Archive 18.6.2005 - 28.6.2005

iTunes Podcasting not with old iPods?

It seems that PodCasting is only supported with iPods starting from the Clickwheel-iPods. Those with the old mechanical wheel don't get a firmware update, and neither do the Touchwheel-iPods. Which I honestly find quite pathetic. The Touchwheel-iPods aren't that old after all, they don't need to be phased out already.

Not that it bothers me much - I don't read most of the blogs by podcasters, I wouldn't know why I would want to listen to them - but somehow it bothers me when gadgets are retired as too old too quickly. Especially when they are high-priced items like an iPod.

Pfahl confesses

Pfahls-Prozess: The "Phantom" in Court - and indeed as the tenor. And a weak glimmer of hope on the horizon shows - that perhaps one of the most vile political smear stories will be unraveled.

Strucki apparently has damage from the stroke after all

After all, this would explain his latest idea - which I found on the Schockwellenreiter - to want to use unemployed people as training material for the Bundeswehr.

On the other hand: with this, he could then practice armed house combat and storming of civilian fortifications again. Really nicely with hand flamethrower cartridges, battering rams, fragmentation grenades ...

Hey, according to the argumentation of various politicians (if I hear this dehumanizing "fördern und fordern" already), the unemployed are anyway the last dirt, so it doesn't matter if the Bundeswehr freaks - whose gentle manners are proverbial - then nicely heat up the opponent.

Well, it is probably true: you can't be stupid enough to become a federal minister.

Entrepreneurs against software patents

Software patents: Entrepreneurs accuse Union of "electoral fraud":

Entrepreneurial initiatives from several federal states warn in an open letter (PDF) the CDU and CSU members of the European Parliament against "committing systematic electoral fraud" and "causing entrepreneurial misjudgments (...)." The Union should finally admit that it is closer to Microsoft than to the German middle class.

One trigger was SAP:

The Walldorf-based SAP AG recently placed full-page ads in EU magazines urging the proposed directive. SAP demands "patent protection (...) for innovations in IT, as created by SAP (...)." However, these innovations lie exclusively in the software sector. SAP software is used for accounting, order processing, and financial reporting. The SAP ad mentions the term "business processes" (between companies and within) three times.

Of course, the Justice Ministry sees this massive incompetence quite differently and still claims that pure software patents are not possible - even though reality has long since said otherwise. And so we (open-source programmers as well as medium-sized software companies) are being sacrificed on the altar of the software industry - which then politely thanks with greater job cuts and relocation of software production to countries outside the EU.

What a mess

vcXMLRPC is an XML-RPC implementation in JavaScript. Very practical for integrating JavaScript code and server code when you don't want to manually piece together every encoding/decoding. However, the project apparently stopped being developed in 2001.

Soothing Priorities

FTPWelt.com: First criminal proceedings initiated against users:

Parallel to the investigations against the users, the prosecution of the four alleged masterminds from southern Thuringia and Munich is being prepared, Germerodt announced.

Exactly. Before nailing down the masterminds, one first goes after the much more lucrative end users. Reassuring that in Germany too the focus is always on the petty criminals (if such a term is even permissible for FTPWelt users) and not so much on the masterminds ...

Cultureless State Parliament?

Culture Committee in the State Parliament abolished?:

If this were the case, cultural policy in NRW would only be in the hands of the state government, criticizes the German Cultural Council. Because: The committees in the state parliament have the task of parliamentary accompanying and controlling the work of the government. Thus, cultural policy is actually democratically legitimized in the cultural committee, its abolition would cause considerable damage to this legitimacy, according to the Cultural Council.

Well, with such culturally barren barbarians in the state government, it is by no means surprising that culture no longer gets an appropriate place ...

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Hubble spies lord of the stellar rings

Hubble spies lord of the stellar rings - Saurons Auge guckt aus dem Weltraum auf uns. Und nur aus einer Entfernung von 25 Lichtjahren - das ist praktisch um die Ecke von hier. >The ring is composed of dust particles in orbit around Fomalhaut, a bright star located just 25 light years away in the constellation Pisces Austalis – or the Southern Fish. A recent image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope - which makes the system look uncannily like the Great Eye of Sauron from the blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy - confirms that Fomalhaut’s ring is curiously offset with respect to the star. Interessanter als das eigentliche Aussehen (wobei das wieder mal ein Beweis für die Notwendigkeit des Weiterbetriebs des Hubble Teleskops für mich ist) ist natürlich der vermutete Grund für das Aussehen: der Stern könnte ein Solarsystem ähnlich dem unseren haben. Also mehrere Planten in unterschiedlichen Entfernungen - möglicherweise sogar relativ kleine Planeten.

Strange Court Decisions Are International

Supreme Court rules against P2P, Apple to benefit?:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of studios and record labels, saying that peer-to-peer software companies should be liable for the copyright infringement of people using their products

Presumably, hammers, cars, and curtain cords will also be banned in the USA next. Oh no, that's not possible - murder isn't such a serious crime as copyright infringements ...

I would be interested to know how the court wants to maintain such a decision in the context of a network like freenet - where there is no central instance or company. But facts seem to be completely irrelevant in the entire copyright discussion around the film and music industry anyway.

PEP 342 -- Coroutines via Enhanced Generators

PEP 342 describes simple coroutines for Python. Coroutines are essentially mini-threads with manual control - you can freeze code in the middle and restart it with a new defined value. Thus, coroutines provide the first step towards primitive continuations - the only thing missing would be the ability to copy a coroutine.

Philip J. Eby writes about the implementation of this PEP - which, by the way, is based on Python's generators and iterators.

Come on, folks, finally ensure that generators are copyable and it's done.

Satellite photo of Münster

Google Maps are really quite funny - even if the images are sometimes unfortunately a bit thin in resolution. Here is the satellite image of Münster. The long blue blob is the Aasee - an artificial reservoir of the Münsteraner Aa created by Hermann Landois. The strange green ring in the city is the Promenade - a remnant of the old city fortifications and one of the main traffic routes for cyclists in Münster. The green outgrowth on the ring to the left, above the Aasee, is the Schlosspark. The blue strip from top to bottom in the right area of the image is the Dortmund-Ems Canal - the widening in the upper area is the lock system and the branch to the left into the city is the Stadthafen.

And as usual, I realize that a) I take too few photos of Münster and its surroundings and b) Wikipedia contains impressively many things.

Scatman Eddy as an outsider - we are lost.

Off he goes, data protection

Because the interior ministers want to store connection data for one year. And the demands are very far-reaching:

The interior ministers' conference, meeting under the motto "Mit Sicherheit was los" (With certainty something is going on), expressed its support at its meeting on Friday in Stuttgart for a minimum twelve-month retention of telephone and internet data by telecommunications providers. The security experts, who consider this measure, which deeply encroaches on fundamental rights, particularly necessary in cyberspace.

The fact that this data desert violates data protection regulations and has so far always been rejected by the Bundestag is completely irrelevant to the interior ministers. And Schily already has concrete plans on how to circumvent this hurdle:

The SPD politician referred in Stuttgart to the plans for the blanket surveillance of users, which the national government representatives in Brussels are currently pushing forward via the EU Council, disregarding the EU Parliament. This involves obliging providers to retain all connection and location data for months and years, which arise during the provision of services such as telephoning, emailing, SMS sending, surfing, chatting or file sharing.

A very simple solution - let's use the undemocratic EU decisions, where a government can decide without the Bundestag. The federal government has already set an example with software patents. And then one can subsequently refer to the fact that one is merely implementing EU law. It may have nothing to do with democracy, but who cares. Democracy doesn't interest Otto Orwell and his colleagues anymore anyway.

Also nice to see how the interior ministers deal with the - justified - criticism:

Concerns from civil rights activists that the retention of data would mean that all electronic communication of people is monitored and that users are placed under a disproportionate general suspicion were dismissed by Rech. In his opinion, the term "glass citizen" is "overused".

If necessary, the data protection officers will simply be gagged, as Otto Orwell has already tried to do. The fact that the economy is massively against it because it will cause disproportionately high costs is also irrelevant to them. Absurd decisions in the name of alleged security and alleged malice of the internet have even stood up in court - as can be seen from the absurd blocking orders of the Düsseldorf government presidency. Fortunately, one is still allowed to report on it, as a court has recently ruled. For now. Otto will surely come up with something ...

The network must "not degenerate into a lawless space," explained Rech, referring to the often expressed fear of security politicians about allegedly unregulated online areas.

Sorry, but if the interior ministers' efforts succeed, the internet is a lawless space. Free from the right to informational self-determination. Free from data protection. Free from proportionality of means.

For me, one thing follows quite clearly: the focus on the user-friendliness of projects like gnupg, tor and mixmaster must be significantly increased on the client side, so that we have a chance at all to protect ourselves from this data collection mania of the interior ministers. Unless one wants to find one's own movement profile on the internet publicly available for download at some point or explain to the nice gentleman from the domestic intelligence service why one was on the left-wing radical website ...

John Cleese speaking

To The Citizens Of The United States Of America:

In light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy.

Read. Really.

Introduced at LinuxTag: a image viewer for the blind - way cool!

LiveSearch with WordPress works

I just took a look at LiveSearch and played around with it a bit. It can be integrated into WordPress with some hacking. If you now enter a term in the search form on the right, a list of search results will appear after a short delay - specifically the titles of the posts. This uses the normal WordPress search, so these are the same results you would get if you simply pressed Enter - just faster thanks to Ajax and as a direct inline list. Fun stuff. Should work with current IEs, Mozilla derivatives, and current Safaris.

However, strangely enough, the cursor keys for moving through the search results don't work for me, even though the code seems identical to the BitFlux page. Somehow it doesn't find the first line or something - very strange. But that part doesn't really interest me, so it doesn't bother me if it doesn't work.

Hmm. Safari works flawlessly, but my Firefox under OS X doesn't seem to work. Very strange. To be precise, it works with Firefox only after I delete a character with Backspace or press Space once. After that, it runs smoothly. Can someone explain this to me? Strangely enough, the cursor key navigation in the search results works with Firefox - if you have a list of results...

Update: strangely enough, the cursor key navigation now works in Safari. Something here is very strange ...

Microsoft and RSS

Well, Microsoft is jumping on the RSS bandwagon and what do they do? Of course, they create an extension that will likely cause problems with many parsers: Simple List Extensions Specification.

Where the problems might lie? Well, Phil Ringnalda has described it quite well. And when I look at the above format description from Microsoft, I'm not really clear why they need this extension at all ...

Safari and the Rabenhorst

Does anyone know why Safari on Tiger is saying goodbye to Rabenhorst? And if someone knows, can they tell Kai so he can fix it and I don't have to rewrite an article every time because I wanted to check something with him again?

The strange thing: when I turn off JavaScript with PithHelmet on his site, nothing happens. But his site has no JavaScript - only the Jabber status (which, by the way, is displayed extremely large without JavaScript activation) is embedded via an OBJECT tag instead of an img tag. Could it be the OBJECT tag for PNGs that sends Safari to the Orkus?

Ah, yes, after a bit of digging, it seems to be the case. Go to this page and you will have the same problem - Safari crashes. Apparently, the OBJECT tag is used to display PNGs on older IEs as well - the same PNG is referenced via an OBJECT tag and an included IMG tag. Unfortunately, this leads to crashes with Safari 2.0.

Why disabling JavaScript (not disabling plugins, which one would rather suspect with the OBJECT tag!) leads to Safari not crashing and the PNG being displayed incorrectly (too large), I honestly don't quite understand ...

Oh, and the bug with object tags seems to have existed for a long time - the oldest reports I found in Google are from 2003. It would be nice if Apple would actually fix the bug. Or someone else, since the source is now available.

By the way, OmniWeb - although it also relies on the WebCore framework - does not have this problem. It would have been too easy ...

Update: the culprit has been found. It was the WebDevAdditions for Safari - I simply installed the current b11 and everything works normally again.

Merkel muzzle

Merkel imposes gag order on Union regarding VAT increase:

CDU leader Angela Merkel has reportedly imposed a gag order on her party and faction regarding the topic of VAT increases.

Of course not because the Union does not want to implement a VAT increase - but because voters should not be given the idea that they are firmly planning a VAT increase and then possibly vote for other parties.

The frightening thing about so much stupidity in the strategy? It will probably work with the German voter ...

Environmentalists criticize the Whaling Commission

Those who believed that the meeting of the Whaling Commission was a success for animal rights activists will be proven wrong:

Japan announced that it will double the quota for scientific whaling to more than a thousand whales. In the future, not only minke whales but also endangered fin and humpback whales will be hunted. Homes describes this as a "catastrophe for species conservation."

Under the guise of alleged science, the madness will continue - regardless of whether there will eventually be no more humpback or fin whales left. The threats to small whales will also not decrease in the future - because changes in fishing will not be discussed. Regardless of whether thousands of small whales die in the process.

And of course, all of this is again only for commercial purposes. Even Norway - which certainly has its own whaling history - kills whales mainly to sell them to Japan, where there is more money to be made ...

WebObjects 5.3 and Linux?

Apple releases WebObjects 5.3 Update:

Deploys to virtually any J2EE server or the WebObjects J2SE application server

Who hosted the first WebObjects application under Linux on an OpenSource J2EE server?

CardSystems Exposes 40 Million Identities

Bruce Schneier with some thoughts and possible demands regarding the recent security debacle at a large American credit card authorizer. Apparently, the data should not have been on their system at all - due to the high demands that credit card companies (at least in the documents) place on authorizers, Card Systems should actually be out with Mastercard and Visacard.

Women are still underrepresented in the US IT industry - blogged for Jutta.

Microsoft's Omnipotence Fantasies

Microsoft will enforce Sender ID:

Now Microsoft apparently wants to enforce the system on its own, because soon all emails to Hotmail users that do not come with Sender ID will be visibly marked for Hotmail users and thus labeled as potential spam.

Great. Very big strategy. The working group was dissolved because no agreement could be reached because the patent situation with Sender ID was not resolved by Microsoft - and now Microsoft simply wants to enforce it again.

But I think that in this case Microsoft is cutting into its own flesh: there have long been significantly better webmail services that also play significantly better in the network community. Hotmail has long since lost the importance it once had before being sold to Microsoft. Therefore, my prognosis is that not many people will be particularly impressed by this step. The victims are the Hotmail users and possibly their correspondents, who are stuck with an even inferior mail service anyway ...

OXlook - Open-XChange connects to Outlook - blogged for the company. Don't ask ...

Search engines are not liable for stored thumbnails

No damages for image display in search engine thumbnails - which even received a sensible reasoning from the court, as the thumbnails are only temporarily stored for processing search queries. Although the reasoning is so logical that one almost expects the whole thing to be overturned on appeal and the Hamburg variant (search engines may only use images with consent - which would de facto make image search engines impossible, at least on the scale that would be useful) to prevail ...

I generally consider USB sticks to be unnecessary and silly. But the SwissBit Victorinox retroALOX 1GB has a high "must-have" factor.

The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923

I am neither the first nor the most original person to write about Franz Kafka blogged. But no matter how late I jump on the bandwagon, this is a blog that you really should read. And even a Megawattworm couldn't find anything to criticize about its intelligence.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Smalltalk Compiler is an older but still good description of the compiler classes in Smalltalk-80 derivatives like VisualWorks Smalltalk and Squeak.

About Moleskines ...

... writes Astrid Paprotta - lovely.

I admit that I also use Moleskines - the Red-Black ones are also quite nice, but they are too thick for me. Although the Moleskine could also be one or two centimeters smaller. They can also be used well with a ballpoint pen ...

Hypocritical Phonies

State Secretary sees potential for improvements in software patent directive - while her boss lobbies for the Council's proposal in the European Parliament. Of course, they are so well informed by software patent opponents - as we could see how the government implemented the Bundestag's request ...

Webspammer with new tricks?

It seems like web spammers are learning a few new tricks. In any case, I stumbled upon links to myself that come from a WordPress blog consisting only of wild HTML snippets that seem to have been created due to searches for "house" - and then in the blogroll of the blog are various typical junk sites. So it could be that spammers are now building pseudo-sites with links and content that are supposed to flood the search indexes of systems like Technorati or the ping services.

Oh, and the Texas-Holdem guys have also learned a few new tricks - the URLs now have more changing server names and file names so that normal keyword filters no longer work quite as well and I am more often presented with spam for moderation - for a long time the stuff went directly into the trash because the guys were really too stupid ...

Annoying bunch.

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Final is out

NeoOffice/J is indeed a software monster - but so are all other office packages (at least those with a correspondingly large range of functions). And unlike the others, NeoOffice/J is not only free beer but also free speech. So go and download, so that Microsoft gets another kick in the ass.

Nostalgia-Surfing

Softlanding Linux System was the first Linux distribution I used. I had it copied onto 5 1/4" floppies from an acquaintance through the university. Slackware - which emerged from it - I naturally only smiled at and ignored as a high-tech user, as it still used the outdated a.out executable format. I switched quite early to Debian (still a 0.9 version) - but I have been consistently loyal to it only since version 1.2.

On my desktop computers, all kinds of systems - and unfortunately far too many PC systems among them, as I didn't have my Mac from the beginning. So I struggled with OS/2, various Windows versions, and again and again DOS with all kinds of multitasking add-ons (Desqview was cool).

Exotics also got a chance: with the Mac, I also tried BeOS for quite a while - but the software offering was too boring for me. And on the PC, the weirdest thing was a stripped-down Windows 3.1 of mine that served as a bootloader for ObjectWorks (which merged into Visual Works) and then managed my system in Smalltalk - but it wasn't a solution either due to the system break.

Linux on the desktop? I'd rather not. At the company for a while, at home also from time to time (also on a Mac), but somehow it never really clicked. Too spoiled by the Mac, I think. Although it's strange - because especially for Linux there are the most programming language implementations, and programming in exotic languages has remained my favorite game genre to this day ...

Servers? Since Debian, only Linux. 9 years now. Although in times of Apache+stuff, it has almost become irrelevant what runs underneath. It's also strange how we have achieved the holy grail of programming - fully portable software that doesn't care about operating systems. Completely without Java, by the way. The new desktop is the web browser anyway.

In my professional career, there are also things like MVS system programming in Assembler and longer years of Cobol slavery. But I'll spare us the links ...

Apple sued over iTunes interface

Patent madness this time against Apple:

These areas include iTunes' menu selection process, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by genre, artist and album.

Translated: the guy claims to have patents on how to select menus in iTunes, copying music files to a portable player, and sorting music tracks by genre, artist, and album. Great. Very high level of creativity.

Of course, patent supporters will now have plenty of reasons why this would not be possible in Europe. And they will refer such nonsense as the one above to the realm of fantasy until the cases are actually tried in European courts.

It's amusing when a company that likes to wield the lawsuit club against copied interfaces finds itself on the receiving end of such a lawsuit club. But the matter itself is concerning - what is being done with patents today has nothing to do with the original intention - protecting the inventor from exploitation by powerful companies.

The Horror of Sony DRM

Who wants to know what Sony's digital rights management really means for a Windows user: Michael Amor Righi describes the joys he had with a CD and the DRM software, especially the removal of the latter ...

Found at zenzizenzizenzic

The State Sees Everything

A note on the culture blog about a FAZ article on the tax identification number and the central register of the entire federal population based on it. Yes, everyone gets the tax identification number - even newborns. Comment from the culture blog:

The Federal Republic of Germany as a state is well on its way to generally suspecting and criminalizing every citizen, and those who carry out these measures are making themselves complicit in this development. 1984, Brave New World, and Globalia are calling.

Found via Zenzizenzizenzic

Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress

Who wants to participate in Google's latest toy, there is a WordPress plugin for it. I myself have not yet quite decided who actually benefits more from the sitemaps - the site admins or Google. I guess it's - similar to rel="nofollow" - rather in Google's favor.

del.icio.us mal Wiki = Code Snippets

Code Snippets is a system where you can insert small code snippets and assign tags to them. So really something like a wiki for source code with tags. You can quickly group by tag combinations and then see all the snippets for this topic. And of course, you can easily add your own snippets. Could be very interesting with a bit more content - so to speak, living cookbook books.

The Basic Rights Report 2005

shows how we are maneuvered around the Basic Law via back channels to gradually undermine our fundamental rights. Technical feasibility and data greed lead to an ever-increasing undermining of the framework set by the Basic Law. The Federal Constitutional Court thereby becomes a purely theoretical finger-pointer - because as we now know, even a ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court is not reason enough for the state apparatus to curb its desires.

MEP overturns software patents

After all, the EU deputies are swinging into line with the EU Council. That's what people like the concentrated incompetence of the German government - some call her the Federal Minister of Justice - imagine democracy to be. There was a clear vote of the European Parliament. There was a unanimous resolution of the Bundestag factions. There were clear protests and clear warnings from experts. And who will win in the end? The lobbyists.

If that's what democracy is supposed to be, then I'm Heinzelmann. And then the prolethicians in Berlin are surprised when the citizens reject the EU constitution - which would have given such mummery a constitutional cloak.

On the altar of monopolization, these idiots sacrifice the medium-sized software industry and open source. Just to crawl up to some slimy lobbyists - for which the companies they represent then diligently cut jobs, sell off parts of the company to non-European investors, and move production abroad.

Great strategy.

Should Fin and Humpback Whales Be Hunted Again?

Japan will now also hunt minke and humpback whales

Japanese whalers will now be allowed to hunt almost 900 minke whales annually in the IWC protected area of the Antarctic. After a two-year transition period, the catch quota for fin and humpback whales will be increased to 50 animals each. Both species are highly endangered. Japan justifies the increase in quotas with an alleged recovery of whale stocks.

How perverse does a society have to be when it subordinates nature to economic interests to such an extent that even endangered species are not spared. Our nature is irreplaceable - everything we destroy is gone. Never comes back. But who cares - if some idiots want to buy something, others want to make money from it. And they come up with the most absurd lies to justify it.

Even if there were a recovery of animal populations: the populations are so decimated that any recovery is urgently needed for the survival of the animals. Large whales have large territories and few calves - if the population becomes too low, the whales no longer find each other often enough for reproduction. Similar problems already exist today with blue whales.

Staats-GmbH for tax software is dissolved - just plain embarrassing the whole thing. And the money that was burned there ...

Tuition Fees in NRW

Since summer 2006:

It was a rather uncontroversial meeting two weeks ago: In just three hours, the major topic of "education" was dealt with. Result of the harmonious coalition round of CDU and FDP: The "fastest possible" introduction of tuition fees, possibly as early as summer 2006.

Ripping off can be done very quickly, and freeing up studies from the bothersome working-class children for the sons and daughters of citizens again goes even faster for bourgeois parties. Although it is an absolute audacity in NRW with its extremely high proportion of workers, but what does that matter to Zerrüttgers and his ilk. They will ruin the country faster than the SPD ever could have ...

Oooops!!

Uuuuups!!

It wasn't me. Honestly.

Crafts want to offset sick days with vacation

According to at least association president Otto Kentzler. And the shocking part: apparently, something this idiotic already exists:

According to the report, such a regulation already exists: in the Bavarian collective wage agreement for confectioners, it is already stipulated that for every five sick days, one vacation day will be deducted. However, the maximum "vacation loss" is limited to three days per year.

But what the illness (for which one is declared unfit for work by the doctor) has to do with recovery time (as vacation is defined) and how such a thing can go together is of course not explained.

Oh, and the fact that the rate of sickness is already at a record low does not interest this puppet from the trade association at all - why let oneself be impressed by facts and reality when one can instead unload one's populist nonsense ...

Cash Registers: Dispute Over the Use of the Special Contribution

During the health care reform, the employee is being robbed again:

The revenues from the additional contribution rate flow to the health insurance funds. There is no link to individual services.

This is an absolute audacity. First, they lie that the contribution rates are being lowered through the health care reform. Then, employees are asked to pay separately to secure benefits that are no longer secured. And the Minister of Health still claims that her idiotic reform is the best thing since sliced bread.

Above all, the reason why the link to the benefits for the special payments was removed from the law text in the first place is an audacity:

In the law text from autumn 2004, the two benefits were not mentioned for constitutional reasons. Background: Retirees, for example, could have sued for a special contribution for sick pay before the Constitutional Court because they cannot receive sick pay at all.

Ultimately, this turns a rather dubious maneuver to avoid lawsuits into a direct reach into the pockets of employees - because the benefits will probably be cut in the long run anyway, or they will reach in again. Of course, the whole thing could have been implemented in a legally compliant and correct manner. Or one could have come up with the idea that the equal burden on employees and employers makes sense. But the competence in the Ministry of Health probably does not suffice for that ...

In this way, employees whose salaries are high enough are literally driven out of the statutory health insurance - because nobody likes to be taken for a ride like that. And if all the high earners opt out, the health system will be even more strained and there will be even less money available.

The proletarians in Berlin couldn't care less. They are all privately insured ...

Software description from metaowl.de

Who cares what plugins I used to put together the Metaeule? Here is a first description. Basically, all parts are normally available, I just had to write a few small plugins and a bit of glue code and a few small patches myself. Already a pretty good sign for WordPress and the available plugins when you can get so far without having to do too much work yourself.

Of all places, NRW ...

WASG: Lafontaine wants to be number one in NRW - oh Menno, does the stun grenade have to be placed in NRW? I wouldn't have anything against the WASG, but sorry, Lafontaine is simply unacceptable. Too many have forgotten his actions against the unions in the 80s, too many his hollow populism. He doesn't offer solutions for NRW or the federal government - only empty slogans.

Just a question for the Mac experts

I have a strange problem: for some time now, all applications appear two or three times in the "Open with" menu. Is there any way to stop the computer from doing this nonsense? I suspect this is due to the backups - there are the same applications again on external drives, but somehow they should disappear, on my normal drive there is definitely only one Photoshop ...