Sorry, but you got a few things wrong. Although you might be essentially right, let me be a Fact-Nazi (got it? A German, calling himself a Nazi. Funny, huh? Aw...):
1. The mandatory check-up (so-called "Hauptuntersuchung") is every _other_ year, and only after four years for a new car. Still, judging from what I see on `Pimp my ride', it is possible in the states to drive cars that would never be allowed on public streets in Germany.
2. Nobody is "happily driving at 250+ Km/h". Yes, I have been overtaken by the occasional Porsche doing 300 km/h (~190 mph) and Mercs at 220 km/h are not exactly a rare sight, but these people are notorious for closing up to an arm's reach of your bumper with headlights flashing; and they are generally considered arseholes with tiny wangs.
3. About 60% of the Autobahn network (that's an estimate, I couldn't be bothered to look it up) have speed limitation, typically 120 km/h. That doesn't stop people from speeding there, but they get caught sooner or later (the Autobahn police squad sports disguised, camera-fitted cars with appropriate engines)
4. From what I hear from friends with American licenses, you are right about driving licences.
5. Accidents don't happen on Autobahns. They happen on county roads with sharp curves, crossroads and narrow passages. Due to the Autobahn's construction (or any other Highway's, for that matter), head-on crashes are nearly impossible, and deadly crashes are much rarer than they are on county roads (believe me, I am an EMT...)
I've been taught that Einstein-Rosen bridges ("Wormholes") are unstable in MSc lectures. This knowledge is at least five to ten years old. I can't find the appropriate paper at the moment, but if you try this summary of Black Hole Theory, for example, it will tell you on page 25 that Wormholes are not crossable. There are similar problems with time machines ("closed timelike curves") and other strange phenomena of Quantum Cosmology: They all sound so cool at the beginning, but the closer you look, the less interesting they get.
I would mod you insightful if I wouldn't be the parent poster.
I haven't followed the public debate on DNA samples (I have partly switched to British news sources, and for some reason they don't care that much about Mooshammer.:-). I am a strong opponent of general DNA screenings, regardless of the crime in question, and you are certainly right about the risks associated with this method. Nevertheless, I still think that the Federal Republic of G is, as of this day, much less Orwellian a state than, e.g., Britain or the US of A (think of the sex offenders registry. That's inbelievable. And they call themselves the land of freedom...). At least we have a lively public debate about privacy issues. The concept of a "federal scretary for privacy" ("Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragter", oh how I love this language:-) is unheard of in the angloamerican states, as far as I know. Most Londoners I know, even the scholars, are happy about each and every camera, mikrophone, ASBO etc. because it is supposed to make London a "safer" city.
You are partly right. Yet, writing from (and living) outside of Germany, I have to tell you that Germany is still a shining example for privacy, freedom of speech and other personal freedoms.
Examples: When was the last time you have seen a public CCTV in a German street or public place? In London (where I live) there is nearly no street left without one, and the Authorities now want to introduce microphones as well.
Yesterday, we read about a Professor being fired for stating his opinions in public. In Germany, Professors cannot be fired. IANAL, but I think we are about the only country worldwide that has academic freedom carved into the first page of the constitution. ("Forschung und Lehre sind frei.")
As to the personal ID cards. I don't think the nationwide DNA databases you mention will be coming anytime soon (the public outcry was too big). On the other hand, the personal ID cards we have today are a very good thing in my eyes. You have to keep in mind that there are actually good uses for these things. In the UK, everybody is scared that public ID cards will be introduced, and how Orwellian that will be. But they forget that, up to now, they have to bring drivers licences, bank statements (! -- you would never have to disclose your monetary situation in Germany, just to rent a flat, for example), hell, even birth certificates for every minor participation in public life, like voting, renting a flat or bying booze. And these ways are still less secure than a personal ID.
To end this: Be happy about your Personalausweis. And get less paranoid about Schily. If we would have a conservative government (as Britain de facto has), we would already have all the things you (and I) are so scared about.
Funny how you managed to give a somewhat insightful analysis but misnamed the German dictator four times: The name is "Hitler". "Hilter" stems from a Monty Python sketch.
If I was an Astronaut I'd tell Nasa this isn't at all acceptable.
It's not like they can ask for anything. They're soldiers. They follow orders. And since there is no imminent danger, I don't see why they should abandon a multi-billion dollar space station because of a broken part. Sorry, but that's their job. Being an astronaut might be every kid's dream, but it is still friggin dangerous, too. They know that, and they will live through this.
Actually, I don't think they are very interesting. I haven't read TFA, but it looks like they plotted the inverse size of the pipe radially and physical distances (or whatever) along the polar axis.
In the current form, the resulting diagram is completely unsurprising: There are a few big backbones and a huge number of small outer pipes. Who would have guessed that?
In a much higher resolution, the graphs may actually tell some interesting facts. As they are now, they are simply eyecandy.
There's a difference between between "public" as in "you can't complain if someone stands next to you in the tube and overhears all of your conversation" and "public" as in "you never know who's watching and listening". London is already tightly packed with CCTV (although I have to object to the "CC". I fail to see what's so closed circuit about wireless cameras that present their pictures on the net, like this one, very close to where I live). Nevertheless, whenever the police publishes pictures of an "unidentified" mugger, you see that it is actually impossible to identify an unknown person on the pictures. What is possible, however, is to follow certain persons around town as they do their daily work.
To cut it short: London is already quite Orwellian (the Royal Opera is right...). We definitely do not need microphones eavesdropping on us. I can already see the first headlines in the metro: "Drug dealers arrested after being overheard by micros!" And everyone will cheer...
but I think "bioterrorism detection" is simply a buzzword that helps attract a lot of money. Especially the use of the word "future" implies that they have not really an idea what to use their invention for. It's simply a neat trick. It has been done before, by the way, on a much smaller scale:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6693/ab s/394539a0_fs.html
What you're saying is right (to a certain extent) for the standard computer user's environment. But in a hospital, there are some pretty nasty germs around. Think about TBC, for example. Or MRSA. Combine that with a "population" of, by definition, very sick people with a weakened immune defence and you might begin to understand why hospitals have to worry about hygiene, on keyboards just as much as everywhere else. Especially in isolation wards or in intensive care units, were the patients' bodies are busy wrestling with death, the last thing you want to have floating around are the antibiotics-resistant germs from the guy in the adjacent box.
Nevertheless it would imply that the radiaton spectrum should roughly look like a gaussian around 1022 keV (twice the electron mass of 511 keV). I haven't read anything about that in the last years, but I am rather sure that this is not the case (otherwise, nearly every physicist looking at the graph would shout "pair-annihilation" immediately, because 1022 keV is such a famous number).
Es tut mir leid, Sie enttäuschen zu müssen, aber gar so außergewöhnlichen kompliziert, wie Sie sich das dem Anschein ihres Beitrags nach vorzustellen scheinen, ist die englische Sprache, insbesondere im Vergleich zu anderen gesprochenen und geschriebenen menschlichen Sprachen, in denen es durchaus, und ohne größere Anstrengung, möglich ist, Sätze über mehrere Seiten zu strecken, ohne deshalb gleich das Verb irgendwo im Satz verstecken, sich auf drei grammatikalische Fälle beschränken, Monumentalkombinationssubstantivmonster vermeiden oder sich auf sechsundzwanzig Buchstaben beschränken zu müssen, nun auch wieder nicht.;-)
Your country just historically doesn't really have rights. European countries have no founding principles because they jsut where always there.
Britain has the bill of rights, if I recall correctly. Germany got a shiny new constitution after the second world war. The reason for "all" the anti-hate-speech-laws is historical. Some countries in Europe found out the hard way that completely free speech -- like spreading FUD against democracy and tolerance -- can be dangerous for a society. The technical term for the current system in Germany is "armed democracy". I like that. It doesn't mean you'll be prosecuted for talking against the government. It means you'll get sacked if you lie against your fellow neighbour or against society as a whole. Wether you actually did so will be decided upon by a judge, not a governmental body.
The iPod shuffle has a "play in playlist order" mode. You just move the slider to the middle:
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/shuffle.html (to the right).
Now we're talking about a 512MB flash player (ipod shuffle) that does play playlists for 99$, compared to a 99$ for a 256MB player that is larger and heavier than the shuffle and doesn't include a battery (let's not talk about design, that's a matter of taste). Frankly, I've got a shuffle, and I've never missed a display. Do you actually take your mp3-player out of your pocket to look at the crappy little display while scrolling through the music? Sorry, but iriver has lost. If you really want an fm-tuner, buy headphones that include one (for 5 bucks). I don't want it. I've got the shuffle: My personal radio station that plays only stuff I like, and always something different. A full 1GB shuffle brings you through the day without repeating a single tune.
Actually, I think he mostly speaks in Swedish, since he's from Sweden. That's a large Country in the north of Europe (an area called Scandinavia), boasting one of the world's best education systems, an extremely well developed technological infrastructure (far better than the US, for example) and very strict ecological standards. The people there have got a language that is different from English (although remotely connected, both being germanic languages). English -- since you might wonder -- that's the language you've just used. Or, well, tried to. Swedish sounds quite different when compared to English. It is much more melodic. "Bork" is not a very common word in Swedish, as far as I know.
Surprisingly enough, the swedish people, despite having this beautiful old language, try very hard to learn and speak English, because it happens to be a very popular language all over the world. It might be that a few of them have a rather strong accent, but you should hear how ridicolous native english speakers sound when they try to speak _any_ other language.
Sorry for ranting. I know you where joking. But jokes about other people's lack of english skills mostly come from persons who have never mastered a foreign language (we don't even talk about their own...), that pisses me off.
And, by the way: I'm not swedish. But all (8) the swedish people I know are extremely proficient in English.
The review process is by no means free. The peer reviewers have to be specialists in the field the article discusses. Sometimes, there are only two or three such peers world wide and they are just as hard working as the author. If you want them to sit down and think about an article they didn't write for a day, you have to pay them.
Apart from that: "Author pays" is a really bad method. It keeps young authors from publishing frequently (since they're on a budget).
Face it: For a peer-review process, some money is needed. It either comes from the author, which is bad, see above; from the readers, which is still better, since Universities -- the mayor subscribers -- have more money than the individual author; or from some third party, which is always a problem since it raises the problem of this third entities interests in publications. Example: Who is going to pay for a journal of Egyptian Studies, as opposed to one for Silicon Technology?
The system of peer-reviewed publication lies at the heart of the modern scientific community. Sure, it's not perfect. The huge number of contemporary journals is a big problem for university libraries. But I don't see a better solution for the moment. But it would help if the journals would cut costs by, e.g., publishing only electronically, although I don't know how much of the price of the journal is actually accountable to printing.
The sizes are: 0.2l for Kölsch and Alt. 0.3l for some kins of "Pils" which consider themslelf noble. 0.4 for a standard everywhere pils,a nd your pint is just between 0.3 and 0.4. The enxt size is 0.5l for Weiten.
You must be from the Rhine-Ruhr Area. In southwest germany, people buy half a litre of beer. In Bavaria, it's typically simply one litre (a "Maß"). I think the litre is a fine volume measurement for alcoholical beverages. It just depends on where in the world you live and how much alcohol is deemed to be appropriate by society.:-)
I can't believe my eyes. Two links from slashdot. Directly to my university. In this very moment, I've got a ssh-shell open on the slashdotted server. And I am happy to inform you that it is working nicely.:-)
To give a few insider informations: This (rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~jknoblo2) is a student account. This girl is hosting her movie on the free account that every student in Heidelberg gets! Oh this is just so cool. Now I have to go out and find her...;-)
Since I see a lot of misunderstanding in your and many other comments further down: It has to be made clear that the german law forbids the glorification of the third reich and/or the denial of its crimes. This is not the same as informing about the true history. In fact, every german pupil has to study german history between 1933 and 45 at the very least once in his school life (if you're on A-levels, it's at at least three different times). There's no single day of the year and no single newspaper without some (minor or major) article related to this period of our history, nearly every village has some sort of memorial for the victims of racism and fascism in among its community and everybody has to deal with his or her own personal story under the dictatorship (i.e. the one of his ancestors, most people are to young nowadays to have lived back then, of course). It is wrong to assume that Germans just don't talk about history or that the german state would try to hide it (like, e.g., the spanish government does with the history of the Franco dictatorship or the US Government does with the history of the native americans).
The search engines are just going to block contents from extremist sites. What happens to you in the states, if you try to read an Al-Quaida Site from within a public library?
as the article goes on to say that had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction.""
Ok, let's look at a toymodel:
Say the density of such stars is uniform in the galaxy. Then the frequency of such explosions within 10 ly from us should be something like
(1/400) * (10/50000)^3
if we assume that the frequency of these things within 50000ly is on the order of 400 years.
That is... wait... *tiptiptip* 2*10^-14, i.e. once (or twice) in about 10 trillion years (the universe has an age of a few 10^9 years!).
Well, the galaxy is more like a disc. So let's try the same with an exponent of 2 instead of 3. This gives 1*10^-10, still less then one of these "mass estinction" events in the age of the universe. Not much to fear here...
Isn't entropy dimensionless?
Also, I know a girl who did a thesis about this and she came up with an entropy of 4 for english.
Yep, I only wanted to mention that I know girls. Thank you.
Doesn't comply with W3C-suggestions
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I also think it bears noting that Google is pulling out all the stops to build rich web apps, no matter how weirdly they have to hack the browser to make them go. And I strongly believe that this is a trend that is here to stay -- XHTML Strict/CSS/etc be damned. At the end of the day, what really matters to users is compelling apps that let them get their work done quickly.
At the end of the day, Google _has_ cared about XHTML Strict/CSS/etc. From the head of googles web app:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd "> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
And I'm quite happy about that. There's a reason why the w3c gives out definitions for html et al.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but you got a few things wrong. Although you might be essentially right, let me be a Fact-Nazi (got it? A German, calling himself a Nazi. Funny, huh? Aw...):
1. The mandatory check-up (so-called "Hauptuntersuchung") is every _other_ year, and only after four years for a new car. Still, judging from what I see on `Pimp my ride', it is possible in the states to drive cars that would never be allowed on public streets in Germany.
2. Nobody is "happily driving at 250+ Km/h". Yes, I have been overtaken by the occasional Porsche doing 300 km/h (~190 mph) and Mercs at 220 km/h are not exactly a rare sight, but these people are notorious for closing up to an arm's reach of your bumper with headlights flashing; and they are generally considered arseholes with tiny wangs.
3. About 60% of the Autobahn network (that's an estimate, I couldn't be bothered to look it up) have speed limitation, typically 120 km/h. That doesn't stop people from speeding there, but they get caught sooner or later (the Autobahn police squad sports disguised, camera-fitted cars with appropriate engines)
4. From what I hear from friends with American licenses, you are right about driving licences.
5. Accidents don't happen on Autobahns. They happen on county roads with sharp curves, crossroads and narrow passages. Due to the Autobahn's construction (or any other Highway's, for that matter), head-on crashes are nearly impossible, and deadly crashes are much rarer than they are on county roads (believe me, I am an EMT...)
... that's... erm... one physical barrier, isn't it?
Besides, what is a "physical" barrier anyway? Air? Sheet of Paper? Block of lead? Sorry, but that doesn't sound like a very insightful review.
I've been taught that Einstein-Rosen bridges ("Wormholes") are unstable in MSc lectures. This knowledge is at least five to ten years old. I can't find the appropriate paper at the moment, but if you try this summary of Black Hole Theory, for example, it will tell you on page 25 that Wormholes are not crossable. There are similar problems with time machines ("closed timelike curves") and other strange phenomena of Quantum Cosmology: They all sound so cool at the beginning, but the closer you look, the less interesting they get.
I would mod you insightful if I wouldn't be the parent poster.
:-). I am a strong opponent of general DNA screenings, regardless of the crime in question, and you are certainly right about the risks associated with this method. Nevertheless, I still think that the Federal Republic of G is, as of this day, much less Orwellian a state than, e.g., Britain or the US of A (think of the sex offenders registry. That's inbelievable. And they call themselves the land of freedom...). At least we have a lively public debate about privacy issues. The concept of a "federal scretary for privacy" ("Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragter", oh how I love this language :-) is unheard of in the angloamerican states, as far as I know. Most Londoners I know, even the scholars, are happy about each and every camera, mikrophone, ASBO etc. because it is supposed to make London a "safer" city.
I haven't followed the public debate on DNA samples (I have partly switched to British news sources, and for some reason they don't care that much about Mooshammer.
You are partly right. Yet, writing from (and living) outside of Germany, I have to tell you that Germany is still a shining example for privacy, freedom of speech and other personal freedoms.
Examples: When was the last time you have seen a public CCTV in a German street or public place? In London (where I live) there is nearly no street left without one, and the Authorities now want to introduce microphones as well.
Yesterday, we read about a Professor being fired for stating his opinions in public. In Germany, Professors cannot be fired. IANAL, but I think we are about the only country worldwide that has academic freedom carved into the first page of the constitution. ("Forschung und Lehre sind frei.")
As to the personal ID cards. I don't think the nationwide DNA databases you mention will be coming anytime soon (the public outcry was too big). On the other hand, the personal ID cards we have today are a very good thing in my eyes. You have to keep in mind that there are actually good uses for these things. In the UK, everybody is scared that public ID cards will be introduced, and how Orwellian that will be. But they forget that, up to now, they have to bring drivers licences, bank statements (! -- you would never have to disclose your monetary situation in Germany, just to rent a flat, for example), hell, even birth certificates for every minor participation in public life, like voting, renting a flat or bying booze. And these ways are still less secure than a personal ID.
To end this: Be happy about your Personalausweis. And get less paranoid about Schily. If we would have a conservative government (as Britain de facto has), we would already have all the things you (and I) are so scared about.
Funny how you managed to give a somewhat insightful analysis but misnamed the German dictator four times: The name is "Hitler". "Hilter" stems from a Monty Python sketch.
Must... resist... to make... "spelling Nazi"-pun.
It's not like they can ask for anything. They're soldiers. They follow orders. And since there is no imminent danger, I don't see why they should abandon a multi-billion dollar space station because of a broken part. Sorry, but that's their job. Being an astronaut might be every kid's dream, but it is still friggin dangerous, too. They know that, and they will live through this.
Actually, I don't think they are very interesting. I haven't read TFA, but it looks like they plotted the inverse size of the pipe radially and physical distances (or whatever) along the polar axis.
In the current form, the resulting diagram is completely unsurprising: There are a few big backbones and a huge number of small outer pipes. Who would have guessed that?
In a much higher resolution, the graphs may actually tell some interesting facts. As they are now, they are simply eyecandy.
and I have to disagree.
There's a difference between between "public" as in "you can't complain if someone stands next to you in the tube and overhears all of your conversation" and "public" as in "you never know who's watching and listening". London is already tightly packed with CCTV (although I have to object to the "CC". I fail to see what's so closed circuit about wireless cameras that present their pictures on the net, like this one, very close to where I live). Nevertheless, whenever the police publishes pictures of an "unidentified" mugger, you see that it is actually impossible to identify an unknown person on the pictures. What is possible, however, is to follow certain persons around town as they do their daily work.
To cut it short: London is already quite Orwellian (the Royal Opera is right...). We definitely do not need microphones eavesdropping on us. I can already see the first headlines in the metro: "Drug dealers arrested after being overheard by micros!" And everyone will cheer...
but I think "bioterrorism detection" is simply a buzzword that helps attract a lot of money. Especially the use of the word "future" implies that they have not really an idea what to use their invention for. It's simply a neat trick. It has been done before, by the way, on a much smaller scale: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6693/ab s/394539a0_fs.html
Yes, and one piece of software can run on a zillion pieces of hardware. Think of "Windows".
Yes, I cry for a reply joke on this.
Your subject sums up your mistake quite well.
What you're saying is right (to a certain extent) for the standard computer user's environment. But in a hospital, there are some pretty nasty germs around. Think about TBC, for example. Or MRSA. Combine that with a "population" of, by definition, very sick people with a weakened immune defence and you might begin to understand why hospitals have to worry about hygiene, on keyboards just as much as everywhere else. Especially in isolation wards or in intensive care units, were the patients' bodies are busy wrestling with death, the last thing you want to have floating around are the antibiotics-resistant germs from the guy in the adjacent box.
Yes, I have worked in hospitals.
Bugger, you're right guys. Sorry. I'll go and hide in a corner for a while.
Nevertheless it would imply that the radiaton spectrum should roughly look like a gaussian around 1022 keV (twice the electron mass of 511 keV). I haven't read anything about that in the last years, but I am rather sure that this is not the case (otherwise, nearly every physicist looking at the graph would shout "pair-annihilation" immediately, because 1022 keV is such a famous number).
Es tut mir leid, Sie enttäuschen zu müssen, aber gar so außergewöhnlichen kompliziert, wie Sie sich das dem Anschein ihres Beitrags nach vorzustellen scheinen, ist die englische Sprache, insbesondere im Vergleich zu anderen gesprochenen und geschriebenen menschlichen Sprachen, in denen es durchaus, und ohne größere Anstrengung, möglich ist, Sätze über mehrere Seiten zu strecken, ohne deshalb gleich das Verb irgendwo im Satz verstecken, sich auf drei grammatikalische Fälle beschränken, Monumentalkombinationssubstantivmonster vermeiden oder sich auf sechsundzwanzig Buchstaben beschränken zu müssen, nun auch wieder nicht. ;-)
The iPod shuffle has a "play in playlist order" mode. You just move the slider to the middle:
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/shuffle.html (to the right).
Now we're talking about a 512MB flash player (ipod shuffle) that does play playlists for 99$, compared to a 99$ for a 256MB player that is larger and heavier than the shuffle and doesn't include a battery (let's not talk about design, that's a matter of taste). Frankly, I've got a shuffle, and I've never missed a display. Do you actually take your mp3-player out of your pocket to look at the crappy little display while scrolling through the music? Sorry, but iriver has lost. If you really want an fm-tuner, buy headphones that include one (for 5 bucks). I don't want it. I've got the shuffle: My personal radio station that plays only stuff I like, and always something different. A full 1GB shuffle brings you through the day without repeating a single tune.
Actually, I think he mostly speaks in Swedish, since he's from Sweden. That's a large Country in the north of Europe (an area called Scandinavia), boasting one of the world's best education systems, an extremely well developed technological infrastructure (far better than the US, for example) and very strict ecological standards. The people there have got a language that is different from English (although remotely connected, both being germanic languages). English -- since you might wonder -- that's the language you've just used. Or, well, tried to. Swedish sounds quite different when compared to English. It is much more melodic. "Bork" is not a very common word in Swedish, as far as I know.
Surprisingly enough, the swedish people, despite having this beautiful old language, try very hard to learn and speak English, because it happens to be a very popular language all over the world. It might be that a few of them have a rather strong accent, but you should hear how ridicolous native english speakers sound when they try to speak _any_ other language.
Sorry for ranting. I know you where joking. But jokes about other people's lack of english skills mostly come from persons who have never mastered a foreign language (we don't even talk about their own...), that pisses me off.
And, by the way: I'm not swedish. But all (8) the swedish people I know are extremely proficient in English.
The review process is by no means free. The peer reviewers have to be specialists in the field the article discusses. Sometimes, there are only two or three such peers world wide and they are just as hard working as the author. If you want them to sit down and think about an article they didn't write for a day, you have to pay them.
Apart from that: "Author pays" is a really bad method. It keeps young authors from publishing frequently (since they're on a budget).
Face it: For a peer-review process, some money is needed. It either comes from the author, which is bad, see above; from the readers, which is still better, since Universities -- the mayor subscribers -- have more money than the individual author; or from some third party, which is always a problem since it raises the problem of this third entities interests in publications. Example: Who is going to pay for a journal of Egyptian Studies, as opposed to one for Silicon Technology?
The system of peer-reviewed publication lies at the heart of the modern scientific community. Sure, it's not perfect. The huge number of contemporary journals is a big problem for university libraries. But I don't see a better solution for the moment. But it would help if the journals would cut costs by, e.g., publishing only electronically, although I don't know how much of the price of the journal is actually accountable to printing.
I can't believe my eyes. Two links from slashdot. Directly to my university. In this very moment, I've got a ssh-shell open on the slashdotted server. And I am happy to inform you that it is working nicely. :-)
;-)
To give a few insider informations: This (rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~jknoblo2) is a student account. This girl is hosting her movie on the free account that every student in Heidelberg gets! Oh this is just so cool. Now I have to go out and find her...
Since I see a lot of misunderstanding in your and many other comments further down: It has to be made clear that the german law forbids the glorification of the third reich and/or the denial of its crimes. This is not the same as informing about the true history. In fact, every german pupil has to study german history between 1933 and 45 at the very least once in his school life (if you're on A-levels, it's at at least three different times). There's no single day of the year and no single newspaper without some (minor or major) article related to this period of our history, nearly every village has some sort of memorial for the victims of racism and fascism in among its community and everybody has to deal with his or her own personal story under the dictatorship (i.e. the one of his ancestors, most people are to young nowadays to have lived back then, of course). It is wrong to assume that Germans just don't talk about history or that the german state would try to hide it (like, e.g., the spanish government does with the history of the Franco dictatorship or the US Government does with the history of the native americans).
The search engines are just going to block contents from extremist sites. What happens to you in the states, if you try to read an Al-Quaida Site from within a public library?
Say the density of such stars is uniform in the galaxy. Then the frequency of such explosions within 10 ly from us should be something like
(1/400) * (10/50000)^3
if we assume that the frequency of these things within 50000ly is on the order of 400 years. That is... wait... *tiptiptip* 2*10^-14, i.e. once (or twice) in about 10 trillion years (the universe has an age of a few 10^9 years!).
Well, the galaxy is more like a disc. So let's try the same with an exponent of 2 instead of 3. This gives 1*10^-10, still less then one of these "mass estinction" events in the age of the universe. Not much to fear here...
Isn't entropy dimensionless?
Also, I know a girl who did a thesis about this and she came up with an entropy of 4 for english.
Yep, I only wanted to mention that I know girls. Thank you.