The following is the idea sketch for the birds. Each bird flies above the capital of each Dutch province. In the final coin these random birds are replaced with a bird which is typical for that province.

Le directeur général du nouveau quotidien et du Parisien-Aujourd'hui en France explique que si L'Equipe se veut "le journal de l'exhaustivité en matière de sport, de la profondeur des analyses", Aujourd'hui Sport sera concentré "aux trois quarts sur le football, le reste étant dédié aux autres grands sports et aux courses hippiques".

Il découvre un événement inouï : Mamavirus produit des virions mal formés… car il est infecté par un minuscule virus. On connaissait depuis 1915 les virus de bactéries, les bactériophages. Voici à présent Sputnik le «virophage», premier virus de virus, publié en septembre.

I had in my mind an idea to do an entry on Sony for the past few months, but what the hell, it fits here. Keep the caveat that I worked for Sony for a year and a half, and have been a Sony customer for something like 20 years or so. I still buy Sony; it's my editing software, it's occasionally my DV tape or my DVD-ROM media or a peripheral or two. I own a Playstation 2. I have a Playstation 1. I could probably do some rooting around in the office and the basement and flip a few things around and see the Sony logo. So I got a lot of Sony here, in my life and my home.
 
But if you ever needed an example of a company that functions purely on contempt, silicon and viciousness, look no further than the Sony Corporation. All divisions. All departments. All products. Fuck Sony. Put me down for that, if you need to add a quote file somewhere:
 
"Fuck Sony." - Jason Scott
 
Like I said, Sony is my editing software. But it's not. Sonic Foundry is my editing software. But Sony bought Sonic Foundry, Sony has taken it over, and Sony has renamed it from "Vegas Video" to "Sony Vegas" and have started smooshing the product into the Sony way of looking at things. The most recent version of the editing software simply will not work with my HD camera I bought; you have to buy one of several solutions to be able to pull in the audio/video into Sony Vegas. This is not because it's a difficult thing outside of Sony's capabilities; it's because Sony are bastards. Version 5.0 had presets to work in "HD". Now they don't; Vegas 6.0 works in "HDV", Sony's format that they love. And they added support for rendering your projects in PSP-compatible formats. Because PSPs are owned by Sony. And the format is owned by Sony. And Sony wants you to use Sony Products to generate Sony-Only Compatible Stuff that works with other Sony Products so you can play it in Sony Devices. Sony wants it all, and they don't care what gets in their way.
 
I could expand this entry until you couldn't read it in a single sitting, talking about all the crap Sony has done over the years, inventing formats, adding features so their devices can fuck over the people using them to Sony's financial advantage, ruining viable technologies so that it all goes to Sony. Law Nerds and Rights Nerds who are more qualified (or willing) than myself to go into the deep details of various legal events around "Digital Rights", "Copy Protection", and other such hot-button subjects will say the word "Sony" dozens of times in such rants.
 
A contributor to how HDMI (a video format in use today) has a contingency for allowing the device to produce shittier resolution if it suspects you're making a copy? Sony. The reason that some devices will refuse to work with others because it sees a "copyright bit"? Sony. Meetings that occurred years ago where there was an attempt to make hard drives aware of files and prevent certain "types" from being copied onto them? Sony was in that room. Sony's always in the room, always has someone in there, ready to suggest the most asinine, hare-brained, overcompensating actions to guarantee that the customer, ultimately, doesn't have the ability to do anything with Sony hardware or software that Sony doesn't like, or which Sony can't get a per-use fee from.
 
The fight over the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray formats is crazy, because all it was ever about wasn't the quality of the image, or the good compression, or the top-quality sound. It wasn't about interoperability, it wasn't about future expansion. It was about greed. It was about who could keep more money flowing in licensing out their format to other companies, and it was about how much copy protection bullshit can we cake onto the discs before the machines are wasting the maximum amount of fossil fuel trying to decode our precious movies. And like I said, Sony's right in there, pushing Blu-ray, pushing another jammed-up, fucked-up, useless format that has a germ of good innovation surrounded by a ten-foot shit-shell of "gimmie".
 
Sony is doing this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sony is trying, at every level, to fuck you. This is what they do.
 
Does Sony have good people in it? Of course it does. Every place has good people in it, well-compensated engineers who do good inventions and come up with brilliant ideas and next-level dreams. The problem is, Sony takes those amazing dreams and turns them into hammers that they slam across their mouths of their customers.
 
No one event has really caused me to suddenly discuss this. Like I said, it's the realization that it's more the whole idea of contempt that bothers me more than one specific entity or another who shows it. Lying in my hospital bed gave me time to mull over things in my life, and I realized that contempt was one of the bad forces in my life, something I show myself occasionally, and I have to rid it out of my life as best I can, one step at a time.
 
But until I'm successful, I'm going to show contempt for Sony. Trace it back. Look it up. Sony makes life worse. They've worked hard to make life worse and life is worse for them being around.
 
Fuck Sony.

So let's fast forward to Blu-Ray, the rat that won the rat fight. Companies that give you lots of information on the website are fun, so here's a good page from PacificDisc.
 
Now, I don't expect you to browse this thing closely, so let's go right to the boner:
 
Advanced Access Content System (AACS) is required on all Blu-Ray projects, unless you are producing a ROM-only product. Any Blu-ray disc (BD-25 or BD-50) with any video content, be it for commercial or non-profit purposes must pay the AACS fees. The AACS fees, which are our true costs, without any mark-up, include: an AACS Media Key, AACS Content Certification and all AACS Order Processing Fees.
 
PacificDisc does not collect AACS Content Provider Fees. These are to be paid for by the content owner directly from AACS LA and proof of license is required before a project is started.
 
AACS is required on all Blu-ray discs and costs $1,585 per title plus $0.05/disc

No. Holy Jesus Muffin Baked In Hell's Sweet Flame No.
 
There is no fucking way I am going to go through the pain of applying for a "license" to some asswipe centralized copy protection gestapo so that I can be issued my unique serial number, blowing $1,585 out the window for the privilege of this delicious turd which I then HAVE to use (HAVE to use, I must stress) on my disc so it "can't be duplicated" by normal people but easily duplicated by anyone else and THEN pay another five cents PER DISC for all future copies of the disc using this key I didn't want for copy protection I don't want. On TOP of the royalty to the patent pool of the Blu-Ray Consortium per disc. No fucking way! I couldn't make this clearer if I formed the words using a pile of dead offspring. This is an utter deal breaker, friends.
 
Think about that the next time you're in the store considering buying your Blu-Ray player with tasty $30 Sony Royalty in it. Think how much money for all these products out there in the shelves is going to this crime family of copy protection licensing. Most smaller houses consider a 10,000 unit sale of something to be a wild success; it's usually something like 5,000. Mine has been less than that. This would mean that thirty to fifty cents of every unit you buy is going into NOTHING. Into BREAKING THE DISC SO YOU "CAN'T COPY IT".
 
Where's the EFF in all this? I answer my own question: this situation is too far out there to really get involved with. A judge would point to online distribution and DVD-ROM and hard drives and point out that there's no constriction of free speech here. They wouldn't win. It's too esoteric. But if Blu-Ray becomes "the" way you go to a table and buy a copy off of a stack next to an eager filmmaker, then it's really the only easy transport mechanism for that direct-sell crowd. It's sewed up. It's owned. It's bought and paid for and fuck you, little guy. Go blow it up on youtube and count your blessings we haven't shut that shit down this week.
 
I push the papers back on the table. I get my jacket. I leave the room.
 
No fucking way am I doing Blu-Ray.