I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that.
I suppose it stems from the fact that German is known to be pretty complicated to learn, especially when English is your mother tongue.
I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.
Actually, JFK had a quite remarkable pronounciation. He could not entirely conceal his American accent, but managed to get his tongue round very well. However, the crowd reacted with such enthusiasm because two years before JFK's speech, the East Germans had started constructing the Berlin Wall isolating West Berlin. And at this climax of the Cold War, an American president declaring his solidarity in such an emotional way was something West Berliners were really pining after.
Do you actually know that Microsoft doesn't? At least product activation and update services have to "phone home" regularly, and you can't tell what information is being transmitted. So if Canonical uses a piece of software that
everyone is able turn off easily,
works in a transparent way so that every user can acutally view the collected data if (s)he wants to,
does not only come in binary form,
does not collect personal data or personal data can be excluded easily
why should we all expect a major uproar?
Anyway, given these prequesites, I'd voluntary install this piece of software. But this would mean a tough job. I know many Ubuntu-users who associate "transparency" with a userfriendly gui, whereas most of the experienced users would prefer a CLI. Therefore the application should be completely manageable through the console as well as through a GUI. The display of the collected and transmitted data has to be accessable both ways, too. Microsoft does - on the other hand - not have applications to manage product activation and updates which comply with the mentionned criteria. So - once again - I believe that it would cause a greater buzz if MS did this.
Interesting. Why should a student deliver a file in some MS Office-format? Our students have to deliver their diploma thesis on a disk/cd together with a printed version. This is because the faculty employs some software solution to track down plagiarism. But nobody is told to give us DOC-files, as PDF (or even plain text) is absolutely sufficient. I could not figure out a single reason why one should want to have a DOC-file apart from the desire to copy/paste usable paragraphs!
Well, I also considered that. But in my experience, StarOffice has never really moved away from its niche. It was heavily promoted by a large number of magazines and put on CDs in the pre-broadband area. During my time at a big German university, I met only one person using StarOffice... it was my girlfriend who switched after MS Word had fried her diploma thesis. Oddly enough, after being bought by sun, the number of OpenOffice-users among my co-students rose sharply. Most of these new users don't even known the ancestry of their new tool up to now. My colleagues here at the chair of production economics (I work for a different university now) mostly used OpenOffice for the first time, when I installed it onto every single PC we have. Most of these colleagues ignored it until some of us used it to produce our new textbook (900 pages of text, hundreds of figures and tables, thousands of formulas) without a single crash. It surely impressed them but sadly not enough to switch... I am still the only one using it for writing my thesis....
Well, at least the intended mechanism will make sure that people notice that their PC is abused. Furthermore, it imposes pressure on people to care about some basic security measures. I think, many of them will soon take care - in whatever way. But if they refuse to realize that their data is in trouble and that they are (passively) involved in online crimes, why not shut down their net access? Someone who does not exactly know what to do will know the shop where (s)he bought the equipment or even a local shop that offers paid support - there is no excuse in that case.
I've made some similar experience on my own some years ago while living on campus connected to a network of about 1,000 machines. The admins enforced a "three strikes" directive: if someone's machine was spreading viruses via internet access or via FTP/SMB shares or misbehaved in other ways (disturbing the DHCP and break-in attempts on internal servers, mainly), (s)he got a notice in her/his (real life!) post box to stop misbehaving/to fix the computer. As I recall, the note contained a paragraph offering help in case people weren't able to cope with the problem themselves. They only had to block less that 10 Machines during the time I lived there (4 years, approx.), as people really reacted quickly and we could even observe a (small) learning curve because new inhabitants mostly were briefed by their neighbours shortly after they had moved in.
So: Go ahead, Aussie ISPs! That's definitely the way to go - and to further sysadmin appreciation, but that's a different piece of.....
Essentially you're saying that a German citizen can only freely express themselves in a way the government deems appropriate.
I think you miss the essential point here: Germany was fortunately liberated in 1944/45 by the Allies. The Allies enforced the process of Denazification, which envolved several actions, first and foremost the removal of Nazi symbolism of official buildings, renaming of streets and places which the Nazis had given names of their own (mostly Hitler's). The Allies were keen to prevent any uprising of Nazi terror once and for all. So, since 1949, the year when both German states were founded, the Germans (in the West as well as in the East) decided to make it a prime directive of their policy to keep fascism down. So, your freedom of speech in Germany is protected by the state, as long as you do not praise Nazism or deny the existence of the Holocaust. That's it. And the reason is not censorship as such, but a very special, mostly German and Austrian, responsibility to keep a promise that was given after 1945: not to let facism rise a again on German soil.
From what I can tell Germany's general legislation seems to be more of a "Think of the children!" rather then focused on liberty.
The fact that children aren't allowed to buy/consume things that adults may, is a quite different discussion. For example, people under 18 aren't allowed to consume pornography as well as hard alcoholic beverages (beer is allowed for everyone under 17, hey they're the Germans:-) ). I think, you would call it a violation of the freedom of speech, when your six-year old is kept from buying a bunch of sex-magazines on his way home from school.
Nazi symbolism is forbidden for any German, regardless of age, sex, profession, belief, etc. It may only depicted for educational reasons (museums or historic textbooks, as far as I know). The spreading of "Mein Kampf", Hitler's first book, is for example not forbidden by the state, but of the current copyright holder.
By the way: Have you ever been Germany or Europe, at least?
I've said it once and I'll say it again: Germany is not a free country.
Alright. Let's have a look at the German constitution (Grundgesetz, basic law, they call it).
I retrieved an official English translation for it via Wikipedia, quote:
(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be
the duty of all state authority.
(2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable
human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice
in the world.
(3) The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive and
the judiciary as directly applicable law.
As every governmental decision has to obey to this fundamental rule, why should Germany not be "a free country"?
What you say about Nazis is in fact not true. It's quite the opposite: If you spread Nazi ideology you may soon face some time in jail, but not if you protest against neo-Nazism. The censorship of videogames is mainly related to a certain law which forbids to show Nazi-symbols, like the swastika. So, if you want to sell a game there, leave them out, and it can be sold. How could law differentiate between videogames and propaganda posters and allow video games to show those symbols while keeping neo-Nazi propaganda from doing so?
I'd say you depict Germany in a really distorted way. Deducting non-freedom from special Nazi-related laws is a little far fetched, imho.
As far as I remember, Nintendo has been trying to build up the corporate image of a "family friendly" entertainment company. The elderly people on slashdot might remember the ridiculous censorship that Nintendo forced on "Maniac Mansion" before they backed its release for the NES (link: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html). Nintendo financially relies on embracing new target audiences for their products to evade direct competition with Sony and Microsoft. Just recall the introduction of the Gameboy, which was technically inferior to its main competitor, the Atari Lynx or think of the WII, which shares most of its components with the not-quite-new Gamecube. Directly targeting the same audiences like Sony or Microsoft got Nintendo in trouble really soon. So, as long as Nintendo does not make an U-turn in its sales strategy it is therefore very likely that "mature" content will be nothing more than a niche that they accept but don't actively promote.
To make sure that you can use your computer for online banking without any data being read/written from/onto your harddrive, you might check out "Bankix" from Germany-based "Heise Online" (of H-online.com fame). They modified an Ubuntu-Live CD to keep the system from accessing the hard-disk using a modified kernel. Heres the original description (in German, of course). Follow this link, if you prefer a robot-translated English version.
the German cliché you mention might be true on one hand, but on the other, there are other reasons for the customers to relax and wait for further things to happen. German laws are somewhat consumer-friendly, so that Hans and Franz who eventually got digitally bankrobbed can be sure to get every single Euro back to their bank account - even if they take notice of this fraud after weeks.
By the way, this shows a not-so-famous German cliché: Germans expect governmental protection in many ways and rely on it.
You might have noticed that the European Union has suffered a noticable number of cases in which criminals manipulated ATMs to get access to both debit card data and the customers' security codes (so called "skimming"-fraud). As far as I have read about thoses cases, the banks have been balancing out every loss on their customers' accounts - even without any legal pressure to do so.
Maybe it is quite comforting to live here, in the Old World -- at least for my dear Euros:-)
This 1970s sci-fi movie immediately came to my mind: Phase IV. In this movie, some scientist study ants which collaborate to spread in a desert-like area and also start to sabotage the science-lab short-cirtuiting computers and AC.
This ist the first time, a foreign firm loses in a German court in a GPL-related case. Furthermore, the judge pointed out that it is not sufficient to offer the related sources only on the internet and mention this in a rather general way in the product manual.
If you run many windows-applications under linux via wine, the (windows-)virus threat surely matters. As you usually don't launch wine as root, $malware will only have limited system access, but write access for a wine-run virus on/home/$user can a real pain in the ass:-)
"This is Greg Burdette, DNN, live from the $motorway. After a couple of hydrogene cars crashed here this morning, we're lucky to have nobody seriously injured. It seems that 25 People have drowned, though."
(yeah, I know, hydrogene combustion produces not thaat amounts of water:-)
if this engine works in a similar way to those lpg- or natural gas-powered cars here in Europe, the answer is easy. Those vehicles ususally keep a small gas tank (read: for *gas*oline:-) ) to power up the engine until it reaches a minimum torque and then switch to gas/lgp-combustion. Furthermore, the gasoline tank is used as reserve-tank. In case you're running out of gas, the engine switches to gasoline.
Germany would have several percentage points removed from their gov't yearly income. I doubt that. US-troops in Germany tend to import a lot of goods from the US. Since Germany's taxes on goods like books and food are only 7%, it won't be much.
Japan would simply remove their pacifist requirements of their constitution, they'd make out the best. Why would they? This does not mean that Japan runs no armed forces. In fact they do, but only their constitution only allows them to defend Japan. It's similar in some European contries, too.
US simply need NATO-airbases and military hospitals to pursue their hegemonial strategy.
Not since the USSR split. And that's why the US use several German bases and hospitals to support their mid-east troops in Iraq. No, they don't land in Turkey or former USSR-republics.
Anyway, this is going off-topic. If you're really serious, you prove that it seems more important to the US to organize their military and political influence around the globe than to struggle that any American can get cured of common deseases while not going bankrupt.
Totally correct. We should immediately end all humanitarian foreign aid. Also all military aid, including housing our military in foreign countries like Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Japan at huge cost. Immediate withdrawal. If you did not intend this to be ironic, I'll say your statement clearly reflects my main point: the US have turned inside out when it comes to their political principles. It changed from isolation (beginning of 20th century) to an hegemonial strategy in which it is way more important to influence other state's politics than to care about the US-American people in the first place. Sad.
Furthermore, do you really think, a withdrawal of US-troops could have any persistent and remarkable impact on the European economy? You know these are hollow threats because, firstly, US have been reducing their forces in Europe for years and, secondly, US simply need NATO-airbases and military hospitals to pursue their hegemonial strategy.
I mostly agree with you, Simon. Isn't it strange that, on one hand, the US spend money on humanitarian goals to help the Third World to fight hunger and desease but, on the other hand, lots of their own people don't even have access to proper medication?
Social, tax funded, insurances for everyone to back anyone who gets unemployed, injured, seriously ill or who gets too old to work, are the prime achievements that make me feel secure here in Europe. In most aspects, European countries imitate concepts coming from the US, but when it comes to healthcare I think the US should have a close look at their friends in the Old World.
Reminds me of this popular Einstein-quotation: "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
No matter how "heavy" the nuclear explosion might have been, it's scary to think about *any* agression using non-conventional weapons.
Hm, I just found out on "World of MULE" , that someone made it possible to play the original MULE with 4 players over the internet! Sadly, "Atari MULE Online doesn't seem to run natively on Linux. Let's hope it runs with WINE...
Slashdot Mirror
I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that.
I suppose it stems from the fact that German is known to be pretty complicated to learn, especially when English is your mother tongue.
I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.
Actually, JFK had a quite remarkable pronounciation. He could not entirely conceal his American accent, but managed to get his tongue round very well. However, the crowd reacted with such enthusiasm because two years before JFK's speech, the East Germans had started constructing the Berlin Wall isolating West Berlin. And at this climax of the Cold War, an American president declaring his solidarity in such an emotional way was something West Berliners were really pining after.
why should we all expect a major uproar?
Anyway, given these prequesites, I'd voluntary install this piece of software. But this would mean a tough job. I know many Ubuntu-users who associate "transparency" with a userfriendly gui, whereas most of the experienced users would prefer a CLI. Therefore the application should be completely manageable through the console as well as through a GUI. The display of the collected and transmitted data has to be accessable both ways, too. Microsoft does - on the other hand - not have applications to manage product activation and updates which comply with the mentionned criteria. So - once again - I believe that it would cause a greater buzz if MS did this.
regards,
stirz
Hint: Grab yourself a copy of this movie and it'll become clear why the Germans are keen to protect their personal data from collection.
I recall "The Lord of the Rings" being called "unfilmable". Nevertheless, Peter Jackson was able to prove those skeptics wrong :-)
Interesting. Why should a student deliver a file in some MS Office-format? Our students have to deliver their diploma thesis on a disk/cd together with a printed version. This is because the faculty employs some software solution to track down plagiarism. But nobody is told to give us DOC-files, as PDF (or even plain text) is absolutely sufficient. I could not figure out a single reason why one should want to have a DOC-file apart from the desire to copy/paste usable paragraphs!
Well, I also considered that. But in my experience, StarOffice has never really moved away from its niche. It was heavily promoted by a large number of magazines and put on CDs in the pre-broadband area. During my time at a big German university, I met only one person using StarOffice... it was my girlfriend who switched after MS Word had fried her diploma thesis. Oddly enough, after being bought by sun, the number of OpenOffice-users among my co-students rose sharply. Most of these new users don't even known the ancestry of their new tool up to now. My colleagues here at the chair of production economics (I work for a different university now) mostly used OpenOffice for the first time, when I installed it onto every single PC we have. Most of these colleagues ignored it until some of us used it to produce our new textbook (900 pages of text, hundreds of figures and tables, thousands of formulas) without a single crash. It surely impressed them but sadly not enough to switch... I am still the only one using it for writing my thesis....
Well, at least the intended mechanism will make sure that people notice that their PC is abused. Furthermore, it imposes pressure on people to care about some basic security measures. I think, many of them will soon take care - in whatever way. But if they refuse to realize that their data is in trouble and that they are (passively) involved in online crimes, why not shut down their net access? Someone who does not exactly know what to do will know the shop where (s)he bought the equipment or even a local shop that offers paid support - there is no excuse in that case.
I've made some similar experience on my own some years ago while living on campus connected to a network of about 1,000 machines. The admins enforced a "three strikes" directive: if someone's machine was spreading viruses via internet access or via FTP/SMB shares or misbehaved in other ways (disturbing the DHCP and break-in attempts on internal servers, mainly), (s)he got a notice in her/his (real life!) post box to stop misbehaving/to fix the computer. As I recall, the note contained a paragraph offering help in case people weren't able to cope with the problem themselves. They only had to block less that 10 Machines during the time I lived there (4 years, approx.), as people really reacted quickly and we could even observe a (small) learning curve because new inhabitants mostly were briefed by their neighbours shortly after they had moved in.
So: Go ahead, Aussie ISPs! That's definitely the way to go - and to further sysadmin appreciation, but that's a different piece of.....
Essentially you're saying that a German citizen can only freely express themselves in a way the government deems appropriate.
I think you miss the essential point here: Germany was fortunately liberated in 1944/45 by the Allies. The Allies enforced the process of Denazification, which envolved several actions, first and foremost the removal of Nazi symbolism of official buildings, renaming of streets and places which the Nazis had given names of their own (mostly Hitler's). The Allies were keen to prevent any uprising of Nazi terror once and for all. So, since 1949, the year when both German states were founded, the Germans (in the West as well as in the East) decided to make it a prime directive of their policy to keep fascism down. So, your freedom of speech in Germany is protected by the state, as long as you do not praise Nazism or deny the existence of the Holocaust. That's it. And the reason is not censorship as such, but a very special, mostly German and Austrian, responsibility to keep a promise that was given after 1945: not to let facism rise a again on German soil.
From what I can tell Germany's general legislation seems to be more of a "Think of the children!" rather then focused on liberty.
The fact that children aren't allowed to buy/consume things that adults may, is a quite different discussion. For example, people under 18 aren't allowed to consume pornography as well as hard alcoholic beverages (beer is allowed for everyone under 17, hey they're the Germans :-) ). I think, you would call it a violation of the freedom of speech, when your six-year old is kept from buying a bunch of sex-magazines on his way home from school.
Nazi symbolism is forbidden for any German, regardless of age, sex, profession, belief, etc. It may only depicted for educational reasons (museums or historic textbooks, as far as I know). The spreading of "Mein Kampf", Hitler's first book, is for example not forbidden by the state, but of the current copyright holder.
By the way: Have you ever been Germany or Europe, at least?
You're not as far off the deutschmark as you think.
There, fixed that for you.
I've said it once and I'll say it again: Germany is not a free country.
Alright. Let's have a look at the German constitution (Grundgesetz, basic law, they call it). I retrieved an official English translation for it via Wikipedia, quote:
As every governmental decision has to obey to this fundamental rule, why should Germany not be "a free country"? What you say about Nazis is in fact not true. It's quite the opposite: If you spread Nazi ideology you may soon face some time in jail, but not if you protest against neo-Nazism. The censorship of videogames is mainly related to a certain law which forbids to show Nazi-symbols, like the swastika. So, if you want to sell a game there, leave them out, and it can be sold. How could law differentiate between videogames and propaganda posters and allow video games to show those symbols while keeping neo-Nazi propaganda from doing so?
I'd say you depict Germany in a really distorted way. Deducting non-freedom from special Nazi-related laws is a little far fetched, imho.
Fortunately, "The country that tried to take over the world" has ceased to exist in May 1945. So what are you talking about?
As far as I remember, Nintendo has been trying to build up the corporate image of a "family friendly" entertainment company. The elderly people on slashdot might remember the ridiculous censorship that Nintendo forced on "Maniac Mansion" before they backed its release for the NES (link: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html). Nintendo financially relies on embracing new target audiences for their products to evade direct competition with Sony and Microsoft. Just recall the introduction of the Gameboy, which was technically inferior to its main competitor, the Atari Lynx or think of the WII, which shares most of its components with the not-quite-new Gamecube. Directly targeting the same audiences like Sony or Microsoft got Nintendo in trouble really soon. So, as long as Nintendo does not make an U-turn in its sales strategy it is therefore very likely that "mature" content will be nothing more than a niche that they accept but don't actively promote.
To make sure that you can use your computer for online banking without any data being read/written from/onto your harddrive, you might check out "Bankix" from Germany-based "Heise Online" (of H-online.com fame). They modified an Ubuntu-Live CD to keep the system from accessing the hard-disk using a modified kernel. Heres the original description (in German, of course). Follow this link, if you prefer a robot-translated English version.
Hey John,
:-)
the German cliché you mention might be true on one hand, but on the other, there are other reasons for the customers to relax and wait for further things to happen. German laws are somewhat consumer-friendly, so that Hans and Franz who eventually got digitally bankrobbed can be sure to get every single Euro back to their bank account - even if they take notice of this fraud after weeks.
By the way, this shows a not-so-famous German cliché: Germans expect governmental protection in many ways and rely on it.
You might have noticed that the European Union has suffered a noticable number of cases in which criminals manipulated ATMs to get access to both debit card data and the customers' security codes (so called "skimming"-fraud). As far as I have read about thoses cases, the banks have been balancing out every loss on their customers' accounts - even without any legal pressure to do so.
Maybe it is quite comforting to live here, in the Old World -- at least for my dear Euros
Regards,
stirz
This 1970s sci-fi movie immediately came to my mind: Phase IV. In this movie, some scientist study ants which collaborate to spread in a desert-like area and also start to sabotage the science-lab short-cirtuiting computers and AC.
:-)
scary thing that those creatures really exist
He's called Harald Welte .
This ist the first time, a foreign firm loses in a German court in a GPL-related case. Furthermore, the judge pointed out that it is not sufficient to offer the related sources only on the internet and mention this in a rather general way in the product manual.
:-)
Go Harald
Regards
Stirz
If you run many windows-applications under linux via wine, the (windows-)virus threat surely matters. As you usually don't launch wine as root, $malware will only have limited system access, but write access for a wine-run virus on /home/$user can a real pain in the ass :-)
"This is Greg Burdette, DNN, live from the $motorway. After a couple of hydrogene cars crashed here this morning, we're lucky to have nobody seriously injured. It seems that 25 People have drowned, though."
:-)
(yeah, I know, hydrogene combustion produces not thaat amounts of water
Hello,
:-) ) to power up the engine until it reaches a minimum torque and then switch to gas/lgp-combustion. Furthermore, the gasoline tank is used as reserve-tank. In case you're running out of gas, the engine switches to gasoline.
if this engine works in a similar way to those lpg- or natural gas-powered cars here in Europe, the answer is easy. Those vehicles ususally keep a small gas tank (read: for *gas*oline
Greetings,
Stirz
Anyway, this is going off-topic. If you're really serious, you prove that it seems more important to the US to organize their military and political influence around the globe than to struggle that any American can get cured of common deseases while not going bankrupt.
Regards,
Stirz
Furthermore, do you really think, a withdrawal of US-troops could have any persistent and remarkable impact on the European economy? You know these are hollow threats because, firstly, US have been reducing their forces in Europe for years and, secondly, US simply need NATO-airbases and military hospitals to pursue their hegemonial strategy.
Regards,
Stirz
I mostly agree with you, Simon. Isn't it strange that, on one hand, the US spend money on humanitarian goals to help the Third World to fight hunger and desease but, on the other hand, lots of their own people don't even have access to proper medication?
Social, tax funded, insurances for everyone to back anyone who gets unemployed, injured, seriously ill or who gets too old to work, are the prime achievements that make me feel secure here in Europe. In most aspects, European countries imitate concepts coming from the US, but when it comes to healthcare I think the US should have a close look at their friends in the Old World.
Regardsstirz
(please excuse my bad English)
Reminds me of this popular Einstein-quotation: "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
No matter how "heavy" the nuclear explosion might have been, it's scary to think about *any* agression using non-conventional weapons.
Regards,
Stirz
Hm, I just found out on "World of MULE" , that someone made it possible to play the original MULE with 4 players over the internet! Sadly, "Atari MULE Online doesn't seem to run natively on Linux. Let's hope it runs with WINE...
Regards,
Stirz