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Caroline Farrow investigated for misgendering someone in a tweet. It happened. Seriously. That's the UK - apparently calling someone by the wrong gender can get you investigated by the police. And it is not just Mr. Sturzenberger - a sign condemning Islam will get you a 1000 euro fine, in Germany.

There is no freedom of speech in most of the world.

have greater inequality than the US health care system. [citation needed]

Sure, here you go:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/gel...

That is, 90% of Germans are forced into the mandatory system, with long waiting times and little choice in doctors, while the remaining 10%, mostly those making more than EU 54000 must by insurance in a less regulated and much more expensive private market (and receive much better service in return). Switzerland effectively also has a two tier system.

I'm glad you like those systems and recommend them for the US. I think they would be a great improvement over the system the US has right now, in large part because the German and Swiss system are more market oriented and more tolerant of inequality (i.e., vastly different services depending on your ability to pay).

Before and at the start of what is now NSA and GCHQ projects to get to Soviet and other nations communications was well funded. In the late 1940's the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk got used and the UK used the HMS Turpin. Converted to super-T specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a lot of effort was made to get near Soviet sites.
The problem for the UK was the need for submarine broadcasts. Would the Soviet Union find their locations?
What slowed the UK's operations was the discovery of a UK scuba diver near a Soviet ship in Portsmouth harbour, the Crabb Affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... After that the UK was aware it had to be more careful. The US seemed ever more fixated with Murmansk and by the 1960's the UK was helping again with submarine work e.g. via HMS Taciturn and long term snorkelling to stay on site.
Later the newer upgrades became available into the 1970's. By the 1980's everyone knew of the Soviet underwater Ivy Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... work that tapped Soviet communication cables.
Why any of this history made Slashdot is strange... given the CIRCUIT, REMEDY and GERONTIC news "Snowden doc leak lists submarine'd cables tapped by spooks" (26 Nov 2014)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://international.sueddeuts...
The bending of the optical ensures no telco staff will be aware. The taps stay in place collecting all e.g.
political, business, negotiations and all other national and international calls given decades of cheap peering.
The only questing left is to ask is did the Soviet Union know? Could they detect the 1950's missions or well placed top staff mention the missions gaping back to the late 1940's? The Soviets knew about Ivy Bells.
The ability to pipe decades of disinformation deep into the NSA and GCHQ would have been successful given the US and UK's total collection dependance on such collection missions.
Thats the problem with huge budgets and a total reliance on electronic intelligence, signals intelligence once discovered.
Decades of overtime, medals and complex networking vs the thought that it was all for sorting disinformation.

I have wondered already, why the reckless ideas didn't poped up early and where invalided by sane arguments:
* remote control means == remote attack vector/system error, could crash a thousand planes at once
* humans can react indvidually on unknown problems (wrong and right, but at least they can)
* never ever a sane person will give his life to a computer (did anyone trust windows? linux? macos?)
* planes are not cars, if a computer on a car "fails" it will probably crash, if it fails on a plane *it will crash*

And here an good example to trust pilots in case of emergency (german source):
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/pan...

Short:
1. wrong sensor data
2. computer believes sensors
3. computer starts fast descent
4. experienced pilot decides to turn of flight-computer
5. 109 passenger saved ...
5. airbus releases updates for flight-computer and new manual for pilots

This story was released only four days before the tragic incident with Germanwings. Flight number "LH 1829" means Lufthansa, same basically same airline.

Everything costs money to make and install. Really not sure what your point is.

Yes, everything, including the renewable generation equipment. If you remove the feed-in tariffs for renewables and tell them to operate at the real market price, they'll hate it. If you remember, there's this thing called LCOE which dictates the minimum electricity price at which your plant will be profitable over its planned life time. Having the cost of electricity go down is not good for high-LCOE sources like wind & solar, it's terrible, because it pushes them into insolvency. Their initial ROI plans estimated for the cost of power to go up as fossil fuels get depleted, which would make them profitable, not for it to go down. You'll see this effect strengthen over the years as subsidies go down and the number of times of overproduction (and thus excessively low prices) goes up. Here's just a few to give you a taste:
Prokon insolvency is part of a crisis of the Wind energy industry
After Prokon: Windwärts announces insolvency
Indebted windpark developer: Windreich announces insolvency

You'd be crazy not to install solar if your roof is pointing the right direction in the UK.

Sure, and you know why? Read further down on that website:

How do I make money with solar panels?
Solar panels allow you to earn money in the following three ways:
Feed-in tariff rate – 14.38p/kWh: Firstly, the government pays you for the electricity you generate and use, this typically add ups to about £400 per year for an average 3kW panel. The Feed-in tariff is tax-free, index-linked and lasts 20 years.
National Grid sell back rate – 4.77p/kWh: The government also pays you for the electricity you produce but don’t use. This gets sold back to the grid and will earn you about £60 per annum.

My EDF bill listed as 12p/kWh that I paid to the generator to supply me: me -> 12p/kWh -> generator.
This website suggests that with solar the government pays me to use electricity? government -> 14.38p/kWh -> me? For my electrical consumption? WTF? This is a completely messed up system that is ass-backwards. Imagine if everybody were doing this. A quick back of the envelope calculation comes to about 8 billion GBP. And that doesn't mean the UK wouldn't need a grid - these systems are still grid connected. At best it would take a bit off the demand (since residential use is only a small portion of electrical consumption).

These power grid guys have worked out how to deal with the fluctuations:

Honestly, your argument is a promotional fluff piece for a battery storage supplier about a pilot project at 6 small sites? Wonderful talk about how they love the community, hug trees and save the environment? The question isn't whether it can be done - of course batteries can store energy, that's not at dispute here. The question is: is it economical? Small pilot projects mean nothing. You can spend a whole lifetime coming up with brilliant solutions to the wrong problems. Do the quantitative analysis, only then can you begin to grasp the scale of the problem.

You mix up precautions with actual cancer.
And the rest of you post shows: you never eber tried to get an educated opinion.
http://www.kinder-v-tschernoby...
http://www.erftstadt-hilfe-tsc...
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder....
Perhaps you like to put this one into google translate: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wis...
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder....
http://ukrainischekinderkrebsh...
http://www.sos-kinderdoerfer.d...

I'm to lazy to make a detailed search for the happenings from 1986 till 1995 ... you can do that your self.

Well, if you meet a still living liquidator make sure to touch his hand, he is one of less than one permille who has survived it. No idea where you get your idiotic ideas from.

The nuclear/radioactive material surrounded them in terms of metric tons ... several thousand times more stuff than the remainings of the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombs.

"I've flown on some lightweight seats with Lufthansa on a short haul flight recently. Even on a 2 hour flight, they were the most uncomfortable airline seats I've ever sat in. "

As the legroom goes, they will begin charging 20-60€ for the extra legroom on the seats where the emergency exists are.
(german link)
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/reise/lufthansa-preise-mehr-beinfreiheit-fuer-euro-1.1798063

Parent is correct. The following link contains the passage in question. Google translate the paragraph that begins with "Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts":

"Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts als Ausdruck und Produkt menschlicher Schwächen, die Bibel eine Sammlung ehrwürdiger, aber doch reichlich primitiver Legenden. Keine noch so feinsinnige Auslegung kann (für mich) etwas daran ändern. Diese verfeinerten Auslegungen sind naturgemäß höchst mannigfaltig und haben so gut wie nichts mit dem Urtext zu schaffen. Für mich ist die unverfälschte jüdische Religion wie alle anderen Religionen eine Incarnation des primitiven Aberglaubens."

The machine translation is pretty readable:

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still plenty of primitive legends. No matter how subtle design can (for me) change this. This refined interpretations are naturally highly diverse and have next to nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other genuine religions is an incarnation of primitive superstition. "

"Reichlich Google appears to have reordered the adjective in the last sentence, transferring it from "the Jewish religion" (die unverfälschte jüdische Religion) to "all other (genuine) religions". Translating that part alone produces "the unadulterated Judaism".

Can't we just stop with this Myth once and for all? The world is capable to produce more food that humans can ever eat, the problem is that most of the people can't afford to buy food.

Please go to the poorest countries in the world, and tell them that GE food can solve all their problem and feed their children. The people don't have money to get normal wheat or rice, how please in the world can they afford to buy expensive GE wheat, or rice, from one supplier, Monsato.

It's all a matter of money and who have the money to buy stuff. In Germany we throw away food in a volume of 20 Billion Euros each year. That is one year turnover of Aldi in Germany (one of the biggest groceries stores). Alone with the thrown away food we could feed all the starving people in the world twice.

Or in England we throw away 4,1 million ton food each year. So please stop with this myth that we need better technology to feed the world population. No we don't need better technology, we need a better redistribution of wealth. We need to make sure that all people in the world can afford to buy food. We can ship bananas or pineapples around the world to Germany, but we can't ship bread, wheat or rice to the starving countries? Because the starving people don't have money to buy our food so we throw it away.

* http://www.taste-the-waste.de/

Indeed, and of all the political parties trying to use this mess to their advantage at the moment the only ones who grasp this point are the Pirate Party.

""Es gibt keinerlei Möglichkeit, einen Trojaner zu installieren, der den rechtlichen Erfordernissen entspricht." Ein Richter könne nie nachweisen, ob Beweismittel auf Computern eines Überwachten nachträglich verändert wurden."

In English:
"There is no possible way to install a trojan that satisfies the legal requirements*. A judge can never prove whether evidence on the computer of a person who has been monitored has been altered after the fact or not."

  (*referring to an earlier judgement by the constitutional court that spying programs can only be used to record VOIP conversations and email exchanges and strictly nothing else)

Source: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/streit-um-staatstrojaner-spaehprogramm-entzweit-schwarz-gelb-1.1160102-2

Non-Americans don't even have the same business models that drive traffic to US sites. They don't even have per-story comments [...]

It would have been sufficient to RTFA to see that you are wrong. Underneath the text even the Google translation shows quite prominently "Read comments (162 posts)". Let us visit the largest German news websites that I can name off the top of my head and click on an exemplary story to see who has per-story comments:

• Süddeutsche Zeitung: check
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: check
• Die Welt: check
• Der Spiegel: check
• Focus: check
• Stern: no
• TAZ: check
• Tagesschau online: check

7 out of 8 have per-story comments. This business model has very much arrived here.

No, it is the opposite around: I get just one factually false statement after another from you,

Like what?

Then disprove it. Bring me one singel case where emails where accessed legally without court order.

I gave you the law:

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/g10_2001/BJNR125410001.html

Here are some newspaper analyses:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/entwicklung-der-sicherheitsgesetze-viele-jaeger-sind-der-freiheit-tod-1.377313

http://www.welt.de/politik/article1589067/BND_darf_Telefonate_von_Verdaechtigen_abhoeren.html

If you dig a little deeper, you'll see that the BND routinely monitors international calls (from their facility in Pullach). It's neither a secret or a great mystery. And they did the same thing back in the 1970's and 1980's for calls to/from East Germany. The have general authority to do that and don't need a court order for each instance. God only knows what the German "Verfassungsschutz" does.

• Germany:
  "Ku-Klux-Klan ja, Wikileaks nein"
• Spain:
  "Apoyo a organizaciones racistas"
• The Netherlands:
  'Je mag met je Visa- of Mastercard wel geld geven aan de Ku Klux Klan, maar inmiddels geen donaties meer doen aan WikiLeaks.'
• Turkey:
  "Ku Klux Klan'a bagis var, Wikileaks'e yok" [Sorry for the spelling, but /. filters the characters otherwise]
• Poland:
  "[..]- nie ma za to problemów z donacj np. na róne odamy Ku-Klux-Klanu"

Interestingly, the Swiss High Court in Lausanne ruled in 2000 that Swiss tax authorities can use "stolen" data to prosecute tax evasion. Similarly to the recent case, the Germans got hand of a CD-ROM containing incriminating banking information and then forwarded data about Swiss citizens to the Swiss authorities.

Source (in German): http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/825/502064/text/

What I am saying, is that they are unfit to breed with each other, which is scientifically proven.

Except that scientists disagree with that:

http://www.gfhev.de/de/startseite_news/2008_GfH_Stellungnahme_Inzestverbot.pdf

As this is in German, short summary: There are plenty of genetic defects that give your child a 25% or higher chance of suffering from it and there is no scientific reason why those should be allowed to have children while incest should be outlawed.

Another point mentioned here:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/365/436111/text/

Is that the numbers for for incest defects might be inflated, as often one or both of the partners already has a mental defect. So the result of mental defect in the child doesn't have to be the incest, but could just be caused by the defect already in the parent. So choosing a different partner wouldn't even help all that much.

You want to label it as eugenics to gain all the emotive power of that word.

If the state comes with full force and tells people to either get a new girlfriend or get sterilized I call that eugenics. You might not like that, but keeping the gene pool clean simply isn't the job of the state and on top of that implementing it by outlawing incest is a highly ineffective way of doing it. And of course as already mentioned before the current laws don't even mention the procreating part, but just the sex part and if that isn't bigotry I don't know what is.

Why did this take so long to get into mainstream media? According to a well-hidden footnote on Wikipedia it was in Science on January 16. I read about it a week ago in a German newspaper.

> The government doesn't seem to need to take any action against that.
Article from today:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/201/454881/text/
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/201/454881/text/

On the other hand, what would people say if let's say the government in the US would "ban" the print of these materials.

• He is saying that they primarily want to focus their resources on prosecuting copyright violations which have a commercial background.
• They consider 3.000 illegally shared audio files and 200 illegally shared movie files lower bounds for commercial background, respectively.
• He is saying that they derived these numbers from the assumption that, on average, an audio file was worth 1 euro, and a movie file was worth 15 euro, resulting in commercial damages of 3.000 euro each.
• He's saying that, inspite of this, illegally sharing copyrighted material is still illegal.
• Furthermore, he states that in his jurisdiction (the biggest one of three total in North-Rhine Westphalia), there were around 25.000 cases related to copyright infringement filed in court within the first half of 2008.
• He is saying that in his experience, most of these cases get filed to get at the identity of people behind IP addresses in order to sue them for damages.
• He's saying that network operators charge the prosecutors (that's him) 17 euro per hour for matching up IP addresses to people. They can do this according to German law.
• He also states that all these cases add considerable overhead to their day-to-day operations because they are binding a lot of their resources.
• While he's saying that copyright infringement is to be considered a criminal act, he also says that it is a lesser criminal act than others.
• The interviewer compares filesharing to consuming Cannabis, which the interviewer says is being treated similarly. The interviewer says that both copyright infringement and consuming Cannabis were primarily done by younger people.
• The chief ackknowledges the interviewer's remark that both of these are primarily done by younger people. He says that juvenile behaviour should not be criminalised in each and every case, and that focusing their entire resources on such cases was out of proportion.

Link?

(in DE - you may have to run it through a translater)

From:

sueddeutsche.de Debatte um Atomenergie-Gefahren Kranke Kinder und eine alte Streitfrage - Wissen:

Das Risiko nimmt mit der Nähe zu

Die Forscher unter der Leitung der Mainzer Epidemiologin Maria Blettner stellten fest, dass zwischen 1980 und 2003 im Umkreis von fünf Kilometern um die Reaktoren 77 Kinder an Krebs, davon 37 an Leukämie, erkrankt waren. Im statistischen Durchschnitt seien 48 Krebs- beziehungsweise 17 Leukämiefälle zu erwarten gewesen. Etwa 20 Neuerkrankungen seien also allein auf das Wohnen in diesem Umkreis zurückzuführen.

--> in EN ->

Risk increases with proximity

Researchers under direction of epidemiologist Maria Blettner in Mainz, Germany noted that between 1980 and 2003, within a radius of five kilometers around the reactors 77 children with cancer, including 37 from leukaemia, were ill. A statistical average of 48 or 17 cancer-leukaemia cases can be expected. About 20 new cases were solely contributed to living in this vicinity.

Well, according to the ADAC-Test Portuguese are the third best drivers in europe. I hope that (but I'm not sure if) you're one of them. :-) http://motorcenter-content.sueddeutsche.de/automob il/artikel/207/63144/

The Germans like it ... isn't the beer any good?

Well guess what, we dont.

Well guess what, we dont.

There's a small article about it here, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has both this picture and this article (with more pictures). The car ran on diesel (not any alternative fuel) at an average speed of 75km/h, or about 46mph. Some sections of Autobahn have a minimum speed of 80km/h (50mph).

This was a concept car which isn't much more than a motorcycle on three wheels with a cockpit rather than a fairing. However, VW is a big name in fuel efficiency. The Lupo, a production car, needs less than 5l/100km, or close to 50mpg, and that with a top speed of 199km/h or about 120mph. In Europe, with fuel about three times the cost of the US (for many reasons including taxes and ecological concerns), this is important.

Bio-diesel is gaining acceptance and outlets in Germany, as is LNG (liquid natural gas), but this car wasn't using them. DaimlerChrysler is still working on hydrogen power, a much more sensible fuel.

Is it really "News" in December when this car ran in April?

woof.

There's a small article about it here, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has both this picture and this article (with more pictures). The car ran on diesel (not any alternative fuel) at an average speed of 75km/h, or about 46mph. Some sections of Autobahn have a minimum speed of 80km/h (50mph).

This was a concept car which isn't much more than a motorcycle on three wheels with a cockpit rather than a fairing. However, VW is a big name in fuel efficiency. The Lupo, a production car, needs less than 5l/100km, or close to 50mpg, and that with a top speed of 199km/h or about 120mph. In Europe, with fuel about three times the cost of the US (for many reasons including taxes and ecological concerns), this is important.

Bio-diesel is gaining acceptance and outlets in Germany, as is LNG (liquid natural gas), but this car wasn't using them. DaimlerChrysler is still working on hydrogen power, a much more sensible fuel.

Is it really "News" in December when this car ran in April?

woof.

What most people don't seem to know is that Heisenberg didn't visit Bohr alone. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was also there, and he is still alive today.

He gave an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung one or two days ago. His recollection of the meeting is rather interesting (the interview is in German, sorry).

Firstly, he says that Heisenberg started an A-bomb project in 1939, in which Weizsäcker took part, but by 1941 they came to the conclusion that they would not be able to succeed before the war was over. The problem was the tremendous effort needed to separate the isotopes. So from 1941 on they were only interested in building a reactor. Once that worked (it never did, as the heavy water production was sabotaged) there might have been the possibility to create Plutonium and build a bomb with that. But they didn't expect this to happen before the war was over by conventional means.

The reason Heisenberg went to see Bohr, according to Weizsäcker, was that they didn't want the Americans or the British to build a bomb either. If they stated publically that they're not working on a bomb, then of course nobody would have believed them. But Heisenberg thought that they might believe Bohr. So he hoped that Bohr could convince the Allies not to build the bomb either. This was not motivated by pure pacifism - he didn't want Germany to get nuked.

In 1941 the war looked pretty good for Germany, they were winning on all fronts. So basically Heisenberg believed that a German victory was inevitable, but with conventional weapons. He tried to explain this to Bohr, who was shocked. Bohr may have understood Heisenberg's "inevitable" to mean that he WAS working on a bomb, and planning to use it. But Weizsäcker suggests that Bohr may well have understood correctly, and didn't want the Germans to win (conventionally), and therefor figured that the Allies would have to build a bomb, to avoid a Nazi victory.

What we can accept as quite reliable, is the following: (a) Heisenberg did lead an A-bomb project from 1939 to 1941. (b) He came to the conclusion that he couldn't build a bomb before the war was over. (c) He continued working on a reactor from 1941 onwards (possibly with the option of producing Plutonium for later weapons use).

And what also seem quite plausible: (d) that he tried to convince Bohr that he was only working on a reactor, not a bomb. This is what he claimed afterwards, and is backed up by Weizsäcker. Many people might not believe these two, so here is another interesting piece of the puzzle:

I read some time ago, either in Physics Today or in Scientific American that when Bohr came to Los Alamos, he brought with him a sketch which Heisenberg had made during his 1941 visit. Bohr claimed it depicted a bomb which Heisenberg was building, but the people at Los Alamos recognised it as a heavy water reactor. As far as I remember, the sketch depicted a large bottle, filled with water (presumably heavy water, but only labelled "H2O"), and some stuff inside. Can anybody dig up this sketch on the net? At any rate, this strongly suggests that Bohr had misunderstood Heisenberg, and mistook Heisenberg's reactor for a bomb.