Indeed, as of April 22 2009, the german government has accepted a law censoring child porn on the internet. Nobody can object that child porn is bad, but in practice this law will end up blocking random urls (that can be instantly renamed anyway), and creating the means to block any information, be it on purpose or 'accidentally'.

Why censor? Because control of information means more power over people. How this applies to video games is not directly clear to me either, but as the summary says there is a lot of money involved which probably does not go to state taxes.

The wording of these safety reports is essential. Same happened to the subway of Cologne. They sent engineers to one of the buildings along the track that had cracks in it. These engineers wrote a report in which they described that it didn't look so bad, but recommended further investigation. This lead to the city not looking in to it anymore, and a collapse of the city library a few months later, killing several people and destroying irreplaceable historical documents. As far as protective lab clothing is involved, during my chemistry master's project I didn't wear protective clothing in the lab most of the time. I guess it was a bit of a prestige issue, having the feeling that you know enough of the risks to assess when to wear a labcoat or not. In retrospect, I was bullshitting myself, even if I myself would be able to assess the risk of my work, there is no way on how to assess the risk of what the others in your lab are doing. Or just bad luck, a tube could just let loose all of a sudden. And indeed, why was this lab accessable by this girl at all, at this day. Shut the bloody lab down during obligatory holidays.

Or for a next "Cube" or "Saw" movie.

Happened to someone I know about two months ago. She was suspicious about the e-mails (one about the change to automatic billing, one about the change back), but they looked legit. I already guessed it was a screw-up on skype's site, as no money was charged. Just as bad: in any case (or was it jajah) is that they automatically click the little checkbox on automatic payment every time you make a payment via their web site. You have to opt-out every single time.

I had a hardware problem on my german Dell Ubuntu mini, the keyboard would get stuck on one letter. I called Dell, got routed to the person responsible for service calls on Ubuntu machines, convinced him it wasn't a software problem and arranged with him to get a new keyboard sent to me. So no, they do their service themselves.

I have no access to the Dell sales statistics, but if I go to the german consumer website of Dell, and select a mini, it is right there in my face: 2 out of 3 offers for the 9" are ubuntu, one out of 4 for the 10". The 12" inch version is only available with ubuntu. I bought a 9" early this year, and are very happy with it, it is my main machine. I mounted an SD card as a disk, increased ram to 2 GB, and I have a very efficient linux machine now.

My only problem is that dell broke the loading of .Xmodmap some updates ago, and I'm not sure how to get them to repair it. Maybe I should call? A bigger problem, though not for me personally, is the network manager in unbuntu 8.04, which can't start umts sticks in a decent way. I assigned one of the nice buttons in the dell desktop to a wvdial script, but for people coming from windows, it would be a let-down.

No. Without these malevolent hackers, the website would have gotten into severe problems anyway with this backup scheme. The ones that should be persecuted, if any, are the sysadmins who had a very sloppy backup solution to backup the data worth a lot of time invested by their community.

and smell the lid, not the container!

In Germany there are several weekly newspapers with in-depth news. "Die Welt" and "Die Zeit" I buy them every now and then actually like that concept a lot, since they won't have the one-paragraph news flashes that I read on the internet anyway, but they do have a lot of longer articles about current situations. This one newspaper gives me enough to read for a week, and it's conceived in such a way that it's not outdated when I read it a week later. In contrast, some months ago I got a free yearly subscription on "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" because of some online job site. This would normally cost about 600 euros I guess, and give me a >20-page newspaper every day. I just never got to read most of each paper, ended up with a lot of old paper, and found many articles about financial situations that were just slightly different from the news a day before. So, for me, a nice weekly 'old'-news newspaper anytime.

Or even better: hit the monkey tree times to be able to make a comment!

I am reading/typing from the train at this very moment. Since this week, I have a 40 minute train trip in my commute, and I found that it is very useful for relaxing internet stuff like slashdot. About 50% of the trip I have umts, 25% it falls down to gprs, and the rest is unfortunately without signal, but since it is at the same spot every day I can just preload some pages I want to read during that time. Currently using a linux netbook, it takes 1-2 minutes between boot and until the usb umts stick is started. I am therefore considering the android, though I am not sure if the screen will be practical enough.

For my overall 50km trip in a densely populated part of germany, I spend as much on public transport as I would on just the gas for the car. Due to traffic jams in this area even the time needed from a to b is almost equal.

I agree, the difference between the functionality of a computer OS and a smartphone OS is steadily decreasing, and at a point in the near future will be gone completely, so it makes a lot of sense to include all of them in the same chart.

There is no corrugation on the nokia screen, it just clicks. So no, they're not doing it better. The airpump system is probably not the best solution, but at least the effect of individual buttons is there.

I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. For example, I search for a new 'hip' band, so they only have a myspace page. Now, try to find the band biography or past tourdates. You won't find it. Instead, you will see a list of pictures of 'friends' of the band, about whom you couldn't care less. In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.