Why has it failed to protect to Mr. Appelbaum ? Just because the word "Appelbaum " sounds Jewish ?
You're asking too much here - I mean, we're not even able to protect our own Bundeskanzlerin, let alone a mere mortal foreign citizen
[...] plus inhouse VB stuff that keeps some stuff on old MS Windows systems here
All of our VB(6) stuff runs without problems on Win7 without me having done anything special to make it run there.
I'd go so far to say it's even better now, because Win7 (and Vista before) have the VB runtime included, so installation has basically become a copy & paste of the EXE.
[...] a coincidence that this happened just before XP is retired.
I disagree. I'm not a native English speaker, but most music I listen to has English lyrics. Now - I've even got a hard time to understand the lyrics in my native language. For English songs, I really need to concentrate hard to understand the lyrics. Therefore they could very well sing "LaLaLa" (OK, with some variations
"I have seen the horse vomit."
That's not right. Our expression is "(Aber) Man hat schon Pferde vor der Apotheke kotzen gesehen." A translation might be "(But) Horses have been seen vomitting in front of a pharmacy". It's a phrase that's added after describing a very unlikely situation, which may nonetheless happen, e.g. "Given X and Y, I doubt that Z will happen
Sure. Here you go. Source of that URL, an article of the German IT publisher/news site Heise.
That article is about kino.to, a streaming "service" for pirated movies, to which you had to subscribe for a flat monthly fee. It is assumed (and that's what the Süddeutsche article linked there states), that anybody subscribing to that service had to know - by using common sense - that it can only be an illegal streaming portal and that streaming of illegal content is, well - illegal. And you had to be a suscriber in order to use that service.
That's a bit different from the current case.
... or pick a religion which hasn't a contract with the German state for collecting taxes (hint: any non-christian religion).
In thousand years? Just ask your replicator (aka "3D printer" these days) to create one
The question is whether that worry is rational or not
I don't think that is the point. It's rather how many feel the same (rational or not) and censor themselves. If a big enough part of a constitutional democratic country's inhabitants feel that way, it's troubling for a democracy. It typically is one of the attributes of a totalitarian regime that its citizens don't dare to speak up freely.
There are plenty of markets that are free enough that the advantages (and disadvantages) of free markets are clear.
No there aren't, because people like you keep forgetting (or ignoring?) one of the main prerequisites that Adam Smith described for a "free market" to work: equal knowledge of buyer and seller.
For a free market to work (according to Smith), a seller must be aware of all "ingredients" (cost of work for production, production methods, cost of raw materials etc.) of a product in order to decide a) the product's worth and b) being able to compare it to similar products. The cheap, low quality knife might be good enough for me, whereas the professional cook goes for the high quality and expensive one.
So, be honest: for how many of the products you buy each day, do you know the exact raw material combination? Are you able to judge the toxic level of all chemicals used in those products? Do you know the medications given to the animal whose meat you're buying, all the herbicides and fertilizers used for those vegetables, how many kid's slave labor is involved in the production of that t-shirt and how many m of fresh water have been contaminated during the mining of these rare earth used in your new gadget?
No, the parent was correct: free market (as defined by Smith) does not exist. Not even close these days.
Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places. You don't have that under feudalism.
You should check your facts again. The fast majority of people in this world don't get paid decent money. Hwll, most of them don't even have enough to eat. And that's mainly because a few people like you and me get paid decent. We're basically living off of their lives in our "glory capitalism world".
I agree. I don't know German either, but you watch his speeches and suddenly want to join in whatever it is he is talking about. You have to wonder if anyone with that capability has ever been on the good guys team? Churchill was inspirational but not in the same fuck yeah way as Hitler.
Funny/intersting how speaking the language (natively) seems to make a fundamental difference. For me as a German, I find Hitler's speechs adhorent. Most likely because I also understand what he's saying.
Churchill OTOH is rather impressive to me with his sonor, cold-blooded but nonetheless emotional voice. And that by just listening to the sound of his voice, without spending any attention to what he's saying.
They are also the reason most websites on the Internet are free.
Not sure how old you are, but lots of us do remember the internet from long before Big Corporation Overlords discovered this "new-fangled web thingy". And it was always free ("free" both as in "free beer" and "free of ads"), although hosting did cost a shitload of money compared to nowadays. But people ("people", mind ya, not "money-grabbing corporations") put up free content nonetheless. Because they enjoy sharing stuff.
Remember: the same people that complain about ad-blockers are the people that make money off of the free contribution of others. That's the Facebook model: let users provide free content - we collect the money by selling their souls.
Excuse me using extrem vocablary, but this is utter bullshit!
Here's a quick run-down from the man responsible for the (media-created) "global cooling" of the 70s.
Besides the excellent explanation of what went wrong in the first place, how he found out about it and published his new findings immediately, the part I especially like about that article is the the final paragraph:
Ironically, inside the scientific world, this switch of sign of projected effects is viewed as precisely what responsible scientists must do when the facts change. Not only did I change my mind, but published almost immediately what had changed and how that played out over time. Scientists have no crystal ball, but we do have modeling methods that are the closest approximation available. They can't give us truth, but they can tell us the logical consequences of explicit assumptions. Those who update their conclusions explicitly as facts evolve are much more likely to be a credible source than those who stick to old stories for political consistency. Two cheers for the scientific method!
With your bare hands?!?
