As someone who lives in a legislation system where legal fees are always open (because they will become part of the sums awarded in civil cases), I am very used to know how much a certain case has cost. The Bar Association even hands out a list how much certain legal services have to cost, and you can sue an attorney if he sends you a fee statement that differs from the Bar Association's rules.
It seems that the Döner Kebab guild has the rights at the fat patent... at least Döner Kebab is the most served fast food in Germany (15 mio servings per day, compared with 5 mio burgers and about 1.2 mio bratwurst/curry wurst).
Same here. I am 5'11", 220 lbs, which puts me at 30.7. I am also a runner and bicyclist (doing mostly triathlon), play soccer, but I don't go to the gym. Most people estimate my weight at 180 lbs, but I still have probably 30% body fat (the last measurement resulted in 31.5%). Because I once was at 150 lbs (and then I got into military service and grew fat within months...), I know it's not heavy bones I am carrying around, it's just lots of superfluous fat;)
There surely are dozens of examples of trained people with a high BMI (look at all those Sumo wrestlers), but for each one you can problably name ten who are just fat:)
But fat children also tend to be more muscular than thin ones. They often excel in excercises which require a certain amount of power like throwing a ball or shotput. If you calculate the amount of energy they burn on a normal track you will be amazed.
I guess that the BMI was just a nameplate for "tendence to obesity", for the normal folks to understand what they were actually studying without just talking about "fat children". And then there is surely a correlation between the BMI and the percentage of body fat one has. There are fully trained athlets whose musculature increases the BMI into obesity levels without being obese. But those are not normal people. Most people with a high BMI are really fat, and if you do a statistic you probably wont find a 1 as correlation factor, but something very high in the 0.9. Those few heavy lifters don't exonerage a whole fat population from being obese.
In the end: The children's activity level and fat level don't seem to corrolate enough to put "increased school exercise" on the list of successful weapons against obesity.
You seem to forget that 90 mio dead people which are dead because they are just in the wrong country might cause another 1.2 billion people to get really angry. And if you finally killed 1.2 billion people Global Warming because of CO2 will be the least of your environmental problems.
Mr Ahmadineshad invented a new version of MAD. What ever you do, either enough of us survive and will be really fanatic, or we all are dead. Lets just hope this doesn't work out.
PS: If suicide bombing really made military sense, Israel would be conquered by now. It isn't. I always thought it a little like the flu: It is really annoying once you caught it, you can't really vaccinate against it (just against certain tribes), it kills thousands and hundred thousands of people each year, but in the end for most the live goes on after three days in bed.
"Soldier" (or the french version soldat, also used in German, where the related term "Söldner" always means a military person who serves solely because of the money, while the soldat also might be conscripted or be a volunteer of patriotic motives) definitely derives from the latin word "solidus", which was the gold coin Severus Alexander (Roman emperor from 222 to 235) introduced for the quarterly payment of his troups. Since then the soldier is someone who receives a sold (a solidus) for his military services.
It may be that the english word "sell" has a similar source or is somehow related to the German words "sollen" or "Soll" (must resp. debt), because if you sell something, the receiver now is required to pay. For details ask a language specialist:)
An interesting related Roman concept of security outsourcing was that of the foederati, mostly german tribes which had a contract (foedus) to protect the Roman border (limes) against other german tribes in exchange for land for settlement and certain rights within the Roman society. Interestingly though the intermarriage with the local celtic or roman population was forbidden, so the german tribes always were considered foreign, thus the foederati were indeed some kind of "outsourcing companies".
This concept worked very well for more than 250 years, between the Varus Battle 9 AD and the plundering of Trier (Augusta Treverorum) in 275 AD by the german Alamans. After the Christianisation of Rome by Constantin the Great the German foederati even served as regular Roman troups, and Germans were filling the highest ranks in the Roman military. Famous Roman foederati were the Goths (Southeast Europe) and the Franks (northern Rhine), which later founded their own kingdoms in todays Spain (Visigoths, conquered by the Arabs in 711), France (Franks, what a surprise!) and Italy (Ostrogoths, conquered by byzantine troups in 553) on the remainings of the Roman Empire. The end of the Roman Empire is often considered as the time when in 476 the german-roman officer Odoaker (of the German Skires) removed the child-Emperor Romulus from the Roman Throne and called himself Rex Italiae (King of Italy). Reason? Open payments for German military services!
I am pretty wary about those clauses anyway from a judical point of view. Does the company sign a non-compete clause too? Do they get barred from taking your knowledge and train your replacement? You are also in a competition against all other potential employees that could do your job.
I wonder what happens in a job interview if you ask to put an according non-compete clause for your employer in the contract. In the EU most non-compete clauses are nullified anyway, because you have the right of free choice of your workplace, so the issue doesn't arise.
Actually, most of the work to liberate Europe was done by Russia. The entire western front pales in comparison to the scale and the number of casualties on the eastern front. For several years, Russia bore nearly the entire brunt of the German attack. It's the eastern front that exhausted the German war machine. Could the US have accomplished anything without Russia being there? I sincerely doubt it. Could Russia have done it without the US? Very probably (although lend-lease certainly helped).
It was one of the political ideas from the U.S. and the U.K. to wait which side (Nationalsocialism or Communism) seems to be winning and then to support the other side, thus weakening both at a maximum. That's why the Conferences of Yalta and Teheran had taken place in early 1943 already, when German troups held most of European Russia till the Neva and Volga rivers, but the Invasion was in the second half of 1944, when soviet troups were already at the German borders.
I guess this idea worked pretty well until the end of WW II. Except for the hispanic peninsula all fascist movements in Europe got rooted out until the end of 1945 (in the Baltics, in Italy, in Greece, even in France, in Finnland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia). As soon as the ink was dry on the Potsdam Agreement (the Potsdam Declaration was not signed by the Soviet Union) the West switched sides again and was then supporting any country or regime that was outspoken anticommunist, sometimes even independent of any other merits. On the other hand the Eastern Block jumped to support anyone who declared to be communist, opposed to the U.S. or to the western livestyle.
That's why we have all those strange dictatorships popping up everywhere and all those allegedly communist upheavals in the 50ies until the 80ies.
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure] any more than you can outsource responsibility.
Of course you can. Security is one of the oldest businesses ever outsourced (that means taken away from your own employees/slaves/servants and given to a foreign group for money/treasures/valuable gifts). What do you think the name 'soldier' comes from? It's a person working for sold (from latin solidus = a Roman gold coin), not because of loyality or proudness or legal requirements. Having foreign groups serving as your protection is one of the oldest tricks in the book because you hope that the foreign people are ignorant about your internal struggles and intrigues or don't have any local alliances, and if they aren't as independent as expected, you might replace them without fear of a local unrest.
That's the business of Pinkerton and all the other security agencies, and even outsourcing bookkeeping and document production, exchange and storage is old news. Every middle age town had its writers or calculators whose business was to work for the local traders who weren't able to write or didn't have the calculatory knowledge for bookkeeping. And even today you go to a solicitor if you really want your documents to be correct, authentic and secure.
And especially torments that yield good intelligence. (What do you think you get as intelligence if the guy you are tormenting really doesn't know anything, because either he's the wrong guy to begin with, or he just got the information needed for the task he has to perform? Or what if he has a good, convincing story memorized as part of the plan? And moreso: If you can distinguish good and bad intelligence, why are you tormenting anyway, wouldn't it be easier just to act on the facts you knew anyway to be able to make the distinction?)
It is a lot more trivial than that. About all soviet-inspired communist countries understood themselves as people's democracies or people's republics, which is quite strange, as it would mean: people's people's rule. But the argument was that the western democracies were actually locking the people out from the rule of the state (quite similar to the 'silent majority' discussion), so the 'real people' just needs some kind of elite that leads it to the (communist) rule.
So whenever you see someone not democratically elected voicing loud opinions and making demands, who claims that he has the silent majority behind those, you know he's trying to pull a similar stunt;)
Don't forget the invention of pizza (ok, the idea to put stuff on a flat dough and bake it wasn't all that new, but to name it 'pizza' was) and Chop Suey (which was invented as a 'chinese style' meal for U.S. americans).
I always wondered why Santa Claus would set up a workshop at the North Pole... given that he was born in Lykia (in today's Turkey), was bishop in Myra (also in today's Turkey), and finally got buried in Bari (southern Italy) I expected his workshop to be somewhere in the Mediterran. What drives such a person north of the Polar Circle to either Rovaniemi (Finish version), Mo i Rana (Norwegian version) or the North Pole itself (U.S. version)? What sinister conspiracy is going on here? And why does Canada remove the laws that would allow us to investigate? (by the way: the German Santa Claus, as depicted in the Struwwelpeter, does still seem to live in Turkey, at least he's wearing a caftan and a kind of fez.)
I wasn't intending a rebuttal, merely a supporting and clarificational posting.:) And I know the danger of falling victim to homicide is rather minimal. My beloved example is the rate of death because of choking on a fishbone (about 700 per year in Germany). That's about the same number of victims than homicide (about 900 per year). Because eating fish also poses other threads (for instance food poisoning), the salmon on your plate is about as dangerous to your life as your worst enemy.
I was just trying to point out that calling a country "safe from terrorist attacks" is just misleading, because even if we could rule out certain types of terrorist attacks, there will be hundreds of other types that may be committed anyway. And the line between a terrorist attack and a criminal attack is blurry at best. If a mafia clan is killing someone from a neighboring mafia clan, this is a criminal act intended not only to remove a real or perceived thread to the own clan, but also a message intended at the other clan, thus also a terroristic attack.
First of all: Terrorists are a quite minor thread to your life. Don't feed the trolls, and don't cry about possible terrorist threads. Terrorism is effective because of the terror it causes, not because of the number of deads or the cost of repairing the damage. Every terrorist who causes a new security measure put in place or an old being reinforced knows he was effective beyond all dreams.
Second of all: If we would wage war on every potential killer of yours, we would have to concentrate the forces first on you, then on your mother, then on your stepfather (if you have one), then your biological father. Those four persons are the most probable to take your life. They are responsible for about 50% of all homicides. (I am not sure, but I think either your husband/wife or your own children come next.)
Third: There is no direct relation between cause and effect in terrorist attacks. The most recent attempt to a terrorist attack in Germany I know of was a man who planned to carbomb a bank. Not for political reasons, but because of bad service. What's next? Battle against the Customer?
That's why I think the idea of an 100 percent protection against terrorist attacks is just silly. You never know what or who causes the urge to attack someone, and you can't foresee the method they will be trying. That's why there is the call for Common Sense. Eliminate the foreseeable threads by protecting infrastructure that causes much havoc if attacked and is a quite easy target. Don't try to thwart every single plot that has been discovered or can be thought of individually. We are back to the old problem: "Enumerating badness" is never complete and seldom a sensible way to deal with threads. Try to be secure by design, not by eliminating threads.
Most interesting are the abstinence vows like the one the Southern Baptists have (The True Love Waits campaign and similar). Appearently everyone qualifies for the vow, even people who had sex before. And you can restate your vow as often as you want. Maybe we should check the adolescenses' drawers for the numbers of TLW-buttons they contain to get a more exact number of sexual partners they had (One TLW button per partner).
In a certain way yes. If the research you are doing doesn't get any new grants, or any other sources of money (funding, sale of results, money from charities, your own money), your department at the university gets closed.
Thomas S. Kuhn called and wants his paradigm change back!
Global Warming research will keep you employed, independent of your stated hypotheses. As if scientists critical of the thesis, Global Warming would be a) existant and b) influenced by Man weren't able to get any funding.
Science at least from a social point of view works not as a democracy, but more like horse racing. You can bet on whatever you want, but only one horse will win, and there is more money to be made, but also more risk in picking outsiders. It took some time and lots of little races to finally admit Global Warming to the big races, and now Global Warming is in front with some length, and the crowd is chanting "Global Warming! Global Warming!". It looks as if Global Warming will make it, but there are still people betting on the old champions Steady State and Atmospherical Balance, who might come from behind and could still be overtaking Global Warming.
2) If we could get the legal $ystem out of it, the costs would be much lower but there would be more malpractice. We currently say "no mistakes and no malpractice" but that decision probably doubles or triples every thing we do medically. Which in some cases means that the procedure that could be done cheaply- is now too expensive. This sounds fine in theory, but practice says that the country with the least socialized health care system, e.g. the country where the legal system tries to keep out of health care as much as possible, is at the same time the country which spends the biggest part of its GDP on health care. For some reason the privatized health care is (against all economic theories) the most expensive to have. Silly reality. Should definitly wise up.
You are right. So the full decicion was, that it is neither a search (which needs the suspect being present) nor a wiretapping (which only captures live conversations). So the court determined that this has to have a completely new legal base. A county in Germany (Northrhine-Westphalia) already set up new laws to allow this, but those laws are currently challenged on constitutional grounds.
That's exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court's decision. The chapter 102 of the Criminal Court Proceedings (102 StPO) was very clear that for any search the suspect or at least an eyewitness has to be present, and exactly that was the provision of secret spying missing. So the court likened this to wiretapping the phone or using secret microphones to listen to conversations in the suspect's home ("Großer Lauschangriff"), which both need a warrant.
Right. Somehow the church which gets the money has to be determined. So at one point in time someone has to declare your affiliation with a church for you. Almost everytime this is already done in the proceedings after your birth by your parents and the hospital office staff (sometimes before the birth when registering with the birth hospital...)
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As someone who lives in a legislation system where legal fees are always open (because they will become part of the sums awarded in civil cases), I am very used to know how much a certain case has cost. The Bar Association even hands out a list how much certain legal services have to cost, and you can sue an attorney if he sends you a fee statement that differs from the Bar Association's rules.
It seems that the Döner Kebab guild has the rights at the fat patent... at least Döner Kebab is the most served fast food in Germany (15 mio servings per day, compared with 5 mio burgers and about 1.2 mio bratwurst/curry wurst).
Same here. I am 5'11", 220 lbs, which puts me at 30.7. I am also a runner and bicyclist (doing mostly triathlon), play soccer, but I don't go to the gym. Most people estimate my weight at 180 lbs, but I still have probably 30% body fat (the last measurement resulted in 31.5%). Because I once was at 150 lbs (and then I got into military service and grew fat within months...), I know it's not heavy bones I am carrying around, it's just lots of superfluous fat ;)
:)
There surely are dozens of examples of trained people with a high BMI (look at all those Sumo wrestlers), but for each one you can problably name ten who are just fat
But fat children also tend to be more muscular than thin ones. They often excel in excercises which require a certain amount of power like throwing a ball or shotput. If you calculate the amount of energy they burn on a normal track you will be amazed.
I guess that the BMI was just a nameplate for "tendence to obesity", for the normal folks to understand what they were actually studying without just talking about "fat children". And then there is surely a correlation between the BMI and the percentage of body fat one has. There are fully trained athlets whose musculature increases the BMI into obesity levels without being obese. But those are not normal people. Most people with a high BMI are really fat, and if you do a statistic you probably wont find a 1 as correlation factor, but something very high in the 0.9. Those few heavy lifters don't exonerage a whole fat population from being obese.
In the end: The children's activity level and fat level don't seem to corrolate enough to put "increased school exercise" on the list of successful weapons against obesity.
You seem to forget that 90 mio dead people which are dead because they are just in the wrong country might cause another 1.2 billion people to get really angry. And if you finally killed 1.2 billion people Global Warming because of CO2 will be the least of your environmental problems.
Mr Ahmadineshad invented a new version of MAD. What ever you do, either enough of us survive and will be really fanatic, or we all are dead. Lets just hope this doesn't work out.
PS: If suicide bombing really made military sense, Israel would be conquered by now. It isn't. I always thought it a little like the flu: It is really annoying once you caught it, you can't really vaccinate against it (just against certain tribes), it kills thousands and hundred thousands of people each year, but in the end for most the live goes on after three days in bed.
But in the same way the company already got compensated by me. It's called "work".
No. Sold is just the German word for "military salary" ;)
"Soldier" (or the french version soldat, also used in German, where the related term "Söldner" always means a military person who serves solely because of the money, while the soldat also might be conscripted or be a volunteer of patriotic motives) definitely derives from the latin word "solidus", which was the gold coin Severus Alexander (Roman emperor from 222 to 235) introduced for the quarterly payment of his troups. Since then the soldier is someone who receives a sold (a solidus) for his military services.
:)
It may be that the english word "sell" has a similar source or is somehow related to the German words "sollen" or "Soll" (must resp. debt), because if you sell something, the receiver now is required to pay. For details ask a language specialist
An interesting related Roman concept of security outsourcing was that of the foederati, mostly german tribes which had a contract (foedus) to protect the Roman border (limes) against other german tribes in exchange for land for settlement and certain rights within the Roman society. Interestingly though the intermarriage with the local celtic or roman population was forbidden, so the german tribes always were considered foreign, thus the foederati were indeed some kind of "outsourcing companies".
This concept worked very well for more than 250 years, between the Varus Battle 9 AD and the plundering of Trier (Augusta Treverorum) in 275 AD by the german Alamans. After the Christianisation of Rome by Constantin the Great the German foederati even served as regular Roman troups, and Germans were filling the highest ranks in the Roman military. Famous Roman foederati were the Goths (Southeast Europe) and the Franks (northern Rhine), which later founded their own kingdoms in todays Spain (Visigoths, conquered by the Arabs in 711), France (Franks, what a surprise!) and Italy (Ostrogoths, conquered by byzantine troups in 553) on the remainings of the Roman Empire. The end of the Roman Empire is often considered as the time when in 476 the german-roman officer Odoaker (of the German Skires) removed the child-Emperor Romulus from the Roman Throne and called himself Rex Italiae (King of Italy). Reason? Open payments for German military services!
I am pretty wary about those clauses anyway from a judical point of view. Does the company sign a non-compete clause too? Do they get barred from taking your knowledge and train your replacement? You are also in a competition against all other potential employees that could do your job.
I wonder what happens in a job interview if you ask to put an according non-compete clause for your employer in the contract. In the EU most non-compete clauses are nullified anyway, because you have the right of free choice of your workplace, so the issue doesn't arise.
It was one of the political ideas from the U.S. and the U.K. to wait which side (Nationalsocialism or Communism) seems to be winning and then to support the other side, thus weakening both at a maximum. That's why the Conferences of Yalta and Teheran had taken place in early 1943 already, when German troups held most of European Russia till the Neva and Volga rivers, but the Invasion was in the second half of 1944, when soviet troups were already at the German borders.
I guess this idea worked pretty well until the end of WW II. Except for the hispanic peninsula all fascist movements in Europe got rooted out until the end of 1945 (in the Baltics, in Italy, in Greece, even in France, in Finnland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia). As soon as the ink was dry on the Potsdam Agreement (the Potsdam Declaration was not signed by the Soviet Union) the West switched sides again and was then supporting any country or regime that was outspoken anticommunist, sometimes even independent of any other merits. On the other hand the Eastern Block jumped to support anyone who declared to be communist, opposed to the U.S. or to the western livestyle.
That's why we have all those strange dictatorships popping up everywhere and all those allegedly communist upheavals in the 50ies until the 80ies.
Of course you can. Security is one of the oldest businesses ever outsourced (that means taken away from your own employees/slaves/servants and given to a foreign group for money/treasures/valuable gifts). What do you think the name 'soldier' comes from? It's a person working for sold (from latin solidus = a Roman gold coin), not because of loyality or proudness or legal requirements. Having foreign groups serving as your protection is one of the oldest tricks in the book because you hope that the foreign people are ignorant about your internal struggles and intrigues or don't have any local alliances, and if they aren't as independent as expected, you might replace them without fear of a local unrest.
That's the business of Pinkerton and all the other security agencies, and even outsourcing bookkeeping and document production, exchange and storage is old news. Every middle age town had its writers or calculators whose business was to work for the local traders who weren't able to write or didn't have the calculatory knowledge for bookkeeping. And even today you go to a solicitor if you really want your documents to be correct, authentic and secure.
And especially torments that yield good intelligence. (What do you think you get as intelligence if the guy you are tormenting really doesn't know anything, because either he's the wrong guy to begin with, or he just got the information needed for the task he has to perform? Or what if he has a good, convincing story memorized as part of the plan? And moreso: If you can distinguish good and bad intelligence, why are you tormenting anyway, wouldn't it be easier just to act on the facts you knew anyway to be able to make the distinction?)
I know the term "radioactive neutrons" as "neutrons emitted by radioactive decay" (e.g. spontaneous fission of a core).
It is a lot more trivial than that. About all soviet-inspired communist countries understood themselves as people's democracies or people's republics, which is quite strange, as it would mean: people's people's rule. But the argument was that the western democracies were actually locking the people out from the rule of the state (quite similar to the 'silent majority' discussion), so the 'real people' just needs some kind of elite that leads it to the (communist) rule.
;)
So whenever you see someone not democratically elected voicing loud opinions and making demands, who claims that he has the silent majority behind those, you know he's trying to pull a similar stunt
Don't forget the invention of pizza (ok, the idea to put stuff on a flat dough and bake it wasn't all that new, but to name it 'pizza' was) and Chop Suey (which was invented as a 'chinese style' meal for U.S. americans).
I always wondered why Santa Claus would set up a workshop at the North Pole... given that he was born in Lykia (in today's Turkey), was bishop in Myra (also in today's Turkey), and finally got buried in Bari (southern Italy) I expected his workshop to be somewhere in the Mediterran. What drives such a person north of the Polar Circle to either Rovaniemi (Finish version), Mo i Rana (Norwegian version) or the North Pole itself (U.S. version)? What sinister conspiracy is going on here? And why does Canada remove the laws that would allow us to investigate? (by the way: the German Santa Claus, as depicted in the Struwwelpeter, does still seem to live in Turkey, at least he's wearing a caftan and a kind of fez.)
I wasn't intending a rebuttal, merely a supporting and clarificational posting. :) And I know the danger of falling victim to homicide is rather minimal. My beloved example is the rate of death because of choking on a fishbone (about 700 per year in Germany). That's about the same number of victims than homicide (about 900 per year). Because eating fish also poses other threads (for instance food poisoning), the salmon on your plate is about as dangerous to your life as your worst enemy.
I was just trying to point out that calling a country "safe from terrorist attacks" is just misleading, because even if we could rule out certain types of terrorist attacks, there will be hundreds of other types that may be committed anyway. And the line between a terrorist attack and a criminal attack is blurry at best. If a mafia clan is killing someone from a neighboring mafia clan, this is a criminal act intended not only to remove a real or perceived thread to the own clan, but also a message intended at the other clan, thus also a terroristic attack.
First of all: Terrorists are a quite minor thread to your life. Don't feed the trolls, and don't cry about possible terrorist threads. Terrorism is effective because of the terror it causes, not because of the number of deads or the cost of repairing the damage. Every terrorist who causes a new security measure put in place or an old being reinforced knows he was effective beyond all dreams.
Second of all: If we would wage war on every potential killer of yours, we would have to concentrate the forces first on you, then on your mother, then on your stepfather (if you have one), then your biological father. Those four persons are the most probable to take your life. They are responsible for about 50% of all homicides. (I am not sure, but I think either your husband/wife or your own children come next.)
Third: There is no direct relation between cause and effect in terrorist attacks. The most recent attempt to a terrorist attack in Germany I know of was a man who planned to carbomb a bank. Not for political reasons, but because of bad service. What's next? Battle against the Customer?
That's why I think the idea of an 100 percent protection against terrorist attacks is just silly. You never know what or who causes the urge to attack someone, and you can't foresee the method they will be trying. That's why there is the call for Common Sense. Eliminate the foreseeable threads by protecting infrastructure that causes much havoc if attacked and is a quite easy target.
Don't try to thwart every single plot that has been discovered or can be thought of individually. We are back to the old problem: "Enumerating badness" is never complete and seldom a sensible way to deal with threads. Try to be secure by design, not by eliminating threads.
Most interesting are the abstinence vows like the one the Southern Baptists have (The True Love Waits campaign and similar). Appearently everyone qualifies for the vow, even people who had sex before. And you can restate your vow as often as you want.
Maybe we should check the adolescenses' drawers for the numbers of TLW-buttons they contain to get a more exact number of sexual partners they had (One TLW button per partner).
In a certain way yes. If the research you are doing doesn't get any new grants, or any other sources of money (funding, sale of results, money from charities, your own money), your department at the university gets closed.
Thomas S. Kuhn called and wants his paradigm change back!
Global Warming research will keep you employed, independent of your stated hypotheses. As if scientists critical of the thesis, Global Warming would be a) existant and b) influenced by Man weren't able to get any funding.
Science at least from a social point of view works not as a democracy, but more like horse racing. You can bet on whatever you want, but only one horse will win, and there is more money to be made, but also more risk in picking outsiders. It took some time and lots of little races to finally admit Global Warming to the big races, and now Global Warming is in front with some length, and the crowd is chanting "Global Warming! Global Warming!". It looks as if Global Warming will make it, but there are still people betting on the old champions Steady State and Atmospherical Balance, who might come from behind and could still be overtaking Global Warming.
The race is on, place your bets!
You are right. So the full decicion was, that it is neither a search (which needs the suspect being present) nor a wiretapping (which only captures live conversations). So the court determined that this has to have a completely new legal base.
A county in Germany (Northrhine-Westphalia) already set up new laws to allow this, but those laws are currently challenged on constitutional grounds.
That's exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court's decision. The chapter 102 of the Criminal Court Proceedings (102 StPO) was very clear that for any search the suspect or at least an eyewitness has to be present, and exactly that was the provision of secret spying missing.
So the court likened this to wiretapping the phone or using secret microphones to listen to conversations in the suspect's home ("Großer Lauschangriff"), which both need a warrant.
Right. Somehow the church which gets the money has to be determined. So at one point in time someone has to declare your affiliation with a church for you. Almost everytime this is already done in the proceedings after your birth by your parents and the hospital office staff (sometimes before the birth when registering with the birth hospital...)