blumentopf

Germany here. My impression is that there are some hotspots (e.g. Berlin) with enough users on OkCupid that using the site actually makes sense. In the rest of the country the user base seems to be relatively small. In areas with US Army presence (e.g. Patch Barracks Stuttgart or Grafenwöhr Training Area) one can find an awful lot of US expats on OkCupid, people who obviously know the site from back home. Locals however seem to prefer the German sites. Which is somewhat sad, I think OkCupid is unique as a mixture between a dating site and a social network, it leads to a more casual tone there. The German sites are mostly focussed on finding partners for longterm relationships, by and large they seem to be not as casual and relaxed as OkCupid (e.g. parship.de).

"The LAN interface includes both 10BaseT and 10Base2 connectors."

http://alliancetesteq.com/equipment/agilent-hp-1670a

So an off-the-shelf Ethernet switch will do. Contemporary 10GBase-T products are generally compatible with ancient 10Base-T. Another fine example of extreme backwards compatibility.

"The new default in Git 2.x is ‘simple’. It means that when doing a git push without specifying a branch, only your current branch will be pushed to the one git pull would normally get your code from."

Hello? Why wasn't it called "current" instead of "simple"?

Why are these unintuitively named options so frequent in git?

Apart from the outages, the favicon is missing since a few days.

Further ways to contact the Customer Assistance Center (not in the PDF):

phone: 00800 1 777 7777

e-mail: cs.deutschland@cac.mercedes-benz.com

Exactly. Time for another HN meetup. :)

Thanks for sharing this Momo.

One recommendation regarding taxes: Do it yourself.

You're not obliged to enlist the help of a Steuerberater. If you've just got an Einzelunternehmen or GbR, you only have to file a list of earnings and expenses (Einnahmenüberschussrechnung) plus some forms.

Also, become a member of the Bund der Steuerzahler (www.steuerzahler.de / www.steuerzahler-baden-wuerttemberg.de). They offer a vast set of brochures and summaries on their website's members area which can help you find your way around the German tax system. It's also possible to call them and ask for help if you have trouble with specific rules (though they're not allowed to provide proper consulting like a Steuerberater). Membership costs just 56 Euro per year.

I've been doing my tax declaration myself for years now and the few times I've interacted with Steuerberaters I realized they don't know more about the tax system than myself (sometimes they know less).

In the 1990s every O'Reilly book (except for the extremely think ones like Sendmail or Unix Power Tools) used the awesome "RepKover" lay-flat binding which was later done away with. Guess that was a result of the "financial discipline" dogma. :-(

Demographics.

When the Green Party emerged in the early 1980s, they made it into the Bundestag pretty quickly because they could draw votes from a large base of young voters (the babyboomers). Nowadays young voters are a tiny fringe group so their votes hardly make a dent. That makes it more difficult than it used to be for a party representing (more or a less) their generation to cross the 5% hurdle.

The U18 vote which was carried out yesterday resulted in 12% for the Pirate Party: http://www.u18.org/das-projekt-u18/

Cynically speaking, the situation may look brighter for the Pirate Party in 4 years when more pensioners are dead.

English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

Starting from which version? CoreText 1.0.4 is not affected.

Regarding DNSSEC, it should be noted that ECDSA was specified in April 2012 (RFC 6605) and resolver support started with Unbound 1.4.17 (May 2012) and BIND 9.9.2 (Oct 2012). So this was very recent and the percentage of resolvers on the Internet which have already upgraded to an ECDSA-enabled release is so small that it is absolutely pointless to use ECDSA with DNSSEC now. Most of the resolvers won't recognize the algorithm and will treat the zone contents as unsigned.

Regarding OpenSSL, I tested ECC with S/MIME in 2009 and it turned out to be unsupported. Just tried it again with 1.0.1e and it's still not supported. It works for TLS but the problem is that vendors ship outdated releases: Debian stable comes with 1.0.1 which is good, RHEL comes with 1.0.0 which is not so good (no TLS 1.2), SLES comes with 0.9.8j (even in the recently release SLES 11 SP3) which is very bad.

So support for ECC is still very disappointing and far away from being usable in production.

Problem is, even if DDG would be hosted in, say, Europe, the NSA would still be able to snoop on the traffic. As has been recently revealed, the German BND may siphon off up to 20% of the traffic at DE-CIX (Internet exchange in Frankfurt) and on average siphons off 5% [1]. The BND closely cooperates with the NSA. As we've seen in the last couple of weeks, Europe is basically a US colony and Germany in particular is not a true sovereign state. [2] What to do? Host in Russia, Latin America?

(Disclosure: I am German and DDG is my default search engine.)

[1] http://h-online.com/-1909989

[2] http://sz.de/1.1717216

This seems to be the original story (HT Fefes Blog):

http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/incision/former-nsa-contr...

The situation isn't really better in Germany. The Constitutional Court (and current Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger) is our last, best and only line of defense against the security hardliners in the conservative party (CDU/CSU).

Since the ruling of the Constitutional Court, whenever there was some crime, there'd be the predictable knee-jerk reaction by Hans-Peter Uhl (CSU) that it wouldn't have happened if we had data retention. And equally predictable, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger from the liberal democrats (FDP) would say "Nein". There's even a website to look up whether Uhl has called for data retention (hatuhlschonvdsgefordert.de).

Federal elections are coming up on September 22 and it's likely that we'll get a grand coalition again (CDU/CSU + SPD). That would mark the end of Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger's tenure as Justice Minister and it would be a boon for the hardliners. Heaven forbid!

In Germany, the data retention law was ruled unconstitutional by the German Constitutional Court on March 2, 2010. Data retention was allowed in general by the court, but only with significant restrictions. The German government failed to pass a new law which fulfills both the EU data retention directive and the court's restrictions. The EU Commission therefore is currently sueing Germany to implement the EU data retention directive. If the EU Commission prevails, Germany will have to pay 315.036,54 Euro per day as a penalty fee until a proper law is enacted.

Is the rationale behind PRISM really terrorism?

Here in Germany there's a lot of talk that PRISM is ultimately a tool for industry espionage. The Boundless Informant world map shows Germany in bright orange. People are wondering: Is Germany breeding terrorists or is NSA simply interested in trade secrets?

Going by that logic, terrorism is a red herring. By making details about PRISM and NSA's hacking activities public, Snowden is undermining the US's ability to covertly vacuum up trade secrets, thus weakening the US industry. That's why the US government is freaking out. You can bet that German companies are now reconsidering using cloud services hosted in the US, or cloud services at all, or American (closed source / potentially backdoored) software at all.

Being in the same age bracket as OP, I think the youth craze in the IT industry contributes to "older" engineers feeling sidelined and burned out. Basically with 35 you've jumped the shark. It's arguably worse than the fashion industry or showbiz.

True. And I would actually go so far as to reject some of the advice, e.g. the strict separation between home and work and the timeboxing: I often take a pause during the day to do some stupid housework. This lets me toss around a problem in my head that I'm working on and when I later return to my programming I have a fresh pair of eyeballs and have formed new ideas to solve the problem. That kind of relaxed way of working on a problem would be impossible with timeboxing.

"M-x replace-string RET"

Try M-% instead.

This seems to be the only top-level comment that actually gets what pg is driving at: Simplicity.

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche's philosophy was that design should be honest. The car shouldn't pretend to be more than it really is. Reduce the design to the core of the product, eliminate distractions. Don't align the design to current fashion or trends. He believed that it's the other way round, fashion aligns itself to well-designed products.

"Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained. [...] A product that is coherent in form requires no embellishment. It is enhanced by the purity of its form. Form should be presented in a way that is easily understood and that does not divert attention from the product and its functional purpose. [...] Good design must be honest.”

(Source: http://www.porsche.com/spain/aboutporsche/pressreleases/pag/... )

AS path = the numbers of the Autonomous Systems that traffic will pass through to reach that particular destination

No it's not forged as can be seen from the AS path in the global routing table.

AS path as seen from the RIPE NCC RIS looking glass for 194.71.107.0/24:

... 2914 39138 22351 131279 51040

... [NTT America/ARIN] [rrbone/RIPE] [Intelsat/ARIN] [STAR JOINT VENTURE/APNIC] [The Pirate Bay/RIPE]

Apart from that /24, STAR JOINT VENTURE only advertises 175.45.176.0/22 (albeit as four /24, idiotically enough). What's kind of interesting is that this /22 is visible with a much shorter AS path:

... 3257 4837 131279

... [Tinet/RIPE] [China Netcom/APNIC] [STAR JOINT VENTURE/APNIC]

The question is: Is is deliberate that the Chinese don't allow transit of the Pirate Bay /24 through their network? (As opposed to Intelsat, a Washington-based American company.)

A minor correction to this article, to the best of my knowledge Mercedes-Benz uses batteries produced by Deutsche Accumotive (a joint-venture of Daimler and Evonik) both in the smart electric drive and the forthcoming B-Class E-Cell. The Tesla batteries were only used in pre-production smart electric drives, as a replacement for the old ZEBRA NaNiCl batteries.

I have a hard time believing Brendan's pledge to diversity given Mozilla's non-support for Gecko embedding.

There's a number of Gecko-based browsers, e.g. Camino, and they've left their users in the lurch by ending support for Gecko embedding: http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding

Mike Pinkerton has for years been voicing rightful criticism that Mozilla is focussing on Firefox and nothing else, see e.g. this interview of 2006: http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277

If Mozilla really wants diversity, why haven't they made an effort to make Gecko attractive for embedding, thus providing an alternative to WebKit? Instead they've done the exact opposite.

"In the beginning I looked around and couldn't find the car I dreamed of. So I decided to build it myself."

("Am Anfang schaute ich mich um, konnte den Wagen von dem ich träumte, nicht finden. Also beschloss ich ihn mir selbst zu bauen.")

-- Ferdinand "Ferry" Porsche on inventing the 356

It's not an update. The software is the same as released in 2005. Only the license keys are special keys that make the software bypass the Internet activation.

So why did they make the software downloadable at all and not just the special license keys? The Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite they acquired uses the same activation servers. In that case they only made special license keys available and not the software.

This smells like a thinly veiled strategy to penetrate the market without saying so (for whatever reason).

You'd have much higher latency working on the remote VMs than on local VMs. You'd also be dependent on Internet connectivity and you'd have to rely on Hetzner's machines being available whenever you need to do your work. Shit does happen.

Derivatives like Knoppix or Ubuntu wouldn't be possible -- or at least couldn't sprout so easily -- if it weren't for that strict adherence to open source guidelines. The way it is, makers of derivatives need not worry about infringing IP rights, they can simply depend on the Debian community to sort that out and only include free software in the distribution (free as in freedom).

-- Debian user since April 1996 (0.93R6)