Slashdot Mirror

Oh really? What are you doing here then?
https://www.welt.de/vermischte... Mentions that children talk about smart phones, not that their parents are distracted.
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/ges... writes the same thing.
https://www.zeit.de/news/2018-... the same thing.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/Sommer-Wasser-und-viele-Nichtschwimmer,schwimmunterricht126.html no mention at all.
https://www.zdf.de/verbraucher... no mention at all.
Then you have garbage mainstream media:
https://www.rtl.de/cms/immer-m... in reference to "Neuen Osnabrücker Zeitung" who writes that smartphones are the cause. So let's see what that paper writes, because I found the article.
(probably not garbage media) https://www.noz.de/deutschland...
See. Not a lot about smartphones at all and certainly not in the head lines.

Not really. After the warantless mass-surveillance by the governments has been confirmed to the wider public, EU countries have allowed themselves to broaden their wiretapping laws. Countries within NATO exchange data they collect between each other to get around the national privacy laws.

The new eCall system is basically a mandatory car tracking system within the EU. The regulation says that the "minimum set of data" (MDS) includes:
Information about the incident including time, precise location, vehicle identification, eCall status (as a minimum, indication if eCall has been manually or automatically triggered) and information about a possible service provider (CEC, 2005).

Additionally, paid versions of this system provided by the car manufacturers or resellers, can include extra data and continuous reporting to the 3rd party. This is similar to the situation with some modern (e.g. hybrid) cars that are continuously connected to the 3rd party servers in exchange for cheaper insurance.

It doesn't matter what is the official explanation, as long as you have to connect to a base station, your location is known. The situation is analogous to cell phone tracking.

Betrayed by our own data - Zeit Online (2011)
Mobile phones are tracking devices that reveal much about our lives. One look at our interactive map of data provided by the Green party politician Malte Spitz shows why.

Malte Spitz: Your phone company is watching

Germany is going for its ANISKI project to study non standardized communication.
Both links are in German but translation services should help.
http://www.zeit.de/digital/dat...
https://netzpolitik.org/2016/p...

Ah yes, how very typical for neonazi crybabies bemoaning themselves as victims even though they are the ones who get violent.

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

http://www.zeit.de/politik/deu...

Fuck you and your patron saint Breivik.

No, I don't apologize.

You are an idiot.

Germany has not 2 million immigrates in a single year. Where would we place them? Again: 2M immigration in a single year, that is one person per 40 citizens, that is a bit more than 2 per 100. You would simply see them on the street!!! That is a no brainer. The city would be "full with them".

https://de.statista.com/themen...
http://www.zeit.de/politik/aus...

OTOH we have numbers like this, same magazine :D
http://www.zeit.de/politik/deu...

Which support your claim but subtract the emigrations ...

Anyway. If every year 1 or 2 million would immigrate we had not a stable 80M population but would gain 7 - 10M over a decade: which we don't.

No, I don't apologize.

You are an idiot.

Germany has not 2 million immigrates in a single year. Where would we place them? Again: 2M immigration in a single year, that is one person per 40 citizens, that is a bit more than 2 per 100. You would simply see them on the street!!! That is a no brainer. The city would be "full with them".

https://de.statista.com/themen...
http://www.zeit.de/politik/aus...

OTOH we have numbers like this, same magazine :D
http://www.zeit.de/politik/deu...

Which support your claim but subtract the emigrations ...

Anyway. If every year 1 or 2 million would immigrate we had not a stable 80M population but would gain 7 - 10M over a decade: which we don't.

I closed my node after reading those news. Jacob is a very outspoken enemy of the surveillance state. His speech To protect and infect part 2 was one of the best about the Snowden revelations.

Jacob was expelled from Tor based on several types of accusations made in a website, including rape, intense kisses and crude language (they went for all the audiences). His friends here sort of expelled too when they didn't believe all the accusations or pointed some of them were false (indirectly by claiming they were covering for a rapist and making personal attacks). They went after his other businesses and his doctorate too. It was textbook character assassination.

Write a blog purpoting to be one of their victims
Email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends etc

For those who are interested on what happened to Jacob former face of Tor that is also involved with Wikileaks:
The weaponising of social (Analysis from some person on the internet)
What has this man done? (On the German Magazine Zeit online - in English)

"I am not a victim of Jake," she told Die Zeit. She says she told a friend about the intense kiss in confidence. This story was not merely used on the website without her permission – she says the story was also "heavily manipulated."

I should warn that they are very long reads.

Now there is an "ex-cia" agent working on Tor.

The person responsible for a questionable website with at least some false accusations and the exit of several developers holds a key position.

There is increased development on usage statistics (that does make sense and is a response on attacks being used against tor - I am being paranoid here, but I wasn't a paranoid enough before Snowden and was proven a fool).

Also, as much as I admire Schneier for his work and would like his addition if it was in other circumstances, something that always bothered me about him is that he always focused on the NSA violations against Americans and American companies. I don't remember him criticizing the NSA for spying on innocent foreigners and on other countries (despite international agreements and the fact that foreigners are people too), I would like to be shown otherwise, but if he did it was tangentially. His discourse has always been that they should do a better job at protecting American national security and companies (and not that such military powers shouldn't exist).

Citation?

http://www.spiegel.de/sptv/a-2...
http://www.greenpeace-energy.d...
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/...

just what I found in a few seconds. Sorry, it's all in german, but I was talking about my country.

In all instances I'm aware of, coal is cheap because its plentiful and cheap/easy to dig out of the ground.

Not once you use real costs. A lot of the subsidies are hidden subsidies because they are not officially marked as such. But when the government cleans up after companies, gives them land for free, passes special laws with special tax breaks just for them, that's a subsidy just by another name.

No you didn't fix it for anyone. You're just throwing a temper tantrum.

http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/...

http://www.welt.de/politik/aus...

http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Naviga...

The sources are in German. The first on is on the topic of effects of East German wind power and the effects for the polish network http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/...

On the whole energy concept of Poland
http://www.welt.de/politik/aus...

And the projects in building new gas and coal plants:
http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Naviga...

While they plan to build new plants, they also have a problem due to low prices on the European electricity exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Energy_Exchange) and other trading places. Therefore, many projects might be be realized.

Tennet a large energy net company shows that electricity prices on the market have declined making coal less profitable: http://www.tennet.eu/nl/news/a...
While coal prices may get lower due to Chinas reduced imports, running coal plant still cannot keep up with solar and wind power (onshore). http://www.theguardian.com/env... (sorry from last year).

Hope that helps.
 

Yes, and it's also the same Germany whose own Greens are causing it to increase its emissions of greenhouse gas:
  http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/...
(In German, but the bar chart lists both CO2 and other greenhouse gases)

Tell-all telephone

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet.

By pushing the play button, you will set off on a trip through Malte Spitz's life. The speed controller allows you to adjust how fast you travel, the pause button will let you stop at interesting points. In addition, a calendar at the bottom shows when he was in a particular location and can be used to jump to a specific time period. Each column corresponds to one day.

Also I forgot: The article I have linked to has many links to its sources. Among other, I you follow the links you find the following article from "Die Zeit" at http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/... with the following quote "Wir beobachten die Versorgungsqualitaet sehr genau und haben keinen Hinweis, dass die Zahl der Stromausfaelle im Zuge der Energiewende zugenommen hat." from the head of the Bundesnetzagentur, the government institution regulating the electricity grid in Germany. Translation: "We monitor the quality of the supply very carefully and have no indication that the number of power outages increased during the Energiewende". So this nonsense if *officially* debunked.

Where the BSI takes issue with their reporting. Of course, with the extent now clear of the US government's use of US IT companies to maintain American political and economic advantages, if you were running a non-US-based company or a non-US-governmental organization, you'd want to do as much critical business with non-American hardware, software and services as possible.

I wouldn't take technological advice from Die Zeit. They still think steam engines will never replace the Spinning Jenny.
Also ... the BSI ... bruahahaha.

*snort*

Whatever backdoor MS has planted for whoever asked them will propably have made its way into any older Windows version via their automatic update.

Where the BSI takes issue with their reporting.

Of course, with the extent now clear of the US government's use of US IT companies to maintain American political and economic advantages, if you were running a non-US-based company or a non-US-governmental organization, you'd want to do as much critical business with non-American hardware, software and services as possible.

There were some interesting articles in German online media regarding this. The BND acknowledged that they were forwarding at least mobile communications data to the NSA and defended this as fight against terrorism.

Example source: http://www.zeit.de/politik/2013-08/bnd-gibt-daten-weiter (in German)

Preferably visualized in this form.

Not just elected politicians either. Every high-level government worker, for their government-issued phones and pagers.

That would get them to scream about it.

Imagine if we could actually hold our public officials accountable for their actions.

See here for what it actually looks like for one politician in Germany.

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

"Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet."

I want Dianne Feinsteins metadata, then. Shouldn't be a big issue, after all Malte Spitz did it, and we didn't find out anything about him... except just about everything he did.

And even that was just the position data. It did not include who he called, it was just a simple newspaper (with limited resources) doing it, and it was not cross-checked with every other person in Germany.

You really ought to've had an inkling. Alright, it wasn't spelled out, but the writing was on the wall.

Note that using PAYG without any name attached is still a better than going contract, even if more marginally so than you'd've thought. And yes, there's millions of other ways in which you can be tracked, in fact are being tracked.

In a sense you've lost the war for your privacy years ago. But since we're still alive we can show we care. We can invent better systems and get them rolled out.

In fact, the EU is sponsoring "5G" development (why? beats me. At a guess, pork barreling.) so the few stray Europeans here could write their MP and demand that the new generation of mobile protocols be more respectful to your privacy. The USians can write their congresscritter or senate snake.

And it ought to be possible, it just wasn't a design parameter before. For example, tracking gets harder if the phone is not checked in constantly, but listening to a much larger-range pager-type transmission to know when to check in to pick up an incoming call. Something like that.

And hey, are we not geeks? We can make better protocols too. If the industry isn't interested, well, we'll do another freenet. Mesh telephony perhaps. Maybe not in 2.4GHz, but in some other ISM band. Or yet something else. With 3d printing on the rise we can even have nice handsets, and open source the entire thing too. Why not?

Downside: Electronics, RF, antenna theory, and so on, all in a small-enough package with good battery life, all that is Not Trivial. But hey, challenge, so get cracking.

If the law passes, the search engines will go "fuck that" and only index free content or newspapers that specifically allow their stuff to be indexed for free. The other newspapers will lose their only remaining readers under fifty and die out along with that generation.

There are some newspapers in my country who actually get the internet.

ZEIT launches searchable news archive with API

There was a really great article in a german newspaper these days:
http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2012-09/religion-ideologie-respekt

Basically, the author is spot on - religion always demands respect, but doesn't offer any and doesn't deserve half as much as it already gets.

The believers are bullies, and we need to stop allowing them to shove everyone around.

It has attracted the interest of a member of Congress. Markey, Barton Ask U.S. Wireless Companies to Explain How They Track Their Customers. This is in the wake of Malte Spitz where we were able to see his movements over a 6 month period. link.

Perhaps the Internet doesn't make stupid

sigh. Die Zeit is a respected weekly paper here in Germany, but headlines like this are not really helpful...

What cell towers didn't do was log on the device side, a detailed record of your lat/long movements, which can then be tied to businesses, paths of travel, personal interests, spending patterns, and your daily comings and goings.

They do on their side though. For an example see here. (Thanks to FrykD for pointing this out to me in another slashdot discussion.)
God knows how they are protecting this data or who has access to it, at least I can take steps to protect my data.

Evidence? Ok. A german green politician wanted to find out the same thing so he got access to the information. Turns out that it provides a pretty accurate guide to your moevements. There is an article and an interactive map available here: http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection-malte-spitz

Evidence please. I know that my network provider has data on where I am right now and that they would be capable of doing what you say (given a court order, for example), but that doesn't automatically mean they actually are.

I don't trust Apple any more or less implicitly than my network so I make no comment on whether or not they are in possession of the data my iPhone allegedly collects.

Lookee here: A German newspaper made an interactive map of the location of a politician of the Green party who subpoena'd his cell retained phone location data and made it available. It's a very enlightening demo, IMHO (web-page in German, but self-explanatory: hit the 'Play' button and adjust speed with the slider to the right of it). Not only does it show his location over a very long period of time, but also when and where he made phone calls.

And I'd be really surprised if the US had less data retention than Germany.

Here's the data from politician Malte Spitz: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

It has to be noted that nearly a year before this story first broke (Feb. 24th in the German newspaper "Die Zeit"; direct link to visualisation: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten ), on March 2nd, 2010, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (lit.: federal constitutional court) declared the law in question void. The data in question only still existed because ongoing litigation by Mr. Spitz prevented its deletion. This is not, at this time, still happening.

Nevertheless, the EU directive it implemented still exists, and as is now standard for legislation concerned with security, it is really, really scary. If you live in the EU, this concerns you, so do write your MP or commissioner about it. Security should not be scary. For reference, its full name is "Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC".

http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protection-malte-spitz Scroll down a bit in that article, and you can even pull a copy of the spreadsheet with location data.

Here is the direct link to the visualisation tool: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

The German newspaper Die Zeit who was given access to this data has a visualization of his whereabouts for the 6 months. Press play and adjust speed with the slider to the right. The data is annotated with short reports of his day glimpsed from his Twitter account and blog.

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

You know, he may be a fanatic, but he is quite realistic with the "tracking" part. If you understand german, check out this animation (you can still watch the animation if you don't understand german and get the overall idea though).

Basically, some politicians asked for the 6 months of basic data about his phone useage ( which towers he was near to, with whom, when and for how long he was on the phone) mobile phone providers are required to keep in germany, and journalists at Die Zeit combined those with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account and his party's website to reconstruct where he was and what he was doing in those 6 months.

They were not only able to track him, but also to build quite a detailled profile of his everyday life and personality that way

According to this German article and another German article. The engine uses between 8-15 kWh in normal use.

The trip was 605 kM (377+ miles) at 130 kM/h (81 MPH) or 90kM/h (56 MPH). The 130 in one article seems wrong, and a commenter posted a correction. So, likely it was 90 kM/h.

At the end of the trip the battery pack still had a 18% charge, but the inventors say the range is 600 kM (

So charging to 97% in six minutes required a 79% charge or 90kWh or about 0.9 MW in 6 minutes.

You could drive it for more than 375 miles on a single charge, depending on how deeply you want to drain the battery. Still, who wants to drive more than 7 hours a day. Now if you had just three available stations. you'd be able to drive then entire North-South distance of the US (in 29 hours - I've done it in 21). With seven stations, you'd be able to drive across the US (in 56 hrs ). 377 miles on a "tank" is fairly standard. that's about the range in my cars. There are certainly better ranged cars. The one thing the article breezes over, is that over 55 MPH, you'd likely see polynomially decreasing range.

To clarify: This is not about people, it's about houses. He does not photograph people, he photographs houses from the street walk.

I'm german and following the debate about Google street view since i was overtaken by a car with a 2m mast and some cameras on its roof. I will be on Street View :-).
These pictures were taken approx. 1 - 1 1/2 years ago. Google's intentions were at least known since then. Only now a public outcry from "Bedenkenträger" forces Google to offer this german sonderweg. Only in Germany Google offers a web form were you as house owner can enter your address and your house will get pixelated, like faces and licences plates already are.

I call hypocrite on all people who opt to have their houses pixelated. They give straw man arguments like "Burglars may spy on houses on google" etc. but i bet they will be the first to take glimpses at their neighbors once this gets live our to take a view at the hotel they wish to book for their next vacation. In German there is a proverb for this behaviour: "Wasch mir den Rücken, aber mach mich nicht nass dabei. (Wash my back, but don't get me wet"
Some where else in this threat the Streisand effect was invoked. This is a perfect example how to invoke it. Only this time it's not Anonymous, but a person with a face who will invoke it.

The only reason I can fathom to have one's house pixelated is a typical fear that this is a privacy invasion. It's not. Nothing that can't be seen from the street walk while passing by will be shown. For a reasonable written article see http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2010-08/pro-street-view (in german)

When are we going to start countering the current trend?

When the tech-hostile ultraconservative 60-somethings from whom the parties that bring up such laws draw the majority of their voters have died off. The CDU/CSU parties which pushed this horrendous law is highly popular amongst people over 60 with low education. (Source: Zeit.de, screenshots courtesy of this excellent blog)

And I suspect the situation in other countries to be similar. Those people do not understand what the Internet is and how it works, and they have an unwavering trust in the state and government. A terrible combination.

Seriously, we'll have federal elections (and a bunch of other elections: european parl., state-level) this year, but I doubt that anything will change.
CDU: Merkel's party, Conservative, currently drifting to the middle. Schaeuble, our Minister for the Interior (which includes police in Germany), is one of the worst surveillance guys, and he's a CDU man. Lots of other 1984 fellows, too. --> No option.
SPD: Social democrats. One of the two big parties (together with the CDU). Currently in a coalition with CDU. Some good guys in there, but many others (including most of their MPs) agreed to laws like this. Used to be my party, but obviously it no longer is.
FDP: Liberal. Have a lot of good guys regarding civil liberties (including three who have repeatedly and successfully went to the courts to struck "Anti terror laws" down). But I don't like their economic model, and above all many of them have no backbone.
Greens: Same as FDP regarding civil liberties and surveillance. Might be an option (although for me they are too naive on the environmental area), but voting greens will mean a SPD-Greens coalition (because FDP and Greens are the smaller parties and usually form coalitions with one of the bigger ones).
Left party: Just a bunch of populists.
The reason why such a lot on internet censorship etc. is being passed now might be our "Grand coalition" (CDU+SPD), which has a strong majority. However when I look at other countries, I see similar problems, so that can't be the only reason.
Unfortunately many people willingly give up their freedoms if the government gives them an excuse (terrorism or child porn), but they just don't see how a filter like that could easily be transformed into an anti-government-criticism filter.
All that surveillance scares me. What the hell is wrong with my country?

PS: For the German-speaking guys around here, have a look at this essay by Burkhard Hirsch (an FDP man). An excellent explanation on why civil liberties are so important.

German newspaper Die Zeit has an article online with a gallery of images from the recovered print.

It's trying to impose structure on something that is not very structured--human thought.

True. Unfortunately, "structure" is the only language that machines can work with. If we want the machines to help us, then we need to provide information in a structured way. The current situation (without the "Semantic Web") is in no way different, only that the structure currently only describes the layout and presentation of information. The goal of the Semantic Web is to also be able to provide structure that describes further aspects, like (but not limited to) the content.

One issue we (the Semantic Web community as a whole and I in particular) are working on is to provide tools that make the creation of structure as easy as possible - ultimately through natural language processing, but that does not work too well at the moment.

Why should I have to tag everything I read online? I don't tag things I see in real life.

This is a very valid question, and believe me, it is considered by many researchers. You should, because you get something out of it whose value is higher than the effort that you invested. Why do you mark up text in HTML? I don't do it in "real life", I just put my pen on paper.

If we want computers to be actually useful to us as assistants and not just stupid tools then they will need to begin to operate the same way. That is a very tough problem, yes.

One of the biggest failures in computer science history / AI was exactly that - to try to make computers behave in the same way. Computers are not humans, and they never will be. Computer intelligence is different, and has many strengths but also many weaknesses compared to human intelligence. Computers are increadibly fast at computing, faster than any human can be, but they are extremely bad with vague information and intuitive judgements. So rather than trying to behave like humans, computers should complement humans, and they actually do.

I have read an article about AI (German) in a German newspaper, and it has a very interesting statement: the problem with AI is that all methods that are developed appear rather simple and structured afterwards, and therefore not "intelligent". For this reason, many people claim that AI is a failure. At the same time, we have gone an increadibly long way in AI research.

Sebastian

You may also do some searches on Google Scholar.

http://www.zeit.de/software/patente/index

Actually, this song has a rather interesting history.

It was written and recorded 4 years ago for and by the composer's 5-year old niece. The song had a brief appearance in the popular German TV show "Sendung mit der Maus", was published on a sampler and soon forgotten. But somebody seemed to like it and shared it via p2p networks. The song slowly took of, and last year, it was played by some radio stations. The powers that be noticed, and republished it as a single at the end of 2004. By now, the song is number one in the German single charts and a huge hit in dance clubs and private parties.

Talk about how p2p destroys the music industry.

Look here for more information (in German). If you want to listen to it, I'm shure you'll find it in your favourite p2p network if you search for "Schnappi".

I think EB has started to get beyond their dismissiveness stage concerning Wikipedia and are starting to come to the realization that Wikipedia, not Encarta, is their number 1 long term threat.

That said, it would be wonderful to compare the oldest version of EB's article on Alexandar Hamilton available to the Wikipedia version. Ideally their 3 year old version would be best to compare since that is the age of the Wikipedia version but let's look at their 11th edition version at http://14.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HA/HAMILTON_ALEXA NDER.htm (EB should have had an article on Hamilton for over a hundred years by that time).

Well, for one thing is has extaclty the same birth date issue (his major criticism)!

Or when the current editor-in-chief of EB said in a recent Guardian article at http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=Leisure-Onli ne&o=140475&sa=106;

"People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the UK TV soap opera Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."

Which is an odd comparison since EB does not have an article on Hurricane Frances or Coronation Street, and the Wikipedia article on Tony Blair has been longer than the EB version for well over a year. Oh, and the Coronation Street article on Wikipedia is not twice the size of the Tony Blair article (in fact, they are about the same size).

Oh, and the German Wikipedia won hands down in breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, in a head-to-head comparison between Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta (German version) conducted by the German nation-wide newspaper Die Zeit. See http://www.zeit.de/2004/43/C-Enzyklop_8adien-Test

I'm sure a similar study conducted on the English Wikipedia except against EB and Encarta, would have the same results.

Wikipedia has been around for less than 4 years. These other encyclopedias have been around for much, much longer.

Hm.
1 Tflops would place it anywhere between place 240 (if it were sustained) or 500+ (if it were peak) on the current top500.
Not THAT amazing.
Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).

Btw: Remember the story about the 5MW wind-generator a few weeks ago?
The company cant sell in the us because echelon was used to sniff fax messages that were later given to a us company (kenetech windpower) which made a patent. Complete with the original tying errors. (who was it again who said "whats good for boeing is good for america"?)
(story from ZEIT, titles "treason between friends", here http://hermes.zeit.de/pdf/archiv/archiv/1999/40/19 9940.nsa_2_.xml.pdf

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.

Check out this site (german only, sorry). It describes a similar system, Wahlstreet, which was used to predict voter opinion during the 2002 Bundestag elections in Germany. People traded shares of the parties taking part in elections.
The idea of these types of markets is that stock trading does in fact give a really good image of people's opinion. After all, it is about YOUR money if you voice your opinion.
The results of the Wahlstreet project support this theory: The final poll results were consistent with the election results. In fact, Wahlstreet scored second place in a comparison of the difference between election and survey results of this and some other (conventional) survey institutions.

The german newspaper "Die Zeit" published an interesting article upon video games and art some weeks ago, pointing out that some games could in fact be considered as art.
The article is available online here. It's german, so you might need a translator

I can only recommend Switzerland. Of course, you might consider me biased, as having grown up there. You get decent salaries, affordable taxes, and excellent public services. Due to the country being multilingual (four official languages), people know about foreign languages, and you will always be able to find help, even if you don't speak one of these four, but only English :-)

If you are looking for a position, there are several online resources available (use this link for research-related jobs.

For Germany (and many other parts of Europe), Die Zeit (a German newspaper) offers good job search opportunities, with a lot of links to other, more specialized sites.

Wherever you want to go: Get a company interested in hiring you, then they will do all the paperwork for you (and they are typically effective at doing so). No worries, no lawyers to pay etc.

-Marcel

Your friend made the mistake to start at 2/3 of a normal salary I think.

There is an arti cle in the German IT-Newspaper Computerwoche about German IT salaries. From my experience as an IT Consultant the salaries in that paper seem to be quite low, though.

A typical post-degree starter salary is 75kDM per year.
A junior consultant with some experience gets about 90kDM.

Please keep in mind that we have very high income taxes in Germany. We have progessive taxation (the percentage grows with the income), up to 53% for a high income.

The IT center of Germany is just around München (English speaking people like to mis-spell that "Munich"). For IT people in finance, Frankfurt (we call it "Bankfurt" somtimes) is the place. Smaller IT cities are Hamburg and Bremen in the north, a little bit in the Hannover area. More and more service companies are moving to Berlin now, thus there are some jobs there.

A very good starting point for searching job adverts (sorry, all in German) are the pages of the newspaper DIE ZEIT. They use a crawler to collect information from many other job sites. They have a page for international jobs too.

Your friend made the mistake to start at 2/3 of a normal salary I think.

There is an arti cle in the German IT-Newspaper Computerwoche about German IT salaries. From my experience as an IT Consultant the salaries in that paper seem to be quite low, though.

A typical post-degree starter salary is 75kDM per year.
A junior consultant with some experience gets about 90kDM.

Please keep in mind that we have very high income taxes in Germany. We have progessive taxation (the percentage grows with the income), up to 53% for a high income.

The IT center of Germany is just around München (English speaking people like to mis-spell that "Munich"). For IT people in finance, Frankfurt (we call it "Bankfurt" somtimes) is the place. Smaller IT cities are Hamburg and Bremen in the north, a little bit in the Hannover area. More and more service companies are moving to Berlin now, thus there are some jobs there.

A very good starting point for searching job adverts (sorry, all in German) are the pages of the newspaper DIE ZEIT. They use a crawler to collect information from many other job sites. They have a page for international jobs too.