derda

This has a lot of of similarities with the german Freifunk[0] initiative. Although the philosophy is different. (They work as WISP and let people sign up for the service. Freifunk distributes APs that anyone can plug into their internet connection and provide Freifunk connectivity in their street. Anyone can connect to it).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk

In case of baby milk powder the alternatives exist on the Chinese market. Even german brands are present in Chinese supermarkets. But after some high profile cases regarding low quality products[0], some people are willing to pay a decent premium for a product sourced from a European supermarket. On the height of this crisis I have actually seen signs "max 2 packets per person" for baby milk in german supermarkets close to train stations / airports. I actually met someone who financed a trip to China by maxing out his baggage allowance with baby milk.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Those days are long over. The behaviour might still remain in some small circles (60yr old trophy wifes in a golf club) but is basically unheard and frowned upon pretty much everywhere else in society.

Its not only the lack of AC in houses here in Germany. Public Transport is even worse. In my town only the last delivery of new buses had AC fitted to them (and I think not even all of them). But you cannot really open the windows either, so you are stuck in afternoon traffic in a bus full of sweaty people with no ventilation at all.

They are probably using QNX[1] which doesn't really have anything to do with Blackberry phones. QNX has a pretty wide adoption in the embedded systems community.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

I see it more as a failure of subsidies. Those companies were built for the sole purpose of grabbing government money. Not only is the installation of solar panels highly subsidized in Germany, these companies were often also founded in economically poor regions in eastern Germany which would grant further support. A few years ago there was a real alternative energy goldrush, companies expanded quickly, IPOs happened etc. . The money was plenty and the companies lived well of it. Then the Chinese catched up, and afaik there was/is no real reason to not buy the Chinese product since the German companies had no real advance in quality or technology (maybe they did not innovate, since they thought they were in a comfortable position?). Now the subsidies for installations would go to China. So basically the tax money supposed to prop up German industries supports a Chinese price-dumping scheme. And if that was not worse enough our energy prices are rising and rising (I think I pay about 0,25€ / kWh) (about a third of it is going to alternative energy subsidies). And don't get me started on the problems with keeping the grid at 50Hz....

I read yesterday that sources within the airport/airline confirmed that his name was on the passenger list. Also the cabin staff has a printed passenger-seat list, no doubt that in a plane full of journalists at least one of them will get a glimpse on it.

I don't know about international laws regarding flights passing other countries airspace. But if the US would force down a Russian civilian airplane, to perform an arrest after the request to perform this arrest on Russian soil was denied, I guess that would cause some major diplomatic trouble between the US and Russia. I doubt it would be solved by summoning the ambassador.

I don't know what the official stance here in germany is, but I talked to a member of the Autobahnpolizei (Highway Patrol) and he told me that while they have high powered cars that could follow most cars at high speed they will "give up" when hey feel they pose a danger to other drivers and concentrate on blocking exits etc. . But I have to say I have not seen a police chase in germany my whole life.

In Germany it is common for young people to go from school to a apprenticeship (paid (but extremly little), Apprentices spend half the week at school the other half at the company), these can be anything from plumber, salesman to software developer. So they enter a company at the age of 17 and will often be employed full time when they finish, if not they still have a degree that will enable them to enter the job market on good terms. This is kind of a win-win situation, youth that did not qualify for university or dont want to go can jump right into a job and learn a profession. They will receive a dimploma from the chamber of commerce and even earn a little bit of money. For the companies, the workers are relatively cheap while they are trained, and they will not only receive pratical training in the company, but also a scholarly curriculum worked out by the chamber of commerce. In the last years we actually had the situation that companies cannot fill all their places for apprentices and some are actually looking to hire some from Spain.

PCB-Pool ( http://www.pcb-pool.com ) is a big player and should be shipping to the UK. But they are on the expensive side (production in germany).

Batch-PCB ( http://www.batchpcb.com/ ) takes longer (they have the boards made in china, at a reputable manufacurer), but cheaper.

Itead Studio ( http://imall.iteadstudio.com/ ) China, Very cheap (they buy empty spaces in fabs, you get 5 (or 10) PCBs buts its possible that one or two arent working.

Bilex-Lp ( http://www.bilex-lp.com ), Bulgaria I think.

Multi-CB ( http://www.multi-circuit-boards.eu/ ) I think they are a british company.

I have no personal experience with any of those companies, though. Small batch PCB manufacturing is always expensive. Get in touch with a local hackerspace and etch it yourself ;-)

But they only rent the last mile from the Telekom. Starting at the DSLAM they usually bring their own infrastructure. (Except reseller contracts).

In the last years there also have been many small, local ISPs popping up, often partly owned by the city (Stadtwerke). Some start rolling FTTH connections and finally bring germany to the internet-first-world.

Cable providers, at least Kabel Deutschland (which is the only option here where I live), are sadly no alternative, while they offer high bandwidths without volume based throttling, the traffic shaping they do at peak times and for torrent traffic is ridiculous and makes their service almost unusable.

Their objective is clear: Promote their own cloud-services and make deals with cloud-service providers, since those services are not metered. They already have a deal with Spotify in place for their mobile network ( bandwidth throttling, after a certain volume is already common practice for all providers ). So effectively their are killing net neutrality.

I hope that plan strikes back and they loose money and customers over this.

Why would a theme park do this? Does the government supply a terrorist-fingerprint database?

I would understand if a private company does ID and (maybe) fingerprint checking for visitors of their research facilities. I had this a few times, although most of the time they maybe write down your name and address and thats it. The only facility that took it really serious was the ESA tech-center in Noordwijk (not to be confused with the little theme park they have near by). They needed passport-numbers beforehand, those passport scanning keyboards they have at airports, the software on the pc also looked similar and guards openly carrying big guns (you seldom see that in Europe). But well, its a space research complex there is probably a ton of military secrets around.

But at the admission for a F'kin theme-park... Why?

Those guys add up to the local government. Also they get paid a ton of money (there are more then 4000 EU-civil-servants who earn more than Mrs. Merkel)[1]

[1] - http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article113330591/4365-EU-Beamt... (in german)

Sounds like there are a ton of pitfalls running a company in Spain. Good luck in the tight economy!

So basically the only benefit you get for the fee is health care? Then its pretty expensive. Does it increase with income or is it a flat fee?

Can you work around the whole thing, if you make e.g. your wife (or father, or whoever) the owner of the company and hire yourself as CEO? So you would pay health care + other stuff as a percentage of your wage (which would be very low monthly + share of yearly profit).

I am asking extensively because I plan to spent a year in Spain in the near future. And while all this information is irrelevant to the stay (I am a student and will hopefully have set aside enough to spend the year without having to work on the side). But I really like to understand as much as possible on how the country works. :)

So that money goes into health insurance and social security?

If you work as an "autónomo" and your business fails, do you qualify for social-security /unemployment benefits? In this case it would not be the worst deal, espacially counting in the discounts. The scandal here is, that the system needs ages to approve the paperwork.

Also as I understand EU laws, incorporating somewhere else would not solve the problem, since you are subject to the local taxes at the place where you actually do the work.

As much as I'd love to see something useful coming out of the european commision, I don't really see it. The EU (and its bureaucrats) have been proven absolutely useless or even dangerous when it comes to Internet related issues, I can not see them fixing web-entrepreneurship in Europe.

I am not familiar with the Spanish tax system, but can't you simply register a Ltd in the UK? EU law says that you are free to incorporate your company where ever you want (in the EU). Or what is this 340€ /month about?

Germany saw the problem of many people incorporating in the UK a few years ago and introduced a limited liability company with starting at (theoretically) 1€ capital, called UG. Previously the GmbH required 25.000€.

Wiki tells me the needed capital for a Spanisch S.L. is 3006€, not that much. But I can't find the 340€? What is it about.

I haven't yet deployed a big app with flask yet, but for my "playground" (Intranet App, very low load) I use Gunicorn (http://gunicorn.org/ ), which is extremely easy to set-up. For a deployment you would want to put nginx in front of it to serve static data.

If you just want do develop and test some things the server it comes with is absolutely enough and helps a lot with the debugging. Its as easy as typing "python myapp.py".

> However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

Well that is because the Abitur (german high-school diploma) is regarded equally no matter which school you attended. From what I gathered the US high school diploma is worth pretty much nothing, without knowing somewhing about the school and/or a high amout of AP-classes. Compared to the German degrees, I'd argue that its actually closer to Realschule (the 10yr grade, which does not qualify for university), than abitur. (Except you are at a top-notch school and take lots of AP-classes)...

I would not be surprised, if he runs into stability issues.

Silicon manufacturers have long used the approach, to just manufacture the top of the line chip and then after testing, deactivate certain parts of the chip, to sell as a lower product. It was famous with AMD processors, where you were able to unlock more cores. The thing is, often those cores were disabled for a reason. I would not be surprised if a similar sheme would apply here, too.

Well the definition is Soft Real-Time (which may apply here) vs. Hard Real-Time (i.e. car ECU).

But having done university research work in the field of hard real-time systems I also think "naahh thats not real-time" every time I see some Web-Framework advertised as such. There is a big set of interesting problems in hard real-time systems: Complex scheduling algorithms, fault proctection and recovery, bus systems that are also able to fulfil your timing requirements....

If you spend some time doing this kind of work your had will wrap around different problems. You cannot take malloc granted, you always fear that the compiler does something wrong or that you better write that routine in inline ASM. Etc.

That said, I do a lot of stuff in python now and its refreshing, but I miss these problems a little bit.

The concept is quite old. It was first presented to the public in '02 when Ferdinand Piech drove it to the stockholders meeting.

The model they are now considering to build is based on a variation of the concept, that they showed in 2011. If I remember right the first concept was not a hybrid but only powered by a diesel.

The car is said to go into production in a small series and to sell for about 50k€. I guess it has been pushed by Piech himself who is famous for pushing out complex engineering concepts to production even tough the company will loose money on every sold product. (See also Bugatti Veyron)

I'd bet there are insurance contracts suited for those apartments.

Well if you need real cheap plumbing, you can still hire some eastern European guy and pay him cash. But quality control is your problem then and god forbid if you house is flooded after you come back from a weekend trip...

I like the German approach which says, you have to buy tickets on the platform/at the station for regional trains (that often lack collector who control the tickets), but you can buy them on the train for Inter-City service, while paying a small premium. Of course the latter gives you the possibility that for short trips the collector may not come past your seat or you fall asleep right after getting on the train and the he doesnt see you when going through the carriage.

For the cases, where the ticketing machine isn't working (and you dont have the ability to buy on the train), the normal procedure, that so far always worked for me, is to walk up to the conductor who steps out to the platform before entering the train and tell him about it. Normally you will be able to purchase the ticket from him in this case.

Random Story:

Back in the days (I think somewhere in the 90s) GSM service in Germany was still relatively expensive, I remember my cousin brought back a SIM-Card from Finland and used it for over a year back home. Even including roaming prices it was still cheaper.

Germany had this for some years. The fee is almost the same as in Sweden. I feel ripped off by this, its a remainder of a time when TV-Broadcasting was still so expensive that only public founded institutions could provide it. These ages are long gone. Until beginning of this year it was actually relatively easy to avoid paying it. You just did never answer one of their letters and took care who you opened the door. Now its tax-like for every household. What disgusts me most there is almost no control over the budgets they just collect whatever they want. The politicians that are assigned to the advisory board do nothing, cause they fear bad publicity by the channels (and also want to secure some well paying jobs for friends).