I shouldn’t be updating my site right now, since I’ve got a shitload of words to put together for my paper due tomorrow, but this article in The Register just kills me. Apparently, the Netherlands are planning to tax portable mp3 players, in order to reimburse the music industry for possible use of pirated music on those players. This is common practice already for blank CDs, CD burners and harddisc-drives. The argument that all those devices aid in the unlafwul reproduction of music doesn’t sound any better today than it did a few years back when they introduced it. It’s still pure robbery, nothing else. Here’s a quote from the article:
If this legislation comes into play, the surcharge will be as much as €3.28 ($4.3) per gigabyte. This might put €180 ($235) to the price of a top end iPod.
So, if you want to buy a portable mp3 player in the Netherlands, you’ll have to shell out that extra money, and you still don’t have the right to download any music for free. You’ll still have to either rip your CDs or download music from one of the legal portals, resulting in you paying twice, and the music industry getting double. What the hell? What sort of industry is this, which a priori regards its customers as thieves? And what sort of idiots are the ones who are lured into passing such kind of legislation? Has the whole damn world gone mad?
Oh well, I’ve got my mp3 player, so screw them.
While writing that evil paper, I turned on the TV to listen to a parliamentary debate. It’s about the acquisition of 18 fighter planes, a discussion which has been raging in Austria for quite a while now. Oh well. So, while I was listening to the speakers, I was wondering when they’d finally announce the phone numbers for the viewer-voting. I then realized that I watch too much TV.
I’m a slob. I admit that much. I’ve been living in Vienna for four years, and it took me that long to become a member of the Vienna Public Library, which is really quite excellent. Until today, I didn’t have a clue that only two blocks away, there’s a branch of that library. So, why did I go and become a member today, you may ask. That’s why:
As every day, I was browsing my feeds, and stumbled upon this posting about someone who had bought a CD and become enraged by the FBI warning printed onto the booklet and the disc itself. In the comments to that posting, someone mentioned that he had started the habit of renting CDs and DVDs from the public library and then burning them at home. So I decided to check out the online-database of the Vienna Public Library (just out of curiosity, I swear). When telling my girlfriend about the abundance of CDs and DVDs they have to offer, she made me look up a book she needed for university, and alas, that very book was available, in the branch just two blocks away. Since I should have actually been writing a paper, I happily agreed to go there and become a member. So here I am. From a simple posting about FBI warnings to a member of the Vienna Public Library, all within one and a half hours.
I would really like to add something interesting to my weblog, but my mind is blank. Somehow I’ve managed to put myself into the position again where I’ve only got a few days left to write a seminar-paper; please don’t ask me why I don’t learn from my mistakes. I do that all the time myself. So right now, the only things I can think about are cyborgs and the unbelivable coincidence that the two guys who invented the term were called Kline and Clynes.
After reading an article on the effects incessant checking of mails has on people’s IQ (about 10 points deducted), I decided I needed to get out. I packed the stuff I had to read for university, some coins for a coffee-to-go and off I went. I noticed that reading that stuff in the park is in fact much more relaxing than reading it in front of my computer. Not necessarily less distracting, but I guess there’s always something able to distract me. As a service to the ever-growing community that has built around this site, I’ve decided to upload a few pictures and display them via a freshly installed gallery plugin (which is really quite fantastic and can be found here) I actually switched to yet another one, it’s called Zenphoto and can be found here.
To all the people with dial-up connections: this is for you. Click the little picture to open up that gallery of wonders.
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