a place for nerds to express themselves
the register writes about a japanese man (why is it always japanese or american people who are involved into weird accidents?) who died of hamster bites. that must have been a horrible death. a friend of mine owned one of these animals ones, luckiliy it never bit me. perhaps it was one of these evil kong-fu hamsters who have been around lately?
i hope you don't get my wrong. i'm neither religious nor pro-american, i just thought the headline fits. did you recognize the ":)"? :) ok, back to todays topic. i read an interesting article in the FTD. its about how the church helps Bush to win the election through mobilizing the christians. the methods they describe remind me a lot of the ones a certain dictator used in germany, although that person didn't like religion much (iirc).
Andrew Orlowski, register bureau chief in san francisco, was holding a very interesting speech this week at an convetion in the uk in front of the "cream of the music industry" (as the register puts it). he told them how the biz has to change to profit from p2p and the like. you can read his complete speech here. although its quite long (8 pages), i suggest you to read it as it includes some nice ideas and its easy to read.
wow, i just read about something on slashdot thats still missing in my nerdave. a window which doesnt let through sunlight but gives you a nice view of the outside you wanna see! i wish i had as much flatpanels lying around as hoagy. until i win in the lottery or rob bill gates my 17" tft will be my "window" to the world. :)
strangely i read about crucial news about germany on a british newssite called theregister and not as it should be on heise.de. Deutsche Welle, the german news service which broadcasts throughout the world in many languages, has now a klingon section on their website to celebrate its 10th anniversary. they are also recommending the klingons a short holiday in germany to visit the annual oktoberfest in munich. i suppose the klingons will flee in fear after making contact with bavarians. ;)
The Guardian reports that the pioneer probes which are supposed to travel outside our solar system are hold back by some mysterious force. sounds really interesting. some speculate that there is a flaw in our understanding of gravity or in the probes electronics, whereas others think of unseen dark matter. Probably its just the plutonians playing a trick on us. :)
...or rather should be if this news is credible. ctx, some kind of firm which does surveys, found out that computers cause health problems like a damaged back, sore eyes and headaches. i recently head a health examination and the doctors said everythings fine, although i am working/living with computers for about ten years now. the people who participated in that survey must do something complety wrong. interstingly the articel didn't mention the cancer causing materials used in hardware production which cause the bad smell of "fresh" hardware. unfortunately i forgot where i read about it, else i would have given you a link.
takedown is coming to us cinemas 6 years after it was finished. when i first read the headline i thought: "another one?" the movie has already been released on france on dvd and a couple of years on the net. i saw it back then and must admit that i liked it. but i see no point in releasing it now to cinemas in america, they should have released it directly to video when it was finished.
mhh... nice headline this time. :) a team of swedes and finns found out that too much alcohol can cause dementia, but too less has the same effect. so a moderate drinking habit will keep you healthy when you get older. so the saying with one glass of wine every evening is really true!
the guys over at kernethread have a cool project running called gbaunix. they were able to run 5th edition unix on the gameboy advance. the only thing i miss is a keaboard for the gba. mmhhh... reminds of my gb-backlight project i have suspended 2 months ago.
russia is planning to make the same mistake as america. they dont seem to learn from the failure of their once biggest enemy. now we have two big (in country size) world powers who fight terror. am i the only one who thinks WWIII is not too far away? :)
...can be and often are quite boring and not very interesting, but we alle live in some kind of country and have to deal with local government. some guy (member of the "Bertelsmann Stiftung") gave an interesting comment about the administrational problems in germany in the Financial Times Germany (my favorite newspaper). if just some of the responsible guys would read his comment and follow the advices he gives.
...the floppy is dead. ok, not really dead but gone soon (hopefully). i dont remember when i last used a floppy to store data (must be some 3 years or so), but i now have a really cool application for floppy disks. :)
chris acheson posted a review of a very interisting book written by John Taylor Gatto (a former teacher in ny) on slashdot. the book is about the american educational system and brings up some frightening facts (i wont go into detail here, you should really read the review). compared to america our system looks really good :)
heise.de spotted an interesting survey led by ard/zdf which says, that more than 50% of the german population uses the internet. k, thats nothing spectacular, since this figure is rising constantly. much more interesting is the fact that the germans spend less time online than last year and that they spend nearly four hours a day (YES A DAY! FOUR HOURS!) in front of the TV. hello? the german tv programme consists of 90% crap and the other 10% are the airtime of arte (my favourite station), what are these people watching???
wow, now the patent-department over at ms is really going crazy. first they wanted to claim sudo as their invention and now navigating on websites with the keyboard. thats just silly. Steve Suehring has more details.
nice news from the german military. they finally realized that the german youth is fat and lazy and they want to get rid of those attributes. haha, i'm so glad to do civil service instead of the military. with their new programme the military will loose more recruits than ever.
THIS is it. why dont we have laws like this in germany to protect us from bad food from the east or the south (white sausage)?
while i read this on spiegel.de i was immediately reminded of the hysteria before the "y2k bug" in america. i mean, how senseless is this? for example, if you place your emergency supply in the cellar and theres a flood... what then? yepp you can of course dive for food :). nuclear powerplants? the greens are shutting them down one by one. problem solved :) the only problem "real" problem could be animal-deseases, at least for non-vegan people. if you ask me those guys who came up with this are working with the food industry to push their income.
just some random guy who happens to be very lazy :)
