removed, but it has stoked suspicions that pro-Russian militiamen shot the Malaysian Airlines jet by mistake.

The evidence that may prove pro-Russian separatists shot down MH17

Deadly Ukraine Crash: German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17

Putin's plane was an hour away.

This could have been a simple, yet tragic, case of mistaken identity.

It was, but not as you apparently intend. It wasn't the Ukrainians trying to shoot down Putin and being mistaken but rather the "separatists" shooting at what they mistakenly assumed was a Ukrainian aircraft.

Here (Germany) it was reported that investigators couldn't visit the crash site for a long time because it was in a war zone.
Due to the current armistice the investigators now continue to salvage the wreckage, with separatists apparently helping out

...Merkel probably doesn't want to do anything that might disrupt the German economy.

Somehow it seems you didn't follow the news. And Merkel ...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://www.eff.org/document/2...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://www.eff.org/document/2...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
https://www.eff.org/document/2...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Is this the same UN Climate Panel that was predicting 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010, and then silently pulled all mentions of this from their website when 2010 rolled around and they turned out to be off by 50 million?

Yes.

We decide on something, then put the in the room and wait a while to see what happens, If there will be no great cry and no uprisings, because most people have no idea what has been decided, then we move on -. Step by step, until there is no turning back

Euro was originally planned this way, and the only reason why these banknotes exist in first place is Germany so rich Germans would be able to continue to bring unreported income to Switzerland easily. Also helps the Christ Democrat Party with their illegal donations

Hi Coward. I may have understated it.

http://m.spiegel.de/internatio...

But I dont make stuff up, there are a number of solar fanboys that follow my every post and consistently fail making similar accusations. I always have a basis for my statements.

The PRIMARY reason to use a BlackBerry device is because I don't want the NSA or 4chan all up in my business.

Well the NSA most certainly can be "all up in your business" if you use a BlackBerry so perhaps it's time to switch to something else. As for 4chan, well just don't use "cloud services" for hosting stuff you don't want to be public.

Go tell the managers of Hydro Aluminium that the renewable induced grid instabilities that costs them thousands of euros in equipment damage and then some more from lost work is great for their industry.
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

Yes the do

"Germany's Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good" By SPIEGEL Staff on 09/04/2013:

Germany's agressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor. Government advisors are calling for a completely new start.

Uber has already posted a press release that they won't give a shit and that they will ignore the restraining order.

(German article about Uber's response)
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtscha...

be cost effective to extract uranium from seawater,

Two things about that. #1 It is horribly expensive at over 15 to 30x the cost of current uranium. #2 The extraction process requires absurd amounts of oil based 'net' to extract the atoms of uranium.

Nuclear is already an expensive method of electricity production. Saying that this method of extraction is 'cost effective' is highly misleading. in 2010 Uranium prices spiked, the ocean extraction process would still have been over 7 times more expensive, not to mention there are only prototypes and estimates of cost at this point. Some of the estimates have put the cost of extraction at well over 100x current uranium cost.

The most advanced materials, which can be reused several times, can draw between three and four milligrams of uranium per gram of plastic each time theyâ(TM)re used, says Costas Tsouris, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who is working on that system.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Uranium obtained using the traditional process today would cost between $1,000 and $2,000 per kilogramâ"about 10 to 20 times the current market price, says Schneider. (The price of uranium did rise to around $300 per kilogram as recently as 2007, however.) The new process could cut that cost significantly.

Current price is around $31 per pound ($68 a kilo).
http://www.mining.com/chart-ur...

A sharp spike in uranium prices in 2007 had many people scared in terms of the sustainability of the nuclear industry, [at $100 per lb]

So if the nuclear industry is unsustainable with mined uranium then it is completely unsustainable with ocean extracted uranium, which realistically costs around 20 times as much.

How's that nuclear waste problem coming along? Perhaps the mafia can help.

Just make sure that nuclear waste doesn't leak. Oops.
Radiation leaks force transfer of nuclear waste from New ...
Nuclear waste leaking at Hanford site in Washington, again ...
After $40 Billion , America's Biggest Nuclear Dump Is Still ...
Radiation leak at nuclear waste dump raises questions ...
Ocean disposal of radioactive waste - Wikipedia, the free ...
Thousands of radioactive waste barrels rusting ...
Japan Times: Now 400 tons a day of toxic water is estimated ...

Because nuclear accidents stopped happening after Chernobyl right? Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

But hey, todays new breed of super-human won't make the same mistakes as those past

This also from an interview Merkel gave to public German TV yesterday:

A solution must be found to the Ukraine crisis that does not hurt Russia and which the Ukrainian people must choose for themselves, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday.
...
  "There must be dialogue. There can only be a political solution. There won't be a military solution to this conflict," she said.
...
  On Saturday, her vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel had suggested that establishing a federal Ukraine was the only viable solution to the crisis pitting Kiev against pro-Russian separatists.

Merkel said that if Ukraine opted to rejoin the Eurasian Union with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, then Europe would not make "a huge conflict" out of it.

Especially the last point is clearly a big step back from the earlier all out "Ukraine is EU" position.

Additionally to the economic side, pressure on Merkel also grows because there is more and more doubt, even in German mainstream media, about the veracity of the Ukrainian propaganda and about the destruction of flight MH17. Why is there is no news about it? Is there a coverup (in German)?

What good are laws when governmental thugs just come over and beat people up over TV content they don't like?

And if you understand German: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/g...

Besides, you keep using the word "terrorists". I don't think it means what you think it means. When they start bombing civilians in Kiev, then they would be terrorists. And talking about how Ukraine is forced to fire on civilists is just showing how full of manure you are. There is a German journalist in Donetsk. He has explained several times how Ukrainian armed forces just indiscriminately shells the city while the separatists are nowhere near.

Germany has been in a mad rush for quite a while to build solar and wind power production.

Germany has also been in a mad rush to build more coal fired power plants, and Germany is buring more brown coal than ever before. Germany's environmental policies have been a disaster. They have sky high electricity rates, are heavily dependent on Russian gas, and are spewing more CO2 than ever before. The only thing they have accomplished is to set an example of what not to do.

US military spending remains outrageous, at about the level of the rest of the world put together.

That is irrelevant to the question regarding the US defense budget rising or falling.

I assume you mean the 2013 cuts -- those have been matched, basically dollar for dollar, by increasing the "temporary" budget for Afghanistan.

Sorry, but no. US defense spending has been falling since 2010. For 2015 it will probably end up being about $120 billion less than 2010.

Major personnel cuts are happening too.

Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels

Fundamentalism is a part of it, yes, but would never amount to anything like what we've seen were it not for widespread anti-US sentiments stemming from more pragmatic reasons

Islamist insurrections have been on-going since at least the 1950s (ignoring the earlier ones) and have been aimed at taking control of the local nation. They have nothing to do with the US. You don't know what you are talking about.

Coming from someone who apparently still believes the Iraq war had anything to do with 911 ...

Please provide some evidence for this. You are simply engaging in cheap, misleading rhetoric.

somehow still manages to delude himself that anti-American sentiment somehow thrives in complete isolation of its international posturing

Enjoy your illusions while you still can.

Intelligence Report: Number of Islamists in Germany Grows
Germany: Islamists Infiltrating Schools in Hamburg

German interior minister warns of threat of lethal attacks by Islamists

On Wednesday, German interior minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) warned of an imminent threat of terrorist attacks by Islamist “religious warriors” in Germany and throughout Europe.

“An abstract danger has become a concrete, lethal threat in Europe, with an impact on Germany,” the interior minister said at the presentation of the domestic intelligence agency’s 2013 report in Berlin. The attack at the Jewish museum in Brussels, where four people were killed by a jihadi at the end of May, had “made clear that the possibility of an attack by such forces returning from Syria has become a deadly reality,” de Maizière explained.

Domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maaßen added, “Islamist terrorism represents the greatest threat to society. Germany is not far from terrorism. We continue to be a target for the planning of attacks.”

Officials Say Islamic Terrorism Is Germany's Big Domestic Security Risk

About 15 years ago the term 'micro payment' showed up on the internet.
There where blog posts etc. proclaiming how the 'internet' will change if users, surfers, are able to purchase goods via micro payment solutions. The main problem for paying of small fees at that time was that the minimum fee tompay to a credit card company was somewhere around 3 dollars. So the smallest selling price for something was around 4 dollars. Lets come back to this a at the end of this post.

Suddenly, around 10 years ago companies, especially the online branch of traditional news papers, like http://www.spiegel.de/ decided, we indeed need micro transactions. Or the possibility to 'do micro transactions' .

Somehow they made a deal with the 'credit card companies' that they could now sell articles in their online store for 1.50 Euro. Only paying 1 Euro to the card company, wow! Micro payment. That did not work out that well.

Later, not sure what the price is now or if that option for payed browsing still exists on spiegel online, they dropped the price for users browsing an article to 50 cents!

Isn't that amazing (Steve Jobs :) ) ???

So, if I buy a magazine in paper form, and pay 4.00 Euros (the equivalent of 8 articles online payed) I can read something like 40 articles or minor reports and some jokes, a few letters to the editor etc. etc.

Erm ... so I want to save money, time energy, give more money to the publisher (who has not to pay for distribution, printing, billing etc.) and I get less?

Back to the introduction part: when the term micropayment was coined, perhaps 1995, we talked about prices of 1 cent per article. Not 150cents, not 50cents. We imagined that a user had a contract with a search engine or with his ISP. That he would pay e.g. a yearly fee to use that engine, perhaps 30dollars, that is 30cents per day.
That perhaps reading an article on a random web site, not limited to 'newspapers' or 'magazines' would yield the hoster 1cent per view.

So, spiegel online, http://www.spiegel.de/ has perhaps 50 million hits per day. Does not matter if it is only 10 per day or even up to 100 million. They have(had?) that subsection where you need to pay 50cents - 150cents to few an (old!) article.

On the millions of hits they earn nothing, except income via advertizing. The subsection which is paywalled(was?) creates losses.

If I'm not bad in math the roughly 50 million hits per day would generate 50 million cents per day on income, that is 500,000 euros (per day!). If coming there would be payed via a true micro transaction. It would be super simple to add something into TCP/IP or HTTP that only lets people get onto payed sides if they really want to. I doubt they ever had hits on the paywalled articles worth so much money.

So, publishers/news sites/magazines spoiled the development of true micro transaction, micropayment systems. They are the reason stuff like Bitcoins got born.

Now they demand a search engine "tax"? How do they suppose that ever will work? I certainly won't visit any of them regardless what law gymnastics they perform. The next step will, be Tor, Bittorents, secret search engines, deep scanning and copying tools/sites or aggregation sites where people 'forward' news like in twitter or here on /. and the original news sites are completely cut off.

Don't get me wrong: I have no resentments against magazine publishers. I have nothing against paying for content. But being forced to pay 100 times more for online content - in our aera - than for the exact same content printed and mailed to my house ... Nope!

The only area where we right now have a very small true 'internet revolution', letting ordinary people publish and sell 'creations' in a way that other ordinary people can 'pay' a 'reasonable' price and finally the original 'creator' gets most of it (not an parasite credit car

About 15 years ago the term 'micro payment' showed up on the internet.
There where blog posts etc. proclaiming how the 'internet' will change if users, surfers, are able to purchase goods via micro payment solutions. The main problem for paying of small fees at that time was that the minimum fee tompay to a credit card company was somewhere around 3 dollars. So the smallest selling price for something was around 4 dollars. Lets come back to this a at the end of this post.

Suddenly, around 10 years ago companies, especially the online branch of traditional news papers, like http://www.spiegel.de/ decided, we indeed need micro transactions. Or the possibility to 'do micro transactions' .

Somehow they made a deal with the 'credit card companies' that they could now sell articles in their online store for 1.50 Euro. Only paying 1 Euro to the card company, wow! Micro payment. That did not work out that well.

Later, not sure what the price is now or if that option for payed browsing still exists on spiegel online, they dropped the price for users browsing an article to 50 cents!

Isn't that amazing (Steve Jobs :) ) ???

So, if I buy a magazine in paper form, and pay 4.00 Euros (the equivalent of 8 articles online payed) I can read something like 40 articles or minor reports and some jokes, a few letters to the editor etc. etc.

Erm ... so I want to save money, time energy, give more money to the publisher (who has not to pay for distribution, printing, billing etc.) and I get less?

Back to the introduction part: when the term micropayment was coined, perhaps 1995, we talked about prices of 1 cent per article. Not 150cents, not 50cents. We imagined that a user had a contract with a search engine or with his ISP. That he would pay e.g. a yearly fee to use that engine, perhaps 30dollars, that is 30cents per day.
That perhaps reading an article on a random web site, not limited to 'newspapers' or 'magazines' would yield the hoster 1cent per view.

So, spiegel online, http://www.spiegel.de/ has perhaps 50 million hits per day. Does not matter if it is only 10 per day or even up to 100 million. They have(had?) that subsection where you need to pay 50cents - 150cents to few an (old!) article.

On the millions of hits they earn nothing, except income via advertizing. The subsection which is paywalled(was?) creates losses.

If I'm not bad in math the roughly 50 million hits per day would generate 50 million cents per day on income, that is 500,000 euros (per day!). If coming there would be payed via a true micro transaction. It would be super simple to add something into TCP/IP or HTTP that only lets people get onto payed sides if they really want to. I doubt they ever had hits on the paywalled articles worth so much money.

So, publishers/news sites/magazines spoiled the development of true micro transaction, micropayment systems. They are the reason stuff like Bitcoins got born.

Now they demand a search engine "tax"? How do they suppose that ever will work? I certainly won't visit any of them regardless what law gymnastics they perform. The next step will, be Tor, Bittorents, secret search engines, deep scanning and copying tools/sites or aggregation sites where people 'forward' news like in twitter or here on /. and the original news sites are completely cut off.

Don't get me wrong: I have no resentments against magazine publishers. I have nothing against paying for content. But being forced to pay 100 times more for online content - in our aera - than for the exact same content printed and mailed to my house ... Nope!

The only area where we right now have a very small true 'internet revolution', letting ordinary people publish and sell 'creations' in a way that other ordinary people can 'pay' a 'reasonable' price and finally the original 'creator' gets most of it (not an parasite credit car