3. Inconvenience. Cycling and running clothing often has no pockets.
Now that is a reason I surely haven't thought of yet.:) I carry my ID in my wallet, and if it is inconvinient for me to carry along my wallet (like, say, when cycling or running), I don't have it with me, period. Now, in principle, I guess, you are supposed to have your ID with you here in Germany. But it is surely not a criminal offence not to have it. Of course I never had the opportunity to 'test' that myself, since I never was asked for my ID on the street. On the other hand, it came in handy yesterday when I had to pick up a parcel for me at the post office and they wanted my ID to prove that the parcel was indeed for me. Maybe they would have accepted my driving licence. But I know people which don't have a driving licence, so I don't know what one would do in their case...
Sure, people outside the US don't have the right to vote in the US, just as US Americans don't have the right to vote in other countries. But I'd say considering that the USA is a very important country in the world (among other things THE major military power), it is quite natural that many people actually have a strong interest in the US elections. People worry about which countries have access to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Why shouldn't they worry about which *government* has the power in a country with access to all of that?
The 3rd reich was a democracy. Hitler won the leadership by popular vote.
Hitler came into power by democratic elections, that's true. He was initially the head of a coaltion government. In the last free elections in March 1933 his party won 288 of the 647 seats in the parlament, which made them the strongest party. One of the main steps to gain full power was the so called enabling act. In order to ensure that this law was passed by the parliament, more than 100 MP from opposing parties (social democrats and communists) were jailed. Subsequently, all other parties were outlawed (Here is some kind of summary). I'd say, having all parties except the ruling one outlawed is a bit more than just an "undemocratic element". And the same goes for the total control of the media and the establishment of a police state were rights originaly garanteed by the constitution are only granted as long as the government sees fit to do so.
Reforming Germany after WWII maybe didn't mean introducing democracy for the first time, but it meant giving people trust in the system,since the only over real democracy in German history (the Weimarer Republic) was a failure and lead to the Nazis getting a sizeable amount of votes in 1933. But the 3rd Reich (once the nazis were done with transforming the state to their liking) was about as democratic as the Soviet Union.
The standards are deliberately slack so that we can all say we have harmonised voltages but actually keep our original one. How stupid are these politicians???
Also the old standards had error margins on the nominal voltage, and I once saw I nice plot (and unfortunately can't find it now) which shows the effect of the new standard. Namely that the tolerance ranges were cut on the lower side of the 220V areas and on the upper side of the 240V areas, resulting in the common 230V +/- x percents. So the range the devices have to support to be sold in all of Europe has been reduced by the new standard. And after all, that is all that a "harmonised voltage" is about: who cares if the voltage is exactly the same in the UK and in Spain, as long as the lie in a common tolerance range that all devices sold in Europe support?
That said, AFAIK the voltages in fact were gradually adjusted over several years. So I think, in Germany the nominal voltage is 230V now, while it used to be 220V.
I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs. I want to drive my car into my garage and have it present on my home network. Then from my desktop I will drag/drop songs to the car.
But why do you want an extra player in the car, anyway? I want to have one mobile player, which I can use at home, in the subway, when walking... and when I drive in my car I want to connect to my car stereo and have access to all the music and all the playlists I can listen to in other situations. Of course, the most important functions of my player should be available on the steering wheel.... Why should I want to buy/maintain an extra HD with music just for my car?
US viewers have far more detailed and unbiased coverage of politics available than German viewers: a vibrant network of public radio and television stations, C-SPAN, and numerous high-quality commercial offerings.
I don't doubt that. Of course, in Germany you also find a lot of different news sources on TV, radio, nespapaers, web sites...
Yes, Americans watch garbage because they choose to, not because they have to.
I guess that's unfortunately common in most societies: people want to be entertained and not informed. Our largest newspaper (Bild) is complete garbage, so are many things you see on commercial TV. But of course they show it because people watch it, and not because they are unable to produces something on a higher intellectual niveau (OK, maybe they *are* unable...).
But it will affect many businesses and (probably) educational and not-for-profit institutions. And the extra costs that those businesses incur will have to be passed on to you just as surely as if that money had been taken out of your own pocket.
Naturally German companies already voiced their concerns. The last reaction I've read from the pro-PC fee camp is that the fees would be required from the companies on a per-site basis, that is it doesn't matter whether you have 20 or 20000 PCs in an office complex, you always pay 18Euro/month. So for most businesses the extra costs should be negligible. On the other hand, it makes this fee even more ridiculous: most home users don't pay, because they have a TV anyway, companies usually don't pay that much, because they pay only once per site... So they can't expect to much new income, they just add bureaucracy(and annoy people).
Rather than force all people to pay for something they may or may not agree with (which is one definition of tyranny - are the Germans happy they're back on this course again?)
Hmm, you don't tell us where you are coming from, but assuming you are from the US: So you want to tell me that people are either not forced to pay taxes in the US, or, if they have to pay taxes, they all agree on how their money is spend? What a lucky country (if you are not from the US, please replace US with your country, I'm sure my statement maintains it's validity).
No wonder Germans boast that they never have political scandels like the US - there is nobody to expose and communicate them!
Germany has its political scandals, and it's not Germanys problem if they don't make it into your non-state sponsored media.
While I think the idea to extend the media fee for pupblic broadcasting is ridiculous, I think the system to have some TV stations who don't have to think all the time about their revenue stream from commercials has also its benefits: If I compare the news on public and private TV stations, the public news are more about information, while the private news are more infotainment, designed to entertain the consumer for the time inbetween the "consumer informations" that frame the news show. BTW, apart from private TV stations, there are also alot of other non-"state fee" sponsored media (radio stations, newspapers, internet sites...)
Oh well, at least you have some plugs (4 per waggon), which helps at least. But if you consider that Siemens is also building the trains, you wonder why they can't manage to estabish a repeater or a amplifier in the trains, particular the new ICE are really bad if it come to a mobile connections.
Actually they do manage. The new (=since 2000) ICE3 trains actually have repeaters in some sections of the trains (and sockets at every seat pair). That they don't have repeaters everywhere is more due to what Deutsche Bahn wants and less due to what Siemens could do.
Personally, I care a lot less about the elections in Eastern Congo than the elections in the USA. Just because the US elections are more likely to affect world politics (and thus, maybe, somehow me) than the elections in some 3rd world country. So from a selfish point of view, you should rather ask: "Why not only monitor really important countries?"
Apart from that, this is not really about "Europe monitoring the USA", since for example also the USA and Canada are members of this organization.
not all linux. Dont get this confused with open sourcing everything.
Well, even if they wouldn't have been specific about a Linux distribution, the article only talks about 'porting' applications, not 'open sourcing' applications.
And of course Novell is only going to support companies if the final product runs officially on SuSE Linux (in the sense of an officially supported platform). That does not mean that it only runs on SuSE Linux...
If you want to write a software AAC encoder or player, you need to pay Dolby.[...]The same applies to Fraunhofer for MP3 if I believe,...
Just as a side note, I think you pay at least partly the same guys for MP3 or AAC, at least according to the Fraunhofer website:"Fraunhofer IIS has been the main developer of the most advanced audio coding schemes, like MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) and MPEG AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)."
Their licensing page is here, of course mentioning Via Licensing corporation as licensing administrator...
...a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background......and I mean larger in the sense that you think it really is larger if you measure it. Point is, it can get difficult to judge once the perspective is not so straight forward.
I also don't see how something being closer to the camera qualifies as an optical illusion.
Again I just took the words from the parent poster. But I'm quite sure that you can make a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background - if the angle is right and the difference small enough. I would call that an optical illusion. Whatever...
Look at the picture and tell me if the HVD and CD/DVD are the same size. Could just be an illusion, but the HVD looks bigger to me...
Hmm, the article states: "The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD."
While Wikipedia says: "CDs are available in a range of sizes but the most commonly available is 120mm (about 5 inches) in diameter. A 120mm disc can store about 74 minutes of music or about 650 megabytes of data."
So I would guess "equivalent" in this case really means "==", and that the different sizes on the picture are just an optical illusion...;)
I think the court ruling has nothing to do with spam. The court ruling is based on the German 'law against dishonest competition' ('Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb'). So basically it means that the court decided that if a company is trying to lure people to their website by extensively using meta tags which have absolutely nothing to do with their business, they are in violation of this law. IANAL, but I think among other things this law says that a company is not allowed to make false statements in advertisement etc. So saying (eg in an advertisement) that a product has some special property while it hasn't is not protected by free speech. Is it in the US?
Requiring an id on person at all times and being stopped by the police looking for "paperz please!" seems more like a gestapo, stasi or former USSR method.
I also wouldn't like to be stopped regularly and without any apparent reason. But although I live in a country where you are in principle required to have an ID card (Germany), that never happened to me. I have to show my ID when I travel abroad (outside the EU countries which signed the Schengen treaty - between those there usually are no border controlls). I recently used it to get a parcel from the post office. Teenagers use it to show that they are allowd to buy alcohol and cigarettes (in case of doubt) etc. Most people just see it as a convenient standard for identification if needed. And most people would be quite surprised if out of the blue a policeman would come up to them and asked them: "Paperz please"
Quoting directly from the basic science textbook I used when I was 14.
Hmm, I guess you should send your textbook to NASA, because it seems that NASA doesn't know about this:
"People often refer to "the dark side of the moon", but there is no such thing. The sun shines on all sides of it in turn. However, there is a "far side of the moon" which is never seen from the earth. Over the eons, the gravitational forces of the earth have slowed down the moon's rotation about its axis until the rotational period exactly matches the revolution period about the earth."
I've heard a lot about them open sourcing YaST, though, and I can't find it anywhere. There's no obvious download on Novell's site.
When it was announced it was said that Yast with the new license is expected to arrive with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 this summer. Nevertheless, you can (and always could for at least the last 8 years) download the Yast sources from SuSE FTP servers. It's just not yet the GPL version, so you are not allowed to sell it (only redistribute it free of charge).
This 'not for-profit distribution' restriction came AFAIK from the Yast license. The Yast license allowed free (and only free) distribution, selling Yast for profit (or even small fees) was not allowed. Now Yast is GPL that should be sorted out. I don't know about the restrictions imposed by commercial software on the ISOs.
So you mean that Amazonissellingthesebooks illegaly? I admit that I don't know the details of the law. All I can say is that it is not uncommon to see swastikas and swastika flags in books and on TV in Germany. School books, history books, childrens books about that time (one of the links above) and many reports on TV, also war movies...
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3. Inconvenience. Cycling and running clothing often has no pockets.
:) I carry my ID in my wallet, and if it is inconvinient for me to carry along my wallet (like, say, when cycling or running), I don't have it with me, period. Now, in principle, I guess, you are supposed to have your ID with you here in Germany. But it is surely not a criminal offence not to have it. Of course I never had the opportunity to 'test' that myself, since I never was asked for my ID on the street. On the other hand, it came in handy yesterday when I had to pick up a parcel for me at the post office and they wanted my ID to prove that the parcel was indeed for me. Maybe they would have accepted my driving licence. But I know people which don't have a driving licence, so I don't know what one would do in their case...
Now that is a reason I surely haven't thought of yet.
Sure, people outside the US don't have the right to vote in the US, just as US Americans don't have the right to vote in other countries. But I'd say considering that the USA is a very important country in the world (among other things THE major military power), it is quite natural that many people actually have a strong interest in the US elections. People worry about which countries have access to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Why shouldn't they worry about which *government* has the power in a country with access to all of that?
The 3rd reich was a democracy. Hitler won the leadership by popular vote.
Hitler came into power by democratic elections, that's true. He was initially the head of a coaltion government. In the last free elections in March 1933 his party won 288 of the 647 seats in the parlament, which made them the strongest party. One of the main steps to gain full power was the so called enabling act. In order to ensure that this law was passed by the parliament, more than 100 MP from opposing parties (social democrats and communists) were jailed. Subsequently, all other parties were outlawed (Here is some kind of summary). I'd say, having all parties except the ruling one outlawed is a bit more than just an "undemocratic element". And the same goes for the total control of the media and the establishment of a police state were rights originaly garanteed by the constitution are only granted as long as the government sees fit to do so.
Reforming Germany after WWII maybe didn't mean introducing democracy for the first time, but it meant giving people trust in the system,since the only over real democracy in German history (the Weimarer Republic) was a failure and lead to the Nazis getting a sizeable amount of votes in 1933. But the 3rd Reich (once the nazis were done with transforming the state to their liking) was about as democratic as the Soviet Union.
The standards are deliberately slack so that we can all say we have harmonised voltages but actually keep our original one. How stupid are these politicians???
Also the old standards had error margins on the nominal voltage, and I once saw I nice plot (and unfortunately can't find it now) which shows the effect of the new standard. Namely that the tolerance ranges were cut on the lower side of the 220V areas and on the upper side of the 240V areas, resulting in the common 230V +/- x percents. So the range the devices have to support to be sold in all of Europe has been reduced by the new standard. And after all, that is all that a "harmonised voltage" is about: who cares if the voltage is exactly the same in the UK and in Spain, as long as the lie in a common tolerance range that all devices sold in Europe support?
That said, AFAIK the voltages in fact were gradually adjusted over several years. So I think, in Germany the nominal voltage is 230V now, while it used to be 220V.
I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs. I want to drive my car into my garage and have it present on my home network. Then from my desktop I will drag/drop songs to the car.
But why do you want an extra player in the car, anyway? I want to have one mobile player, which I can use at home, in the subway, when walking... and when I drive in my car I want to connect to my car stereo and have access to all the music and all the playlists I can listen to in other situations. Of course, the most important functions of my player should be available on the steering wheel.... Why should I want to buy/maintain an extra HD with music just for my car?
US viewers have far more detailed and unbiased coverage of politics available than German viewers: a vibrant network of public radio and television stations, C-SPAN, and numerous high-quality commercial offerings.
I don't doubt that. Of course, in Germany you also find a lot of different news sources on TV, radio, nespapaers, web sites...
Yes, Americans watch garbage because they choose to, not because they have to.
I guess that's unfortunately common in most societies: people want to be entertained and not informed.
Our largest newspaper (Bild) is complete garbage, so are many things you see on commercial TV. But of course they show it because people watch it, and not because they are unable to produces something on a higher intellectual niveau (OK, maybe they *are* unable...).
But it will affect many businesses and (probably) educational and not-for-profit institutions. And the extra costs that those businesses incur will have to be passed on to you just as surely as if that money had been taken out of your own pocket.
Naturally German companies already voiced their concerns. The last reaction I've read from the pro-PC fee camp is that the fees would be required from the companies on a per-site basis, that is it doesn't matter whether you have 20 or 20000 PCs in an office complex, you always pay 18Euro/month. So for most businesses the extra costs should be negligible. On the other hand, it makes this fee even more ridiculous: most home users don't pay, because they have a TV anyway, companies usually don't pay that much, because they pay only once per site... So they can't expect to much new income, they just add bureaucracy(and annoy people).
Rather than force all people to pay for something they may or may not agree with (which is one definition of tyranny - are the Germans happy they're back on this course again?)
Hmm, you don't tell us where you are coming from, but assuming you are from the US: So you want to tell me that people are either not forced to pay taxes in the US, or, if they have to pay taxes, they all agree on how their money is spend? What a lucky country (if you are not from the US, please replace US with your country, I'm sure my statement maintains it's validity).
No wonder Germans boast that they never have political scandels like the US - there is nobody to expose and communicate them!
Germany has its political scandals, and it's not Germanys problem if they don't make it into your non-state sponsored media.
While I think the idea to extend the media fee for pupblic broadcasting is ridiculous, I think the system to have some TV stations who don't have to think all the time about their revenue stream from commercials has also its benefits: If I compare the news on public and private TV stations, the public news are more about information, while the private news are more infotainment, designed to entertain the consumer for the time inbetween the "consumer informations" that frame the news show. BTW, apart from private TV stations, there are also alot of other non-"state fee" sponsored media (radio stations, newspapers, internet sites...)
I don't know, but if you see something, the sceptics will claim the picture is fake.
Oh well, at least you have some plugs (4 per waggon), which helps at least. But if you consider that Siemens is also building the trains, you wonder why they can't manage to estabish a repeater or a amplifier in the trains, particular the new ICE are really bad if it come to a mobile connections.
Actually they do manage. The new (=since 2000) ICE3 trains actually have repeaters in some sections of the trains (and sockets at every seat pair). That they don't have repeaters everywhere is more due to what Deutsche Bahn wants and less due to what Siemens could do.
Why the hell would we Europeans care?
Personally, I care a lot less about the elections in Eastern Congo than the elections in the USA. Just because the US elections are more likely to affect world politics (and thus, maybe, somehow me) than the elections in some 3rd world country. So from a selfish point of view, you should rather ask: "Why not only monitor really important countries?"
Apart from that, this is not really about "Europe monitoring the USA", since for example also the USA and Canada are members of this organization.
Of course, since also Canada and the USA are members of the OSCE, that would have to be a really big map. :)
not all linux. Dont get this confused with open sourcing everything.
Well, even if they wouldn't have been specific about a Linux distribution, the article only talks about 'porting' applications, not 'open sourcing' applications.
And of course Novell is only going to support companies if the final product runs officially on SuSE Linux (in the sense of an officially supported platform). That does not mean that it only runs on SuSE Linux...
If you want to write a software AAC encoder or player, you need to pay Dolby.[...]The same applies to Fraunhofer for MP3 if I believe,...
Just as a side note, I think you pay at least partly the same guys for MP3 or AAC, at least according to the Fraunhofer website:"Fraunhofer IIS has been the main developer of the most advanced audio coding schemes, like MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) and MPEG AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)."
Their licensing page is here, of course mentioning Via Licensing corporation as licensing administrator...
thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.
Emm, wasn't it 100 million songs? They claimed to have sold 5 million songs in Europe in the first 10 weeks....
...a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background... ...and I mean larger in the sense that you think it really is larger if you measure it. Point is, it can get difficult to judge once the perspective is not so straight forward.
I don't see why you are confused.
;)
I'm not. The parent poster was...
I also don't see how something being closer to the camera qualifies as an optical illusion.
Again I just took the words from the parent poster. But I'm quite sure that you can make a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background - if the angle is right and the difference small enough. I would call that an optical illusion. Whatever...
Look at the picture and tell me if the HVD and CD/DVD are the same size. Could just be an illusion, but the HVD looks bigger to me...
;)
Hmm, the article states: "The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD."
While Wikipedia says:
"CDs are available in a range of sizes but the most commonly available is 120mm (about 5 inches) in diameter. A 120mm disc can store about 74 minutes of music or about 650 megabytes of data."
So I would guess "equivalent" in this case really means "==", and that the different sizes on the picture are just an optical illusion...
It seems that Mr. Enderle is confusing the Nuremberg Trials and the Milgram experiment... The rest is not too intelligent, either... ;)
It's even restricting freedom of speech.
I think the court ruling has nothing to do with spam. The court ruling is based on the German 'law against dishonest competition' ('Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb'). So basically it means that the court decided that if a company is trying to lure people to their website by extensively using meta tags which have absolutely nothing to do with their business, they are in violation of this law. IANAL, but I think among other things this law says that a company is not allowed to make false statements in advertisement etc. So saying (eg in an advertisement) that a product has some special property while it hasn't is not protected by free speech. Is it in the US?
Requiring an id on person at all times and being stopped by the police looking for "paperz please!" seems more like a gestapo, stasi or former USSR method.
I also wouldn't like to be stopped regularly and without any apparent reason. But although I live in a country where you are in principle required to have an ID card (Germany), that never happened to me. I have to show my ID when I travel abroad (outside the EU countries which signed the Schengen treaty - between those there usually are no border controlls). I recently used it to get a parcel from the post office. Teenagers use it to show that they are allowd to buy alcohol and cigarettes (in case of doubt) etc. Most people just see it as a convenient standard for identification if needed. And most people would be quite surprised if out of the blue a policeman would come up to them and asked them: "Paperz please"
Quoting directly from the basic science textbook I used when I was 14.
Hmm, I guess you should send your textbook to NASA, because it seems that NASA doesn't know about this:
"People often refer to "the dark side of the moon", but there is no such thing. The sun shines on all sides of it in turn. However, there is a "far side of the moon" which is never seen from the earth. Over the eons, the gravitational forces of the earth have slowed down the moon's rotation about its axis until the rotational period exactly matches the revolution period about the earth."
I've heard a lot about them open sourcing YaST, though, and I can't find it anywhere. There's no obvious download on Novell's site.
When it was announced it was said that Yast with the new license is expected to arrive with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 this summer.
Nevertheless, you can (and always could for at least the last 8 years) download the Yast sources from SuSE FTP servers. It's just not yet the GPL version, so you are not allowed to sell it (only redistribute it free of charge).
This 'not for-profit distribution' restriction came AFAIK from the Yast license. The Yast license allowed free (and only free) distribution, selling Yast for profit (or even small fees) was not allowed. Now Yast is GPL that should be sorted out. I don't know about the restrictions imposed by commercial software on the ISOs.
SUSE is now one of the premier players on the linux scene now...
;)
Hmm, I think they also were before. But with Novell's help probably even more so.
So you mean that Amazon is selling these books illegaly? I admit that I don't know the details of the law. All I can say is that it is not uncommon to see swastikas and swastika flags in books and on TV in Germany. School books, history books, childrens books about that time (one of the links above) and many reports on TV, also war movies...