Rapidly falling prices of assets that many people have invested their whole economic life on makes the population clamor for government intervention on an industry deemed to be too big to fail.
You’d probably like this, Jorge.
It’s a carbonated mate drink. Very refreshing, although the taste might be a bit on the light side.
You may have noticed that the number of posts related to freedom and privacy has decreased significantly. That’s because I’ve mostly given up on people caring about their own privacy, and it feels significantly like I’m preaching to the choir, with the eyes of the mostly apathetic congregation glazing over.
Still, what the fuck.
Free software is an issue I mostly stay away from, since a lot of the free software rhetoric comes from either a very commie point of view or simply misguided mantras like information wants to be free! (no, information doesn’t want anything), but this sort of Apple nonsense is an excellent example of what pushes people to the extreme of claiming that all software should be free. If I own a device, for which I paid with my own money, it is my property. I should be allowed to run whatever the hell I want in it. That doesn’t mean that I can necessarily redistribute Apple’s code, but come on, insisting on turning customers into criminals just because they want to use software other than that blessed by Apple on their devices is idiotic at best and corrupt at worst. They still haven’t learned that extremism on one side will engender extremism on the other.
Listen to Lessig, people. It’s a fight you can’t win, and you’ll only end up alienating those who so dearly wish to give you their money. ProTip: that’s not so smart a move in a recession.
Non-ranting information at the EFF link above, as well as the Free Your Phone site.
I’ve really been looking forward to The Dust of Time, the last of two movies starring Willem Dafoe playing at the Berlinale. The first one, Adam Resurrected, is a brilliantly odd piece and probably the last such great part Jeff Goldblum will ever get (the other one being The Fly). This movie… well… let me just put it this way.
De-bullshit-fier: Only Theo Angelopolous knows what this confused, boring set of kitchen-sink scenes is supposed to mean. Dafoe somehow manages to sleepwalk hurriedly through something that should be titled Alzheimer – The Movie.
Four countries produced the movie. It seems that they also took turns writing and editing it.
On my last night in Hamburg I went out drinking with the Unity folks and the guys from Nordic Game. Not entirely unexpectedly, it turned into a major geekfest. A guy was carrying a Magic the Gathering deck, someone else claimed to have a 1st Edition D&D tome, there were bets on if American Beauty or Fight Club had been released before (I won). What I did not see coming was when the bartender, a girl in her 20s, jumped in singing Where is my mind?, served everyone white russians while calling them Lebowskies, and pretty much won the whole my-library-is-geekier-than-yours thing when she said she had a 1st edition of Paranoia. And that was before we got into the flaming drinks.
It was a lot of fun.
Weather was really nice in Hamburg. It wasn’t even snowing, and temperature was only -2 celsius.
I can’t get used to how most supermarkets are closed on Sundays.
Something else I’ve noticed is that groups seem in the habit of waiting outside a place until all their friends arrive, and then go inside once they’re together, instead of the Costa Rican way of waiting inside and the group growing as people arrive. Why a culture that has to withstand such weather would develop a habit of waiting outside in the cold is beyond me, unless it’s to encourage punctuality so that their friends don’t freeze to death.
I’d never seen Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary Baraka, and only knew about it that it was one of a kind, so I got curious when I saw that the Berlinale was showing it as part of its retrospectives I decided to get a ticket for it. Mark Magidson, the film producer, was there for a Q/A session.
Turns out it wasn’t just a presentation of the film, but the first-ever projection from a new 70mm print. With DTS sound. Displayed on a huge screen.
If you haven’t seen it, the film is basically a slideshow of film vignettes set to music, filmed in about 26 countries. There isn’t a single word of explanation, and the effect of the impeccable montage superimposed with the music is stunning: since it is almost impossible to know immediately where each scene comes from, or what it will switch to in the next few seconds, you spend the whole movie wondering – is that Brazil or Indonesia? Mexico or Morocco? The stratification alternates between the obvious and the obscure, with the latter never detracting from the film, since one of its intentions seems to be precisely to have you question why the image is there and what your preconceptions about it are. Is the tattooed asian a yakuza gangster, or meant to be one, or is he just another example of how we brand ourselves to indicate our tribe, much like the young Australian aboriginals early in the film?
My only regret is I saw it sober.
We have an expression in Costa Rica, vergüenza ajena. It comes to mind when you’re sitting in a theater, and two german women begin calling excitedly konnichiwa! konnichiwa! after the young director and actress of Miao Miao, a Taiwanese film.
While off on Berlinerstrasse today looking for an asian supermarket, I found a small restaurant advertising itself as specializing in croatian food. I’d never had croatian food, and I was unlikely to be in the area again (nothing to see there), so I dove right in even though I’d planned to start eating lighter and go for some falafel. The croatian lady there did not speak English, but we managed with my smattering of German and a lot of grunting, menu pointing and chest pounding.
That’s the wiesse bohnensuppe, a soup with large white beans that was very good, and came with an excellent bread. The main course was called räuberplatte, which apparently translates to robber’s plate (In Sprachtools we Trust).
That’s three sausages, a lot of pork, some french fries, rice and chopped onions. Yes, the onion on top is on fire. And of course, the inevitable half-liter of local beer.
It was very good overall, if a bit heavy, and an indecently large amount of food for 16 euros. It actually reminded me a lot of Romanian cuisine, in that they share the same we’re-going-to-kill-you-of-a-heart-attack approach to nutrition. I remember now my mom mentioned that her serb uncle uses to prepare something similar to the Romanian sarmale, and the two countries are pretty close, so I wonder how much culinary cross-pollination there was.
That’s it right there – Adria Grill, Berlinerstrasse 141.