• A school in the US equipped students with laptops – and actively spied on them and their families at home using integrated webcams (without their knowledge or consent). Moreover, they were actually stupid enough to discipline a pupil for “improper behavior”, using a photograph of the webcam as evidence. (source)
• Over 200 Russians got sick after a mass in the church St Michael in Irkutsk. The infection was caused by … holy water. (source)
• “Don’t you hate it when you can’t get that pesky alien implant out of your groin? Dr. Roger Leir is here to help.” They are serious about this, by the way: Dr. Leir actually removes alien implants, if you happen to have problems with them. He has lots of “evidence” posted on his website. (source)
• “Harvard professor and noted Google critic Ben Edelmen provided video evidence of the Google toolbar transmitting data back to the Mountain View Chocolate Factory after he chose to disable the application in the browser window he was currently using.” (source)
• Utah passed a bill two days ago, disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are “essentially harmless”. (source)
• The German cinemas increased their turnover by 22.8% in the year 2009. So much for “internet piracy is killing the movie industry”. On the other hand, it has to be stated that there seems to be a rather sad ongoing trend: small cinemas are closing down, and the big chains are gaining more and more market share. But the same applies to all other stores, e.g. bookstores, so that’s nothing the “pirating” can be blamed for. It’s the way capitalism works, I presume. (source)

(1) Why pirates save the environment
The pirate raids in the seas east of Africa have had a significant impact on the environment: international trawlers that were illegally fishing there for years have apparently been avoiding the shores, which led to a dramatic increase in fish stock. In Mogadishu (capital of Somalia), the growing supply has led to decreasing prices, thus people who live there can actually afford to eat fish for the first time in many years. So far, most of the fish was exported.
(Source: sz-online.de)

(2) Why there is beauty in architecture
I have not seen anything like that before … take yourself 12 minutes, relax, get a cup of tea and a blanket, and watch this. Please.
And after you realize that this is nearly 100% rendered (this is not filmed, it was created with a computer), I hope you’re as amazed as I am.

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Some officials at an international European airport come up with the funny idea to put explosives in bags of passengers who don’t know about this, in order to check the security of the airport.

Security finds explosives. After a hard day of work, the conversation maybe goes like this:

“Hey guys, good job. By the way, did we actally find all explosives we put into the luggage?”
- “Not sure sir, we didn’t count how many we put in. Around ten, I presume?”
“Oh well, should be fine really. It’s just explosives in the luggage of random innocent travellers. What could possibly go wrong?”

Or perhaps like this?

“Hey guys, funny thing huh, we missed one, hehe.”
- “Ye well, lol. Wonder what will happen?”
“Haha, the person will get arrested I guess. Let’s go to a bar and get wasted.”
- “Sure.”

Now comes the part where it gets less funny, because that actually happened. RTI.IE reports that Bratislava Airport Security put eight explosives in luggage of unsuspecting passengers, and failed to detect all – leading to a major incident at Dublin Airport this morning.

The explosive was one of eight pieces of contraband planted by the authorities in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers at Bratislava Airport in Slovakia last weekend as part of a test of security procedures.

Seven were detected by airport security, but the eighth – 90g of research development explosive – was put in the luggage of a Slovakian electrician who lives and works in Dublin.

The 49-year-old unwittingly brought the material to Dublin when he returned from Christmas holidays.

(via fefe)

I have shown recently that in spite of all the pirating …

• … “Revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales.” (link)
• … “People who illegally download music from the internet without paying for it are the music industry’s main clientele, because they are at the same time the very people who buy the most music legally.” (link)

There are some more interesting numbers that were reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

• the US film industry had a 10% turnover increase in the year 2009 in their cinema section (up to 9.87 billion Dollar);
• DVD-sales went down by 13% to 8.73 billion Dollar – until 2009 DVDs always were the biggest percentage of turnover;
• DVD-renting went up by 5.5%, but the overall turnover only increased by 1% (to 8.15 billion Dollars), indicating a heavy competition on the market. You can rent DVDs for 1$ per day in the states in many stores now.

(via Fefe via Heise)

Seit einer Weile müssen wir ja nicht nur für Radiogeräte und Fernseher GEZ Gebühren entrichten, sondern auch für internetfähige Computer. Ob wir das Internet überhaupt nutzen, um auf öffentlich-rechtliche Sender zuzugreifen und diese zu verfolgen, ob die Angebote im Internet überhaupt mit den Angeboten im Fernsehen vergleichbar sind … das interessierte bisher niemanden.

Seit Januar 2007 verlangt die Gebühreneinzugszentrale 5,76 Euro für internetfähige Computer – allerdings nur dann, wenn weder Radio noch Fernseher angemeldet sind. In der monatlichen Gebühr von 17,98 Euro sind alle Geräte enthalten.

Das Verwaltungsgericht Braunschweig hat die PC-Rundfunkgebühr nun für unzulässig erklärt:

Das Verwaltungsgericht Braunschweig urteilte, der NDR stelle derzeit im Internet „keinen gebührenrechtlich relevanten Rundfunk zur Verfügung“. Der Sender könne seine Radioprogramme im Internet nicht unbegrenzt vielen Nutzern anbieten. Deshalb sei die Gebühr unzulässig. (4 A 188/09)

(via fefe)

I want to keep posting news – weird news, but also important ones.

• New LED traffict lights can’t melt snow:
  

  Municipalities around the country are taking different steps to keep their signals shining brightly in the face of Mother Nature. Crews in St. Paul, Minnesota, use compressed air to keep their lights clean. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, city workers brush the snow off by hand in a labor-intensive process.

  This will be (ab-)used by conservative politicians against “green technology”, I’m sure about it. Just wait.

• ‘Green’ vibrators promise sustainable pleasure:
  

  The Earth Angel, described as “eight inches (20 centimetres) with a sleek white finish”, is a wind-up vibrator which comes with a handle built into the bottom.

• The new German government, consisting of Christian Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and “Liberals” (FDP) want to pass a bill, in order to increase economic growth in these hard times. This is heavily criticized by independent experts – some parts of the bill more than others. In any case, the idea is to make more debt now. More and more debt. Who cares who will pay it off? Who cares that money we borrow now will have to be repayed eventually? In order to get the bill passed, the second chamber – the Bundesrat – has to agree. The Bundesrat is the representation of the German counties – due to the fact that the majority of German counties are governed by CDU/CSU/FDP, no problems were expected. But two of these counties actually refused to agree. What happened? The government bought these two states now. They get more money here, and more money there, and all of a sudden they agree with the bill. (This is not the first time counties are bought – SPD and the green party did it before a couple of years ago. Under great protest of CDU/CSU/FDP … right.)
• You may have heard that US drones got “hacked” by “terrorists” – if you look a bit closer, the truth is actually this:
  

  The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s [.ö..] But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it.

  And again: if you collect information, and pay a lot of money to do so, and you don’t protect the information, it will be in vain. Everybody will have access to this information. It is useless. I wonder when people will start to understand this.

• The politician Wolfgang Neskovic from the left party only received 294 of the necessary 312 votes for becoming a member of the control commitee for the German intelligence apparatus – all other parties will be represented. There was lots of whining around by the left party after the vote. The hilarious thing is: 21 of the 76 politicians of the left party were absent during the election. Now do the maths yourself. I try to avoid it on my blog, but this is the right time for a “lol” here, I reckon.
• The municipality “Gilching” in Bavaria (Germany) – inhabited by around 17.000 people – has installed fingerprint scanners in their elementary school. Children who want to enter the building have to put a finger on an electronical reading device. Now, why is that? Because of “security reasons”. Clearly, the most dangerous people in the world are children between the age of 6 and 11.
• France is a very “clean” country, compared to European standards, regarding CO² emissions. Why? Because they nearly only use nuclear power in order to produce electricity (85%). The winter has hit them very hard now, the average temperature is over 5° C less than it is normally around that time of the year, for a couple of days already, and the power plants are not able to produce enough electricity for the country. So they have to buy energy – mostly “dirty” energy – e.g. from German coal-burning power plants.
• A couple of months ago, the old government (CDU/CSU & SPD) passed a bill regarding the censorship of the internet. It caused a huge outcry in the German population, there was a petition signed by over 150.000 people who opposed this bill, there were many independent experts (asked by the government!!! to give their opinion) who opposed it … but it was election time, so the law was passed anyway. The SPD – now in the opposition – pretends that never happened. They criticize the law, demand “deletion instead of censorship” – which was our slogan when we strongly opposed the bill! – and make themselves hilarious in more ways. Seriously: people might be stupid. But not that stupid. I hope.
• In Munich, a family father gets beaten up by the police because he barbecues at a lake (where everybody else also barbecues – i lived near the lake for 6 years and was there fairly often); but it’s not allowed. He is like, a terrorist or something! And they have to be treated without mercy …
• An interesting video of completely inappropriate police violence directed against young people who sit peacefully on the street (to protest the clearance of a church by the police) in Denmark. Check out how they pull arms and legs straight before they beat on them with their clubs, to increase the pain and maybe break …a bone or two.
• Eleven Iranian soliders went into Iraq to occupy the oil field Al-Fakka – upon arrival they hissed the Iranian flag.

(Source: most of the stuff is taken from Fefes Blog – and of course all the sources I quoted in the text)

Torture and the CIA
23 CIA agents have been found guilty by an Italian court for abducting the Milan citizen Abu Omar into an Egypt “torture prison” in 2003. They were sentenced to five till eight years imprisonment. Rawstory.com has some … interesting details:

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
[...]
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles [...] I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Sex Offenders in the US
In the United States, the most common age of sex offenders is … 14. Sex offense in this case usually means: getting caught experimenting. In many states, there isn’t a legal difference though to a 45 year old male raping a child. You’re a sex offender. You get registered for lifetime, in some states even with your data put openly on a website for everyone to access.

These kids usually get sentences far worse than if they’d killed a buddy brutally with a sledgehammer. A quote from the official report:

“[...] greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14 (figure 6). The frequency of offenders within age groups declined gradually with age, reaching half the peak frequency by the late 30s.

Blood Samples, Please
The news-channel NDR reported a couple of weeks ago, that the German car-manufacturer Daimler actually only employs people who “voluntarily” take a blood test. I don’t think I do have to comment on this practice … just add that it still is illegal in German to test the blood for e.g. hereditary diseases et cetera, but of course nobody knows what they do with it. More importantly, nobody knows how they store the information. After around 100.000 data loss affairs this year in Germany … I’d be more than careful.
Anyway, the funny thing is: a week later, the newspaper TAZ writes that the NDR itself is also asking his employers to be to “voluntarily” (cough) give away a blood sample.

• Erdogan beats up a 13 year old child – child going to prison (German link).
• US troops attack Somalia.
• A satirical overview over the German political parties regarding the internet (German link).
• Unmanned US drone had to be shot down in Afghanistan after the fail-safe programming … failed.

(via Fefe)

I’ve been sitting in front of this blank white “add a new post to your blog” field for a few minutes now. Pondering.

How should I possibly express how excited I am? How should I try to describe how awesome this news is to people like … me?

I guess I can’t. So I rather don’t even bother to try. Here’s the story, without any emotional humbug: this is a pictures of an exo-skeleton.
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