rostigerpudel

Calling Hungary war-torn is a stretch, yes. But (South-)Eastern Europe at the time was an area of conflict and that was felt in Hungary as well.

The end of communism was surprisingly peaceful. Yugoslavia rapidly disintegrating afterwards was an entirely different affair. Austria had a border with Yugoslavia - with the part that today is known as Slowenia. The actual independence war of Slovenia lasted only 10 days [1]. Still, troop movements happened in sight of the Austrian border and the Austrians were not happy at all.

The outbreak of full conflict between the recently declared independent states of Croatia and Bosnia with Yugoslavia happend shortly after and was not over in 1993/94 [2]. So I guess any Austrian border patrol would have been wary of refugees/smugglers/shady elements crossing any eastern border.

Hungary was never immediately affected by the war in the former Yugoslavia, but it had an enormously long border with a country at war with itself and the economic impact (loss of trade with the southern neighbours, influx of refugees etc.) could be felt in many ways. So, compared to western standards, Hungary might, at the time, have looked slightly less than appealing. In particular if you didn't know the local language and were smuggling...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

Thanks for pointing those out. I never noticed them before.

It is, if upon written request, the terms are confirmed by the one offering the bounty. This has happened here. The originally reporting newspaper has this to say (translation by me):

"[...] The doctor had noted the biologist's 100.000-Euro-Offer on the internet. At the start of the trial, he stated that he had requested (and received) written confirmation of the bet. He sent the documents to the biologist - together with his account number. Still, he did not receive the money and proceeded to sue. [...]"

Original article here: http://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.kurioser-masern...

Actually, I dont' think that is the webserver's job.

Relying on your webserver to protect you against SQL injection is probably not what you want to do. The webserver has no knowledge at all about what kind of program you run behind it. You would need to teach it everything about what you're doing.

Seriously, you are much better off just using prepared statements everywhere than trying to teach a webserver the finer points of your particular combination of SQL and the language you use. It's like parsing HTML with regular expressions. It might hold up for a while or for certain tasks, but will explode quite unexpectedly at some later point.

Some reasons why I do not like tutanota:

* They say the combination of AES-128 and 2k RSA keys is secure

* The private key is stored on their servers (password needs to be set, but if security hinges on the private key password...)

* The website contains FUD (e.g. the FAQ [1])

* They have been sending UBE with loads of FUD to promote their services

[1] https://tutanota.de/#!faq (the language switch is all the way down at the bottom)

To put this into perspective for non-Germans: A preliminary injunction requires urgency. Urgency is in the eye of the beholder but most courts here expect you to request an injunction within four weeks of your gaining knowledge of some wrongdoing.

Taxi Deutschland waited too long (almost a year) which is why the injunction was overturned. However, the judge also let on that on the merits, Taxi Deutschland would win court proceedings - the case just is not considered urgent anymore.

Ah, old times.

This weekend I will retire my last desktop machine running Gentoo (still have some servers running it). It's been serving my mother for almost ten years with only minor hitches along the way. The machine is an AMD Sempron at 1.8 GHz so updating Gentoo is such a pain that in the last few years I would only update when she was away for a few days. So she would leave it on and I would update the computer remotely which creates its own set of possible problems.

Why didn't I switch to some other distro? Well, I tried, but this is the only machine I have ever used where there is a significant effect of all the Gentoo toiling involved. Ubuntu would take minutes to just display the login screen and starting firefox meant a whole different dimension of time for grabbing a coffee (lunch, rather). After a brief attempt, back to Gentoo it was. So the trade-off up to now is usable everyday speed vs. excruciatingly slow updates.

The new machine will run Ubuntu, though, because my mother wants to be able to update her computer herself these days (parents grow up too fast, sigh). Still, I owe to Gentoo much of what I know about Linux and computers, in particular to only shoot myself in the foot very carefully when the docs warn me that whatever I am doing is a bad idea. Chasing bizarre build failures taught me that not all hard- and software is created equal, no matter what some "standard" says. Sometimes hardware implementation of some feature is plain broken and sometimes I tried to install that singular combination of software that just won't work. Or I forgot to include drivers for, say, mass storage...

It's good to see Gentoo is alive and kicking.

edit: Just to be clear, the service in dispute is UberPop.

Anyone can get a taxi license as long as they fulfil some (basic, really) conditions.

To get the taxi license you have to show that you and your car are fit to drive and that you probably will not cause too much damage in the process. That means taking exams, regularly having your car checked (there is a difference between checks for commercial and non-commercial vehicles here) and having insurance that lives up to German standards (an insurance that pays 1 000 000 $ per accident like the one shown on that certificate of Uber's is a joke).

Not that significant a barrier but it keeps out the duds and the crazy. The whole process is easy enough so that supply well meets or exceeds demand in most German cities, even at strange times of day. Maybe Uber is too stupid? I don't think so...

Uber does not want any of that. They only want to have a clear path for the race to the bottom. They do not care about safe transportation, just about their bottom line (I would, too, if I had raised that amount of capital for what is basically a phone app). That's ok, they are for-profit, this is what they're here for. The Frankfurt court has done what it is there for. It has told them that, while rules are in place, they need to be followed. Uber had plenty of time to prove to authorities that they are OK guys. They didn't. They are not "disruptors". By not following regulations, they are, most probably, simply breaking the law and competing unfairly.

Of course you can be cheaper if you skip the background check, driving test and reliable insurance.

My screen - like probably a significant portion of screens out there - is wide, 16:10 or 16:9. So without multi-column layout, I have three layout possibilities: Long lines (hard to read), large font (wasting screen real estate) or some form of fixed-width central column with auto margin (also wasting real estate).

With multi-column text layout I (think I) read faster. It is much easier for me to remember where on the screen a certain passage was in case I have the desire to re-read at a later point in the text (say, because I am not sure if I understood correctly). Plus, for long texts it is much easier to jump to an earlier part of the text when it is still visible than to scroll back.

So I wouldn't flat-out refuse that Good may come of this. I don't see the application of multi-column text on a phone screen given its size but tablets seem to have reached sufficient size and resolution. Multi-column text still breaks the way I usually read on the web, but I feel it might be worth getting used to.