If bugfixing those planes will be as rigidly pursued as with some open source software, maybe the phrase 'buying a ticket' gets a totally new meaning ;-)
When ruling against government 'trojan horses' infecting private computers, the German Constitutional Court used a similar idea, thereby extending the German contitution's equivalent of integrity of the home by introducing a new 'Fundamental right to confidentiality and integrity of information systems'. So this is something that can also be interpreted in a modern way.
I realize that the court ruling was about private computers, not data on servers, but as you said, it makes a difference if the informations systems you use can be expected to produce 'public' records.
Additionally, 'not implemented in Germany' is not entirely correct. It was implemented by the Great Coalition a couple of years ago, then declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court shortly after. So all upcoming formulations of data retention will have to comply with those constitutional requirements.
In the context of Finance, I have read about Haskell and other functional programming languages several times before, so I was wondering what were the specific benefits of doing financial stuff in functional languages? Is it because complex solutions are easier to prove to be correct? And how does the (more or less purely) functional approach there work out with the fact that they basically do I/O all the time, meaning (I guess) high frequency input of financial data, computing and then output from and to standardized existing interfaces?
Edit: What I mean by that is - everytime I read FP books, IO is basically what everybody tries to explain on the last few pages and is rather ashamed to do at all. That makes it hard to imagine how those languages come to use in real world scenarios, that's why I'm asking ;-)
> Lots of fonts have numerals that are the same size/location as the rest of the text.
Actually there's not a 'rest of the text' that is homogenous, unless it's completely uppercase. In normal body copy it's a rhythm of ascending and descending letters, and to that those numerals are meant to fit.
The meaning of 'Lining Figures' is numerals that are spaced proportionally (the opposite of their tabular version). They are a good option in technical texts (as those set with LaTeX typically) where you want to integrate numerals, but still have them stand out.
They are also the default numerals in many digital fonts, even if there are the 3 other options as well (it's a 2x2 system of proportional vs monospaced and text numerals vs lining numerals).
It's actually not such a big hack - it just uses technology that is meant to be used for writing systems that have to put together characters as pieces, because there are so many of them, like many asian languages require :-)
The sound of the Bösendorfer is beautiful and really special, maybe they should sponsor more like that. I'd love to listen to some 19th century stuff on that piano, in particular.
Check out Friedrich Gulda's 'Mozart Tapes' for more of it.