A ninth person has died of a mystery form of pneumonia that the World Health Organization says can not be stopped by standard drugs and is being spread across the globe by international air travelers.
"Until we can get a grip on it, I don't see how it will slow down," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson. "People are not responding to antibiotics or antivirals. It's a highly contagious disease and it's moving around by jet. It's bad."
Sony is releasing a player (and presumably software) that allows user to squeeze 30 hours of music onto a CD. It's their MP3 CD-R player except using Minidisc's compression ATRAC to avoid saying the scary twoletteronenumber acronym. Phillips is releasing a DVD-R player that will allow up to 100 hours of music... in MP3?
Music companies are shitting themselves like this is something new:
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people pirate more music like this has to be very bad news for the music industry," says a spokesman for Britain's record industry trade association, the BPI
Copying music, no matter if you own it or not, is now piracy. Making a CDr for the car... piracy. Compilation of tracks you own. PIRATE! Having an MP3? Guess what? Hell, using your CDrs for backup of data or music your band created? Frigging pirate. We poke your eye out and chop off yer leg. Ahhrrr!
Did you know there is no "fair use" clause in Australia'a copyright laws? You legally cannoy copy your music CD in Australia. You can make backups of software and that's about it.
Please? Stop teasing with Thundercracker, Jazz, Skywarp, Prowl and Red Alert.
I want to fill the internet with this sort of thing. Scans of old Transformers trading cards. I want to scan every and put it on the net for all to few and keep copies of ferret away so all can enjoy in a million years time!
This guy's webpage, a major showoff of his Transformers collection should keep me busy for hours.
The crazy Hasbro politicing that killed Optimus Prime (see Transformers : The Movie):
However, Hasbro decided if killing off a major character was good for G.I. Joe, it would be even better for Transformers, so they ordered Optimus Prime to be bumped off in the Transformers movie even though that had never been the intent in the original script. The audience for Transformers was about 3-4 years younger on average than the Joe fans. The Joes fans at least made some acknowledgment that War Is Not Fun and People Get Hurt (sidebar: In every story I ever wrote or edited for G.I. Joe, I made it a point to show somebody getting seriously hurt. They wouldn't let me deal with death, but I could tell kids there was a physical price to combat).
The younger Transformer fans freaked when Optimus Prime went to that big junkyard in the sky; there had been nothing in the tone of the story that indicated it could take such an ominous turn (yeah, Orson Welles was going to eat the galaxy, but that was all a fun Star Wars-ish romp; it wasn't like somebody you knew and liked was going to bite it). Parents howled in protest to Hasbro, and Hasbro decreed G.I. Joe: The Movie be slightly re-edited and re-dubbed to indicate Duke survived (that clunky "We just heard Duke's going to be all right -- yea!" ending).