musing about – since everything is turning from tape to disc – when "rewind" metaphors will disappear from everyday language or pop song lyrics (if ever).
tourette trail.
(strangely enough coming to one's mind being at the schmetterlingspfad at cobenzl on a really beautiful afternoon in early autumn sunlight.)
modern people do not drive cars. cars are for dinosaurs. cars are too big, too dirty and represent vintage technology and uncivilized culture.
cars are not urban class. au contraire, in cities those clumpy four-wheel drives represent rural relics. cars are about power, dominion, animal instincts and consolidation of the ruling and rolling class.
they even are counter-revolutionary because better transportation is around but cars and car lobbyists keep them from evolving.
cars are stupid. now, then what are the people who tend to buy even bigger cars nowadays? cars which extend the size of common roads, which need even more of the luxurious combustible already getting scarce, cars which their conductors hardly can control, let alone estimate their dimensions pulling back or forth in everyday traffic?
cars represent a system and its failure. they are the cause and a symptom.
can the bicycle save civilization?
yes, some people need cars. that's ok. but i am pretty confident they will be happy with an equivalent replacement for their personal transportation. because they are not stupid.
politiker ohne wehrdienstzeiten, aber für den wehrdienst.
parteisoldat.org – alte bekannte allüberall.
how odeo screwed up. includes an interesting list of screw-ups.
ok, apple.
apple wants to force me to update itunes to version 7 for further shopping in the itunes store – but i don't want to.
it's neither just because of the ugly graphite interface with its sharp corners and the dark, depressing, ashy and pale "colors"; nor due to the various itunes glitches people have found...
primarily, it's because jhymn cannot remove apple's variant of the music biz' big idiotic fetish aka digital rights management from the purchased songs anymore.
that's why i was still using itunes 4.9 in the past time (which jhymn still works with). because i believe that i should be able to play my purchased music on any mp3 device.
and thus, that's why i won't buy any other itunes store item until the situation will have changed dramatically.
it seems apple (and of course all their even crazier competitors) rather want me, as a tiniest part of their customer group, to not purchase anything at all than to purchase with the software version of my choice and the freedom to hear my music and play my videos anywhere.
in the end, that's what this required update is really forcing me to do: to stay away from their store. ok, apple.
"I'm writing this essay for a magazine, for all of its other attributes, is distinguished by its unclothed women. What about an unclothed page? Is that the page's 'natural' state? And is there something equally taboo about it? Equally erotic? Does it make it more exciting to know that the advertising space in this issue runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 a page? And if so, why?" – Jonathan Safran Foer: Emptiness. (via kottke.org.)
Befürchtete Kommerzialisierung der ORF.at-Foren.
"Um unsere Bedenken zu begründen, lassen wir unkommentiert den als nächsten [ORF-, Anm.] Online-Direktor kolportierten Herrn Thomas Prantner zu Wort kommen."
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does anybody have an idea about (or a pointer to) how programmers can make a standardized distinction between formal and informal wording in one and the same language? is there a german de_du.DE and one de_sie.DE locale? how is this done in other languages which make such differences?