Here’s the lyrics to the song he played

[Quote]:

Vor der Kaserne,

Vor dem großen Tor,

Stand eine Laterne,

Und steht sie noch davor,

So woll’n wir da uns wieder seh’n,

Bei der Laterne wollen wir steh’n,

Wie einst, Lili Marleen.

Unsere beiden Schatten,

Sah’n wie einer aus,

Daß wir so lieb uns hatten,

Das sah man gleich daraus.

Und alle Leute soll’n es seh’n,

Wenn wir bei der Laterne steh’n,

Wie einst, Lili Marleen.

Schon rief der Posten:

Sie blasen Zapfenstreich,

Es kann drei Tage kosten!

Kamerad, ich komm’ ja gleich.

Da sagten wir Aufwiederseh’n.

Wie gerne wollt’ ich mit dir geh’n,

Mit dir, Lili Marleen!

Deine Schritte kennt sie,

Deinen schönen Gang.

Alle Abend brennt sie,

Doch mich vergaß sie lang.

Und sollte mir ein Leid gescheh’n,

Wer wird bei der Laterne steh’n,

Mit dir, Lili Marleen!

Aus dem stillen Raume,

Aus der Erde Grund,

Hebt mich wie im Traume

Dein verliebter Mund.

Wenn sich die späten Nebel dreh’n,

Werd’ ich bei der Laterne steh’n

Wie einst, Lili Marleen!

[Quote]:

This video features some of the expert wingsuit pilots from team "Need 4 Speed" carving around the European mountains in their Phoenix Fly V4 wingsuits.

Leaving a trail of smoke, the pilots skim inches away from the mountain at over 100MPH, experimenting with wingsuit proximity formation flying.

[Quote]:

Want to know who said what this week about the protests? Here’s a little Occupy Wall Street quiz.

1. “I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.”

2. “I think it expresses the frustration the American people feel.”

3. “They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.”

4. “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”

5. “We are the 1 percent.”

6. “God bless them for their spontaneity. It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”

7. “This is like the Tea Party — only it’s real. By the time this is over, it will make the Tea Party look like … a tea party.”

8. “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.”

9. “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have.”

10. “I’m very, very understanding of where they’re coming from.”

Read the rest of this entry »

[Quote]:

Leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared Friday that God created America to lead the world, and accused President Barack Obama of deliberately weakening his nation.

Romney sought to bolster his credentials to serve as commander-in-chief as new polls showed him back at the top of the Republican field and in a tight potential head-to-head matchup with Obama ahead of next year’s election.

“God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers,” Romney said, in the most important foreign policy speech of the Republican campaign so far.

“America must lead the world, or someone else will,” he said, arguing that the globe would be more dangerous absent a prime role for Washington, Romney said in the speech, delivered on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war.

[Quote]:

Deep-pocketed corporate interest are writing big checks to members of the supercommittee, the group of 12 senators and members of Congress who have been tasked with coming up with a plan to cut over $1 trillion from the budget in the next decade.

Ten members of the committee got $83,000 from some of the biggest corporate donors in the country in the three-week period in August that is covered in the latest federal election filings, according to a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.

$10,000 of the total came from the political action committee (PAC) of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Another $8,000 came from the military contractor Lockheed Martin. Also on the list of donors: Goldman Sachs and Comcast. These are corporations seeking to protect lucrative government contracts.

[Quote]:

But then again do you really want to work for a company that is going to force you to think about such seemingly retarded things? Maybe if they pay enough? Maybe if they just pay period. Hmm, welcome to the graduating class of 2012.

[Quote]:

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.

In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

This is a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence. The argument that there wasn’t enough investment in the Web is belied by the fact that a) the Web attracted more investment than any of the network service technologies that preceded it (by orders of magnitude), and; b) that the total investment in the Web is almost incalculably large. The only possible basis for believing that the Web really would have benefited from patents is a blind adherence to the ideology that holds that patents are always good, no matter what.

[Quote]:

A virus has made its way into the operating center of the US drone fleet — and no one is quite sure what the infection is up to. The virus runs a keylogger that records every movement of the people operating our drones. So far, it hasn’t tried to make contact with any outside source to transmit that information

Ruh-oh. I’m sure the computers in the operating center are not connected to the Internet, right? Right?

[Quote]:

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out. The new law, sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication.

“Under this bill, if a young couple plans a wedding in Amsterdam, and as part of the wedding, they plan to buy the bridal party some marijuana, they would be subject to prosecution,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for reforming the country’s drug laws. “The strange thing is that the purchase of and smoking the marijuana while you’re there wouldn’t be illegal. But this law would make planning the wedding from the U.S. a federal crime.”

The law could also potentially affect academics and medical professionals. For example, a U.S. doctor who works with overseas doctors or government officials on needle exchange programs could be subject to criminal prosecution.

[Quote]:

It should be noted that another puzzle was scheduled to run today, and was already set up. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times, was sent the tribute puzzle at 11:21 last night, and after thinking about it overnight, decided to run with Der’s puzzle. Here is Shortz’s account of how it went down:

“Making a last-minute change like this isn’t easy. The puzzle that had been previously scheduled for tomorrow was already at The Times, laid out on the page, ready to be printed. The Arts section closes at 5 p.m., so the new puzzle needed to be edited, typeset, test-solved by three people, polished, and then sent to The Times before then.

In addition, the old puzzle that was scheduled for AcrossLite and the puzzle applet both had to be replaced with the new puzzle — and the latter is handled in the Netherlands, which is six hours ahead of New York. Also, the “Wordplay” blog entry for tomorrow’s puzzle needed to be replaced, as did the file on XwordInfo.

Unfortunately, it was too late to replace the old 10/7 crossword in tomorrow’s International Herald Tribune, which publishes the Times crosswords on the same day they appear in The Times itself. So I.H.T. readers will get a sneak peek at a crossword that now won’t appear in The Times for several more weeks.

When all is said and done, I think the extra effort was worth it. Kevin made an outstanding puzzle honoring a truly great man.”

If you’d like to give the puzzle a try, you can obtain a PDF version here.

[Quote]:

The death of Steve Jobs has provoked the biggest online reaction of any event in recent history, with social media monitoring firm SR7 expecting official Twitter figures to come in at 10,000 tweets per second.

The huge reaction eclipses the previous biggest event, Beyonce’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, where it was revealed that she was pregnant, which generated a record 8868 tweets per second, according to SR7.