Amazing. Still, Anne Will asks the right question on the Tagesthemen: why didn't the Union react earlier, when it was known how he thinks and what he means? The suspicion that it's only to limit public damage is very close at hand. Well, how Merkelnix squirmed in the interview was really amusing. Ms. Will knows her business.
I found the original article on RP-Online: Politik.
Ugh, by now almost all the features I liked about Panther have bugs in them, plus a few features I've been using since Jaguar. But they're not going to get me to update with that...
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Here someone reports how they built a web application with an Apple XServe, OpenMCL (the free version of Macintosh Common Lisp) and the Portable AllegroServe, and what it encompasses. They also used a custom-written framework for web application development with Common Lisp - I'm curious whether that will be released as well. Maybe I'll get a CLDS together someday after all. Here's the original article.
Will Armstrong accept the challenge? I don't think so. The next Tour would put him at the top of all Tour riders if he wins it, and I don't think he'll want to unnecessarily risk this opportunity.
At VeloNews: The Journal of Competitive Cycling there is the original article.
Just found at ScriptingNews: quite practical for administrators, the new feeds from Security Focus:
Great idea: you don't have children because your life planning makes children simply impossible (e.g., because of financial constraints, or because work doesn't allow for a normal relationship)? Or because your partner is past the age when she should have children (or you're past the age when you should father children) and the risk to the child would be too great? Or because you or your partner is infertile? Perhaps the blood type of you and your life partner is also incompatible, so that child and mother would be exposed to great danger? Perhaps one of you is HIV positive or affected by another serious illness that would be passed on to the newborn? Or perhaps you're gay and therefore can't have children and are classified as unsuitable for adoption because of your homosexuality? No problem, there's only basic pension, so you're screwed in old age. Beautiful new world of discrimination. When will it be demanded that such people should kill themselves in a socially acceptable manner upon retirement?
The CSU should urgently remove the extremely dishonest S in the middle of the party name.
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
An interesting interview with the former British environment minister about the effects of cultivating genetically modified plants on the environment. Michael Meacher's conclusion is by the way very negative for GM plants.
The original article can be found at Spiegel Online: Science at this link.
Cryptography bans. Great idea. Criminals will certainly all comply with them. How stupid does a politician have to be to believe something like that? Yes, I know, as stupid as some politicians on the interior committee, but how stupid is that really? Paving-stone stupid? Bread-in-puddle stupid?
Crypto bans only criminalize the perfectly sensible legal use of the technology, nothing more. What follows from this is a presumption of guilt based solely on the use of a technique - he encrypts, so he must be hiding something evil. The fact that maybe it's simply about preventing everyone from reading along (and sorry, but I wouldn't trust the agencies that could read along with deposited keys any further than I could throw them), that no longer matters when cryptography without key escrow is banned.
The state's constant demand to believe it's allowed to read everything anyway is completely divorced from reality. This whole eavesdropping mania brings nothing except a restriction of our rights and high costs.
At heise online news there's the original article.
Yep. Got back from Hamburg at 23:10, got off the train and down in the station in front of the station bookstore there's a horde of people listening intently to some guy tell stories until 0:00 because that's when the Harry Potter sale starts - they even had the food shop next door open specially. On the way home then saw a Harry Potter party at a small corner pub with witch costumes. Weird.
And I've had the 5th book lying around in the corner (the English edition) the whole time and haven't even started reading it...
At No Retreat, No Surrender there's the original article.
Not cool. Now the Python Package Index is being spammed - in this case, a financial advisor registered himself as a package on PyPI - the downside of an open architecture. Maybe it would be better if projects had to request a project key first and could only send updates with it - that would have prevented spam from the start, but would have required more work upfront since these keys would need to be manually approved for the whole thing to make sense. Let's see how PyPI tackles the problem.
I found the original article at Artima Python Buzz.
It's getting absolutely insane what SCO is demanding now. Why should IBM have to disclose all possible documents and personnel data based on nothing but wild claims without any evidence whatsoever? I can't really imagine that something like this could go through — even in the US legal system. It would be about time for IBM to come down on this with the legal hammer.
Simply buying SCO would definitely be the most boring solution to the problem anyway. I want to see SCO blood!
At heise online news there's the original article.
In the dumb department: Belkin is forcing their own customers through a firmware upgrade for their WiFi router to redirect occasionally to ad pages for a Belkin product (which can be disabled, but is enabled by default). Marketing by Idiots.
I agree that Hohmann deserves to be fired. But since when does Stoiber (CSU) decide on expulsions from the CDU? Am I confused or is it Stoiber? And what does Merkel have to say about it now?
I found the RP-Online: Politik and the original article.
Well, I have to chime in too. Of course Dirk is right when he points out a weakness in the Google system. Of course he has the free choice what he does with his blog platform - even making it available to Google spammers. But if he does that, he has to deal with the resulting backlash. And it comes.
What is Google spamming about? Not everyone may be clear on what's behind it. So here's an explanation of some phenomena related to it. Ultimately, so-called search optimizers bet on the fact that the advertised websites are linked in many places. Through linking, the ranking in Google rises. The more links, the higher. The higher the ranking, the higher the advertised website appears in Google's result list. And that's exactly what these people sell. Improvement of the position in Google search results. Search optimizers sometimes do this themselves by finding link partners for the site to be promoted. That's the positive method. It requires work, but that's what they're paid for. The result is usually small link networks between companies with complementary products - in principle a real-life form of "customers who like this product also like that product," like you know from Amazon. But there are also others that are far from positive. These other methods rely on external Google-juice (that's the jokingly used term for the base ranking of a website). The reason: if a website has a high Google ranking through linking, it can pass some of that on to pages it links to. A link from a site with high ranking is rated better than a link from a site with low ranking. Google spamming targets this.
Some search optimizers operate link farms - these are simply lots of domains and web servers without real meaningful content. Usually the pages are simply filled with words according to usage frequency (so search engines can find something). These link farms form a closed circle of sites that now has to become large enough for Google to use it for ranking. That gives the optimizer a basic ranking. Advertised sites are now linked from these link farms and pushed in ranking. Who operates like this, for example, is the Scientology Church. The disadvantage for the optimizer: it's some work and the costs are there for the many sites in the link farm. But it can be well automated. However, Google can also easily recognize it and ban it from the index!
The second approach to using external Google ranking is simple ranking parasitism. This can happen in two ways. The better known is comment spamming. Many suffer from it.
The reason for comment spamming is simply that the weblog scene through its index pages, central services, and links to each other has very high Google ranking. This means that links from weblogs to websites are highly valued by Google - the corresponding links appear multiple times through page replication and content syndication (for example, the excerpts and links at blogg.de are syndication).
We simply have with weblogs.com, various German indices, main pages of weblog communities like Antville servers, and all the regional services, with Geourl, with open syndicators (Phantom4 thingies for example) and who knows what else crawling around there - extremely fast high ranking. Many central pages simply link only to weblogs - are classified by Google through the many links as link hubs, and the linked pages inherit some of the Google-juice of the central page. Additionally, on some central pages the title links and sometimes the content of weblogs are replicated. Also, the weblogs link very strongly to each other and thus push their Google-juice up mutually.
Comment spamming relies on the fact that Google indexes the comments on many weblogs - this is especially true for weblog systems where the comments are integrated into the layout, as Moveable Type can do it, or for another example: the Schockwellenreiter's blog. My own is less of a target for comment spammers because my comments are external to the website - and are excluded from Google indexing by a robots.txt (you can also just disable traversal and leave indexing active, that should be enough). Comments on weblogs with lots of Google-juice become positive for the target websites.
Here people build on foreign Google-juice without providing their own performance (content) and therefore it is parasitism.
The same applies to what happens at blogger.de. Huh? Why are they parasiting? They have their own blogs, don't they? Yes. But these own pseudo-blogs are on a community server. The blogger.de server - if it's actively used for blogs - will build up quite a bit of Google-juice, just like it is with all Antville systems. The reason is the integration into the main index. What's only missing is a correspondingly high number of weblogs with content, preferably with high internal linking as seen on other Antville servers (many ants link to other ants), and that reflected through the main page - that produces plenty of Google-juice. Through the bloggers.
A ranking optimizer can use this well by occasionally posting on their own blogs that point to websites to be promoted. Once the blogger.de main page has good Google-juice through the bloggers themselves, it becomes interesting for them. Ultimately they're also just parasiting from the webloggers here, though not quite as directly as with comment spam - here they're more parasiting from the community than from the individual blogger.
Everyone has to decide for themselves how they handle this and what they think of such methods, but I'm of the opinion that normal, editorially maintained blogs would bring just as much for the companies to be promoted - but they would also give back content for the bloggers. Of course that's work - but it would be an honest form of search engine optimization that would also benefit from external Google-juice, but at least would integrate itself into the system with content.
The current ranking blogs on blogger.de with their nonsense content are a pure parasitic solution that I would strictly reject on hosts I operate, should they ever appear.
At Nochn Blogg. you'll find the original article.
Some background and summary of the situation surrounding Diebold voting (fraud?) machines in the USA at Indymedia. There's also a link to the emails from Diebold as a PDF. I'm also going to help with the request to mirror and make them available internationally: diebold.pdf: 3.00 MByte, last modified: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 15:42:50 GMT, file type: application/pdf
Just a lot of isolated cases. Nothing to see here. Move along.
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
A feuilleton by Michael Moore in Die Zeit. Available in full online. He also has a few quips for us: "It's as if you're turning into us, into a people that believes the rich must always get richer and everyone else should kiss their ass." Here's the original article.
Sure, it's not a big deal to put up an imprint – but what's all this cease-and-desist nonsense? If laws are now only being misused to enforce wrongdoing, then it's high time we changed the laws.
The fact that a central authority against unfair competition lends itself to such rubbish says a lot. What kind of legal understanding does it take to abuse an apparatus designed to protect economic interests to beat up on a private website? And how do they reconcile that with their own mandate: as a cross-industry association of companies and business organizations for the purpose of promoting commercial interests within the meaning of § 13 UWG throughout the federal territory? What kind of promotion of commercial interests is present in such an absurd attack? Sure, now all sorts of people will cry out: but it would be commercial for these-and-those-absurd-reasons – maybe because of banner advertising or whatever else – and then they'll immediately tell you again that the law is simply unambiguous on this and that the competition authority is in the right. So what? Screw being right! In Germany it's only about being right anymore, no matter how absurd, how ridiculous, or how stupid the occasion is. Stop to think about whether the action is even appropriate? Oh come on. Why would you, that would overload the poor little brain...
In a few billion years, Canis Major should be completely dissolved. - that should drastically lower property prices there
At Physikalische Kleinigkeiten there is the original article.
Merkel said on Wednesday evening on ZDF that the CDU leadership had left no doubt with its rebuke of Hohmann that ways of thinking like those of the MP would not be tolerated. - which is why he continues to be a faction member and remains a party member. Because of course a way of thinking changes immediately through a rebuke.
We acted decisively and announced consequences for any repetition. - well, surely that will prompt Hohmann to change his mind. He's now a very nice and friendly fellow. Sure. We all believe that.
The Union leadership has done nothing in all previous incidents involving Hohmann, and it will in fact do nothing here either. And not the next time either. No wonder - at a time when a Minister President writes a foreword to a book that propagates far-right ideological ideas, such an MP hardly stands out.
However, it irritates me that Jürgen Rüttgers actually makes a demand that I agree with - namely the one for Hohmann's expulsion. A topsy-turvy world.
I found the original article on RP-Online: Politik.
Well, of course that can be done. And I even believe in the easily - because the complete hardware abstraction is in the Darwin kernel. The system is nicely layered - everything higher up is written in Objective-C (okay, older parts from the old OS world like Appleworks certainly in C++ or C). The porting effort for OS X to Intel should really be very minimal. And I even think that within Apple there could well be a machine with Intel chips running ported OS X. The question is whether Apple would benefit from it: Apple doesn't just make money from supplying software (or an operating system among many), but also and especially from sold hardware. If Apple now switches not only the used components but also the CPU to standard parts, what kind of control or defense would Apple still have against the clones so despised by His Highness?
Because one thing is clear: an open clone market would be anything but beneficial for Apple. They need their own hardware market - and the availability of cheap alternative devices would disturb that very significantly.
At MacGuardians you can find the original article.
And so they come to light, one after another: the lies of the US government.
On RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
So we also know what our NRW tax money is being wasted on ...
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Well, I'm not sure if I'd think it was great if Google logged what I share on IRC channels. I think archives and IRC are quite at odds with each other — IRC is simply fleeting conversation, like chatting at the regular table in a pub. I wouldn't think it was so cool if someone put a tape recorder on the table at the regular table to record everything ...
At Google Weblog there's the original article.
You sit in a 3-hour meeting and what happens? Suse gets sold. Something like that.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
He's certainly right about that. The more polemical and primitive the media become, the lower the level of public discourse sinks, and that really does harm democracy. After all, democracy doesn't consist only of elected representatives, but also of the people themselves. And the more stupidly they behave, the stupider the outcome. And sensationalist articles like the fuss over Florida Rolf (the costs for which are only a fraction of those for the ridiculous Eurofighter—yet he received far more space in the tabloid press) certainly don't help with opinion formation...
An important factor in a democratic society is functioning and critical press as a counterbalance to the state apparatus. The problem is that while our press is certainly critical, some of the unreflective drivel can hardly be called functioning.
Does every society get the press it deserves?
I found the original article at RP-Online: Multimedia.
So, the General is fired because the MP read his panegyric to Frontal21 of all places. Bad move, but the reaction (firing the General) is appropriate.
But what about the MP? Still only a reprimand, a bit of admonition and finger-wagging, and the — long overdue — removal from the Interior Committee (why did such a right-wing character get on there in the first place). Instead, he's now allowed to manage nuclear power plant safety.
But when will a real consequence — faction expulsion — be drawn here? Or does he have so much support within the Union that the necessary majority for it can't be assembled? How deep is the brown swamp in the Bundestag?
To Mr. Struck: from my own experience during my Bundeswehr service, this is definitely not an isolated case, the General. Believing that is very naive, Mr. Struck.
Marine researchers are puzzled by mysterious bubbling sounds from herrings. The fish apparently deliberately release air through their anuses in bubbles. Researchers suspect that herrings communicate this way. - and evolution does have a sense of humor
I found the original article at RP-Online: Science.
Hey. For people like me who read other sites almost exclusively through the aggregator, it would have made sense to put a notice as the last post in the old RSS feed, colleague! Then you wouldn't have to wonder where the weekly dose of shockwave is staying...
(by the way, it would also be cool if the RSS feed contained complete post texts again, then you wouldn't have to click through so often to read the rest)
At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.
And at Groklaw there are now comments on SCO's actions, which I already mentioned in P1488 Here's the original article.
I must indulge my — old and slightly perverse — fondness for Forth again and post a link here to 4th — a standalone Forth compiler. Such a standalone compiler is nice, but actually completely contradicts the nature of Forth, which is actually based on an interactive system. On the other hand, however, a compiler that really produces minimal programs is quite nice. Definitely interesting for small systems. By the way, the website looks like it wants to win first prize for ugliest website of all time Here's the original article.
Great. A Union MP known for years for antisemitic remarks gets—after his latest outburst—what? Exactly. Not fired. Not ostracized. He just gets a different committee position.
At INSTANT NIRVANA you can find the original article.
It just occurs to me: exactly a year ago I published the first comment (P2) with Radio.
Do all municipalities have the same intelligence as Münster and, during their austerity measures, prefer to promote and support stupid prestige projects instead of social facilities? At tagesschau on the internet you can find the original article.
... the horror in autumn.
A new push by the American legal system to abandon any contact with reality. According to a strict interpretation of the proposed legislation, it would then be illegal to distribute any code that does not contain copy protection code approved by a central authority. Somehow we've seen something like this before with export restrictions on cryptographic products - the result was that interesting projects emerged outside the USA ...
|KK| The questions Meisner should ask himself, if he's already mounting such a high moral horse, are laid out in the Telepolis article: What healthy organism is Meisner talking about? Pedophile priests? The repressed sexuality in the Catholic Church, which gifts the urges of its dignitaries to God, but neither to women nor men? Is the archbishop talking about holy matrimony, which remains a sacrament only in the fulfillment of procreation, but not of desire? Does he mean the "housekeeper concubinages" behind the doors of the parsonage? Or should he talk about the misery of illegitimate priest's children, who are denied today and were abandoned in the times of Urban II, while their mothers were sold as slaves? - but Meisner will definitely never engage with that. Because it cannot be what must not be. The question I ask myself when I read quotes from Meisner: when verbally propagating his unspeakable disgustingness, does he actually have an erection?
At Telepolis News you can find the original article.
In the TAZ, some of the derailments by Hoh(l)mann were summarized at some point. Of course, the Union never really did anything about it. For this reason, I also view Rüttgers' calls for resignation as mere shadowboxing.
At TAZ I found the original article.
Not necessary, Ronny, really not necessary. Just stay outside. Go away. The Bundestag is already full.
At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.
Reusing historical abbreviations should be avoided, writes the IAB, or only considered after 200 years. - right. 200 years. Sure.
The short version of what Datev is saying: We have no idea about Linux, we're too lazy to inform ourselves and anyway our software is a heap of old junk that can't be properly ported anywhere because we didn't pay attention to portability during development. We are losers.
At heise online news there is the original article.
Hmm. That's a massive violation of the GPL - after all, a derived product is being kept under wraps here.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Oh yeah, the brown filth in the Hessen Union. Sometimes the master, sometimes the rabble. And then right away the double dose: communist, Jewish revolutionaries! But ugh, that's absolutely dreadful, not just Jews, but lefties too! And Marx, he was certainly the worst of them all! What a huge pile of garbage that Hohmann is spouting. Are there Hessian Union politicians with brains? I'm just asking, after Koch one doesn't really expect that anyway, but maybe a few are hiding from the public? If so: why don't they defend themselves against such nonsense?
At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.
As formulated so nicely on Groklaw: the representatives of Open Source and IBM probably wanted to first verify whether this was all just a hoax, whether SCO really made all these absurd claims. After they found their voice again, representatives from IBM, the FSF and some others are speaking up. SCO doesn't come out looking very good in the reactions...
Hmm. And then there are still problems with FileVault and you hear more frequently about difficulties with Firewire drives. Ok, it was probably a good thing that I waited, I'll probably stick to the .1 version. At heise online news you can find the original article.
And the madness continues
At Spiegel Online: Wissenschaft you can find the original article.
Do we now have to rock back and forth in our seats like Kirk and colleagues in the ion storm?
At heise online news there's the original article.
Well, folks, I guess it's true. They must really be trying to inspire IBM to buy them out. I don't see any legal hope for SCO. - yes, that's how it looks. Legal kamikaze or something like that. Although, he's not wrong about this either: As for the GPL, it's total war. - the statements that the GPL is not enforceable, that it's invalid, that it violates the US Constitution, that it eats small children and makes them fat (ok, SCO left out the last two), that could actually lead in this context to the GPL having to be defended in court for the first time. The outcome should be very interesting.
I love these subtle titles at http://dotcomtod.de/ I found the original article at dotcomtod.
That's great. An employer where I definitely don't want to work...
At heise online news there's the original article.