Mako got an email accusing him of being a bot. If that were only true... Because he obviously would be an open-sourced bot then.

And I'd really really like to get my hands on his sourcecode. Those who regularly read (and see!) his blog postings will probably agree with me that most humans will not be able to produce this unique markoesque style we like so much. So if he were a bot, he would be a major breakthrough. We could just seti-ize him and after watching a season of "the Mako show" on TV we would have the ultimate operating system, bringing together all the benefits of the known operating systems and more.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) there is only one Mako, and he looked pretty human the last time I saw him. Although he apparently has super-human powers, out-dancing Alfie. So maybe he IS a bot.

According to Heise Newsticker, T-Online must not store the dynamic IP-Addresses of its dialin users, since this information is not needed for billing. A general storage of this information for "debugging" purposes or abuse cases is also not allowed.

This is a good day for data privacy in germany, after all the recent pushes by our minister of the interior to spy on us. (And a bad day for the music industry, since this means it will be harder to find out the names of all those napster users).

Interestingly, this case derived not from a file sharing process: an ironic posting in the heise forums resulted in the case, the author of the posting won - and immedeately filed against T-Online for having had his name assigned to the IP-Address. THANK YOU, Holger Voss, for fighting for our privacy!

Note that the policy will probably still be able to find out who you are while you are still online. Given T-online's 24h-hangup practice this means up to 24h hours.

I've ordered myself an MP3 player with Amazon, and I really enjoy watching the UPS tracking system. Here's an excerpt:

Whoa! Apart from arriving three times in Sparks, my package apparently left at a about 1/15th of the speed of light. Without line-of-sight, since there is a huge mountain range inbetween...

Yay, I hope my player survived this speed... ;-) And I hope no truck will ever overtake me on the highway at this speed...

After having seen the latest IBM/Lenovo student offer in germany (albeit I'm tempted to buy a different brand after the repair hassles I had) I'm wondering about the state of Linux on tablet PCs: the Thinkpad X41 Tablet for 2200 € (with 60 GB HD, big battery, 1.5 GHz) sounds like an interesting offer (apart from me being afraid of the turning hinge breaking that is, and wondering if I'll ever use the tablet mode...)

So does anyone have experience with hand writing recognition in Linux?

Guess I will better stick with a normal laptop (and maybe not IBM?)...