Subject URL: Cure for cancer version 102523

This report from the Herald Sun (damn dodgy paper but I couldn't find this article anywhere else, which may say something...) indicates that a simple chemical castration can regenerate the body's immune system to the level of puperty. If proven true in humans, this will be a massive help to people suffering from depleted immune systems (HIV, cancer patients etc.) The effect has been confirmed in cancer patients in Melbourne.

But I've heard of many miracle cures before that don't seem to come to the surface, although I don't know anyone who would need it so I'm not really looking it up. This one is so damn easy and effective we may be on a winner.

Subject URL: Mental Note, don't lose your job

Looks like the IT industry is in a slump, with IT jobs hard to come by. A quick search for jobs of interest for myself on The Age didn't come up with much, at least in the contracting market. And apparently a recession is coming.

Subject URL: Copy protection for CDs

Look's like my latest project of burning B-sides CDrs of all my favourite bands from the CD singles will be impossible soon thanks to Macrovision's SAFEAUDIO. Oh joy. Slashdot rants are here with a pretty cool explaination of Macrovision on VCRs and how that could be converted for use for audio. Good comment... MP3 has lowered our expectation of audio quality, making analogue copies of music less of a no-no.. making any copyprotection in the digital domain useless because there isn't a thing that can stop analogue copying.... or is there? ;/

Subject URL: Alternative's to Napster

I tried a couple of alternatives last night. One of which was Newtella, designed to use the Gnutella interface for just serving and finding MP3. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to return anything in searches.

I then played with Gnotella and found it just as easy to use as Napster, but didn't try downloading anything yet. Just filter sharing files to MP3 and off you go. Main problem with these alternatives is numbers. The reason Napster rocked so hard was the number of people using it, and searches for even seriously rare stuff (Supergroove b-sides etc.) would usually come up. The Gnutella network just doesn't have those numbers yet, and so searches are slim. Also, the non-central server method of Gnutella means very slow searches. Napster could get 100 answers to your query in seconds, Gnutella takes time. Lots of it.

Hey whoops. Petrol is 97.9 today. There ya go.