WWW/LX - the Internet Solution in Your Pocket! - The manufacturer's website for the TCP/IP stack with applications for the HP 200 LX

CDU politicians want to open party to the 'right'

Oh great, instead of eliminating the cause of the phenomenon and finally pursuing a policy that offers people a meaningful perspective for their lives, the whole thing is simply opened up to the right. Even more garbage, even more populism, and even more lies. That's the politicians' answer to political disillusionment and protest votes. I never expected much intelligence from them, but that really takes the cake.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

CSU apparently wants to significantly restrict dismissal protection

And once again, an attempt is being made to smash something that doesn't suit the economy. The CSU previously spoke loudly in favor of a more social regulation of health insurance contributions and made a big fuss about how they were the much more social Union - and now they're running to the right of the CDU. Of course, those evil unions and those oh-so-lazy and useless workers. You have to get rid of them all, then the economy will boom. What a load of rubbish.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

dirtSimple.org: Using 2.4 decorators with 2.2 and 2.3 - How to use Python decorators with 2.2 and 2.3 - even though with slightly different syntax

Sniffer service warns companies when mentioned in weblogs

Oh wow, we're so important that we already have to be monitored ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

Public prosecutor demands eight years for Berlusconi

I don't think it will happen, but putting Berlusconi in jail would certainly be something

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

German Internet Prize Awarded

There are efforts to prohibit private copying, which in plain English means taking away a right. We probably can't prevent the prohibition of private copying, but we don't support this idea and are thereby constantly contributing to the fact that new business ideas cannot develop on the market. - how short the reach of these federal idiots really is.

Private copying was absolutely legal before the massive cuts of the current government. There is no effort to allow it - there are efforts to prohibit it. A previously existing right for citizens is being taken away. And the federal shredder even thinks such a chubby victory would be a success. With politicians this fucking stupid, it's no wonder that political disaffection sets in. Every reasonably intelligent citizen must feel ripped off by something like this.

At heise online news there's the original article.

The Rage of Heiner Geissler

Heiner Geisler is doing what I like about him again: shitting on the current direction of the Union and simply speaking his mind. And as has happened occasionally in recent years, I agree with him again. Even though he's certainly looking at the problem from a completely different angle - the result is the same.

Capitalism devours its children. In the past, capitalists also knew their Marx - perhaps not because they wanted to implement his ideas, but because they wanted to prevent them. But at least they thought about how they could precisely contain the errors that would lead to what Marx described as inevitable in capitalism.

Today only short-term profit and short-sighted personal enrichment count. And that combined with an unprecedented freedom of managers from responsibility. No matter how crappy a result is, managers can continue to pat themselves on the back - and in the next place they can find someone they can run into the ground.

In parallel, the influence of multinational corporations keeps growing - so large that nowadays the various business associations basically only cry for these corporations and completely overlook that with all this madness their own companies will also fall by the wayside.

How can a head of the trades association seriously advocate for economic development that will ultimately sustainably damage the domestic market? Doesn't it occur to them that craftspeople's businesses live almost exclusively off the domestic market? How is a painter or plumber supposed to sell their services if nobody has the money to pay them anymore - only large companies and administrations alone cannot ensure the survival of the trades.

Same with the association heads of retail trade - how stupid do you have to be to speak out in favor of measures that directly and immediately reduce the purchasing power of citizens as the head of such an association? How are retail chains - even large chains like Metro - supposed to make meaningful sales in Germany if only a small upper class can afford to shop (or wants to - it's not necessarily about what people can do, but what they think they can do and act accordingly)?

Ultimately, the same applies to the BDI chief and all the other straw men: if companies with German headquarters become fewer and fewer, there will soon be no need for German business associations anymore. Maybe one or two lobbying organizations remain, but why would large corporations put money into an association if only they and maybe a Japanese competitor sit in that association anyway? Do they really believe that their smaller industrial company will survive the wave of mergers and hostile takeovers?

What is currently happening is primarily, of course, fatal for the people who have to live in this system and who see the increasing dismantling of their rights and security. But that's only the beginning - with the people, the domestic market also goes under and with it the economy itself. All the babblers who today help to break apart the system with their reforms are definitively burying the German economic location. And once that's gone, Europe won't be doing well for much longer either - because other countries in Europe are going through these problems too and everywhere things are being dismantled.

The result that is emerging cannot be the goal - because we've already had a society where workers are dirt and the money bags ultimately determine everything. And in every era when we had that, we didn't like it. One would think we had finally learned something from our history...

I found the original article at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.

Free tablets for nuclear power plant residents

It's kind of strange, really. On one hand, there's always an emphasis on how safe nuclear power is and that even in the event of accidents, not much would happen. On the other hand, considerable effort is expended to contain damage in the event of a major accident - which is of course commendable in principle. But wouldn't it be time to think about how to tackle the risk at its root? In any case, the arguments of nuclear power proponents remind me strongly of tap-dancing around the issue.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Japan starts whaling operation

And they continue to tell their lie of scientific work

At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft I found the original article.

Microsoft: Internet Explorer as secure and comfortable as all other browsers

As detached from reality as this Microsoft person expresses themselves, they might as well go into politics. At least a state government, if not even the EU Commission.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Audit Office Criticizes Toll Collect

While we're on the subject of shoddy work and corruption ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Study: Fraud costs healthcare sector billions

But the solutions for the problems of the healthcare system are still just about cuts to services and increased financial burden on patients for the federal bunglers. And only when there's absolutely no other way does the health minister admit that all her talk about coming contribution reductions was just hot air and wishful thinking...

Wouldn't it be time to really clean up this system? To curb the influence of the pharmaceutical industry? To subject doctors—even against their will—to stronger quality controls? To finally place health insurance funds under independent and centralized supervision?

If really double-digit billions are really being lost through fraud and negligence—then I want to see part of it recovered, because those are far more dignified cost-saving options than what the government has put on the table so far. Yes, the doctors, the industry and the funds will complain and grumble. So what?

But knowing our government, it'll probably just come down to some voluntary self-declaration by those involved—which of course nobody feels bound by anyway and won't stick to. Just like with the training placement regulations. All lies and shoddy work.

At tagesschau.de - The News of the ARD you can find the original article.

Condor Project Homepage - Multi-system batch queue with load monitoring

Generic Functions have Landed

Generic functions with multiparameter dispatch in Python

Shibazuke Serialization - Object serialization for Python that only supports basic data types

Tanks greet protesters in America

Tank deployment at anti-war demo in the USA? Sure, the possibility that the tanks got lost and just wanted to ask for directions is certainly there. Because tanks are never equipped with radios and can never ask command for directions. And the alternative too - that they simply got stuck at a traffic light and that's why they were driving around there - sounds completely plausible. The suspicion that some trigger-happy military person or perhaps the tank crew themselves thought their appearance at an anti-war demo should clarify something to the demonstrators is probably pure paranoia.

At Warblogs:CC I found the original article.

The More Things Change...

How H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Evening Sun Foresaw Bush - Back in 1920!

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

At [/ndy's Weblog][0] you can find the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: Novell presents further evidence

And another nail in the coffin of SCO's great lawsuit?

At heise online news you can find the original article.

US federal judge stops Guantanamo tribunal

Is reason finally stirring?

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

The instruction 'Careful driving' was not given

Which raises the question for me anyway why a train 400 meters long with corresponding weight and such a nasty load (which apparently wasn't even properly declared on the train) was allowed to barrel through the area at such high speed ...

At Telepolis News (09.11.2004) you can find the original article.

iListen - does anyone have experience with it?

ASH is now selling iListen in the German version - at the proud price of 250 euros including headset. The US package costs 149 dollars including headset. Ok, so of course an adaptation to German had to be made first - with speech recognition software, that's quite significant. And that costs money and needs to be recouped, of course.

But has anyone already had experience with it? Probably not with the German version - but with the English one? I'm particularly interested in transcription of recordings - with the iPod and the small Belkin microphone I have a usable dictaphone and the PDA can also be used as one, so it would make sense to take notes by voice (it's faster than typing or writing) and then have them transcribed afterwards. But it's only useful if the software is really as good as advertised.

So how is it - has anyone perhaps already used the English version? Any comments?

Here you can find the original article.

Another new GPG key

Since I have lots of old keys floating around (2 or 3 on the PGP keyservers, 2 as well on the GPG keyservers) that are all no longer active - among other things because I haven't had those hard drives or floppy disks for a long time. So I created a new key again to complete the confusion.

But I haven't uploaded this one to the keyservers - at least not for now - only linked it in the imprint. Anyone who wants to use a previously unknown key has to contact the owner first anyway to check if it's the right, genuine key.

Let's see how long this key survives my forgetfulness until I eventually destroy it for good. On the other hand, things have changed for me: I now have backups.

(and I've backed up the key on a memory stick and carry it with me on my PDA)

Does procurement law trip up open source in administration?

Just a bunch of funny pointed hats spouting funny nonsense.

You can't really take it seriously when authorities keep requiring Windows as an operating system and dismiss Linux from the start because it supposedly doesn't work with Microsoft systems (which of course is bullshit). To me it sounds like yet another worry-wart trying to make themselves seem important at others' expense.

Well, what do you expect from a conference of a Federal Association for Digital Economy...

The original article can be found on heise online news at this link.

All (!) EU legal documents in one internet database

Keep this in mind. You might need it someday.

At netbib weblog there's the original article.

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Language detection using character trigrams - Interesting approach to language detection using trigrams

Confidential! - Confidential?

Funny what you can find on Google. I looked to see if someone had already ported Frontier to Linux. In doing so, I stumbled across the linked page where it apparently was already discussed at some point — making Frontier open source back in 2001, probably under the Apache License. The pages have something on them that says "Confidential" — with a fake red stamp. No idea if that's an internal discussion site of Userland.

There's also a download area with old source code — it still contains an NDA for access to the sources.

Google finds everything.

Here's the original article.

The Climate of Fear

How the media actively participate in 1984.

At raben.horst you can find the original article.

Debate over longer working hours continues

And so the next pig is driven through the village. Never mind that we don't hold the supposed top spot within Europe for low weekly working hours. Regardless of the fact that we're not the leaders in public holidays or vacation days. Even the Institute of the German Economy sees Germany only in 4th place - with very small gaps to places 5-10 for vacation days. And for working hours, the Hans-Böckler Foundation sees Germany only in the good middle field. The politicians arrange their world to suit them just as they need it for their purely populist and completely fact-free ideas. And when politicians repeat the nonsense often enough, eventually even the last person believes it - because someone only contradicted it somewhere and all the politicians say the same thing, so it must be true, right?

And so eventually Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, society is aging because suddenly all people will live to be 150, crime is rising out of control, nuclear power is harmless, and the SPD is a left-wing party.

At tagesschau.de - The News from ARD you can find the original article.

First Partially Privatized Prison in Germany

Corruption now 15% cheaper? Presumably, the Hessian politicians have also privatized and outsourced their brains. Well, you can't really expect sensible actions from the Koch gang anyway...

I found the original article at tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD.

Frontier Kernel - Sourceforge project for the Open Source Frontier Kernel

PyLog -- A first order logic library in Python - Prolog in Python

Zope.org - ZopeX3-3.0.0

Well, here it is, the new Zope with the new architecture. Everything new comes in November, or so. Looks quite amusing, but somehow it's also quite different from what Zope was before. However, I'm not yet sure whether I should like it or dislike it

Here you can find the original article.

Nuclear power opponent killed in accident with Castor train

Just roll right over it, garbage is more important than opponents and besides, where would we end up if we let ourselves be held back by such things

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Factor programming language

Once again something from the corner of obscure programming languages. And this time it's a Forth descendant again, but one that borrows more heavily from Lisp and functional concepts and also orients itself more toward Lisp in its system architecture. Looks quite interesting and of course speaks directly to an old Forther and Lisper like me. The author also has a weblog where he occasionally writes about his language and its implementation - currently, for example, about type inference in Factor. Here's the original article.

Media expert: Journalists rely too often on internet research

In addition, online editorial departments could respond to user interest since user access would be evaluated according to Machill. "This is a new, unprecedented form of interactivity. Until now, time-delayed feedback was only possible through letters to the editor." - ouch. I think the media expert probably hasn't seen an interactive medium up close if log file evaluations already count as special interactivity for him.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Python Object Sharing (POSH) - Pack Python Objects in Shared Memory

Which holiday could you do without?

Totensonntag can easily be dropped.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Debate over conscription reignited

When I look at the kind of people who voluntarily join the Bundeswehr, I want mandatory military service to continue. At least that way a few people with some sense end up in the organization and throw a wrench in the works - and most importantly, they get to see what kind of silly and ridiculous circus it all is. And yes, I'm speaking from experience, I did my military service at a Bundeswehr command headquarters.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

do you remember this?

Fits well with my previous article about Jesus never existed. Because we all know that only Brian was the true hero on the cross. At Pepilog - do you remember this? you can find the original article.

Healthy Kids Snacks?

Probably not new, but because the Kinder chocolate commercial got on my nerves again and I did some research - here are a few figures about so-called children's food products. Why there need to be children's food products in general - except maybe for baby porridge - was always a mystery to me anyway. But then again, I absolutely loved eating spinach as a child (and I still enjoy it with scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes)

Here's the original article.

Ohio isn't over yet.

Well, the 2004 election apparently was just as bungled in process and correctness as the 2000 election. Regardless of the fact that the majority relationships at least matched the outcome this time, it looks very much like the USA is simply accepting another election with serious flaws as being fine and nothing will change for the future. And such a country considers itself the pioneer of democracy ...

At Bill Bumgarner there's the original article.

Python Memory Management

A few interesting pieces of information about how Python manages memory and why Python processes sometimes don't want to give back memory.

Here you can find the original article.

Religion - the Tragedy of Mankind

Someone dedicated an entire website to the topic of Christianity and – with bright, screaming aesthetics – threw themselves at every contradiction they could find. Topics include the existence, or rather non-existence, of the individual person Jesus Christ, the non-existence of Nazareth, the contradictions in the accounts of places and rulers, as well as conflicts with the traditions of other (more advanced) cultures from the same period. The origins of Christianity and its roots in other religions are also described.

Pleasantly striking on the pages: each essay references sources and offers approaches to verify the statements. Verifiable sources help make pages – despite their truly terrible layout – more credible.

No, I haven't verified all the sources – I haven't even read everything, just skimmed through it. Some things I already knew from other sources appear here too, some things are missing (for example, I didn't find a reference to Zoroaster as a source of monotheism). But then again, I haven't worked through everything yet.

The often stomach-aching topic of Jewish religion and its origins (which tends to be appropriated and botched by Nazis) also appears to be fairly well presented.

What is somewhat irritating at first, however, are the somewhat sensationalist titles of the essays – they could easily be taken from tabloid newspapers. But don't worry, the essays behind them are much more sober.

Here's the original article.

Obligation to monitor emails hits the provider industry hard

Well, the chili pepper can't even get its own software working, but providers are supposed to deliver customer emails at their own expense. It's already absurd what's still going on. And the deadline is approaching.

Maybe providers should simply refuse and maintain this refusal in any corresponding lawsuits - if all the providers are sued away, perhaps politicians will eventually realize how stupid the whole thing was - because there's certainly no free surveillance of mail traffic from foreign providers for the state...

The original article is available at heise online news here.

Crystal VST Instrument - Software synthesizer for OS X and Windows

Experiences with pycrypto

I recently posted a link to pycrypto in the blogmarks - I've now used it in the Toolserver Framework for Python to add encrypted RPCs and RSA authentication. I have to say, I'm really enthusiastic about this library - you can achieve results very simply and quickly, the interfaces of the various algorithms are very sensibly designed, and it's a good collection of algorithms - including often neglected areas like proper random number generation (including access to operating system mechanisms for this purpose, on Linux, OS X, and even Windows!). So if you're planning a project with Python and cryptography, definitely check out this library. It's so simple to use that it's even suitable as a standard library for small use cases - for example, for encrypting passwords or similar purposes. Somehow remarkable, I'm now using the second project maintained by Andrew Kuchling: in the Toolserver Framework for Python, the Medusa server is included as the web server - a fast and compact web server written in Python with many interesting extension options. The original article is here.

MidiKeys - Software keyboard for OS X

Seekbot Seitentest - Tool for analyzing the search engine friendliness of a page

Speechless

Yep.

The original article can be found at kulturnation.de.