Dyrathror

The last days with all these disasters in Japan made me think about an article I wrote nearly 30 years ago. I think it must have been about 2 years before the Chernobyl. I was studying physics and wrote an article in which I collected arguments why mankind should conquer space and how to achieve this goal.

The perhaps funny thing today is that at this time, despite the discussion and my personal engagement against nuclear power, this was not the original impulse for my desire to write this article. Actually I started thinking about our global situation after I read the book ‘Worlds in Collision’ from Immanuel Velikovsky. Not that I think our cosmos is as chaotic and dangerous as he writes in his book but there is a considerable chance that a huge meteorite might hit the earth changing everything here.

Once the first thoughts in this direction are done more and more pieces get visible painting an unsettling picture.

The scenario splits up into two groups of dangers.
First there are global catastrophes:

• Nuclear war
• Reactor explosions polluting the environment with highly poisonous Plutonium
• A big meteroid hitting the earth
• uncontrollable outbreak of a fatal disease
• uncontrollable mutation as result of genetic experiments

and many more perhaps individually not fatal catastrophes which might boost each other when coming together (as we can just see in Japan).

Second there are the man made dangers:

• Overpopulation
• Waste of limited resources
• Environmental pollution
• loss of diversity of species on earth

only to name some of them.

Now we can start to argue about how to prevent these catastrophes from coming.

In my original article I started to develop a quite futuristic approach which was probably the reason why the article has never been published.

To leave Earth and go into space is not a technical problem, it is an economic problem. It needs a lot of money to build the first stations in orbit so that considerable amounts of people can start living in space. Money nobody wants to spend at the moment because there are always more urgent, political motivated projects which have to be funded. No politician and no economic leader is interested in plans which will take perhaps hundreds of years, will be a long struggle without immediate return on invest and low actual visibility to support their position.

So probably we will stay bound to earth until all needed resources are spent for other, more urgent, projects and we finally have to realize that we succeeded in making our earth inhabitable but have no means any more to go somewhere else.

What is to do? If our main problem lies in the economy perhaps we should start there. Rethinking how our society is built and which our common goals should be would be a good start. But after all the problem will come back to us personally. We have to change ourselves. Our attitude about fighting against each other to become the leader of the pack, our focus in economic success. We have to overcome our animalistic heritage. And it is exactly this point where mankind will be standing at a crossroads.

Recommended reading: Elena Filatova’s report about Chernobyl

According to Senator Michin the global warming will not happen, it will become cooler. ABC news

It seems that signs like the flood and cyclone in Queensland cannot be result of the global warming. The sea level rising will only be a temporary phenomenon and the glaciers will start to grow again soon and the polar ice will become thicker.

I understand the problems of the science community to bring all facts into a model which finally can tell us what the future might bring.

But when I hear some of our politicians I really feel safe that nothing bad can happen to us or our children. They seem to know exactly what the future holds for us. I only wonder how they can be so far ahead of our scientists.

While I was living in France I needed a new printer/scanner and decided to buy a HP Photosmart Premium, a combined office machine with everything you need for your home-office. It was not really cheap but it was said that buying directly from the internet would give a 50€ cash-back.

The machine itself runs fine apart some minor problems while scanning but …

The first problem I had was to get my cash-back money. I tried to contact the support via mail and received the answer I should try to call a certain support line. I tried but could not get anyone on the phone so after some tries I just gave up and thought I might as well live with the price I paid. Anyway, the ink for the printer cost quite a fortune and you learn fast where HP makes its real money!

Now I moved to Australia and naturally I moved my printer too.

Lately I ran out of yellow ink and went into a shop to buy a replacement cartridge of yellow. In the shop I was already astonished that there were no 364 cartridges to buy but 564 cartridges which are described as valid replacement for my HP Photosmart Premium c309a.

Back home I got shocked. Not that the cartridge didn’t fit. It was looking exactly like the 364 one which I wanted to replace … but the printer denied to use this original HP cartridge which is the right one for my printer !!! (in Australia)

I called the support and learned that each HP printer has a region code which can be altered three times only and that because I moved to Australia I have to change the region code now. But they could not help me directly and I cannot change the code myself as it seems, the passed the issue to a second level support which should call me within 48h. Naturally I didn’t get any calls.

Since then I had about half a dozen mails exchanged with the support and each time I got a phone no. to call where I am promised that I will get a call from someone who can change the region code of my printer for me.

So far I am still waiting (about 2 week now and several attempts!).

In the meanwhile I learned from the support hotline that if I change the region code my other (nearly full cartridges) will not work any more because they are bought in France! A full set of cartridges cost about $100,- AUD … are they insane?

My conclusion … after so many years of buying HP notebooks and printers from laser to office machines I am extremely disappointed and will not buy anything from HP any more.

And I can only warn everybody to reconsider if he wants to buy from such a Producer because this is purely rip-off of their customers.

Hey everybody!

It took some time but I finally made it, to move my blog to a new server, update to the newest WordPress version and also update my plugins.

Hopefully I will have some time to write new articles as well

It is about 4 week ago that I switched from my favorite browser Firefox to Googles Chrome. On my Windows 7 system Firefox simply used too many resources.

Today I updated my Spybot installation which protects my registry and made a system scan. What shall I tell you it found 26 tracking cookies on my computer which I caught during only the last 4 weeks. My main usage of the internet is to search for programming informations.

Perhaps I am a little naive but I see no evidence that a session cookie must remain on the computer of a surfer after the user is logged out. Personalization of a website like on Amazon is a nice thing but I think that I should be able to surf in the internet anonymously and only get a personalized view once I reveal my identity intentionally as by logging in.

Instead of anonymity even the browsers reveal more and more informations so that these can already be used as identifying fingerprint as shown in the EFF Panopticlick project.

If you think that all this doesn’t matter to you it is perfectly OK with me but be aware that the companies who are tracking you and your behavior are making a lot of money with your data. What do you get in return? Databases full of tracking data which, connected to a real person, will make you and your doings completely transparent.

What will be the logical next step after connecting you as a person with the sampled data …. ? I don’t think that needs much inspiration.

Be aware when you surf in the internet that many eyes are watching you!

I just came back to the idea that the whole world is just a simulation on a nice super-computer like in the old science fiction film “Die Welt am Draht” from Fassbinder oder in the film “the 13th Floor”.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

There is always the problem how to hide from the simulated entities that their world is quite limited. I believe in our world they found a nice solution to this problem, they made it round!

Since I am one of the guys playing around with an iPhone now I thought it might be a good idea to make my blog a little bit more readable on the iPhone and other PDAs. After a small research I decided to install the WPTouch plugin and have to state: great work, thanks!

I didn’t write anything for quite a while. But now I am back

My break had two reasons. The really good one is that I became father of a little daughter named Thalea in the mid of July. Naturally I hope for the next talent in computer science but who knows. If she is only a little bit like her mother she will absolutely have her own head and push her own ideas!

If you hope that I will publish family pictures regularly now I have to disappoint you. Family business stays private. The next public pictures of Thalea you can see perhaps in her own blog one day.

The second reason for not publishing articles was the deceasing of my beloved IBM Thinkpad Tablet. I think the heat and moisture of Hainan have been too much for it and when the fan finally gave up …

As a more suitable solution for the Hainan weather conditions I bought a desktop computer with many fans and installed Linux in form of the Fedora 11 distro on it. Perhaps installed is said too much. After over a week of installation I am still struggling to get all components supported and fully up and running. Hope that one day I manage to have installed this cool machine as it should be, including accelerated graphics and dolby surround sound.

Nevertheless I will try to revive the laptop. The tablet functionality is simply cool to manipulate images.

This can only be a political joke!

I was pointed by the german netzpolitik.org and Die Neuen Menschen blogs to an article you can read in the news at N24 or Deutschlandradio about a statement from Viviane Reding, commissioner for media of the European Union, about the chinese internet filters.

“Das Blockieren oder Filtern bestimmter Internet-Inhalte ist für die Europäische Union völlig inakzeptabel.”

or in english translation:

“The blocking or filtering of certain internet content is completely inacceptable for the European Union.”

I mean the enforced distribution of the “Green Dam – Youth Escort” software is discussed in China as well and the installation is not mandatory any more as stated by the chinese government.

But I would suggest the European Union to first stop all internet filtering within the Union before pointing out that they think that internet filtering is inacceptable !!!

The internet citizens in Europe are laughing about this sentence.

Was sich derzeit in der deutschen Politik so abspielt läßt sich nur noch schwer mit einem Generationenkonflikt erklären. Ich möchte hier nicht noch einmal auf die Argumente gegen eine Vorratsdatenspeicherung oder eine Netzzensur eingehen wie sie in der letzten Zeit beschlossen wurden.

Was mich erschreckt hat ist wie die regierenden Politiker mit den jungen Mitbürgern in Deutschland umgehen. Wahrscheinlich mit Blick auf die Demographie, die bestätigt, daß das Gros der Wähler bereits genauso überaltert ist wie die Kader der regierenden Politiker, wurden die Mitglieder der oppositionellen Bewegung als Sympatisanten wenn nicht gar selbst als Kinderschänder dargestellt. Die jungen Menschen die mehr als berechtigte Einwende gegen die Zensurgesetze haben und diese auch nüchtern argumentativ untermauert konnten, wurden wie kleine Kindern abgekanzelt und mit leeren Verbalien abgespeist. In der ganzen Debatte um das neue Internet-Zensur-Gesetz habe ich von keinem der befürwortenden Politiker gehört das er einmal direkt auf die Argumente der Gesetzesgegner eingegangen ist oder diese gar wiederlegen konnte.

Die größte Frechheit habe ich dann heute in einem Interview in der Zeit-Online mit Frau von der Laien und Franziska Heine gelesen.

Heine: … Die Unterzeichner der Petition haben gesehen, wie Entscheidungen in der Politik getroffen werden – und das wird sie nachhaltig prägen.

von der Leyen: Das ist doch etwas Tolles

Heine: Für uns war das nicht so toll.

von der Leyen: Das ist lebendige Demokratie.
… Natürlich kann Frustration entstehen, wenn man merkt, dass da auch andere demokratische Prozesse laufen, zum Beispiel Ausschussberatungen, in denen gewählte Vertreter Entscheidungen fällen, …

Ich möchte einmal fragen, was soll daran toll sein wenn einem auf den Kopf gekackt wird? Denn nichts anderes haben die Politiker gerade mit den meist jüngeren Gegnern des Zensurgesetzes gemacht. Gibt den Politikern der Fakt das sie einmal gewählt wurden tatsächlich für die gesamte Legislaturperiode das Recht die Bevölkerung bei den Entscheidungen die sie treffen total zu ignorieren? Na, da haben die jungen Leute ja wirklich den politischen Umgang in einer Demokratie gelernt.

Und dann wird da auch noch ganz frech gelogen:

von der Leyen: … Diese Daten werden jetzt sofort gelöscht. So steht es im Gesetz.

Hat Frau von der Laien das Gesetz zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung wieder abgeschafft? Also stehen die Daten ohnehin bereits gespeichert zur Verfügung und müssen “bei Bedarf” nur noch angefordert werden.

Ich würde diese Art Politik zu betreiben als Politik der verbrannten Erde bezeichnen. Die Kontrollmechanismen werden heute unter Beteuerung sie nie zu missbrauchen eingeführt, populistisch ausgeschlachtet und gepusht mit dem Killer-Argument gegen Kindesmissbrauch zu kämpfen und wir alle haben dann in Zukunft damit zu leben. Diese Zukunft kann für einen jungen Menschen noch ziehmlich lange dauern! Aber was interessiert das schon einen Politiker der bereits an der Grenze des Rentenalters ist (oder bereits darüber hinaus) und noch ein letztes Mal in den Bundestag gewählt werden möchte!

[Nachtrag]
Ein guter Artikel über die Situation auf Spiegel-Online. Ich denke die Politiker, die die ganze Zeit fälschlicher Weise behaupteten das Internet wäre ein Rechtsfreier Raum, werden in Zukunft feststellen müssen das die Proteste gegen ihre Politik nicht nur auf das Internet beschränkt sind sondern direkte Auswirkungen auf ihre Wiederwahl haben werden weil dort wirklich Menschen im richtigen Leben dahinter stehen!

[Nachtrag]
Hier noch ein sehr interessanter Artikel auf Heise-Online über den Umfang der Informationen die bei der Vorratsdatenspeicherung gesammelt werden. Im Internet sind die Bürger längst transparent! Wann kommt die Forderung das sie dies im Leben ausserhalb des Internet ebenfalls werden müssen?