Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

SPD plans anti-spam law

As much as I would welcome the law in theory, the reality of the bill will need to be analyzed more closely - I fear that it won't really accomplish that much. Sure, German spammers will be dealt with, but the fact is that a large portion of spam comes from abroad. There's also the question of what happens with fake emails, where someone pretends an email comes from someone else - will courts be able to understand this technical complexity, or will fabricated emails soon be enough to haul someone before the judge?

Still, I really do welcome the fact that legislation here is finally addressing the nuisance of spam, especially since there are already EU-wide directives waiting for national implementation.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you can find the original article.

TP: "Matsushita is a sh...company"

Another so-called spam-fighting bunch without technical competence: Spamcop. I've been upset with them since their existence because they are completely incapable of understanding even the most basic mechanisms behind email systems and accordingly adapting their nonsensical mechanisms ...

Here's the original article.

Digital Camera Battery - Manufacturers of the most powerfull professional camera battery on the market

Digital Camera Battery - Manufacturers of the most powerfull professional camera battery on the market - Battery systems for digital cameras

DIHK Chief Advises on Production Abroad

I would advise this censored person to have their brain checked. If companies listen to this troll, soon there will be no buyers left for their overpriced cheap productions. And if German industry is sold off abroad, his position as top blowhard will very quickly become utterly superfluous. I keep asking myself when I hear such gross nonsense, what goes on in the minds of such people and who pays them to spout such rubbish.

What kind of trust in the economy is supposed to be built when production is to be relocated abroad and thousands of jobs are put at risk? And the investments of the economy - laughable, the only investments go into the pockets of major shareholders and managers. And if that's actually pointed out, these fat cats treat themselves to arrogant gestures in court.

For every mundane investment that actually goes into production facilities or similar, these people have themselves celebrated as if they had laid the golden egg. And they let themselves be pumped full of money from the federal government each time, or only do it if they're granted far-reaching concessions from state governments and municipalities. Exemption from business tax in exchange for jobs - every small business owner has to pay business tax. Every self-employed person is called to contribute. But large corporations extort their own conditions.

It's all just lies, rip-offs and fraud what's going on in the business associations and executive suites of large corporations and major banks. Trust cannot be imposed from above. And certainly one cannot demand trust-building measures from the government if one is only out to confirm all prejudices oneself.

Sure, the government is a bunch of fools stumbling around and having lost their footing in their own ideas. But still better than the other bunch who only say what the business bosses want to hear and would sell everything for a bit of power - even what still makes our society acceptable.

But one thing is certain: nobody trusts a bunch of talkers who secure their own position with million-mark salaries and networks that ensure at every failure that they can immediately jump into some big business again to mismanage it.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

The Polar Bear (1998)

Mild. Gentle in flavor.

Teufelsgrinsen

Here's the original article.

More Surveillance Desired

Owl Content

Does anyone need more proof of humanity's fundamental stupidity?

As if a surveillance state offers more citizen security. Quite the opposite. The terrorists just end up in another place: within the state apparatus. And that's exactly what's being demanded here. Total surveillance of public spaces. A standard presumption of guilt for all citizens - anyone walking around in public, using public transport, or standing in public places is fundamentally suspect from the start. When will the first person be convicted because the guardians of the public accuse them? How many hidden, invisible witnesses will soon exist for our actions in public, whose statements and claims we can no longer refute because they're invisible and uncontrollable to us?

We've already experienced attacks on private space through Schily and associates. I definitely don't feel any safer because of all this nonsense...

Brave new world. We ourselves are building our 1984...

At heise online news you'll find the original article.

Peeron: Robotics Invention System 2.0 (#3804-1)

Peeron: Robotics Invention System 2.0 (#3804-1) - Parts content list of Lego sets, here Mindstorms 2.0

Schröder: "We''re Staying the Course"

Next stop: the ground behind the cliff ...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Tuple Space

Tuple Space - Description of Tuple Spaces

Petty Criticism - Legal Incompetence - Ebay and the New EU Law

Petty Criticism - Legal Incompetence - eBay and New EU Law

Clarification of the legal situation regarding warranty and its exclusion in private sales

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UFO streaks through Martian sky

We're filling up Mars with garbage too

Here's the original article.

German Zope User Group

Deutsche Zope User Group - Solution for the Compile Problem with DCOracle2 and Python 2.3

First Open-Source License Made for Germany

A nationally adapted open source license is all well and good - but what can it really achieve? Open source is unlikely to be restricted to national borders. And Germany is only a very small part of the world. In my view, it makes much more sense to analyze the existing licenses and work directly with the license holders (such as the FSF for the GPL) to ensure that these general international licenses have full validity everywhere possible.

At most, it would make sense to develop a license addendum that can be attached to the GPL to clarify national peculiarities. Because this way, the exact opposite of the GPL problem could occur: the license is valid in Germany, but not valid outside or only restricted. And that would certainly be just as fatal...

OK, one could do dual-licensing of projects, but then it must be ensured that the licenses don't contradict each other, and that regional restriction is even possible. DFSG, for example, does not allow discrimination by location - and thus a package that is under GPL for international use but under the Bremen License for national use in Germany would potentially no longer be DFSG-compatible.

The original article can be found at heise online news (here).

Little Snitch

Little Snitch - Connection monitor for Mac OS X

placenamehere.com projects pnhtoolbar

placenamehere.com projects pnhtoolbar - Web Tools Toolbar for Firebird and Mozilla

10 out of 1350

Alright, let me fire up the iPod then and do a random selection from it. I'll filter out the audio dramas though.

  • Kate Bush, Why Should I Love You?
  • Element of Crime, Magic Journey
  • Jethro Tull, Wond'ring Aloud
  • Clannad, Wilderniss
  • Tom Waits, In The Colosseum
  • Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes
  • Jethro Tull, Alive And Well And Living In
  • Schmetterlinge, Wenn Ich Wieder Reich Bin ...
  • Madness, The Sun And The Rain
  • Tchaikovsky, Waltz Finale and Apotheosis

It fits surprisingly well with my mix, although Pink Floyd is missing - I've got pretty much all their albums on the iPod.

At das Netzbuch you can find the original article.

Classified

Classified

Verschlusssache

We must stay outside.

Being together

Togetherness

Zweisamkeit

One daffodil does not a spring make. But a whole bunch certainly does ...

Classified Matter

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Togetherness

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Apple Introduces 'Spoken Interface'

Unfortunately probably only available in English again. When will something like this finally come with usable pronunciation for German versions? A spoken interface would be interesting not only for the visually impaired.

The original article can be found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft (here).

Once more on SORBS

In P2019 I had already expressed my frustration about sorbs.net. Here now is the first bounce that came back from an email I sent: SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:XXX@YYYYYY.de: host AAAAA.BBBBB.de [111.222.333.444]: 554 Service unavailable; Client host [62.153.201.130] blocked using web.dnsbl.sorbs.net; Exploitable Server See: http://www.dnsbl.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/lookup?IP=62.153.201.130

Well folks, I can assure you of one thing: I won't go out of my way to get my emails through to someone who rejects my mail based on such an incompetent blocklist. Anyone who thinks they need to work with such a botched blocklist will just have to do without emails from me.

And no, my mail server is not exploitable. And it's not been hacked either, as those clowns at sorbs.net claim.

angry face

Amiga Inc without AmigaOS

Whenever you think the history around Amiga can't get any weirder and more confusing ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

The Alder Router

Cool!

Teufelsgrinsen

At Pepilog - Der Erlrouter you can find the original article.

Leica Digilux 2 Review. Part Two

And the test continues. This time the tester dealt with image quality. It's definitely better than with the Digilux 1. However, I still think that a camera that wants to be a Leica should be less noisy at higher ISO settings. After all, available light is one of the main application areas for Leica equipment. The troubling part is especially that the Digilux 2 delivers significantly worse results in JPG than in RAW, but in RAW it no longer has an image buffer ...

Here's the original article.

Astronomers Discover Planet 'Sedna'

Found Transpluto at Last?

At NETZEITUNG.DE Science I found the original article.

Chinese disappointed: Great Wall very small

Poor China. Nothing to see of the Great Wall of China from space. What a bother.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Freenet AG: Cease-and-desist letters instead of website blocks

What does a provider do when his reputation gets worse and worse because his service gets worse and worse? Of course. He sends cease-and-desist letters to the critics. Actually fixing the problems would be a logical and sensible approach, but you can't expect that from a provider.

At heise online news there's the original article.

GraphicConverter 5.0 delivers dozens of new features

I must definitely try out whether it now handles the old Kodak RAW format properly (the one that was still hidden in TIFFs). It would be nice if I no longer needed three different tools for simple edits and conversions...

At The Macintosh News Network there is the original article.

Suspicion of Corruption at Deutsche Bahn

Now that would be something if they could nail the rail demolition expert extraordinaire for corruption now.

The way he runs the railway, you often get the feeling that he only receives a small part of his salary from Deutsche Bahn AG...

The original article can be found at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft here.

Power shift in Spain

I'm thrilled by the election result in Spain. Not because I trust one side more than the other, but because it shows that occasionally voters might not forget every lie and every abuse after all. After all, very large parts of the Spanish population were against the Iraq War, yet Spain still took a clearly pro-USA position in it. Surely this will have been brought back to mind again through the controversy over the presumption of guilt in the Madrid attacks.

In a commentary on the radio this morning, the commentator suspected that precisely the stance of the Spanish government on the Madrid attacks, particularly its information policy and insistence on assigning blame to ETA, was likely one of the essential factors.

At Wortfeld you can find the original article.

MySQL and the Licenses

Kris from KI breaks down the licensing confusion around MySQL. Very interesting. Although I've been working with PostgreSQL for a long time and pretty much ignore MySQL. Not only because of the strange licensing stories surrounding it, but also because of its rather limited features. By the way, replication is now also available natively for PostgreSQL - the corresponding project was just released as an open source version last year (it was previously a commercial product - P1331). At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp you can find the original article.

PyProtocols

PyProtocols - Interface Declarations for Python

Vitamins against cancer: complaint filed

If vitamin supplements are really to be considered serious alternatives for cancer treatment, they should prove themselves in clinical trials. Human experiments outside reproducible experimental parameters, however, are nothing more than quackery.

You quickly see what the so much advertised remedies are really about when you look at the nice flyers on which remedies for athlete's foot, hair loss, asthma and cancer are advertised right next to each other. Very serious stuff...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Spring is on its way ...

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IsaViz Overview

IsaViz Overview - Editor for graphical RDF representations with GraphViz integration

Is it spring now, or what?

Is jetzt Frühling, oder was?

Is jetzt Frühling, oder was?

Ok, not very impressive. But at least something like spring. You know, with bursts of big green things and stuff ...

Unrest in Union after Köhler remarks

Lacking neutrality? People, a presidential candidate who speaks out openly and directly in favor of a coalition government before the presidential election and even titles it hopefully a union chancellor, doesn't have a lack of neutrality, they have no neutrality at all. But what else would you expect from Kohl's lapdog ... At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Vino' wins another as Jaksche wraps up Paris-Nice

Jörg Jaksche wins Paris-Nice. And on the podium stands Bobby Julich, another CSC rider. Well that gives Bjarne Riis' team reason for hope!

At VeloNews: The Journal of Competitive Cycling you can find the original article.

Flights to the USA only as a transparent passenger

Because consuming couscous indicates you're a terrorist. Especially if the sum of your credit card digits adds up to 7.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find den Originalartikel.

myelin: Feed Normalizer

If you have problems reading Atom feeds or broken RSS feeds, you can try Phil Pearson's Feed Normalizer. It can read quite a lot and produces clean RSS 2.0 from it. A very nice tool for a good purpose, especially after that silly solo venture by blogger.com (now at Google).

Here is the original article.

Frenchwoman becomes Georgia's Foreign Minister

And everyone got worked up just because the chancellor had himself represented by the French president in a vote.

You can find the original article at tagesschau online here.

SPD loses approval in NRW

Yeah, great. Mess the whole thing up even more so that we get the Union shark as PM in the next election and NRW gets really run into the ground first.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Goal Reached

People die. Because terrorists kill them. That is horrible, dreadful. Beyond what one can describe. But what is the reaction to it in our society? The path that has been emerging worldwide since the attacks in the USA will certainly be driven further by the attacks in Spain.

Terrorists kill people for their goals - they exercise terror, which is why they are called that. Regardless of how one views their goals, there is a motivation behind the terrorists' actions, something they aim to achieve, something they want to change. We may not like the changes, we certainly don't like the methods. But nonetheless, that is what distinguishes the terrorist from the rampager: the terrorist has some goal in mind - however absurd it may be - with which to justify their actions. But instead of engaging with these problems, politics relies on repression and the dismantling of democracy and the rule of law. Does it really help if entire population groups are suspected preemptively? If anyone who doesn't conform to the norm is immediately viewed as evil or bad? Put under surveillance, wiretapped, recorded, catalogued and numbered? Sure, now come the sayings from the eternal followers who have nothing to hide. Which means that anyone who opposes it obviously has something to hide. And is immediately suspect. Or a sympathizer. Or both. What will come of this? The terrorists will not win. They cannot win - their behavior is not even designed to win, it is only designed to destroy. The original goals that once existed are buried under a mountain of violence. Even if they actually gained more power, their behavior alone would generate so much rejection that reactions would only become more intense. A spiral without end, or rather one with an end that nobody wants to experience.

Does society win? No. Someone who doesn't dare go out on the street for fear of being run over cannot win. He has already lost without ever having fought. And that is how our society behaves: panic takes over, the foundations of our lives are dismantled. Willingly dismantled! Does this make us safer? No. This is only the illusion of security. Every system has its terrorists. If a system becomes repressive enough, the terrorists end up sitting in the government instead...

Do the politicians win? Certainly in the short term. They will certainly gain votes in the first elections if they beat the security drum hard enough. But at what price?

Those who will be pleased are the reactionaries, those who cry out for the strong arm. Those who feign security to gain their own piece of power. Those who volunteer for every position that gives them any influence, because then they are something better. The block wardens. The camp commandants. The small fascists who are just waiting for an opportunity to show others what they can do - because they think they can order the world. All nice and orderly. In rows and columns. Without thinking. And without being even remotely different.

And that is what is truly terrible: all the victims of terrorism, the dead, the wounded. All for nothing. Neither to the benefit of society nor to the benefit of the terrorists. Simply dead.

Already the first vultures are crying out for more controls, more power for the state, fewer rights for citizens. Of course all in the name of security. None of these loudmouths even think once about the people who died - only the number counts, the persons and fates are unimportant. Much more important is to push through their own interests. Now is the time. The dead in Madrid are just as unimportant to these people as those in New York - they are merely arguments.

It's a good time to kill democracy.

The original article can be found at J-O-S-H DOT NET here.

11.03 - 18:17: Imprint

OK, so that's probably the end of positive court rulings again. Here a judge has once again demonstrated real intelligence.

I found the original article at ab::gebloggt.

A Busy Developers Guide to WSDL 1.1

A Busy Developers Guide to WSDL 1.1 - Very compact introduction to the minimal WSDL elements

Affrus 1.0

Wow. That's another one that flew past me. A graphical development environment for Perl. Really graphical, with a graphical debugger, editor, source navigation and everything that goes with it. Pretty impressive. Such a shame that I switched from Perl to Python as my primary programming language some time ago...

Oh, and after I took a quick look at the demo: I think just about everything is right there! The interface starts right up with a graphical shell where you can quickly hack Perl scripts and play around. The graphical debugger is right there attached to it too - if you're into debuggers and stepping through code and looking at variables, you'll be thrilled here.

Actually, there's only one thing I'm missing there: a browser for the Perl modules and the Perl module path and especially the Perl documentation in the modules. Ok, it has some support: if you open the context menu on a module name in a use statement, you can view the documentation in the terminal. And you can load the module into the environment. And jump to directly exported names. But the documentation is only displayed in the terminal or alternatively in the browser. Ok, that's significantly better than nothing, but somehow an integrated documentation browser would really make the whole thing perfect.

In any case, a great environment with a lot of convenience for Perl programmers. Did I mention that I wish something like this existed for Python?

Here's the original article.

Eizell-Dogma refuted

Fascinating. I found the original article at NETZEITUNG.DE Science.

Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera

Wow!

surprised face

If Epson manages to bring this to market at the right time and at an acceptable price, then Leica will have a hard time with the Digital-M. All that's missing now is some output from the device to judge the image quality. If they really do use the chip that's also in the Nikons, then the whole thing could be really interesting.

Hopefully sample images and pricing will come soon.

At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) you can find the original article.

Eudora Spyware

Eudora apparently sends the IP address of the computer in the URL for Google searches from within the mail program in the latest Windows version. This raises the question of what URL might be included if, for example, Eudora is operated behind a firewall - and suddenly internal information is sent out.

Apart from that: what's the point? The public IP address of the accessing computer is recognizable to the web server anyway. Somehow it all seems a bit strange.

Well, I was never really convinced by Eudora. The user interface is simply poor. And somehow the program always gave the impression of being half-finished. As if someone had started but lost the thread halfway through.

At Disobey Nonsense Network you can find the original article.