That's one reason why I'm in the process of switching to LaTeX for everything. Maybe even spreadsheets, but those are an area where office suites don't try to be "helpful" come what may, so they might still be somewhat useful.
Seriously, it's easier to wrap stuff in an \itemize environment than to argue with OpenOffice over what's a part of your list and what isn't.
Heh. The worst Windows networking I have seen so far is what my father's PC does. Ever since the last reinstall NTLOGON will not accept any logins from another computer. I can connect just fine but any kind of remote authentication fails. This is the same PC that our only printer is hooked up to. As a result getting data from my computer to his for printing means either putting it into my Apache's doument root and then downloading it from his computer via HTTP or using a USB drive and sneakernet.
My business faces ruin. Troll sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many trolls as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique troll stores that sell obscure, lame jokes that no-one laughs about, not even the people that make them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the geek market. My store specialised in trolls - stuff that geeks find hilarious and/or annoying. I don't sell sick stuff like Goatse or Tubgirl, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive In Soviet Russia sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase trolls without anuses or violent diarrhea. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
copy
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer trolls. Why is no one buying trolls? Are people not interested in pop culture references? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Slashdot is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three trolls world wide appears on Slashdot. On Slashdot, you can find and read hundreds of dollars worth of pop culture references in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the lame joke industry, from artists, to troll companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the karma store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike trolls, it's harder to copy karma on Slashdot.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with space ninjas gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to post this troll on Slashdot right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of +1, Funny."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the troll industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "Zo...you ah going to post zis to your frends on Slushdot, punk?" I asked him in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger/Kindergarten Cop voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of space ninjas. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If space ninjas want to steal from the pop culture reference industry, then the pop culture reference industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable troll store will allow you to buy another troll. If the pirates can't buy the trolls to begin with, then they won't be able to post them on Slashdot, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the GNAA outlining my proposal. Suing space ninjas one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention space ninjas use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of space ninjas would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected space ninjas to a hotline, similar to Bust Your Boss. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take space ninjutsu serio
How to secure Windows by yours truly (hope this makes sense; I haven't had much coffee yet):
1. Firewall! Better still firewall + hardware router.
Forget firewalls, at least for home networks. The only thing I rely on to make a Windows PC safe from incoming attacks is NAT. Put the box behind a NAT router and only forward ports when necessary. Bang, zero chance of anything getting in and it's relatively cheap, as well. It also makes firewalls (which sometimes tend to cause more harm than good) obsolete.
True. VB has one strength: Convenient interface development. No other language/GUI toolkit I know has that.
With Java/Swing you have NetBeans which sometimes does what you want and only accasionally completely screws up the form you're working on. I don't know about SWT.
With C++/WxWidgets you get WxGlade which I have never seen actually working. C++/FLTK gives you Fluid, which works most of the time but has always given me problems when working on programs that don't fit in a single file. The Qt RAD tool appears to work, but I haven'tspent much time with it so far.
VB isn't that great a language, but it's really nice for putting together GUIs.
That's true. Now if someone would find a way to produce cheap, reliable, clean power (note that modern nuclear power techniques would allow for all that, even recycling most of the nuclear waste) without a positively evil lobby behind it (er, nuclear power still needs to work on that one)... Then gain, the same person would probably also solve unemployment, make trains show up on time, turn afternoon TV programs into something worthwile to watch and talk Microsoft into handing over the API documentation.
Because sometimes all other fractions consist entirely of scumbags who'd rather kill their family than pass legislation you consider necessary. For example the German Green Party is the country's only party actually concerned about things like privacy and software patents (except for the Christian Democrats who are concerned about destroying privacy). I vote Green, not for their (rather absurd) fixed idea that nuclear power is teh evul, but because I really don't want shit like software patents happening in Europe and they are the only ones who actually care to fight against it. I accept the potential damage their policy deals to the economy as necessary collateral damage.
Yes, I'm a lobbyist. If there was a special interest party that stood in for my interests without the eco-baggage of the Greens I'd vote for them (and make lots of advertisement, so that they might get more than the neccessary 5% in the election). But there isn't and the Greens are effective, so yay for the Greens.
These people are hitting each other with heavy metal objects, they are probably addicted to the body's painkillers or the feeling their brain makes while it is being made retarded.
In that case they should read some corporate propaganda. I feel pain everytime I do and I'm pretty sure that drivel like the big Windows vs. Linux TCO debate is hazardous to brain cells.
People have been reading newspapers for ages, yet newspapers don't make every heading a heavy contrast stripe across the entire page or sharply delimit every margin... Is it because ink is expensive or because ink is distracting?
Very true. The winner actually looks pretty ugly with all those dark blocks floating around in a bright page. I favor the runner-up for being more sane regarding the contrast.
I also use Fx 1.5 but when I click the triangles it tries to open/collapse sections but it doesn't do it properly (after closing sometimes there are some pixels left; after opening sometimes entire rows are missing until I click another header.
Hello? We're talking marketing people here. The same kind of people who think that Germans like products more when the slogan is in English and who are thus using English slogans even for products never sold outside Germany - even though a poll has shown that many Germans don't understand what those slogans are supposed to mean. No other country that I know of has so many slogans in a foreign language.
Soem examples for slogans that just don't work in Germany: RWE Group:One Group, Multi Utilities - only eight percent of all participants in the poll claimed to have fully understood the slogan, 15% claimed to have mostly gotten it. I guess I'm in neither of those groups - I don't quite know how to utilize a corporation. Mitsubishi:Drive alive - Most people correctly translated it to "fahre lebendig", but couldn't tell what that's supposed to mean as you can't drive when you're dead. 18/25%. SAT.1:Powered by emotion - This is a German TV station. Many Germans have never encountered powered by and would probably understand it as "has its eletrical energy provided by". At least it has 33/49%. Douglas:Come in and find out - Apparently this perfume store chain has such a confusing floor layout that it's difficult to leave the store. When people translate "find out" to German they can either translate it to "finde es heraus" (find out about it) or to "finde heraus" (find a way out). The latter translation is the more intuitive one. 34/54%.
Marketers are so far detached from reality, if we'd put them all on a huge pile causality itself would rupture and a gate would open into an alternative dimension where strawberries are sentient and the color purple just got arrested for driving too fast on the Milky Way.
FFT stands for "Final Fantasy Tactics", a brilliant tactics/role playing game for the original Sony Playstation. You should really try it.
Stay away from the GBA sequel though, that one just sucks.
Alternatively it could be some weird mathy jibber-jabber about furrier Transformers or something.
Here's the unmangled list of requirements:
- is a candybar (moving parts = decreased durability = bad)
- has a lo-res black and white display
- has no camera
- has no support for any kind of additional programs. In fact it shouldn't have an operating system. A firmware is enough for basic phone support
- is cheap (I'm talking <= 100 EUR, preferably much lower than 100)
- MAYBE can be connected to my iBook for on-the-go internet. But I don't really need that
That's exactly why I'm going to use my 6210 until GSM will be completely displced by UMTS, at which point I will look for a phone that fulfills the most of the following requirements:
- is a candybar (moving parts = decreased durability = bad)
- has a lo-res black and white display
- has no camera
- has no support for any kind of additional programs. In fact it shouldn't have an operating system. A firmware is enough for basic phone support
- is cheap (I'm talking
- MAYBE can be connected to my iBook for on-the-go internet. But I don't really need that
If I can't get that I'll use someone else's old mobile that I get for free. I don't see any sense in paying a ridiculous amount of money for a phone that includes tons of crap (like Java support or MMS) but sucks at what I want (battery life, reliability, simplicity).
b) Another way to solve this problem is to separate the classes by ability. This way the "gifted" students will have work set at their level. This can be done either by some sort of testing as it is now, or it can be done as in Germany, where the school at some point splits up into several streams - one for students who want to go to university and one for ones who do not.
Actually, we have multiple levels of granularity. Firstly, there's the different schools. We have three kinds of secondary schools: The Hauptschule (5th to 9th grade, the most basic secondary school, attended by the burger flippers of the future, has been dropped by some states), the Realschule (5th to 10th grade, pretty much what you need for most non-academic jobs - in theory) and the Gymnasium (5th to 10th/13th grade, the highest secondary school form, necessary for university). Note that by law you are required to go to school for twelve or thirteen grades; if your secondary school doesn't go for that long you go to another school, usually a Berufsschule (trade school).
At the end of elementary school it is decided where you go - until a few years ago we had a special school for that, the Orientierungsstufe (5th and 6th grade, some states still have it), where your abilities were assessed and you got a recommendation for one of the school forms (although you could and can still attend any school you want as long as they let you in). You can switch between the various school forms and it's possible to complete (for example) the Realschule and then go to a Gymnasium - you start in 11th grade, but you will have to do a hell of a lot of learning in order to reach the level the other students are at.
A peculiarity of the Gymnasium is that you graduate twice. After the 10th grade you have a certificate equivalent to that you'd get for passing the Realschule. You can then go to a trade school or continue with the Gynmasium until you get your Abitur (the "real" Gymnasium graduation).
The German education system is actually a bit more complicated than that (for example there are two different versions of the Abitur and in some states the Gymnasium only goes until the 12th year), but I think this should be enough to give you an overview of differentiation by school form. For even more differentiation confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H goodness take a look at this image: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Deutsches_Bildun gssystem.png
As for in-school differentiation: In the Gymnasium (and the Orientierungsstufe where it still exists) you attend different classes based on how good you (think you) are. In the Orientierungsstufe you had/have A courses and B courses for each subject. Good students are put into the A course and bad students into the B course. I like that system since that way you aren't held back in subjects you are good at and you aren't overstrained in subjects you're bad at, but it seems to die with the Orientierungsstufe.
In the Gymnasium after 11th grade you pick two Leistungskurse (intensive courses) an several Grundkurse (basic courses), which define your education. The Leistungskurse are tougher than normal courses and you have to make special tests in them in order to get your Abitur (among other requirements; for example you get eight grades in the LKs (four semesters times two courses), only two of which may be a D- or worse). Thus, we have another differentiation.
Unfortunately this extremely flexible system is being abandoned in my state (Lower Saxony) in favor of profiles. You don't pick your courses yourself but instead pick a profile (languge, natural sciences or sicial sciences), which then defines which courses you take and which ones are important. Yes, that means that if you want to become a biologist in France you still can't have biology and French as your main courses because they are in different profiles. I think it's stupid, my teachers thought it was stupid (the new system was under development whan I graduated) but our politicians are all over it.
Note that at no point the theories in question say that there is no God. They merely say that there is no perceptible divine intervention in what happens. If we assume that the universe started as a huge explosion we can't rule out the possibility that this explosion was somehow instigated by a higher being. The same with evolution: Just setting the right circumstances for life to develop and then coming back a couple dozen million years later to see if there's intelligent life seems less hassle to me than algning millions of base pairs by hand for millions of species.
Just in case you come up with the "but the Bible says that God made us in his image": The Bible was written by humans and IIRC the early books were written down after being passed on orally for quite some time. The "in his image" thing could just be hubris.
I might have a use for it - preheating cheese. I like to make my sandwiches with lightly toasted bread and preheated cheese that melts when I stack up the stuff. However, at the moment preheating the cheese means putting it on the little brackets that are normally used for rolls. The problem with that is that if the cheese gets too soft it might fall off and right into the toaster. Ugh.
This toaster sounds perfect. I remove one of the glass plates and put the thing on the side. Then I can use the remaining plate to preheat cheese without the possibility of burning it. I also don't have to balance it on those damn brackets.
Okay, so the device has a potential market of one, but I like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just how good is the RNG that was used to generate the OTP?
If the station is serious the RNG is probably physics-based, ie. truly random as far as we can tell.
That's one reason why I'm in the process of switching to LaTeX for everything. Maybe even spreadsheets, but those are an area where office suites don't try to be "helpful" come what may, so they might still be somewhat useful.
Seriously, it's easier to wrap stuff in an \itemize environment than to argue with OpenOffice over what's a part of your list and what isn't.
Heh. The worst Windows networking I have seen so far is what my father's PC does. Ever since the last reinstall NTLOGON will not accept any logins from another computer. I can connect just fine but any kind of remote authentication fails. This is the same PC that our only printer is hooked up to. As a result getting data from my computer to his for printing means either putting it into my Apache's doument root and then downloading it from his computer via HTTP or using a USB drive and sneakernet.
My business faces ruin. Troll sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many trolls as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique troll stores that sell obscure, lame jokes that no-one laughs about, not even the people that make them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the geek market. My store specialised in trolls - stuff that geeks find hilarious and/or annoying. I don't sell sick stuff like Goatse or Tubgirl, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive In Soviet Russia sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase trolls without anuses or violent diarrhea. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
copy Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer trolls. Why is no one buying trolls? Are people not interested in pop culture references? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Slashdot is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three trolls world wide appears on Slashdot. On Slashdot, you can find and read hundreds of dollars worth of pop culture references in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the lame joke industry, from artists, to troll companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the karma store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike trolls, it's harder to copy karma on Slashdot.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with space ninjas gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to post this troll on Slashdot right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of +1, Funny."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the troll industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "Zo...you ah going to post zis to your frends on Slushdot, punk?" I asked him in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger/Kindergarten Cop voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of space ninjas. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If space ninjas want to steal from the pop culture reference industry, then the pop culture reference industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable troll store will allow you to buy another troll. If the pirates can't buy the trolls to begin with, then they won't be able to post them on Slashdot, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the GNAA outlining my proposal. Suing space ninjas one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention space ninjas use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of space ninjas would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected space ninjas to a hotline, similar to Bust Your Boss. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take space ninjutsu serio
You're not a chemist are you?
...I think about five people will get this one.
As a matter of fact I am, but it's only so I can meet the prerequisites for the Wizard job. And so I can learn Auto Potion.
How to secure Windows by yours truly (hope this makes sense; I haven't had much coffee yet): 1. Firewall! Better still firewall + hardware router.
Forget firewalls, at least for home networks. The only thing I rely on to make a Windows PC safe from incoming attacks is NAT. Put the box behind a NAT router and only forward ports when necessary. Bang, zero chance of anything getting in and it's relatively cheap, as well. It also makes firewalls (which sometimes tend to cause more harm than good) obsolete.
True. VB has one strength: Convenient interface development. No other language/GUI toolkit I know has that.
With Java/Swing you have NetBeans which sometimes does what you want and only accasionally completely screws up the form you're working on. I don't know about SWT.
With C++/WxWidgets you get WxGlade which I have never seen actually working. C++/FLTK gives you Fluid, which works most of the time but has always given me problems when working on programs that don't fit in a single file. The Qt RAD tool appears to work, but I haven'tspent much time with it so far.
VB isn't that great a language, but it's really nice for putting together GUIs.
That's true. Now if someone would find a way to produce cheap, reliable, clean power (note that modern nuclear power techniques would allow for all that, even recycling most of the nuclear waste) without a positively evil lobby behind it (er, nuclear power still needs to work on that one)... Then gain, the same person would probably also solve unemployment, make trains show up on time, turn afternoon TV programs into something worthwile to watch and talk Microsoft into handing over the API documentation.
Because sometimes all other fractions consist entirely of scumbags who'd rather kill their family than pass legislation you consider necessary. For example the German Green Party is the country's only party actually concerned about things like privacy and software patents (except for the Christian Democrats who are concerned about destroying privacy). I vote Green, not for their (rather absurd) fixed idea that nuclear power is teh evul, but because I really don't want shit like software patents happening in Europe and they are the only ones who actually care to fight against it. I accept the potential damage their policy deals to the economy as necessary collateral damage.
Yes, I'm a lobbyist. If there was a special interest party that stood in for my interests without the eco-baggage of the Greens I'd vote for them (and make lots of advertisement, so that they might get more than the neccessary 5% in the election). But there isn't and the Greens are effective, so yay for the Greens.
1.) Buy some reps
2.) Get them to pass some legislation for you
3.) Profit!
Note that the usefulness of this is proportional to your funds and the level of corruption in the country.
These people are hitting each other with heavy metal objects, they are probably addicted to the body's painkillers or the feeling their brain makes while it is being made retarded.
In that case they should read some corporate propaganda. I feel pain everytime I do and I'm pretty sure that drivel like the big Windows vs. Linux TCO debate is hazardous to brain cells.
People have been reading newspapers for ages, yet newspapers don't make every heading a heavy contrast stripe across the entire page or sharply delimit every margin... Is it because ink is expensive or because ink is distracting?
Very true. The winner actually looks pretty ugly with all those dark blocks floating around in a bright page. I favor the runner-up for being more sane regarding the contrast.
I also use Fx 1.5 but when I click the triangles it tries to open/collapse sections but it doesn't do it properly (after closing sometimes there are some pixels left; after opening sometimes entire rows are missing until I click another header.
It's a nice toy but certainly not useful.
Hello? We're talking marketing people here. The same kind of people who think that Germans like products more when the slogan is in English and who are thus using English slogans even for products never sold outside Germany - even though a poll has shown that many Germans don't understand what those slogans are supposed to mean. No other country that I know of has so many slogans in a foreign language.
Soem examples for slogans that just don't work in Germany:
RWE Group: One Group, Multi Utilities - only eight percent of all participants in the poll claimed to have fully understood the slogan, 15% claimed to have mostly gotten it. I guess I'm in neither of those groups - I don't quite know how to utilize a corporation.
Mitsubishi: Drive alive - Most people correctly translated it to "fahre lebendig", but couldn't tell what that's supposed to mean as you can't drive when you're dead. 18/25%.
SAT.1: Powered by emotion - This is a German TV station. Many Germans have never encountered powered by and would probably understand it as "has its eletrical energy provided by". At least it has 33/49%.
Douglas: Come in and find out - Apparently this perfume store chain has such a confusing floor layout that it's difficult to leave the store. When people translate "find out" to German they can either translate it to "finde es heraus" (find out about it) or to "finde heraus" (find a way out). The latter translation is the more intuitive one. 34/54%.
Marketers are so far detached from reality, if we'd put them all on a huge pile causality itself would rupture and a gate would open into an alternative dimension where strawberries are sentient and the color purple just got arrested for driving too fast on the Milky Way.
He might be a troll, but he is funny :-D
;)
That was the idea.
Knowing how to hook up a composite video input is irrelevant. The civilised world uses SCART. You can't screw up hooking up SCART.
And just you wait, France will develop a European alternative to that Fourier nonsense as well!
FFT stands for "Final Fantasy Tactics", a brilliant tactics/role playing game for the original Sony Playstation. You should really try it.
Stay away from the GBA sequel though, that one just sucks.
Alternatively it could be some weird mathy jibber-jabber about furrier Transformers or something.
1. Mine useful stuff on moon and send it off to earth
2. Send toxic waste to moon and store in used-up mines
3. ???
4. Equilibrium!!
You just use them liquid from the toilets to shower everything before you pass the liquid back into the water recycling system.
What? too smelly? Well, space exploration ain't a holiday, boy, so put a clothespin on your nose and bear it.
Here's the unmangled list of requirements:
- is a candybar (moving parts = decreased durability = bad)
- has a lo-res black and white display
- has no camera
- has no support for any kind of additional programs. In fact it shouldn't have an operating system. A firmware is enough for basic phone support
- is cheap (I'm talking <= 100 EUR, preferably much lower than 100)
- MAYBE can be connected to my iBook for on-the-go internet. But I don't really need that
That's exactly why I'm going to use my 6210 until GSM will be completely displced by UMTS, at which point I will look for a phone that fulfills the most of the following requirements:
- is a candybar (moving parts = decreased durability = bad)
- has a lo-res black and white display
- has no camera
- has no support for any kind of additional programs. In fact it shouldn't have an operating system. A firmware is enough for basic phone support
- is cheap (I'm talking - MAYBE can be connected to my iBook for on-the-go internet. But I don't really need that
If I can't get that I'll use someone else's old mobile that I get for free. I don't see any sense in paying a ridiculous amount of money for a phone that includes tons of crap (like Java support or MMS) but sucks at what I want (battery life, reliability, simplicity).
You forget that this is Slashdot, where "liberal" and "evil" are synonymous and both used to describe people that often are neither...
b) Another way to solve this problem is to separate the classes by ability. This way the "gifted" students will have work set at their level. This can be done either by some sort of testing as it is now, or it can be done as in Germany, where the school at some point splits up into several streams - one for students who want to go to university and one for ones who do not.
n gssystem.png
Actually, we have multiple levels of granularity. Firstly, there's the different schools. We have three kinds of secondary schools: The Hauptschule (5th to 9th grade, the most basic secondary school, attended by the burger flippers of the future, has been dropped by some states), the Realschule (5th to 10th grade, pretty much what you need for most non-academic jobs - in theory) and the Gymnasium (5th to 10th/13th grade, the highest secondary school form, necessary for university). Note that by law you are required to go to school for twelve or thirteen grades; if your secondary school doesn't go for that long you go to another school, usually a Berufsschule (trade school).
At the end of elementary school it is decided where you go - until a few years ago we had a special school for that, the Orientierungsstufe (5th and 6th grade, some states still have it), where your abilities were assessed and you got a recommendation for one of the school forms (although you could and can still attend any school you want as long as they let you in). You can switch between the various school forms and it's possible to complete (for example) the Realschule and then go to a Gymnasium - you start in 11th grade, but you will have to do a hell of a lot of learning in order to reach the level the other students are at.
A peculiarity of the Gymnasium is that you graduate twice. After the 10th grade you have a certificate equivalent to that you'd get for passing the Realschule. You can then go to a trade school or continue with the Gynmasium until you get your Abitur (the "real" Gymnasium graduation).
The German education system is actually a bit more complicated than that (for example there are two different versions of the Abitur and in some states the Gymnasium only goes until the 12th year), but I think this should be enough to give you an overview of differentiation by school form. For even more differentiation confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H goodness take a look at this image: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Deutsches_Bildu
As for in-school differentiation: In the Gymnasium (and the Orientierungsstufe where it still exists) you attend different classes based on how good you (think you) are. In the Orientierungsstufe you had/have A courses and B courses for each subject. Good students are put into the A course and bad students into the B course. I like that system since that way you aren't held back in subjects you are good at and you aren't overstrained in subjects you're bad at, but it seems to die with the Orientierungsstufe.
In the Gymnasium after 11th grade you pick two Leistungskurse (intensive courses) an several Grundkurse (basic courses), which define your education. The Leistungskurse are tougher than normal courses and you have to make special tests in them in order to get your Abitur (among other requirements; for example you get eight grades in the LKs (four semesters times two courses), only two of which may be a D- or worse). Thus, we have another differentiation.
Unfortunately this extremely flexible system is being abandoned in my state (Lower Saxony) in favor of profiles. You don't pick your courses yourself but instead pick a profile (languge, natural sciences or sicial sciences), which then defines which courses you take and which ones are important. Yes, that means that if you want to become a biologist in France you still can't have biology and French as your main courses because they are in different profiles. I think it's stupid, my teachers thought it was stupid (the new system was under development whan I graduated) but our politicians are all over it.
Their theology is Atheism
Note that at no point the theories in question say that there is no God. They merely say that there is no perceptible divine intervention in what happens. If we assume that the universe started as a huge explosion we can't rule out the possibility that this explosion was somehow instigated by a higher being. The same with evolution: Just setting the right circumstances for life to develop and then coming back a couple dozen million years later to see if there's intelligent life seems less hassle to me than algning millions of base pairs by hand for millions of species.
Just in case you come up with the "but the Bible says that God made us in his image": The Bible was written by humans and IIRC the early books were written down after being passed on orally for quite some time. The "in his image" thing could just be hubris.
I might have a use for it - preheating cheese. I like to make my sandwiches with lightly toasted bread and preheated cheese that melts when I stack up the stuff. However, at the moment preheating the cheese means putting it on the little brackets that are normally used for rolls. The problem with that is that if the cheese gets too soft it might fall off and right into the toaster. Ugh.
This toaster sounds perfect. I remove one of the glass plates and put the thing on the side. Then I can use the remaining plate to preheat cheese without the possibility of burning it. I also don't have to balance it on those damn brackets.
Okay, so the device has a potential market of one, but I like it.