Category Archives: Hi-tech

Uber And Out

March 18, 2015 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Always remember: What is not expressly allowed in Germany is strictly forbidden.

Uber

A court in Frankfurt has ruled that the UberPop ride-hailing service may not operate anywhere in Germany for the simple reason that, uh, well, you ought to have an official permit to do so. To be the driver, I mean.

This is a big relief for everybody here because if people didn’t have to have official permits to use the service then anybody could just simply offer or choose to use the service on his or her own, without being regulated. One can’t have that here because this would make the people who would otherwise make the regulations and hand out the permits superfluous and also make taxi driving more competitive and even bring down prices for the consumer, without these prices being properly regulated first, I mean. There are a lot of bad implications here, people. So, like I said, strictly forbidden. Or verboten, if you prefer.

And besides, they spell Uber wrong.

„Ubers Geschäftsmodell basiert auf Rechtsbruch.“

How Repellent

March 12, 2015 By in Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

To use “ultra-Ever Dry super-hydrophobic” water-repellent paint like that, I mean.

People living in Hamburg’s St. Pauli’s nightclub district are used to hordes of drunken tourists, crime and prostitution but many are fed up with late-night revelers who urinate on public and private buildings.

A local interest group has now applied a special water-repellent paint, also used in shipbuilding, on two especially frequented buildings in the renowned nightclub district near the port to deter ‘Wildpinkler’, as Germans call them.

Ultra-Ever Dry super-hydrophobic was developed by auto-makers Nissan. Its oleophobic nano-coating is water repellant, meaning that those revelers who urinate against it will end up soaking themselves.

And here you thought everybody over here was Sitzpinkler.

Never Forget That Apple Is Still Evil

February 23, 2015 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Just like Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon and all those other hi-tech folks (from US-Amerika).

Apple

But try not to notice that German suppliers raked in two billion euros from Apple last year alone. That would be indelicate or something.

German companies are supplying the glass for Apple’s future Campus 2 “mother ship” in Cupertino, for instance. Glass and Geld (money) don’t stink, I guess.

Apple hat im vergangenen Jahr rund zwei Milliarden Euro an Zulieferer aus Deutschland gezahlt, wie Konzernchef Tim Cook am Montag der Deutschen Presse-Agentur mitteilte. Cook besuchte in Gersthofen bei Augsburg den Glas-Spezialisten Seele, dessen Tochtergesellschaft Sedak die Frontscheiben des neuen Apple-Hauptquartiers in Cupertino liefert. Die eigentliche Fassade inklusive der Sedak-Glasscheiben stammt vom schwäbischen Stahl- und Glas-Spezialisten Josef Gartner aus dem benachbarten Gundelfingen an der Donau.

Duplicitous Doll Disses Deso Dogg (Da Dope)

February 16, 2015 By in Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, High Art, Higher Education, Humor, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Talk about your sleeper cell. That smooth-ISIS-rapping womanizer Deso Dog, aka Denis Da Dogg himself, just fell for the oldest trick in the How-to-Spy-101-for-Dummies book and married an FBI operative who just slipped off to Turkey only to be turned over to those caring folks at the FBI in the US-Amerika itself. Mata Hari

But not before she had transmitted tons of way cool information to them about the romantic rapping sap. Like how he throws down his rhymes half-naked in front of the bathroom mirror, I suppose. And what kind of top secret plans he and his ISIS buddies have been working on these days. You know, stuff like that. Dumbass.

Der ISIS-Kämpfer (39) in Syrien war in die Liebesfalle einer Undercover-Agentin getappt. Sie sollte eine enge Beziehung zu ihm aufbauen, um auf diese Weise wichtige Informationen über die Terrortruppe abzuschöpfen.

German Of The Day: Die Befriedigung Voyeuristischer Bedürfnisse

February 13, 2015 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, High Art, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

That means the satisfaction of voyeuristic needs. And that is not, this guy here below repeats, NOT what his possible participation in the upcoming reality-show-media-spectacle “Mars One” on RTL is going to be about.

Mars One

Well not for him, perhaps. He says he just wants to make the world a better place. On Mars (he’s young – and has an SPD party membership book). And of the 200,000 people who have applied to take part in this cosmic kamikaze picnic he has made it all the way up to the last 660 future contestants batch. You know, he’s still being casted like they do on Germany’s Next Topmodel by Heidi Klum? His mom must be really proud.

You see, the planned “Mars One” mission will need lots and lots of dough to properly sponsor, I mean send their crews to their deaths and that’s why the TV rights have already been sold to the Dutch production firm Endemol, the same folks who bring us, I mean you, shows like Big Brother. So I guess we know where this is going – other than to Mars, I mean – but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the satisfaction of voyeuristic needs, to come full circle again already. No, it clearly doesn’t. It’s just about a simple suicide mission to Mars. Nothing more, nothing less.

Hey, I’m all for the exploration of Mars. But a one-way ticket there for human beings in reality show format is, well, as one guy in the article rightly points out, “ethically questionable” to say the least.

Es geht nicht um die Befriedigung voyeuristischer Bedürfnisse.

The Next Thing You Know They’ll Be Selling These On Ebay

February 2, 2015 By in Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Germany’s utilities, battered by the country’s shift to wind turbines and solar panels, would be glad to sell you a power plant on the cheap. They’ll even pack it up and ship it to another country.

Power Plant

The two largest power producers, RWE AG and EON SE, are especially keen to sell their gas-fired plants, rendered uncompetitive by the rise of renewable energy on the one hand and record low coal prices on the other. It’s a relatively easy task to take them apart, move them by truck and ship and reassemble them elsewhere.

“There is a liquid global market for gas turbines. Transport costs are entirely marginal.”

Opening The Self-Driving Vehicle Autobahn Test Stretch Will Be Easy

January 27, 2015 By in Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Designing the self-driving German vehicles to operate on them will be a completely different matter, however.

Autobahn

Just think of the programming issues involved:

1) They must all be programmed to travel at a safe speed (no less than 250 kph).

2) Each vehicle must always hog the left lane, continually flash its headlights and always have the right of way.

3) Programming the three-inches-away-from-the-bumper tailgaiting function for one vehicle will be a piece of cake but how are you going to get all the other self-driving vehicles out there to do this simultaneously?

4) Giving each other the finger (the German bird) will also be a real challenge as no one will be in the damned car.

5) And what about when these vehicles reach their final destination? How can you possibly program each one to insist on taking the same parking space?

The stretch on the A9 autobahn — which links Munich and Berlin — is supposed to give the industry the opportunity to “test and optimize new innovations in an adapted infrastructure that offers data connections and measuring tools,” a ministry spokesman said. No official launch date has been announced.

Now I Know Why We Can Never Find German Soldiers When We Need Them

January 21, 2015 By in Hi-tech, High Art, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

They’re hiding.

Sniper

The sniper is straight up from the big boulder in the lower left corner, where the color of the stones changes from light to dark.

“The key question for me and my work at the moment is, how images are used to influence people and their decisions,” Menner wrote. “At the core, hiding snipers and ads for Apple have something in common, since both try to infect us with ideas about things we are not able to see. But I think that this is easier to detect while ‘looking’ at hidden snipers than by looking at Apple ads.”

Tanks For Nothing, Vlad

January 4, 2015 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hi-tech, History, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The end of the Cold War didn’t necessarily mean the end of war between big countries, and Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine undermines the notion that a quiet Europe is forever free from war. And modern warfare means tanks. Germany recently bolstered their current arsenal of tanks by buying and upgrading 20 Leopard 2A7 tanks acquired from the Netherlands, though originally from Canada.

Tanks

Upgrading old tanks is fairly routine and accounts for the dangers of the present. Developing a new advanced tank, instead, is a bet on the future. In August, German company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW), makers of the current versions of the Leopard tank, merged with French defense company Nexter. Speaking to the merger, KMW CEO mentioned the idea of a Leopard 3 tank, noting that France has a strategic perspective that stretches decades into the future. In October, when the budget committee of Germany’s parliament put together their draft of a 2015 spending bill, the proposal to develop a new tank was quietly noted, and then debated in an independent German armed forces journal.