Let's not forget that BTK killer worked for them installing alarm systems for people who wanted protection against the BTK killer.

The source is mostly anecdotal: my wife worked for Amazon in Germany. They don't actually break the law but they treat employees extremely poorly [by German standards]. Strikes are frequent and unionization is coming, so things are bound to change.

If you Google for amazon deutschland betriebsrat and similar terms you will find a myriad of articles on the topic.

You can verify that trust by looking at how the employee performs over an extended period of time. There's no need to verify it every 30 minutes.

Despite the strict German labor laws, Amazon's warehouses in Germany get away with as much as they possibly can and some more.

I live abroad (in Europe) and Facebook is the main concentration point for expats from my home country. The groups will often have hundreds of thousands of expats and most of the time it's the easiest & fastest way of getting information on virtually any topic relevant to expat life.

Here in Germany the word Meister, which is the German word for master, is used in so many contexts to mean someone who is responsible for, or specialist in something, that it would be impossible to avoid it completely. For example, the landlord or the one responsible for janitorial services in a building is the Hausmeister. A professional house painter is a Malermeister. The (almost mythical) chap that comes once an year to clean the chimney is a Schornsteinfegermeister.

Yeah the problems have been known for a while, but it's something else to see disassembled ECU code with very specific conditions that disables the system during normal driving. In the talk they even re-create the emissions test conditions on a rolling road with realtime monitoring of the ECU's memory contents, so you can watch as it calculates the amount of urea to inject. As soon as the driving behavior leaves the test boundaries those calculations drop to 0 and stay there. It's pretty blatant.

The EPA just filed a lawsuit against VW, and given this evidence I don't see how they can weasel their way out of it this time.

There was a fantastic talk at this year's Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg delving into the reasons behind "Dieselgate", including insights into the car industry itself and findings from disassembled ECU code. Part of it shows exactly how and why the NOx scrubbing technology was purposely disabled during normal driving. It does work, it just wasn't allowed to do its job, presumably to lower maintenance costs for the customer. And as the talk shows this decision must have involved hundreds of people including upper management, not just a couple of engineers.

The testing methodology for emissions is a shambles and has been cheated by every car manufacturer for decades now to varying degrees. If we're serious about fixing the emissions problems then this is the first place that needs attention. I believe you can make diesels cleaner, but it costs money. Fix the tests to force these emission standards to be applied in normal driving and then let the consumer decide if the added cost is worth owning a diesel. In fact we need to fix the tests regardless, if only to get a proper look at the real state of emissions across the board.

But seriously, the talk is well worth watching.

Sounds good, where do I pick up my Green Gaming subsidy for the new hardware?

Sounds to me like region locking content has become socially unacceptable in this globally connected age. These people are not only paying for the content, they're paying extra on top of it just to get around your arbitrary restrictions.

Maybe it's time for people like her to join us in the 21st century.

1. Three years ago in Brazil you could buy Bitcoins in local online markets using your local account. Several large markets also accepted international wire transfers. Or you could also go to localbitcoins.com IIRC, and buy in cash from people geographically near you.

2. There were services accepting Bitcoins that sold gift cards for Amazon and other big stores. Don't know if there are such services still. Of course they charged fees.

In any case, Bitcoin serves three main purposes, as I see:

I. dealing in shady business (silk road, etc)
II. trading and speculating
III. keeping a handful of libertarians geeks thinking they're really "sticking it to the man"

I and II are obviously the reasons Bitcoin still exists. III is not enough to keep it rolling.

I would be happy enough to see the Mt.Gox judicial nightmare over by Earth Day and get back at least some of my money and BC back. Yeah, let me keep on dreaming...

Damn you, Mark Karpeles! Damn you a thousand times.

Learning facts don't make anyone knowledgeable of science. I think what really means is that your regular software writer (and CS bachelor, IMHO) has no contact whatsoever with the scientific method and with how science actually works. That is, they are unaware of how to develop an hypothesis, test it against experiment, place the phenomenon under a broader context, etc.

A really simple test to see if someone has at least a minimum understand of how science works is asking them about what a theory is. I've seem plenty of college educated people think that, say, Theory of Relativity and Theory of Evolution are mere guesses that haven't still been properly verified and one have not only the right, but the moral obligation to chose whether to believe them or not based on their on personal logic. Actually, most people say things like "this and that haven't actually been proved by science", thinking that there are actually "proofs" of anything in science.

I disagree with how they picture Nye's position as a prominent science educator, but his opinion is right on the dime.

I stopped downloading music and picked up a sub to Spotify instead simply because it's more convenient. I share the same music library on my home PC, work PC and smartphone without having to fiddle with anything. When I'm in the car I plug the smartphone into the deck and listen to the playlists that I've downloaded. Even my AV receiver at home can stream from Spotify. It all just works and I'm always stumbling across new music that I end up liking a lot.

I've even set up a few collaborative playlists with friends. When one of us finds something new we add it to the list, then the others can have a listen and add it to their own private playlists if they like it.

Only two things bother me: not everything is available and some things that were available will simply disappear one day. Same old licensing BS that just doesn't work in a digitally connected world.

One thing is clear though. Previously the music industry made no money at all off me, now they do. Not because of some anti-piracy campaign but because someone was finally able to provide an acceptably priced product that's more convenient than pirating. Funny how that works.

That's possible yes. I guess you could already snap a photo of your completed election ballot to show to those thugs, but you're right that it'd be easier for them to verify votes if they can coerce you into giving up your ID.

If you ask me having those kinds of thugs around in the first place is a pretty good sign of a broken system, but it's a fair point anyway.