AFAIK the biggest reason for this is likely that the ones most likely to take a risk and have an accident are more likely to wear one, i.e. if you have someone who does racing, does mountain biking, is a messenger, rides daily etc, then that someone is
a) more likely to have an accident serious enough to show up in reports/statistics
b) more likely to own and wear a helmet than someone who rides just now and then

So you might have (numbers courtesy of my backside) something like 10% of _all_ bikers wearing helmets, while the percentage for those who cycle the most miles or engage in riskier (not stupider, like riding without lights) forms of cycling might be 40%.
So you might end up with 15% of riders involved in accidents wearing a helmet while their number "should" only be 10%.

Just change your browser's user-agent string to make it look like Google; helps to access others sites, too (e.g. every site of the Gawker-family: for those you either have to enable Javascript or pretend to be Googlebot)

If you use a Mozilla-based browser, there are plug-ins to make switching the string comfortable; user-agent switching is one of the things that I use "prefbar" for.

To quote wikipedia:

So the parliament has an all-of-them-or-nobody right of approval for the whole commission whose members are picked by the heads of the member states' governments .

I've no idea about the situation in Chicago, but I wonder how many of those murders are actually law abiding defenseless sheep being slaughtered and how many are not-so-law-abiding citizens killing each other.

Since I was shopping for a new notebook recently:
there are sometimes notebooks without Windows preinstalled and they're usually cheaper.

There are shops where you can configure the OS and they charge you more depending on whether you selected "no OS" or on the Windows version (ultimate>pro>home).

Depending on the manufacturer and their deal with MS the amounts might differ, though.
Some examples:
* put Win 7 Ultimate instead of Win 7 Pro on a Latitude and your Laptop costs 61 EUR more on dell.de

* Schenker (mysn.de) allows for lots of configuration and the OS options (besides "no OS" for 0 EUR) are:
95EUR -108EUR for Home Premium OEM
133EUR-143EUR for Pro OEM
175EUR for Ultimate OEM

* at a local Lenovo reseller you can get notebooks without Windows; they have, for example, a Thinkpad Edge E525 for 399EUR without Windows and with similar specs and Home Premium for 494EUR

Not that surprising.
There's usually stuff you post yourself (e.g. this comment) and then there's information about you that the company collects (e.g. tracking what websites you've looked at or who you've interacted with).

Sorry, but this is simply not true.
Except for "When it became clear that the Pirate Party would likely get into the parliament (predicted to get 6.5% at most), they were already scandalized, how anybody could vote such loonies."

I'm not sure what you've watched, but it certainly wasn't the coverage by ARD or later the local RBB. Or not a lot of it.

Other parties had no problem naming them and dis so frequently as the success of the Pirates and the catastrophic result of the FDP were the main topics of most discussions.
Yeah, of course they also called the Pirates "new", but so did the Pirates themselves.
During a talk with representatives of all parties (that matter), they even did a little "special" analyzing where the pirates' 9% came from and asked everybody's opinion about that and why their parties didn't manage to get those votes.

Some politicians from the "established" parties even congratulated the Pirates. I remember people from the Greens and the Lefts doing so.
And they certainly didn't say "Congratulations to those others".

And I don't remember a Left party guy talking about "they overestimated themselves".
But I do remember one pointing out how the Pirates _under_estimated their own chances and that the Pirates obviously were surprised by their success as much as anybody else, citing (almost) not having enough candidates listed to fill the seats they won as a proof.
And he wasn't alone, several Pirate candidates repeatedly stated how they were "baff" (perplexed) or "still a bit in shock" in view of their success.

I also have no problem with Künast claiming they gained the most as those gains and losses are calculated in comparison to the last state election in 2006 and the Pirates weren't yet on the ballot back then.
If you say the Pirates gained 6% to reach their 9%, you're comparing their result today to the 3% they got in Berlin during the last national election in 2009, i.e. you're comparing apples and oranges because
a) people vote differently in state and national elections and
b) the gains and losses of the other parties were based on the results of a different election.
Yeah, technically the Pirates gained the most since they went from nothing to 9%, but I don't blame her for ignoring the n00bs when the main intent is to show how they are more awesome than the sucktitide that's their traditional enemies or their (realistic) competitors when it comes to building the government.

I was tempted to do that.
I didn't have a fax, just a PC with an old fax modem specifically kept around to be able to send faxes.

So when I had to cancel a hosting contract and the hoster would only accept a hand-signed letter or fax, I had to print the letter, sign it, scan it back into the computer and then FAX the scanned image.

Since photoshopping (well, GIMPing) is a hobby, I was really tempted to do a "convert letter.pdf letter.jpg" (should turn out shiatty enough to look like a real fax) and slap a scan of a signature onto it.

You can already do that in the other direction.
A friend of mine went from Europe to Beijing by train for the experience and to visit a friend living in Beijing.
She took a train from Germany to Moscow, got onto the Trans-Siberian railway, took a break in Mongolia to go hiking through the prairie for a couple of days and then continued on the Trans-Mongolian route of the railway to reach Beijing.

If the real unix men's attitude is "Sorry, I can't hear the specification over the sound of how awesome Perl is" and they ignore the requirements at hand to produce a really awesome Perl program that can't be executed in the target environment, I would rather give those fannies a chance.

..which sounds a lot like optimizing the heart rate. ;)

Those things can be quite helpful, especially if you're a fatty not used to running.
You'll benefit from one of those things indicating when to slow down and take a short walking break.
Because if you're an unfit - not necessarily tub of lard - , you should start easy and gradually increase how much/fast you run depending on your progress.
Nothing more counterproductive (for body and mind) than going to your limit and being sore for a week afterwards.

There were (are?) real books with ads.

Maybe it was only done by a handful of (German?) publishers, but I remember going through my parents bookshelves and flipping through some paper back whodunits and some had one or two pages with ads, sometimes in context to the story. i.e. making a reference to the story.
A little bit like with old time radio shows: "While $detective leans back with a $cigarette, waiting for the guy to leave the house again, why not get yourself a $cigarette with their unique flavor and our special brand of cancer.."