But on a serious note, this sort of thing could happen. Goverments (not nessacarily the US one) could start forcing certain people to breed together based on their DNA and possible genetic combinations that would happen... sort of like 'natural' genetic modifications.
Or alternately, they could encourage people to choose from certain subsets of population as determined on an individual basis. Even an extreme, like arranged marriages, if they are a superset of the personal selection criteria for the individuals involved, can work well. Why does everything have to be forced? Is it more fun to think about that way? Or is it just simpler for simple minds?
There must be countless ways of planning such a program, many of them pleasant and or humane. Though two problems remain, how to identify benefitial traits (and just what is benefitial) and how these are to be increased in frequency. So, a question for Ask Slashdot could be:
What characteristics would a benefitial and humane eugenics program have? How would it be humanely and ethically rolled out?
Science fiction authors and films have brought up the topic in both the foreground (Gattacca, Boys from Brazil, Brave New World ) and background (Niven's Ringworld novels or StarTreck corp.'s Space Seed & Wrath of Kahn) But how would a program improve the species and remain humane? How would improvement be defined?
Most tribes used to have ordeals which one must pass in order to achieve adult status and privileges, e.g. voting and marriage.
Some still do. One of the First Nations in the US modified theirs to conform to US law and substituted part of the ordeal with an enlistment in the Marine Corps infantry, sending a whole platoon through once every two years.
Others have dropped the requirements.
Finland, for example, used to require that people could only marry if they could read. Given the stigma and other problems back then of out of wedlock children, this gave a huge reproductive advantage to those that could read.
Others never had requirements and actually penalize stronger, healthier, or smarter individuals:
successful athletes are pushed harder until they are crippled or begin to break down organs and tissues or take enhancement drugs, some of which have negative long term side effects.
successful professionals (doctors, lawyers and other highload jobs) must usually postpone or de-prioritize personal development and even family responsibilities for their careers. stress and work load often contributes to shortened involvment in child rearing
military personell (statistically stronger and smarter than median) are put in harms way, exposed to stress and environmental pathogens which can cause physical or mental damage. death is an indefinitely, but wating until after the enlistment or going to school after adds delay, too. having kids during an enlistment has disadvantages which may or may not be significant
academics generally have to postpone or de-prioritize personal development and even family responsibilities for their careers. The sedenatary lifestyle can also cause health problems. New faculty gunning for tenure must work a minimum 80-90 hours per week or face uprooting and relocating
etc.
Anything that delays and/or reduces reproduction reduces the frequency of those traits in the population.
Anything that shortens the useful length of life also reduces the grandparent benefit, which is a key advantage in primates like homo sapiens sapiens. So nowadays, most nations are effectively culling healthy, strong, or smart individuals.
How much of the lack of performance can be traced back to the political environment and legislation that has been hitting the U.S. the last 10 years.
The burden of the DMCA (1996) kicked in five years before the EUCD (2001). The EEA makes it worse.
Software patents only affect US based companies, so far.
Bizarre anti-encryption legislation was in effect long enough to move a lot of security projects out of the US. Since then there has been no incentive to move again.
The last decade or so Microsoft has been crushing startups and really stepped up the pace the last five.
The last five years, Microsoft has been increasing attacks universities and comp sci curriculi so that students and staff waste valuable time with transient gimmicks.
Dude, learn from your neighbors and put up your own bat house.
That will keep the bats from chewing through your siding and crawling into your attic to die. Just make the bat house to specs. If the slot is too wide, then you'll get birds in it. The bats are going to be checking out your eaves, generation after generation, anyway until they find or make a place to live. If you provide a place, they won't have to make their own.
On a happier note, I contacted the university to complain about the stunning degree of narrow-mindedness shown by this -- do they really want to exclude anyone who doesn't use Microsoft Word from consideration??? -- and they replied saying that they were extremely sorry and they'd be happy for me to e-mail pdf files to them.
PDF actually works better for both you and for them. Since they are going to be printing your CV anyway, using PDF (as opposed to one of the many MS-Word formats) means that the fonts and layout will be exactly as you intended it.
Well how about with an older Linux distro? Those were fast too.
A G4 I used as a development machine booted Debian 3
(woody) with a 2.2 series kernel in seconds. Usually, I could turn it on in the morning and by the time I had swivelled my chair back to my workstation (a PII running RedHat back then) I could connect via SSH. I found similar experiences on other PPC architectures. Though G3s, of course, are slower, but still under a minute.
That machine is gone, but I expect similar results from my Mac mini which has just arrived. I have a slow, ARM-based linux machine that boots within 30 seconds. I also seem to recall a trick on an Alpha involving linux in the BIOS which allowed booting in 2 or 3 seconds, but wasn't directly involved in using it or setting it up.
Perhaps the devaluation or collapse of the dollar is a real possibility.
Someone or some group has been
buying up US debt via the Bahamas and then selling it. Perhaps that is to gain influence or just to prop up the dollar a few months longer.
However, if I have expertise in any area, that's not it.
If the dollar does tank, that ought to be a boon for Novell and RedHat, since that ought to make their services cheap for markets outside the U.S.
If the European Union were a U.S. state, it would rank forty-seventh in per capita GDP, according to a report from Timbro, a Swedish free-market think tank. (Yes, there really is one.) In annual income the average European is on a par with residents of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas. (And the report excludes the newer, poorer EU nations of Eastern Europe.)
Except that those EU citizens can all read and write, have free primary, secondary, and vocational schools, free university ('cept the UK), free health care, free dental care, and livable (for the time being) pensions. Excellent public transport that makes it convenient to commute to work or stay late at a pub. Some countries, such as Sweden and Finland, also still enjoy exceptionally high quality produce and meat for the time being. Until recently some even had top quality day care available within walking distance. Others have water so clean you can swim in the rivers right down town.
Yeah a lot of the homes are smaller, but the materials give off less toxic fumes and the construction will last at least a hundred years. I hope not too much of that changes to descend to the U.S. level where strong winds or the passage of a few decades are enough to routinely destroy hundreds of buildings.
All that seems to get left out of these wise and clever cost of living analyses churned out by neoliberal pundits hired by Bush, Bliar, Berlusconi and their owners.
In the US media at least it seems that it took months of pressure to get the Norwegians to knuckle under and prosecute Jon despite no laws being on the books either in Norway or the EU prohibiting DeCSS or things like it. The US media, did however spout off a lot about it being a violation of the EUCD (Europe's DMCA) despite the fact that at the time of the articles the EUCD was not law, nor is Norway a subject of the EU.
No, but we once tried to for nearly a year and a half. Basically, it was down whenever it was needed and took days to get the Windows admin off his fat ass and do whatever it was that was needed to get it online again. We eventually did without.
It was a real clash of cultures. All the MS idiots spent their time trying to convince our department that downtime was both normal and acceptable. Everyone else who had been using computers since before the dot-com scam knew otherwise and we had around 25 linux/unix servers worth of stats to prove uptime was still possible.
The ironic part was that some geographically distant and intellectually stunted managment seemed to think that there was some magic on the windows servers that would increase productivity. That is, despite the inability for Citrix, MS-Exchange or MS-2000 server (or what it was called) to stay up for more than two or three days.
MS-Exchange itself caused lost deals to the tune of millions by 1) delaying some percentage of mail for hours, thus preventing dialog, 2) losing some mail completely with no message or warning, 3) producing false 'user-does-not-exist' messsages resulting in delay/loss of contact with new partners/potential clients
The PC is not dead, but Windows and, by association, Microsoft, is.
Have you ever experienced using a thin-client for the course of a year or more?
Yes, but not as a main workstation and not Windows based. The Linux Terminal Server Project does a good job for a good price.
Dude, it was considered broken back then too. Maybe not in 1995, it wasn't release yet then, but certainly by 1996 people knew it was what used to be called a buggy alpha version.
Ok, then check out Fritis about renovating the old Pentiums. There is also Skolelinux.
Alternately, you can offload much of the CPU load from the ancient desktop machines to some terminal servers, say a pair of dual Xeons or dual G5s, using the Linux Terminal Server Project. The public schools in Portland, Oregan have done really well with this method for a small fraction of a Redmond set up.
BTW if your school's buying new desktop hardware, go with something PPC-based that can run OS X. You can still run Linux or BSD on it if you want, but you get more performance for price.
This comes at a time when lots of records from Bush I and the aftermath of the Reagan years are becoming available.
For example, records from Gulf War v 1.0 are set to be made public. So are records that would clear up some big questions in the Iran-Contra (aka Arms for Hostages) scandals.
It was only later, when the War had dragged on and on, and people (Northerners) were getting tired of it, that he made the war about the ending of slavery; and, even then, he freed slaves only in those states and territories that had rebelled against the Union
Actually that was to play the morality card and get more help from Europe.
Apropos skin color, slavery in most areas, including Europe was not about skin color, but social and economic status. In Denmark in the 1600 and 1700's there was a very fine line between conscript, prisoner, and slave. Going further back, in all the Nordic countries going from the 1500's to the 700's, there were codified rules about slaves, their status and when they could work their own land. The status could change, slaves could become free men and free men could sell themselves into slavery. Most slaves could buy their freedom within four or five years of work.
Anyway, regarding maggots, that and a lot of non-allopathic medicinal knowledge was put on the back burner shortly after the social changes brought on by WWII and improved travel. In continental Europe in the 1400's there was actually a purge of such knowledge and practitioners of such knowledge by the church as part of a consolidation of power. There was a book, Malleus Maleficarum, "The Witches Hammer" on how to find and destroy these socially influential individuals.
I agree that the cost has to be spread out over several parties. The income should be as well.
Only a tiny fracton of the costs ( less than one tenth) of producing a journal have actually to do with printing and distribution. Most of the cost is in the production and review. That is already paid for by a combination of the researchers, their research grants and their university departments. So journals are getting articles for free, which are then edited and peer reviewed for free. Then the journals collect 10, 15, or even 20 thousand dollars per subscription per year for the finished product.
In some ways, the researchers and their institutions get re-paid for their contributions. The researchers can only advance in their field or career if they publish successful journal articles (no books). The institutions benefit from and gain status from having successful researchers. But that doesn't mean that it's either appropriate or sustainable for journals to gouge prices like they have been. However, there has to be a better way to deal with the money. (Yes there are some journals that don't gouge.)
Maintaining electronic journals costs money. That kind of infrastructure is, compared to paper, expensive and difficult to maintain. And, unlike paper, if you miss a step, it's all gone.
I suppose that task and money could be federated to various archives and university libraries.
I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places.
That sounds a lot like the description of an infomercial. We have too many of those already.
The economic benefits you point out are also a conflict of interest, pressuring the journals into publication of mediocre, questionable, or down right shams. It's not going to affect all submission and all journals, but if it affects even a small percent, it shifts the bell curve. Over time, that is enough harm.
Codecs same in both: MS-DRM in your living room
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately the video codecs in both Blu-ray (aka BD-ROM) and HD-DVD are the same. And though MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (based on H.264) are options, according to the standard, so is VC-1 (formerly known as VC-9 aka Windows Media Player) and that means MS-Windows DRM and royalties. MPEG gives a better quality and VC-1 should never have been allowed into either standard.
Going with an open codec like Dirac or Theora instead would have made either one cheaper to use and royalty-free which would benefit producers and manufacturers of the content, the discs, and the manufacturers and users of the hardware / peripherals.
The only major differences between Blu-ray and HD-DVD are the storage capacity and the manufacturing process. Blu-ray has much more capacity, ~50GB vs ~30GB. HD-DVD can be produced without retooling the current DVD manufacturing.
Why not scrap them both and go with BD-ROM with MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Dirac instead? I mean satellite TV has chosen MPEG-4 AVC and doesn't want anything to do with VC-1. Why should anybody else?
VC-1 means not only royalty payments on hardware and software players, but MS DRM in your living room.
As long as retailers don't ask for my social security number...
They can ask. Maybe you're gullible enough to tell it to them and set yourself up for identify theft or a fast ride to credit hell, but it's illegal for them to require you to tell you social security account number.
If you politely refuse, they may squawk about their store's policy. However much a part of the policy it may be, it is also illegal to require it and they must offer an alternate method. Sometimes you have to speak to a manager to get it through. Then they'll squawk about their policy before shortly knuckling under and sheepishly admitting that the law requires them to provide and alternative.
No purchase necessary. A few years ago, I checked out house loans at all the banks in the area. I left a unique, clean e-mail address each time I filled out a form. Magically, I started getting spam shortly thereafter on one of the addresses with lines like "dear prospective homeowner..."
Since the bank associated with that address was running MS on at least part of it's visible-from-the-net infrastructure, I tend to figure that their servers or desktop machines got cracked. Though it is possible that an insider sold the address.
You mean "how to turn on a computer and open a new word processing document."
Teaching the concepts will make the students able to adapt to many computing environments.
Do you see anything in the MIT EECS curriculum that looks remotely like that?
AbiWord and OpenOffice.org both support the OpenDocument (XML) format as well as their own XML-based formats. OpenDocument is being favored by the EU and developing nations have even more benefit from it as it alllows more choice in software and platforms down the line.
What Microsoft is attempting to do is patent one of the uses intended for XML from the very start
The work on XML is based on changes desired for SGML. The main one being, in my mind, that XML documents must be well-formed which makes parsing much easier.
So you could examine SGML and its uses for the last 20 years when it became a standard.
Prior art probably goes back into the 1960's, way before MS, if you also consider GML as well.
many "extra" deer the population carries into the winter will starve.
And because they ate up the food before they died, the other animals are left undernourished and succeptible to disease. Physical density, having too many animals in one place, makes the spread of disease like TB quite thorough. The ones that manage to live through the winter then wander into traffic. During the summer they get into crops.
People have made the problem by removing predators like the big cats, wolverines, wolves, etc. and by continuing to destroy habitat. The problem is made worse when game management is oriented towards over population.
I wonder if the DNR would grant me a damage permit for MBAs.
The numbers have been in for a long time and the dust has long since settled. Now that five years have gone by, I think enough data will be available if there is a correlation between number of MBAs on staff and bankruptcy.
It's hardly ironic. Perhaps you missed that the name Napster is not part of the "networks" anymore. The name has survived, but everything else about it is different.
The name (trademark?) Napster was acquired by Roxio in 2002 and now sells only RIAA-approved top 40 crap in DRM'd MS-Windows-only formats. Which is why it's difficult to find anything beyond the top 40 crap.
Unlike the pre-RIAA Napster, the new service also has many technically imposed limits one how you can use the files you have paid for and downloaded. You still have a wider selection, more flexibility and cross platform options with iTunes or even plain old CDs.
As far as my own software goes I may have to abandon it as I can't affort to fight court cases for opensource software.
It's interesting how the spin has been only on open source software and developers.
Patents are about preventing others making, using, selling, or importing that which is patented. Closed source can just as easily infringe as open source. Since it affects using or selling, this means that consultants, resellers, and even end-user businesses have to cough up.
It's not over, unless you choose to give up now. The European Parliament can still send the CIID back to the sewers it came from, but that means input from you to your MEP.
My friends who had only MS admin and development experience haven't fared so well.
I checked up on many old friends and contacts last year during my travels and found the same thing. MS admins where long term unemployed and people with Linux/UNIX experience had gotten raises or better jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
There must be countless ways of planning such a program, many of them pleasant and or humane. Though two problems remain, how to identify benefitial traits (and just what is benefitial) and how these are to be increased in frequency. So, a question for Ask Slashdot could be:
- What characteristics would a benefitial and humane eugenics program have? How would it be humanely and ethically rolled out?
Science fiction authors and films have brought up the topic in both the foreground (Gattacca, Boys from Brazil, Brave New World ) and background (Niven's Ringworld novels or StarTreck corp.'s Space Seed & Wrath of Kahn) But how would a program improve the species and remain humane? How would improvement be defined?Most tribes used to have ordeals which one must pass in order to achieve adult status and privileges, e.g. voting and marriage. Some still do. One of the First Nations in the US modified theirs to conform to US law and substituted part of the ordeal with an enlistment in the Marine Corps infantry, sending a whole platoon through once every two years.
Others have dropped the requirements. Finland, for example, used to require that people could only marry if they could read. Given the stigma and other problems back then of out of wedlock children, this gave a huge reproductive advantage to those that could read.
Others never had requirements and actually penalize stronger, healthier, or smarter individuals:
-
successful athletes are pushed harder until they are crippled or begin to break down organs and tissues or take enhancement drugs, some of which have negative long term side effects.
- successful professionals (doctors, lawyers and other highload jobs) must usually postpone or de-prioritize personal development and even family responsibilities for their careers. stress and work load often contributes to shortened involvment in child rearing
- military personell (statistically stronger and smarter than median) are put in harms way, exposed to stress and environmental pathogens which can cause physical or mental damage. death is an indefinitely, but wating until after the enlistment or going to school after adds delay, too. having kids during an enlistment has disadvantages which may or may not be significant
- academics generally have to postpone or de-prioritize personal development and even family responsibilities for their careers. The sedenatary lifestyle can also cause health problems. New faculty gunning for tenure must work a minimum 80-90 hours per week or face uprooting and relocating
- etc.
Anything that delays and/or reduces reproduction reduces the frequency of those traits in the population. Anything that shortens the useful length of life also reduces the grandparent benefit, which is a key advantage in primates like homo sapiens sapiens. So nowadays, most nations are effectively culling healthy, strong, or smart individuals.Dude, learn from your neighbors and put up your own bat house. That will keep the bats from chewing through your siding and crawling into your attic to die. Just make the bat house to specs. If the slot is too wide, then you'll get birds in it. The bats are going to be checking out your eaves, generation after generation, anyway until they find or make a place to live. If you provide a place, they won't have to make their own.
Good on you for bringing to their attention.
A G4 I used as a development machine booted Debian 3 (woody) with a 2.2 series kernel in seconds. Usually, I could turn it on in the morning and by the time I had swivelled my chair back to my workstation (a PII running RedHat back then) I could connect via SSH. I found similar experiences on other PPC architectures. Though G3s, of course, are slower, but still under a minute.
That machine is gone, but I expect similar results from my Mac mini which has just arrived. I have a slow, ARM-based linux machine that boots within 30 seconds. I also seem to recall a trick on an Alpha involving linux in the BIOS which allowed booting in 2 or 3 seconds, but wasn't directly involved in using it or setting it up.
If the dollar does tank, that ought to be a boon for Novell and RedHat, since that ought to make their services cheap for markets outside the U.S.
Yeah a lot of the homes are smaller, but the materials give off less toxic fumes and the construction will last at least a hundred years. I hope not too much of that changes to descend to the U.S. level where strong winds or the passage of a few decades are enough to routinely destroy hundreds of buildings.
All that seems to get left out of these wise and clever cost of living analyses churned out by neoliberal pundits hired by Bush, Bliar, Berlusconi and their owners.
In the US media at least it seems that it took months of pressure to get the Norwegians to knuckle under and prosecute Jon despite no laws being on the books either in Norway or the EU prohibiting DeCSS or things like it. The US media, did however spout off a lot about it being a violation of the EUCD (Europe's DMCA) despite the fact that at the time of the articles the EUCD was not law, nor is Norway a subject of the EU.
It was a real clash of cultures. All the MS idiots spent their time trying to convince our department that downtime was both normal and acceptable. Everyone else who had been using computers since before the dot-com scam knew otherwise and we had around 25 linux/unix servers worth of stats to prove uptime was still possible.
The ironic part was that some geographically distant and intellectually stunted managment seemed to think that there was some magic on the windows servers that would increase productivity. That is, despite the inability for Citrix, MS-Exchange or MS-2000 server (or what it was called) to stay up for more than two or three days.
MS-Exchange itself caused lost deals to the tune of millions by 1) delaying some percentage of mail for hours, thus preventing dialog, 2) losing some mail completely with no message or warning, 3) producing false 'user-does-not-exist' messsages resulting in delay/loss of contact with new partners/potential clients
The PC is not dead, but Windows and, by association, Microsoft, is.
Yes, but not as a main workstation and not Windows based. The Linux Terminal Server Project does a good job for a good price.Dude, it was considered broken back then too. Maybe not in 1995, it wasn't release yet then, but certainly by 1996 people knew it was what used to be called a buggy alpha version.
Alternately, you can offload much of the CPU load from the ancient desktop machines to some terminal servers, say a pair of dual Xeons or dual G5s, using the Linux Terminal Server Project. The public schools in Portland, Oregan have done really well with this method for a small fraction of a Redmond set up.
BTW if your school's buying new desktop hardware, go with something PPC-based that can run OS X. You can still run Linux or BSD on it if you want, but you get more performance for price.
This comes at a time when lots of records from Bush I and the aftermath of the Reagan years are becoming available. For example, records from Gulf War v 1.0 are set to be made public. So are records that would clear up some big questions in the Iran-Contra (aka Arms for Hostages) scandals.
Apropos skin color, slavery in most areas, including Europe was not about skin color, but social and economic status. In Denmark in the 1600 and 1700's there was a very fine line between conscript, prisoner, and slave. Going further back, in all the Nordic countries going from the 1500's to the 700's, there were codified rules about slaves, their status and when they could work their own land. The status could change, slaves could become free men and free men could sell themselves into slavery. Most slaves could buy their freedom within four or five years of work.
Anyway, regarding maggots, that and a lot of non-allopathic medicinal knowledge was put on the back burner shortly after the social changes brought on by WWII and improved travel. In continental Europe in the 1400's there was actually a purge of such knowledge and practitioners of such knowledge by the church as part of a consolidation of power. There was a book, Malleus Maleficarum, "The Witches Hammer" on how to find and destroy these socially influential individuals.
Only a tiny fracton of the costs ( less than one tenth) of producing a journal have actually to do with printing and distribution. Most of the cost is in the production and review. That is already paid for by a combination of the researchers, their research grants and their university departments. So journals are getting articles for free, which are then edited and peer reviewed for free. Then the journals collect 10, 15, or even 20 thousand dollars per subscription per year for the finished product.
In some ways, the researchers and their institutions get re-paid for their contributions. The researchers can only advance in their field or career if they publish successful journal articles (no books). The institutions benefit from and gain status from having successful researchers. But that doesn't mean that it's either appropriate or sustainable for journals to gouge prices like they have been. However, there has to be a better way to deal with the money. (Yes there are some journals that don't gouge.)
Maintaining electronic journals costs money. That kind of infrastructure is, compared to paper, expensive and difficult to maintain. And, unlike paper, if you miss a step, it's all gone. I suppose that task and money could be federated to various archives and university libraries.
The economic benefits you point out are also a conflict of interest, pressuring the journals into publication of mediocre, questionable, or down right shams. It's not going to affect all submission and all journals, but if it affects even a small percent, it shifts the bell curve. Over time, that is enough harm.
Going with an open codec like Dirac or Theora instead would have made either one cheaper to use and royalty-free which would benefit producers and manufacturers of the content, the discs, and the manufacturers and users of the hardware / peripherals.
The only major differences between Blu-ray and HD-DVD are the storage capacity and the manufacturing process. Blu-ray has much more capacity, ~50GB vs ~30GB. HD-DVD can be produced without retooling the current DVD manufacturing.
Why not scrap them both and go with BD-ROM with MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Dirac instead? I mean satellite TV has chosen MPEG-4 AVC and doesn't want anything to do with VC-1. Why should anybody else? VC-1 means not only royalty payments on hardware and software players, but MS DRM in your living room.
If you politely refuse, they may squawk about their store's policy. However much a part of the policy it may be, it is also illegal to require it and they must offer an alternate method. Sometimes you have to speak to a manager to get it through. Then they'll squawk about their policy before shortly knuckling under and sheepishly admitting that the law requires them to provide and alternative.
If that's a hassle, you can make up a number.
Since the bank associated with that address was running MS on at least part of it's visible-from-the-net infrastructure, I tend to figure that their servers or desktop machines got cracked. Though it is possible that an insider sold the address.
Also, there are several pages of tutorials for OpenOffice.org
AbiWord and OpenOffice.org both support the OpenDocument (XML) format as well as their own XML-based formats. OpenDocument is being favored by the EU and developing nations have even more benefit from it as it alllows more choice in software and platforms down the line.
Prior art probably goes back into the 1960's, way before MS, if you also consider GML as well.
People have made the problem by removing predators like the big cats, wolverines, wolves, etc. and by continuing to destroy habitat. The problem is made worse when game management is oriented towards over population.
I wonder if the DNR would grant me a damage permit for MBAs.
The name (trademark?) Napster was acquired by Roxio in 2002 and now sells only RIAA-approved top 40 crap in DRM'd MS-Windows-only formats. Which is why it's difficult to find anything beyond the top 40 crap. Unlike the pre-RIAA Napster, the new service also has many technically imposed limits one how you can use the files you have paid for and downloaded. You still have a wider selection, more flexibility and cross platform options with iTunes or even plain old CDs.
Patents are about preventing others making, using, selling, or importing that which is patented. Closed source can just as easily infringe as open source. Since it affects using or selling, this means that consultants, resellers, and even end-user businesses have to cough up.
It's not over, unless you choose to give up now. The European Parliament can still send the CIID back to the sewers it came from, but that means input from you to your MEP.