sábado, 18 de julho de 2009

2 + 2 = 5


Cover by Germano Facetti

The New York Times, reported that hundreds of customers awoke to find that Amazon remotely deleted books that they'd earlier bought and downloaded. Apparently, the publisher determined that it should not offer those titles, so Amazon logged into Kindles, erased the books, and issued refunds. This was aptly compared to someone sneaking into your house, taking away your books, and leaving a stack of cash on the table. (found here)

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were among the wiped books...
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." 1984, part 1, chapt 1.

segunda-feira, 6 de julho de 2009

Ask a toad what is beauty…


photo by Jason Cross. Kermit... the frog... ok, not a toad.
Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794