Don't forget user javascript. While it's not a mainstream feature and technically wasn't invented by Firefox but the guy who wrote the Greasemonkey plugin, it's definitely one of the features I don't want to miss with Opera and Firefox had it first. But yeah, "closing the feature gap" is kinda delusional.

Won't work at all because they don't use just the domain names, they use a subdomain, even if it's just "www".

Try this with your bind resolver:

zone "googlesyndication.com" {
type master;
file "/etc/bind/db.empty";
};

Same for "scorecardresearch.com", "zedo.com", "quantserv.com", "quantserve.com", "googleadservices.com", "google-analytics.com", "layer-ads.de" and "doubleclick.net". Disable cookies for the google search engine. That's what I do and I feel relatively save.

Of course all of this is a moot point if you use a Google service that requires a login, like gmail. In this case they can and have read all the mail you've ever received until right now and there's nothing you can do about it. I prefer my own little IMAP server.

That's good, but not really cookie-free browsing. I use this for sites were you have to click some "Yes, I've read the terms of service" disclaimer away on your first visit but apart from that and a few exceptions for permanent cookie storage (forums, shopping sites, ...) turning cookies off completely is perfectly save and doesn't hinder your internet experience in any way. That said, Google is not on my exceptions lists and never was.

Actually no, the chancellor is elected by the parliament these days, but the parliament at that time was too fractured between too many parties to agree on a chancellor. Therefore Hitler was appointed by the president. Appointing the chancellor in times without a stable parliamentary majority was one of the reserve powers of the president back then. This meant that the parties weren't too motivated to find a stable majority because the government would just continue working with reverse powers. The power to appoint a chancellor without a majority in parliament was one of the powers that was removed with the founding of the Bonn Republic. After he was appointed chancellor, Hitler managed to push a law through parliament that gave him legislative powers by arresting/murdering members of the communist and social democrats (less member of parliament means a larger percentage for his own party) and making some promises to the centre party that he broke days later. As for the Berlin Republic, it's basically the Bonn Republic V1.2. Legally it's the same state, the GDR was dissolved and it's states joined the old FRG. The modifications to the constitution were minimal, they just removed some passages that referred to German territory outside of the German state and that the German reunification was one of the goals of the state.

To understand why the president is such a weak position in Germany, think of it as a constitutional monarchy. Back in 1918 (that's less than 100 years ago, basically yesterday in terms of history) Germany was a monarchy. Then, when the riots broke out, the guys who would found the Weimar Republic intended to go for a constitutional monarchy, with a weak Kaiser who's just a head of state without any actual powers. But things got out of hand, one thing led to another and suddenly the Kaiser was exiled and they had to do without him. So they created the position of president, more or less a Kaiser, just elected. He had some reverse powers and that's it. But in the Weimar Republic political chaos was the very common and so the reverse powers were used on a daily basis. After the war when the new constitution was written this was identified as one of the factors that caused the previous republic to fail and so they decided that the president should have even less reverse powers. And that's how we got here. Also, the Constitutional Court is a very good check against parliamentary power. The judges there tend to have the most common sense of all courts and because they need a 2/3 majority to get elected there, party politics tend to be kept out of the process.

As mentioned, there is no problem with public archives whatsoever. This law is about publication, not stuff that was published a decade ago and is still laying around somewhere. The problem is that an internet website is considered to be a new publication every time someone visits the site. So even if you wrote the names on a website a decade ago and never changed this site, you still published it today, according to the stupid laws that don't know anything about the internet.

This is not about public archives. The newspaper archives have do not need to be altered or anything.

The real problem here is that after all these years the German law still has no concept of this thing called "The Internet". According to German courts the internet is something like a newspaper (sometimes a TV show or a mail-order catalogue) that gets published every time someone watches the page. And that is the real problem here, they apply laws that were made decades ago to regulate something completely different to the internet. That is what leads to highly idiotic and often contradictory court decisions. This specific case is just one example of many.

Another far worse example is that some courts (I'm looking at you here, OLG Hamburg) think that someone hosting a forum is responsible for everything posted in this forum, even if you remove it the second someone complains about it. Of course easily offended lawyers know this and will sue you in Hamburg.

Ignoring for a moment whether or not rights are subjective.

Earlier on you awkwardly defined rights as "things that it is wrong for the government to interfere with its citizens doing". Rights are much better defined as entitlements or permissions granted by agreement.

As another poster pointed out this is an issue about freedom of speech versus the right to privacy.

In this case you clearly seem to value freedom of speech over the right of privacy. However, that doesn't make it right (no pun intended) for you to say that the original poster doesn't "understand what a right is".

I don't have a F-Lock key either and didn't even know something like this existed until reading this poll. But then again, my keyboard doesn't have have of the keys in this poll (Windows Key, That key that opens the context menu, F-Lock, One of the Media keys). Am I missing out on something here? Well, probably not. Good ol' IBM. Voted for Pause, that one doesn't really do anything these days. I don't think I've ever used it after leaving DOS behind.

You should update your system, that bug was fixed years ago. To get the old, broken behaviour with new versions of rm use "rm-rf /*". Ok, not exactly the same, this one won't remove files/directories beginning with a ".". But close enough.

reinforce:~# rm -rf /
rm: cannot remove root directory `/'

Because RAID5 is the footgun of storage solutions. It sux. It always did. It always will. Don't use it. Ever!

Now, I'll admit, with SSD a few of the arguments against it do no longer apply, but there are still enough arguments left. http://www.baarf.com/ has a nice list.

> Your OS doesn't always have time to shut down properly. Don't think anyone's fond of the idea of having their last couple of saves go poof because Windows crashed.

So, what happens if my PC crashes because of some hardware failure and I have to plug in a different HDD for some reason? Or plug the HDD into a different mainboard? All the things I thought I wrote to the disk will be gone. In fact, the file system might be inconsistent if this thing doesn't honor flush requests. But if it does honor flush requests then nothing is gained, it'll still be the OS that does all the caching.

Well, it'll still be a great read cache, 4-16GB read cache is more that most people have as RAM caches, so it'll be good for something.