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In Germany, jet fuel is untaxed, whereas train companies have to pay tax on electricity, in particular renewable energy. Also, VAT is handled differently: if you buy a flight from Germany to another country, only a portion of what you paid for your plane ticket is taxed at German VAT rate, but for train tickets, 100% of the ticket price is taxed with the German VAT rate. These are several factors that make it quite a bit harder for the railway to compete with short-distance flights.

I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.

I think it's also worth noting that Iranians have no possibility of renouncing their Iranian citizenship. So even if they wanted to cut any possible connection to Iran, they will never be able to get rid off their citizenship.

Militarization of police is happening in Germany, as well:

* Police special forces (SEK which are organized on the state level unlike GSG9 which are state police) have switched from blue to military-like green/brown uniforms (which have no tactical value, but that's another discussion).

* Police in e.g. Berlin are changing their fully automatic weapons by phasing out the 9mm MP-5 and replacing it with 5.56x45 G36 assault rifles for "anti-terror defense" purposes.

* More and more police units are equipped with armored wheeled tanks.

* Peaceful left-wing demonstrations in some states are regularly "secured" by special forces equipped with tactical equipment including assault rifles, a clear intimidation tactic. SEK units aren't even being trained to handle demos.

* Crime statistics are recorded in bizarre ways to artificially inflate anti-police violence, which in turn forms the basis for police unions to demand stricter laws. For example, any attack on a single police man is counted as an attack against their whole unit, and suddenly one victim becomes 10 victims in the statistics.

"Just" is the wrong word. With the latest legislation in place, witnesses can be forced to make statements to the police under threat of duress, including fines and jail time.

The. CSU. Is. Not. Conservative.

Call them what they are: a right-wing populist law-and-order party that is only active in the state of Bavaria, but terrorises the rest of Germany with their reactionary and regressive policies.

No, why?

The Germans used metamphetamine during World War 2. They gave it nicknames Panzerschokolade ("tank chocolate"), Stuka-Tabletten ("Stuka tablets"), Herman-Göring-Pillen, or Flieger-Marzipan ("pilot's marzipan"). It was freely available under the brand name "Pervitin" until 1941. From then on, you needed a prescription in order to purchase it.

Interesting detail: look at where they authors are working. This is military research. And I'm not surprised. The problem of having to keep soldiers alert during long phases of sleep deprivation has been around since the early days of modern warfare.

LOL, what? Spanish "el" is etymologically derived from Latin ille/illa/illud, which became el/la/lo in Spanish.

Ironically, Go is a programming language where both an Oberon developer (Robert Griesemer) and the developer of the direct predecessor of C (Ken Thompson) directly took part in the language's inception.

You overestimate the amount of impact adnauseam makes. Users that click on many ads on one page within a short time window, but never convert? Obviously fraud that's being filtered, the user will be blacklisted on both the supply and the demand side, and you very quickly make no impact at all, and will most certainly not disrupt the flow of revenue for anybody involved here. That's not some outlandish futuristic technology, that's standard practice for any half-decent player in online advertising.

Go is still a systems programming language, in the original sense of how Rob Pike explained it in the introductory presentation video about Go from 2009.

While Go's official marketing no longer calls it a systems language, the use of that phrase when Go was originally released does indicate that that they envisioned Go to be a "better C" in a sense

Rob Pike uses the phrase within the first 5 minutes or so of the very first presentation video announcing Go, and explicitly mentions that they mean "systems" in the sense of webservers and the like. Since then, Go being a systems language has endlessly (and often maliciously) been misrepresented, so under these circumstances, it's only understandable why this phrase was dropped, even though it was absolutely appropriate since its first use gave plenty of context.

The struggle with bad tooling is real.

If they do that, then it would just show that he was right all along. And I say that as someone who doesn't even like Assange.

The wonders of modern technology allow witnesses to be interviewed remotely. Many courts actually do that.

Funny how you just focus on the existence of the documentary, and not on the contents of it which I paraphrased. I'm not talking about some fringe Extremist Haredi group, I'm talking about a mainstream Israeli film author closely following and critically introspecting the work of the ADL and their then-CEO.

There's actually an Israeli documentary about how American Jewish lobby organizations make comparing genocides a competition (of course insisting that the Holocaust was the worst, no matter what) and that their leaders and members often do this to compensate for lack of religiosity. So, yes, the Jewish lobbying efforts are unique, and uniquely successful. There's nothing wrong about it per se, but if it happens at the cost of remembering other Nazi victims, or victims of other genocides, things are definitely headed in the wrong direction.

They might be asking for things that they're not really eligible to know, or fishing for a pretext to get rid of him. Employment courts in Germany are very employee-friendly, and most cases (90+ %) are settled. Lawyer fees are strictly based on the value of the case (i.e. how much money/compensation the case is about), and each party has to pay for their own lawyer no matter what the verdict is (a rule to financially protect the more vulnerable employee from being financially ruined by the large corporation with expensive lawyers), so the financial risk for firing someone which is then eventually judged to have been done illegally is relatively limited and financially very predictable.

But the rules regarding long-term sickness are clear: the employee only has to send them the renewed sick notes, that's it.

A relative of mine got cancer. The company he was with ended up paying his wages for over half a year, because they had no legal way of finding out what was wrong with him

I call BS. If you're off sick for 6 weeks in a row with the same diagnosis, the employer stops paying, and the employee has to apply for sick pay (Krankengeld) with their health insurance (Krankenkasse). No doctor is allowed to sign off a patient for longer than 4 weeks at once (i.e. the sick note has to be renewed every 4 weeks), this is even mandated by the public health insurances. So obviously there is no way for the employer to find out for how long an employee will be off sick in the long run, it's meant to be like that, and the employer shouldn't care about it because they're not paying salaries for sickness longer than 6 weeks. In addition to that, there's even a system in place, named "Hamburger Modell", to reintegrate long-term sick patients back into their workplace by working part-time hours, and it's even paid by the health insurance.

Source: was long-term off sick and went through the whole shpiel.

One way you're not getting that is by being the foreigner just off the plane (or even there for a couple of years) that can't speak German

So, like most people in the Berlin startup scene?

It makes cyclomatic complexity explicit that is otherwise hidden by exceptions.

Google started the process of enforcing HTTPS on AdX about 2.5 years ago. Not implementing HTTPS in that large timeframe is rather inexcusable. It's just technical debt that you need to acknowledge, and then get rid of it.

Fortunately, even that is changing. Google forced advertisers who want to buy inventory through AdX to switch their creatives to HTTPS in 2015 already. In my experience, any non-compliance to that comes from shitty agencies that haven't gotten the memo that you're better off just switching everything to HTTPS these days.

He's a software Luddite, he basically wants all computing to be like in the 70's, when he enjoyed hacking on ITS, and people would just share software freely. Everything beyond that is evil to him.

FWIW, Go 1.8's GC uses essentially the same techniques as Metronome.

Oh, they have acknowledged drawbacks from the very beginning, they just never deemed them nearly as important as the author of this blog post.

https://www.google.com/search?q=to+compare+definition

Not the author, but presumably because 1, I and l are visually hard to distinguish in some fonts. Same goes for O and 0.

As for U, I don't know about that, but I recently stumbled upon the issue that Google's OCR software seems to incorrectly recognize U as II relatively often.