As much as I like my Operating System, sometimes the documentation just drives me crazy. I’ve been trying for a few days to get my digital camera to work with Digikam, a KDE program to manage your digital camera. Unfortunately, the program doesn’t detect my camera, although the operating system has no problem to detect it like any other USB mass-storage device. I think I’ve read every snippet of information that can be found on the Internet, but nowhere my problem is described, let alone solved. Adding to that, a lot of information is so cryptic, that nobody except the author understands it. That’s why I hereby demand better documentation. Or another brain to assist my present one in figuring out how stuff works.
Monthly Archive for October, 2004
Today I met Horst from The Aardvark Speaks, who is a very nice guy. Not only has he put me on his regular blogroll, but he also gave me a recording of The Fall’s live gig in Vienna from a few weeks back. Now, I’d never heard of The Fall before I read Horst’s postings on the concert, so I applied for one of the five CDs Horst offered his readers and he graciously approved. So now I’m off to my music lesson.
It’s really interesting to see how many blogs are going crazy right now over the election. Especially the ones with conservative writers. For example The Truth Laid Bear, or the ever so removed Captain Ed from Captainsquartersblog, which are painful to read anyways, but reading them now, shortly before the election, is about as fun as getting hit in the face by a sledgehammer. A not very original sledgehammer too, I might add. Come on, repeating over and over again how bad it looks for Kerry and how much of a winner Bush is, is simply getting old. And blogging every snippet about an allegedly incriminating newsstory found in the mainstream media is really tiresome. Link to the fucking story, goddamnit, and let people read it if they want. That’s what the Internet was invented for.
I am a smoker. I like smoking. I don’t necessarily like the smell of stale smoke, but that’s something you can work around. Unfortunately, smoking is dangerous. It can cause lung cancer, give you all kinds of pulmonary diseases, and it kills millions of people with invisible laser guns. Okay, not that. But that’s it’s still enough to tax smokers into oblivion. According to Austria Tabak, 75% of the price of a pack of cigarettes go to the state. And now, in order to rehabilitate national health care, another whopping 18 cent are added to every pack. Which obviously is not only a way of getting more money in, but also a way to make some smokers quit. It’s a sensible plan. If people keep smoking as much, the money they give via the taxes is used to treat diseases caused by their smoking. Unless of course they are run over by a truck. But that probably doesn’t happen too often, so let’s just assume they get lung cancer instead. And if they quit smoking, the money they don’t spend on taxes will not be used to treat their diseases. It’s a win-win situation.
To make this kind of rehabilitation more effective, I now propose a 50% taxation on all products containing unreasonable amounts of fat. Fat makes people obese. Being obese poses a considerable threat to your health. I also propose an additional 25% taxation on all alcoholic beverages. Alcohol abuse causes a lot of bad things, one of which is that yes, it poses a threat to your health. So, if you drink too much, you are most definitely going to end up a disease ridden, miserable human being. In order to let public health care treat you, you need to pay more taxes.
In the interest of all the people, not only in Austria, please implement the changes I’ve proposed. They would make everyone a lot healthier. And happier. And better human beings. I swear.
Out of curiosity, I checked out coke’s own music download portal in Austria. But obviously, they don’t want me there. Because, as they say, my computer doesn’t meet their requirements, since I don’t run any of the operating systems they prefer. Which would be either Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP. The reason they won’t let me access their service is, that according to them, my operating system is not compatible with their version of the WMA(Windows Media Audio) format, equipped with a special DMA(Digital Rights Management) copy protection. Now, I do know that at least two of the players on my system can play back WMA. But obviously, the cokemusic-people fear I could circumvent their copy-protection by listening to a song on a system other than Windows. Does that mean their songs are only protected on a Windows machine? That would be quite poor copy-protection, in my eyes. Fortunately, I don’t care about the music Coke has to offer me, so no harm done, but for people who do, an alternative operating system could come in quite handy.
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