Slashdot Mirror

Over here in Berlin, they are using natural drones.

Background: the jay buries all those things it thinks it might need next winter -- among them, of course tree seeds (especially oak). But alas, it keeps forgetting a few of them :-)

So just organizing an abundant oak seed offer at strategic places they do their job (not everywhere, alas, that's where biologists come in). And they *bury* the seeds (OK, they eat some of them, but hey, you've to recharge your drone batteries too). And *they even 3D print replicas of themselves*!

Now I'm not implying that one should not hack away on drones. Just that a complete knowledge of the ecosystem might be advantageous.

Someone else mentioned installing it at the border -- yet another reason for completely wiping the system before and after a border check. There are two known cases where this happened. In another case, they broke into someone's home and installed the software on two computers. None of these cases involved terrorism, or child abuse, for that matter.

Source (German, obviously): http://taz.de/Staatstrojaner-gegen-Drogendealer/!79701/

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.

While personally I would prefer a nuclear over a fossil fuel plant, I read that nuclear reactors are too slow to react to the highly variable energy production by wind turbines and photo-voltaic installations which make up an increasingly large percentage of the energy production in Germany.

If this is true, keeping the existing reactors running for an extended period would not be beneficial towards the goal of migrating to renewable energy sources.

The only source I can find for this at the moment is http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/so-bleiben-sie-atomkraftgegner/ (in german) - I would love to hear someone with a better understanding of the subject matter than me address this (and maybe to the other claims in the article).

Mea culpa, I confused the net difference between export and import with total capacity.

I found conflicting sources for total capacity. This article (in German) says that total capacity is 90 GW of which 20 GW are produced by nuclear plants. (That jives with a roughly 25% share.) The highest requirement is in the winter with 80 GW. So shutting down all nuclear reactors would result in an undercapacity, but less than the 20% you've come up with.

Here's a better writeup:

Mainichi Daily News: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110517p2a00m0na008000c.html
taz (German): http://taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/tepcos-verteidigung-broeckelt/

According to these articles, reactor no. 1 experienced some kind of problem (sudden drop of pressure) 10 minutes after the earthquake and well before the tsunami struck. The crew then had some troubles with the cooling system of said reactor but the articles are pretty vague in that regard. This is according to TEPCO's own reports.

Anyway, I've always maintained that the assertion that the earthquake did no damage in Fukushima (and therefore other nuclear plants are "safe") was nothing but a myth pushed by nuclear apologists in their own self-interest. It's nice to see some factual reporting backing up my thesis, by the nuke operator no less.

"on the order of 1000 hours"
Very interesting figure, is it not? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel: "The cartel served as a convenient way to lower costs and took on considerable efforts to cap the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1000 hours" (citation)
It might be argued that bulbs manufactured before that (such as the Centennial) could have been expected to last longer.

Because, the Infidel Danes have to hire many, MANY security guards, to protect the perverted Lego workers and cartooonists, as they continue to produce THESE DISGUSTING LEGO kits!

Al Queerda has vowed DEATH to these infidels!

They are ready to throw boiling Pinoqachole in the cartoonists' and Legoo-workers' faces!

The Indians have it beat by a mile:

http://taz.de/blogs/wp-inst/wp-content/blogs.dir/44/files/2007/02/043%20overcrowded%20train%20India.jpg

Forgot this: Bavarian PM Stoiber and his vision

disc: my post is ONLY about this email issue.

this is rediciolous, bad and unwanted. but calling it fascism is rediciolous also. why? we just experience a normal transition from something "new" into something "standard". email ist mainstream since when? a relatively short time. now govs do notice that email is so common, it has to be reglemented. like old school snail mail. if you want to write a letter, the recipient has to have a real address. there are workarounds like co., postboxes and whatnot, but these workarounds will build up with e-mail just the same. the sender does not need to be identified for snail mail, but that's just a detail.

don't get me wrong, i hate this, i thought THIS time we might adopt a new media/ technique in a free way, but we haven't since thousands of years, why should we now?

now to something different. things ARE going wrong with europe, especially with germany. "our" gov is proposing a law that allows the police to spy our private pc with trojan horses. this is no joke: an interview with the german home secretary (sorry, in german).. there is a law proposal on it's way to ban so called "killer games" like counterstrike even for adults, producing and selling those games would be illegal (which is SO damn stupid, since germany is on it's way to establish itself as a good place for game developers, see crysis). in a few years (i think two) our travelling passports WILL contain biometric information, our passports will follow for sure. i could go on and on for a long time, but these few topics should give you the picture.

so, no more "old europe" anymore, we're about to completely abandon our ancient greek legacy (where democracy and the like originally came from). the reconnaissance is over, until the next great breakdown, but when that happens i WILL stand up beeing a smartass and say: "We told you so..."

iMac iPod iPhone iRak iDiot :-)

iMac iPod iPhone iRak iDiot :-)

I have found no german source reporting about any accepted law.
A copyright reform is currentlys in discussion, but I am pretty sure it has not yet been voted on
in fact this article with todays date says the reform is not yet throught the parliament:
http://www.taz.de/pt/2006/03/25/a0113.1/text

The German left-wing newspaper taz - die tageszeitung has been in financial trouble since I can remember it, and they've been using the "begging for subscriptions" tactics for several years. Until now, they've survived. They even got me as a subscriber some time - slight information overload with two newspapers ;-) but as long as it's a good deed... So there might be some hope for Salon if we take this as a reference.

Or even looking at them, seeing that most of them are in languages other than English, which a rather large portion of English native speakers can't be bothered to learn sufficiently to be able to read an online news site. Among computer enthusiasts, the portion is even larger, probably.

You can try the often-mentioned, often-flamed-against-because-it's-in-German Heise Newsletter, for example, where you'll find links to the legal situation in the European Union fairly often, or the online version of the Spiegel magazine that has its own Net Culture section. For a left-wing perspective, try reading the taz online.

All of this is in German, because I read news mainly in German and English. (I occasionally read things in Arabic and Finnish as well, but there I'm not as qualified as in the other two)

Well, as long as you take the bother to read stuff in any language other than English, of course, there is quite a good selection of active independent online news sources besides the ones you Americans tend to stick to; for instance, the Heise newsletter, the Spiegel or TAZ online magazines or the web.de service in German or, for example, iltalehti in Finnish, even though that one's fairly yellow press.

Even though some of us don't like it, this is an increasingly globalizing world where being able to understand others is a bit of an advantage.