Just as last year, we will man a booth at the Open Source Expo 2009, which will happen at the Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, on Sun 2009-11-15 and Mon 2009-11-16:
It’s a much smaller and more local exhibition than the Linuxtag, but a nice one anyway. We will probably be three people on sunday and two on monday. If you plan to attend, we could shift people, so please do not hesitate to contact me.
Today the 17th Bundestag, the german parliament, has been reelected. As a short summary, one half of the former government is past, while the other half has been reelected. According to the first extrapolations, here are the first results:
Both of the major parties (especially the SPD) lost, while the smaller parties won a lot of ballots. The result means that the CDU will form a government with the FDP.
I’m just listening the broadcast of the Deutschlandfunk. One of the speakers postulated that the SPD will reunion with the Linke. I was not a big fan of such plans.
The result is not exactly my taste. I prefered a government of one of the two major parties together with two of the smaller ones. But maybe it’s is better than the current (read as: former) government of CDU and SPD (aka grand coalition).
Musterstimmzettel zur Bundestagswahl 2009
This post is in german language. It’s about tomorrow’s election of the german parliament, the parties that stand for election and the difficulty to make a decision.
Morgen steht die Bundestagswahl an. Ich halte mich üblicherweise mit politischen Aussagen zurück. Dem Wahlkampf jedoch konnte man sich nicht entziehen, selbst wenn man keinen Fernseher sein eigen nennt – die Wahlplakate waren schlicht omnipräsent. Zudem haben wohl alle Parteien die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten entdeckt, die die modernen Kommunikationsmittel so bieten. Egal ob klassische Webseiten, Blogs oder Twitter, der Wahlkampf ist pervasiv und verfolgt einen auf Schritt und Tritt.
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Two years ago I did a contract with a telco. For 30€ I got a flatrate for both wired telephony and a 2mbit DSL line. The contract included a duration of at least 24 months, which prolongs automatically for 12 further months if none of the partners cancelled it three months before the renewal.
After me and Linus, one further old fart, who is a friend of both usenet and IPv6, but also openstreetmap, entered web 2.0. Welcome Sven :) .
During yesterday’s election of the german president, some interesting glitches happened. I’m not talking about the political aspects of the election, but of some housekeeping issues.
On the 60th birthday of the Grundgesetz, Horst Köhler has been reelected as the President of Germany by the Bundesversammlung.
As in 2004, Gesine Schwan was his main competitor, but Horst Köhler won again. Though we left the chance to get the very first female president ever, Horst Köhler might be the right guy for the next five years. As he is not allowed for a third term in 2014, he might be tempted to even more show the way towards the future, independently from political parties and “daily business”.
(Image shamelessly stolen from de.wikipedia.org)
The german constitution, the »Grundgesetz«, became effective the 1949-05-23. Since then, after 12 years of Nazi terror and the lost second world war, the Grundgesetz became the base of our free and modern democracy. Together with the Bundesverfassungsgericht, it served us very well during the last 60 years. Kudos to its fathers and mothers!
I just finished reading the latest book of Helmut Schmidt, “Ausser Dienst”. It’s an autobiography, and due to his age and (political) experience, he has a lot of things to tell about domestic and foreign policy, about economies and the challenges we will face in the near future.
Not really hot news, but the planned collaboration of Wikipedia and Openstreetmap is overdue. There are some (german language) articles (netzpolitik.org, Schwarzwälder Bote) and blog entries (Raphael Mack, Der Schockwellenreiter) available. More details can be found in this wiki.
After checking the program, you might be interested in the life streams of the LAC. You can use VLC to attend.
In this floor show, Serdar, a turkish-german cabaret artist, used citations of people like terrorists, politicians and other prominent (or not so prominent) people. The tricky bit was that you didn’t know what was citation or even who was cited.
An excellent show which was well worth the 16€, though it definitely was not for the fainthearted. If you are offended by harsh words, Serdar is not for you. All others might enjoy the show. Tourdates are available via his web presence. If you are unsure, find some samples on Youtube.com.
According to The Seattle Times, the CIA assumes that Hugo Chávez has cleverly used voting machines in Venezuela “to undermine democratic elections”:
When Chávez won, Venezuelan mathematicians challenged results that showed him to be consistently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. The mathematicians found “a very subtle algorithm” that appeared to adjust the vote in Chávez’s favor, Stigall said.
The article also mentions causes in Macedonia and Ukraine. I personally still hope that there will be electronic voting systems we can control and trust in the future. But nowadays voting machines offer alluring possibilities of tampering.
For several years, the german police searched for the “Phantom of Heilbronn“, a female only known by her DNA, being suspected for several crimes in germany and neighboured countries. Meanwhile the person in question was found: She’s an empolyee at a firm in Bavaria who boxes the cotton swabs used by the investigators. You guessed it, she likely is not the person responsible for the crimes…
The Brad Blog has a notable article about an election conspiracy, “changing votes at e-voting machines”. Part of the cause was to trick voters who have not been that familiar with voting machines. But that’s not the main point, as such things also could happen with traditional paper ballots. The main point is that a couple of “election officials” managed to corrupt the whole voting process. In turn, this means that it is possible for a minority to get control over voting machines and to possibly manipulate them in a manner that it will be either difficult or impossible to detect the fraud.
Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine allege that »the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace.«. They just published a book called »Against Intellectual Monopoly« to prove their theories.
Such a book is overdue. Not that I’m completely against patents or intellectual properties, but nowadays both are abused to hinder innovative competitors quite often. Thus it is time to review our national patent systems and to control what patents are granted by our patent offices.
Read the book online or download it in PDF format.
As I expected, the currently used voting machines have been banned, as they are not compliant with the german constitution. One of the major arguments is that such machines conflict with the principle of transparency – average citizens must be able to control an election (Cite: “Jeder Bürger muss die zentralen Schritte der Wahl ohne besondere technische Vorkenntnisse zuverlässig nachvollziehen und verstehen können”). There are several articles about it:
Frankly, the judgment is not surprising. I’m also glad that voting machines have not been damned per se, so we still have the opportunity to develop secure and transparent e-voting. I’m really curious what mechanisms we will see in the future.
If you are curious why all this e-voting stuff is that complicated, here’s the video of an interesting talk about this topic.
Selbstverständlich müht sich unsere Verwaltung, amtliche Verbotsschilder in korrektem Deutsch zu verfassen. Das Ergebnis überzeugt jedoch nicht immer, wie das folgende “Corpus Delikti”, gefunden am Karlsruher Rheinhafen, belegt:
Finden Sie die mindestens fünf (sic!) Rechtschreibfehler auf dem oben abgebildeten Schild, markieren Sie diese (am besten mit einem roten Filzstift direkt auf Ihrem Monitor) und Zeigen sie Die korrekturwünsche Ihrer Örtlichen grammatikpolizei ;-) .
Edit: This post already is available via Google search. The translation, however, is rather poor :) .
The Linux Audio Conference, which formerly took place in Karlsruhe, Berlin and Cologne, will leave Germany in 2009 and take place in Parma, Italy. If you plan to attend, book your flights now. If you need a GPX XML file for your GPSr, you can easily get it from openrouteservice.
There is no programme on the website yet, but it should follow during the next couple of weeks.
