Wikipedia has no article for this "Verelendung", and the only two mentions of in the entire (English) site are in the titles of listed works by two Germans.

I suspect he isn't half as famous as he thinks he is, and wants to blame Wikipedia for the lack of business opportunities banging down his door.

To be capable of carrying a package, these are going to be quite a bit larger than some dinky RC copter.
I think being hit with one (or the merchandise it's carrying) could cause significant injury.

Isn't that how the entire job market works? That's why we have the education loan bubble we have -- employers don't believe you know anything without a piece of paper showing you spent thousands of dollars to learn it.

Maybe because by actually converting the currency to money, they're sending the message that they accept it as real money and will use it. It gives a aire of legitimacy to it they don't want to impart. But selling it is simply offering it and taking what they can get. It doesn't say that they think it's worth anything, just that the bidders do. Kind of like if I took a dirty sock and auctioned it. I can say I believe it to be trash all I want then. If someone pays me $10 for it, it doesn't mean it's really worth $10. It just means someone out there is stupid enough to pay $10 real dollars for it, like any other piece of virtual property.

I was expecting a story about them setting some obscure voip service or something. With AOL split off I'm curious these remaining properties are that something thinks qualify as a "telecom" business.

Yes, DVDs are in MPEG2... because DVD discs have to maintain compatibility with DVD players, even older ones, and back in 1998 MPEG2 was the type of video playback hardware chips could handle. Btw, digital cable streams in the U.S. are still generally done in MPEG2 as well. There are some newer models of converters the last couple years that can handle h264, but to maintain compatibility with all the already deployed equipment providers are still feeding them the older, less efficient format.

If you're encoding at a constant bitrate you're doing it like it's still 2005. Should be using a constant quality (variable bitrate) encoding setting to get more bandwidth when it's needed in high-action shots or grainy footage, and less in stark black/white screens and low movement footage.

No, DVD's go quite a bit higher than 2000 kbps. Try 6-9000 kbps.

Most DVDs I see nowadays are progressively encoded, but okay.

Yet another security venerability involving hearts I see.

Even if streaming services eventually overtake physical media usage it still makes little sense to buy a streaming-only player (AppleTV or Roku) instead of a blu-ray player which can access streaming services as well. The difference in costs between the two is too small given the additional functionality of a blu-ray player for playing physical media, including the library of DVDs people may have already from "the good ol' days" before Netflix instant streaming.

Plus, it's a bit more convenient to take your DVD/BD to a friend's house than uncoupling a VUDU or Amazon-On-Demand account from a device to sign in as someone else and access a different library of content.

You're booked when you're arrested, which is long before your trial. So lots of people have had mugshots taken who later were exonerated.
I doubt they are going to thrown out perfectly good records once they have them.

Mugshots of everyone so they don't have to wait for priors to be able to use this technology.

Oh, wait. They're already half-way there with state IDs.

I don't think being a celebrity has anything to do with it. In today's over-marketed society anyone who likes to live a quiet life where they keep to themselves, and doesn't constantly spill out the details of their business via social networking (read as: anyone introverted) gets labeled as "strange" by the rest of town and feared as potential serial killer or terrorist-making-plans-in-their-basement.

Yes, and OSX falling first had nothing to do with the participants specifically targeting it. I mean, they would have nothing to gain from focusing their efforts on a single operating system, like the bragging rights of hacking a supposedly "secure" platform, or taking Macintosh snobs down a notch, or winning a $2000 Mac laptop instead of a $500 Dell. No siree.

Jenga?

No, some of them truly think they have one and not the other. I work in support and I have talked to multiple people who swear what they have is an iPad and they don't. This leads to some obvious confusion when they want me to give them directions on how to do something and the interfaces don't match. It usually isn't until I ask them if their tablet has Apple logo on the back they realize it's not an Apple iPad they are holding.