Vodafone is – surprise! – not too happy about the exclusive deals Apple has been making with cellphone carriers. In Germany’s case, that would be T-Mobile, the cellular subsidiary of ex-monopoly and -state-owned enterprise Deutsche Telekom. They now claim to have achieved an injunction at the Landgericht Hamburg. Good for them.

Good for me?

If I were a potential customer, yes. Vodafone argues that the device should be available in an unlocked fashion, thus making it work with any carrier. (Yes, you can achieve this with hacks, but that’s not the same.) This has previously been achieved in France, albeit for legal reasons, and at a premium price. It goes without saying that more carrier choice would benefit a customer, even if it does come at a premium price.

That said, I’m not a potential customer (at this point). So, is it good for me as a shareholder? Probably not. I’m convinced that Apple hates to partner up with other companies just as much as Microsoft does, so the fact that they do in the iPhone’s case means that they found overwhelmingly good reasons to do so. Whether it’s about the ability to implement features exactly the way they wanted to (particularly Visual Voicemail, which requires some technical changes on the carrier’s end), the added revenue through sharing deals, or something else entirely: Apple must have thought this through thoroughly, and must have found that going this quirky, unusually and potentially damaging (particularly PR-wise) path has benefits that outweigh the downsides. Thus, being a business, their choice was likely the economically smarter one, which means that shareholders indirectly benefit from it, even if only in theory.

Let us also not ignore the hypocrisy of Vodafone. You think for one second that, if they had scored the deal (it’s not as if they hadn’t been in the race), they would have still advocated “customer choice”? Or that, had T-Mobile not revealed a moderately successful first day of sales, Vodafone would have still cared? Vodafone has found that it’s worth having a slice of the cake that is German iPhone sales and that they can disingenuously wrap this into “customer-friendly” PR. Good for them. Good for customers, even, if they win.

Though, with the abysmal state of Vodafone’s EDGE network in Germany, you’d find yourself roaming T-Mobile regardless.

Hello World, encoded and embedded into a wheat field in Germany.

Time to encode random silliness in semacode yourself, and find creative places and ways to post it, somewhere in the world.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is trying to get YouTube to pull nazi propaganda films, according to heise. If that weren’t silly enough, they didn’t even bother contacting YouTube about it, but rather went straight to German television and states that they “expect” German public attorneys to “do something about it”.

Now, perhaps things aren’t quite so fancy down there in Mainz, but where I live, we receive overwhelmingly thorough, critical and insightful education on nazi Germany, including several speeches from contemporary witnesses (though, obviously, that won’t be possible any more soon enough) who get invited to the school. We are encouraged to look at the nazis’ propaganda, whether in film form or as newspaper article with obvious bias.

If the council’s real concern were that some Germans might fall for this cheap video (which, mind you, is so boring, pointless and laughable that you’ll just skip through it), they should work towards improving education, rather than attempting to censor. Wasn’t censorship one of the worst aspects of Nazi Germany to begin with?

There’s a lot awry with German education, but I’m relatively confident that the vast majority of Germans have taken away very valuable lessons on this topic. The few who haven’t (I am, of course, not denying that they exist) won’t be further fueled by such a silly video either.

Just when you think that sport doesn’t do much good…

Via Kottke:

Nine months after the World Cup, Germany is experiencing a baby boom, which is good news because Germany’s birth rate is among the lowest in the world.

Now, I know Germany’s birth rate was low… but the fourth-lowest? Clearly, we need to abolish sexual education and disallow contraceptives.

Kidding.

I fully understand what the health insurance company is trying to figure out: whether my case is genuine and accurate, or a matter of hypochondria, excuses and/or hyperbole. It’s only natural that they’d like to know this in order to decide whether or not (and to what extent) to pay. In other words, their goal makes sense.

The way they go about it, however, does not.

What happens when you fill four pages (plus a cover page) with 42 questions? You get awfully short text fields. In struggling to fill their long-winded answers in, applicants either come up with exaggeratedly succinct (and typically insufficient) answers, or they write in such a small font that nobody can read it any more. Or, you know, a combination of the two. Never mind that these are virtually all questions that I already have answered, just not to them, and not in textual form. It would actually be more efficient to use a dictation device and send in the tape. They’d get a more verbose and more accurate result, and everyone would save a lot of time.

The mess that is the German health care systems has far less to do with lack of money on all ends (though certainly, that will always be an important concern as well) as it has to do with absurd, ivory-tower bureaucracy.

But hey… as long as it works…

Return to filling out the form I shall.