Point being, you can't fight ideas with weapons forever. The US government knows this. As such, we are trying to fight their perverted theocratic ideology with the promise of equality and prosperity that democracy imbues.
Don't kid yourself. We're currently fighting their ideas with weapons. And once we've conquered the Iraqi people with weapons, we'll attempt to replace their "perverted theocratic ideology" with our own.
And as for your comments pertaining to Iraq's oil production - it seems to me that our newfound control (or at least alliance) in Iraq is a sort of investment. We learned from WWII that strategic positioning of our forces and allies is essential. Come war, come oil shortage, or come 'terrorism', we want to have a global network of sympathetic countries, and what better way to acquire such allies than to remove the current government and brainwash the people (yes, we've been paying Iraqi newspapers to publish favorable, US-friendly articles. Google it).
This all leaves me torn. What we're doing in Iraq is at least partly unethical, but if and when war breaks out, ethics only matters so much. While I find our behaviour reprehensible, I, like many others, also would like to look out for number one. But I won't lie to myself about what we're doing. That's more than unethical - it's schizophrenic.
In biology, a life form has traditionally been considered to be a member of a population whose members can exhibit all the following phenomena at least once during their existence:
1. Growth, full development, maturity
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability of individuals to create entities that are similar to, but separate from, themselves
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions. This property is also called homeostasis.
6. Cells, a basic unit of reproduction
As you'll note, each conventional characteristic of life is procedural or structural in nature; there is nothing discretely chemical. Therefore, neither water, nor DNA, nor RNA is necessary to constitute life. Your definition is incomplete.
Also, please be careful to cite your information. You seem to have created your own definition of life, but then referred to it as some sort of universal knowledge without any citation as proof.
I would be scared sh*tless if dogs suddenly got massively smarter. What with the sharp teeth and near-unstoppable jaws, we'd all be goners if they figured out they didn't all need to be obedient.
The grandfather of this post did have some valid points. It boils down to this:
From the individual's perspective, the remedies we have today are a godsend - they stave off death, save our loved ones, and the virtue of their effects is strongly biologically reinforced: one of our strongest instincts is for survival.
Others see things from a more abstract perspective. Because of medical technology, those susceptible or predisposed to diseases that might prevent them from reproducing are now able to reproduce. We therefore assume the responsibility of maintaining a healthy population, taking said responsibility from evolution. "Negative traits", defined as those that decrease the fitness (survival likelihood) of an individual, are no longer eliminated from the population. If we can continue to maintain and increase our medical prowess, then we are right in what we do - we can overcome the diseases that ail us, and we can provide good quality of life for all those who live. But if our technology cannot eliminate and cure the diseases, we fight for nought - all of our efforts simply increase the incidence of the diseases in the population.
Certainly these words are not meants to make value judgements about people. They simply explain the overall effects of our medical advances. We can keep more people alive, but the more we do this, the larger proportion of the population would perish if our medical technology was somehow removed - think Katrina, terrorism, fall of the government, etc.
I agree with the use of medical technology - in fact, I am studying now to become a biomedical engineer and develop devices like the ones mentioned in this article, or even prosthetics to help the injured or disabled. These technologies will increase quality of life for a large number of people. Their utter absence might result in the death of the many who depend on them, but that would result in a healthier population, who would then have a better average quality of life.
Because I am a compassionate person, I cannot support the removal of the medical technology that helps many. But the conclusion I reach after considering the future health of the population worries me. What will lead to the best eventual health and quality of life for the population? It is a difficult question, and most assuredly one that neither I, nor you, nor the writer of the grandparent can answer. Hopefully our medical technology will sufficiently advance to enable us to remove diseases from the population forever, but until then, the current therapies are both a blessing and a curse.
The "war on terror" as we wage it now can never be won. Bush's war has driven a paranoia deep into the psyche of the American people. Rather than vanquish terror, Bush is simply helping it spread.
I thought the same thing about using an inductive loop to measure the current flowing... you have to remember that it will increase the inductance of the wire, therefore affecting the effective resistance and the RC constant of the wire... you would have to have an amazing amplifier and a damn good Faraday cage around your whole wiretap system to get any useful results without being detected.
Which bring me to my next point: if this system were to work, it seems as though the entire wire would have to be nearly inpenetrably shielded from outside EMF. Shielding works both ways, however, so an inductive measuring device would probably be useless anyway, as the signal would never leave the radius of the wire.
Interesting... in fact, prior knowledge on F-Secure's part of this algorithm implies that perhaps they could end the spread of the Sober worm. If they were to design a piece of code that would remove or incapacitate the Sober worm from infected computers and then distribute that code through the generated URL to every Sober worm that is downloading, couldn't they end the spread of this virus?
So why didn't they do this? Oh yeah, that's right - they're in the business of selling anti-virus software. Their survival relies on the continuous existence of major computer viruses. Their incentive suggests that they should only _fight_ viruses, not eliminate them.
So true. Nature "figured this out" long ago. For proof, check out the massively parallel machine that is your brain. It would be interesting to make a simple processor that could be tiled ala VLSI and interconnected to its neighbors or a center controller. Massive multi-threading will work best when the hardware matches the software concepts.
IM, email, and really any technology used at work is not private. Most companies monitor all messages that go through their systems, and you usually must accept this supervision upon use of the network. As has been mentioned, for truly private matters, you should use a personal phone away from the building.
I worked in a lab this summer at UPenn that does neural computation on silicon in a very different way... they build the neurons themselves out of silicon! This technology could ostensibly someday be used to generate the stimuli that could then be fed to the optic nerve or other parts of the brain. They'd need to first advance their now-relatively-simple models and then build a DNI, but they're on the way.
I'm gonna cover up my obvious spelling error by suggesting that by MPIAA I really meant a hybrid cross between the RIAA and the MPAA. You all buy that, right?
This proposed bill makes no sense at all. What gives Hollywood any authority to legally force their copy-protection schemes onto manufacturers? I think they're just getting tired of going the way of Microsoft etc who simply use their vast monopoly to force manufacturers economically to either get on board or die. That Hollywood would even suggest that they should have control over all forms of video content, whether produced by them or not, is preposterous and downright annoying. Suck my balls, MPIAA.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the US population has a bachelor's degree (from census.gov, 2004 census), and I highly doubt that a third of the US population could be expected to be the "best and the brightest". The best and the brightest are receiving higher-level degrees from excellent universities.
Regardless, environmentalism as you use it is not about a sort of civil/biological engineering - it's about an emotional, sympathetic response to the way that some of our citizens treat the environment in which they live. It is a movement that rationalizes its beliefs with often somewhat indeterminate scientific evidence.
Assuming the goal of environmental action ought to be the preservation of an environment in which humans can exist, the present movement cannot be trusted to make appropriate decisions. That said, neither can the present US administration. Both are extremists: the government currently favors a degree of ignorance to environmetal issues, while the environmental movement favors ignorance of technological necessities in their quest for environmental salvation. Both also share a lack of definite knowledge or evidence to support their views, and possibly the intelligence needed to interpret this knowledge and evidence and form it into law or policy.
Mostly, it seems that both sides misinterpret what seems as though it ought to be the final goal of our actions: survival. The military claims that it needs to operate its sonar to ensure our survival. Environmentalists argue that we should not disturb the environment because of their emotional attachment to it or the fact that disturbance could eventually endanger our survival (see biodiversity, stability, global warming, etc). Both are right in some ways, but are wrong in others. The problem is that extremists on both sides resort to mud-slinging, slander, and propoganda rather than open discussion and debate including knowledgeable experts from both sides.
Environmentalism, used to describe the concept that maintenance of our environment is essential to our survival and thus important to study, is then a just belief held by any evolutionarily rational being (that is, one who cares about his or her own survival or that of his or her progeny). So, to defame environmentalism defined as the movement of emotionally devoted but scientifically indeterminate or unaware activists is fine by be. Likewise, the defamation of the stereotypically greedy, short-sighted politician, CEO, developer, etc is just as valid. But to claim that the self-serving maintenance of our environment is unnecessary is as irrational as the assertion that we should halt all technological progress simply because there is a possibility that it may affect our environment. Instead, we need to examine all technologies or lack thereof with the goal of current and future self-preservation.
Disclaimer: I am a biomedical engineering student at a prestigious US university. I am by no means an environmental expert. I'm just presenting my perspective.
Marijuana has certainly received some unfair press in the past, but that does not mean that we should glorify it to the other exreme: smoking marijuana is not harmless.
Smoking anything is bad for your lungs, whether by carcinogens or just damaging chemicals. Marijuana smoke has been found to depress the local immune system (read: your lungs). Studies have been done correlating marijuana smoking with schizophrenia (example), although rarely is there any claim of causality.
Admittedly, I am an occasional smoker, but while I appreciate the positive effects, I also recognize the negative ones. Ultimately, I believe that to smoke or not is simply a personal decision, like the rest of the human diet. It will be great to know more about the ways that the cannabinoid family of chemicals affect the brain, but it's unfair to portray them either as a villain or a hero. They're simply chemicals whose effects are still widely undetermined. I applaud the fact that people are researching the topic, however, and I too wish that research into such topics wasn't so tightly controlled. Perhaps when the political pendulum swings back towards the liberal (and hopefuly more research-and-science-oriented) end of the spectrum we will see more and less obstructed research on topics like this and many others.
That's actually a really interesting idea that serves as a good analogy through which to examine the situation. What if mathematicians had and could have patented their methods as they created them? If Isaac Newton could have patented calculus and licensed it out to those who needed it, where would math be today? Will these new patents have a similar effect on gene research?
War severly skews risk-benefit analyses. When the lives of a large portion of your civilians are on the line, no risk, financial or otherwise, seems too great. Thus, in wartime, a government can invest a lot of money in programs that may or may not come to fruition under the blanket rationale that "it's for the lives of our citizens" ($87 billion for Iraq, whether right or wrong). Technologies that arise from this spending may not have had the funding to come into existence either so soon or at all if not for that rationale. The technologies that are created in this funding bonanza may prove to be beneficial, either in the field of application for which they were designed or in another application realized after the technology become sufficiently advanced.
For the chemists out there, it's an economically net exothermic reaction with a high activation energy. See "Nuclear Fission" for more information.
I think what Google has to offer is not necessarily its current search technologies, but rather a wealth of experience dealing with large amounts of data and, most importantly, a group of brilliant, creative engineers who have been working well with each other for years. The blurb from the article doesn't say that Nasa needs AdWords or PageRank. It says that Nasa wants to sell some space and outsource some large-scale, high-data flow engineering. I'd say Google is pretty damn good at that.
You're paying for one copy of the music, not the right to obtain unlimited copies of said music. Had you simply bought the plastic and mylar, there would be nothing wrong with using a laser to read and record (and copy) the etchings on the underside that coincidentally encode a musician's life's work.
That said, I agree that record labels should allow you to simply purchase an individual license to listen to a song or group of songs. However, this scheme would only allow them to take proactive legal action against people they suspect are pirating music, not prevent pirates from copying in the first place. That legal action (person-by-person) would surely cost more than the lost profits, so the license idea is unfeasible UNLESS the RIAA and its cohorts can manufacture a software/hardware scheme that ensures verification of such a license before music can be played.
The way I see things, however, is that as long as there are people who know how to work any kind of ADC circuit, any DRMed audio or video signal can always be re-encoded into a DRM-free format just after the point of presentation (cable leading to speakers or TV, etc). A workable scheme would need to make it easy and cheap enough to listen to DRMed music (and difficult enough to bypass that scheme) that most users would rather legally purchase and listen to music than pirate. Apple's iTunes is getting there, although the DRM is inconvenient at times (transfering files from computer to computer, etc).
This issue seems fairly moot though. CDs will most likely be out of mainstream use in less than five years, yielding to newer (more restrictive?) formats (flash, holographic, etc). Although I'd love it if the RIAA and major music moguls were out of the picture so artists could get most of the money from their music themselves, I realize this is fundamentally unfeasible. Musicians will always need a broker, agent, manager, etc, as they cannot do all these jobs themselves. This means that profits will always be split between many people. The only way a musician could hope to run his or her own production is to only play at smaller festivals or do homemade recordings and sell them on a self-made, self-owned website.
I'd rather just buy tickets to local shows, though. They're more fun, more social, and more real.
I'm confused as to what the problem is here... I suppose each processor has an integer ID, ranging from 0-65535 (for a total of 65536 ID numbers). It seems like they simply filled the system to the maximum.
Slashdot Mirror
Point being, you can't fight ideas with weapons forever. The US government knows this. As such, we are trying to fight their perverted theocratic ideology with the promise of equality and prosperity that democracy imbues.
Don't kid yourself. We're currently fighting their ideas with weapons. And once we've conquered the Iraqi people with weapons, we'll attempt to replace their "perverted theocratic ideology" with our own.
And as for your comments pertaining to Iraq's oil production - it seems to me that our newfound control (or at least alliance) in Iraq is a sort of investment. We learned from WWII that strategic positioning of our forces and allies is essential. Come war, come oil shortage, or come 'terrorism', we want to have a global network of sympathetic countries, and what better way to acquire such allies than to remove the current government and brainwash the people (yes, we've been paying Iraqi newspapers to publish favorable, US-friendly articles. Google it).
This all leaves me torn. What we're doing in Iraq is at least partly unethical, but if and when war breaks out, ethics only matters so much. While I find our behaviour reprehensible, I, like many others, also would like to look out for number one. But I won't lie to myself about what we're doing. That's more than unethical - it's schizophrenic.
Courtesy of Wikipedia:
A conventional definition [of life]
In biology, a life form has traditionally been considered to be a member of a population whose members can exhibit all the following phenomena at least once during their existence:
1. Growth, full development, maturity
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability of individuals to create entities that are similar to, but separate from, themselves
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions. This property is also called homeostasis.
6. Cells, a basic unit of reproduction
As you'll note, each conventional characteristic of life is procedural or structural in nature; there is nothing discretely chemical. Therefore, neither water, nor DNA, nor RNA is necessary to constitute life. Your definition is incomplete.
Also, please be careful to cite your information. You seem to have created your own definition of life, but then referred to it as some sort of universal knowledge without any citation as proof.
I would be scared sh*tless if dogs suddenly got massively smarter. What with the sharp teeth and near-unstoppable jaws, we'd all be goners if they figured out they didn't all need to be obedient.
but can you run linux on them? You could probably set up some serious clusters...
The grandfather of this post did have some valid points. It boils down to this:
From the individual's perspective, the remedies we have today are a godsend - they stave off death, save our loved ones, and the virtue of their effects is strongly biologically reinforced: one of our strongest instincts is for survival.
Others see things from a more abstract perspective. Because of medical technology, those susceptible or predisposed to diseases that might prevent them from reproducing are now able to reproduce. We therefore assume the responsibility of maintaining a healthy population, taking said responsibility from evolution. "Negative traits", defined as those that decrease the fitness (survival likelihood) of an individual, are no longer eliminated from the population. If we can continue to maintain and increase our medical prowess, then we are right in what we do - we can overcome the diseases that ail us, and we can provide good quality of life for all those who live. But if our technology cannot eliminate and cure the diseases, we fight for nought - all of our efforts simply increase the incidence of the diseases in the population.
Certainly these words are not meants to make value judgements about people. They simply explain the overall effects of our medical advances. We can keep more people alive, but the more we do this, the larger proportion of the population would perish if our medical technology was somehow removed - think Katrina, terrorism, fall of the government, etc.
I agree with the use of medical technology - in fact, I am studying now to become a biomedical engineer and develop devices like the ones mentioned in this article, or even prosthetics to help the injured or disabled. These technologies will increase quality of life for a large number of people. Their utter absence might result in the death of the many who depend on them, but that would result in a healthier population, who would then have a better average quality of life.
Because I am a compassionate person, I cannot support the removal of the medical technology that helps many. But the conclusion I reach after considering the future health of the population worries me. What will lead to the best eventual health and quality of life for the population? It is a difficult question, and most assuredly one that neither I, nor you, nor the writer of the grandparent can answer. Hopefully our medical technology will sufficiently advance to enable us to remove diseases from the population forever, but until then, the current therapies are both a blessing and a curse.
The "war on terror" as we wage it now can never be won. Bush's war has driven a paranoia deep into the psyche of the American people. Rather than vanquish terror, Bush is simply helping it spread.
Calendar! Please!
that's a seriously large boner
I thought the same thing about using an inductive loop to measure the current flowing... you have to remember that it will increase the inductance of the wire, therefore affecting the effective resistance and the RC constant of the wire... you would have to have an amazing amplifier and a damn good Faraday cage around your whole wiretap system to get any useful results without being detected.
Which bring me to my next point: if this system were to work, it seems as though the entire wire would have to be nearly inpenetrably shielded from outside EMF. Shielding works both ways, however, so an inductive measuring device would probably be useless anyway, as the signal would never leave the radius of the wire.
Interesting... in fact, prior knowledge on F-Secure's part of this algorithm implies that perhaps they could end the spread of the Sober worm. If they were to design a piece of code that would remove or incapacitate the Sober worm from infected computers and then distribute that code through the generated URL to every Sober worm that is downloading, couldn't they end the spread of this virus?
So why didn't they do this? Oh yeah, that's right - they're in the business of selling anti-virus software. Their survival relies on the continuous existence of major computer viruses. Their incentive suggests that they should only _fight_ viruses, not eliminate them.
Clockspeed is dead, long-live multi-threading.
So true. Nature "figured this out" long ago. For proof, check out the massively parallel machine that is your brain. It would be interesting to make a simple processor that could be tiled ala VLSI and interconnected to its neighbors or a center controller. Massive multi-threading will work best when the hardware matches the software concepts.
Bah! Not even in Froogle... ;)
IM, email, and really any technology used at work is not private. Most companies monitor all messages that go through their systems, and you usually must accept this supervision upon use of the network. As has been mentioned, for truly private matters, you should use a personal phone away from the building.
I worked in a lab this summer at UPenn that does neural computation on silicon in a very different way... they build the neurons themselves out of silicon! This technology could ostensibly someday be used to generate the stimuli that could then be fed to the optic nerve or other parts of the brain. They'd need to first advance their now-relatively-simple models and then build a DNI, but they're on the way.
http://yoda.seas.upenn.edu/boahen/
I'm gonna cover up my obvious spelling error by suggesting that by MPIAA I really meant a hybrid cross between the RIAA and the MPAA. You all buy that, right?
This proposed bill makes no sense at all. What gives Hollywood any authority to legally force their copy-protection schemes onto manufacturers? I think they're just getting tired of going the way of Microsoft etc who simply use their vast monopoly to force manufacturers economically to either get on board or die. That Hollywood would even suggest that they should have control over all forms of video content, whether produced by them or not, is preposterous and downright annoying. Suck my balls, MPIAA.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the US population has a bachelor's degree (from census.gov, 2004 census), and I highly doubt that a third of the US population could be expected to be the "best and the brightest". The best and the brightest are receiving higher-level degrees from excellent universities.
Regardless, environmentalism as you use it is not about a sort of civil/biological engineering - it's about an emotional, sympathetic response to the way that some of our citizens treat the environment in which they live. It is a movement that rationalizes its beliefs with often somewhat indeterminate scientific evidence.
Assuming the goal of environmental action ought to be the preservation of an environment in which humans can exist, the present movement cannot be trusted to make appropriate decisions. That said, neither can the present US administration. Both are extremists: the government currently favors a degree of ignorance to environmetal issues, while the environmental movement favors ignorance of technological necessities in their quest for environmental salvation. Both also share a lack of definite knowledge or evidence to support their views, and possibly the intelligence needed to interpret this knowledge and evidence and form it into law or policy.
Mostly, it seems that both sides misinterpret what seems as though it ought to be the final goal of our actions: survival. The military claims that it needs to operate its sonar to ensure our survival. Environmentalists argue that we should not disturb the environment because of their emotional attachment to it or the fact that disturbance could eventually endanger our survival (see biodiversity, stability, global warming, etc). Both are right in some ways, but are wrong in others. The problem is that extremists on both sides resort to mud-slinging, slander, and propoganda rather than open discussion and debate including knowledgeable experts from both sides.
Environmentalism, used to describe the concept that maintenance of our environment is essential to our survival and thus important to study, is then a just belief held by any evolutionarily rational being (that is, one who cares about his or her own survival or that of his or her progeny). So, to defame environmentalism defined as the movement of emotionally devoted but scientifically indeterminate or unaware activists is fine by be. Likewise, the defamation of the stereotypically greedy, short-sighted politician, CEO, developer, etc is just as valid. But to claim that the self-serving maintenance of our environment is unnecessary is as irrational as the assertion that we should halt all technological progress simply because there is a possibility that it may affect our environment. Instead, we need to examine all technologies or lack thereof with the goal of current and future self-preservation.
Disclaimer: I am a biomedical engineering student at a prestigious US university. I am by no means an environmental expert. I'm just presenting my perspective.
:)... i haven't smoked in a week or so... i guess my mind needs some expanding, huh?
Marijuana has certainly received some unfair press in the past, but that does not mean that we should glorify it to the other exreme: smoking marijuana is not harmless.
Smoking anything is bad for your lungs, whether by carcinogens or just damaging chemicals. Marijuana smoke has been found to depress the local immune system (read: your lungs). Studies have been done correlating marijuana smoking with schizophrenia (example), although rarely is there any claim of causality.
Admittedly, I am an occasional smoker, but while I appreciate the positive effects, I also recognize the negative ones. Ultimately, I believe that to smoke or not is simply a personal decision, like the rest of the human diet. It will be great to know more about the ways that the cannabinoid family of chemicals affect the brain, but it's unfair to portray them either as a villain or a hero. They're simply chemicals whose effects are still widely undetermined. I applaud the fact that people are researching the topic, however, and I too wish that research into such topics wasn't so tightly controlled. Perhaps when the political pendulum swings back towards the liberal (and hopefuly more research-and-science-oriented) end of the spectrum we will see more and less obstructed research on topics like this and many others.
That's actually a really interesting idea that serves as a good analogy through which to examine the situation. What if mathematicians had and could have patented their methods as they created them? If Isaac Newton could have patented calculus and licensed it out to those who needed it, where would math be today? Will these new patents have a similar effect on gene research?
War severly skews risk-benefit analyses. When the lives of a large portion of your civilians are on the line, no risk, financial or otherwise, seems too great. Thus, in wartime, a government can invest a lot of money in programs that may or may not come to fruition under the blanket rationale that "it's for the lives of our citizens" ($87 billion for Iraq, whether right or wrong). Technologies that arise from this spending may not have had the funding to come into existence either so soon or at all if not for that rationale. The technologies that are created in this funding bonanza may prove to be beneficial, either in the field of application for which they were designed or in another application realized after the technology become sufficiently advanced.
For the chemists out there, it's an economically net exothermic reaction with a high activation energy. See "Nuclear Fission" for more information.
I think what Google has to offer is not necessarily its current search technologies, but rather a wealth of experience dealing with large amounts of data and, most importantly, a group of brilliant, creative engineers who have been working well with each other for years. The blurb from the article doesn't say that Nasa needs AdWords or PageRank. It says that Nasa wants to sell some space and outsource some large-scale, high-data flow engineering. I'd say Google is pretty damn good at that.
It would be interesting to write a virus that pops up a EULA that most users would click Yes to before it installs itself. Would it then be legal?
:).
Then again, I guess CoolWebSearch et al have already done it, albeit by exploiting holes in people's brains rather than in computer software
You're paying for one copy of the music, not the right to obtain unlimited copies of said music. Had you simply bought the plastic and mylar, there would be nothing wrong with using a laser to read and record (and copy) the etchings on the underside that coincidentally encode a musician's life's work.
That said, I agree that record labels should allow you to simply purchase an individual license to listen to a song or group of songs. However, this scheme would only allow them to take proactive legal action against people they suspect are pirating music, not prevent pirates from copying in the first place. That legal action (person-by-person) would surely cost more than the lost profits, so the license idea is unfeasible UNLESS the RIAA and its cohorts can manufacture a software/hardware scheme that ensures verification of such a license before music can be played.
The way I see things, however, is that as long as there are people who know how to work any kind of ADC circuit, any DRMed audio or video signal can always be re-encoded into a DRM-free format just after the point of presentation (cable leading to speakers or TV, etc). A workable scheme would need to make it easy and cheap enough to listen to DRMed music (and difficult enough to bypass that scheme) that most users would rather legally purchase and listen to music than pirate. Apple's iTunes is getting there, although the DRM is inconvenient at times (transfering files from computer to computer, etc).
This issue seems fairly moot though. CDs will most likely be out of mainstream use in less than five years, yielding to newer (more restrictive?) formats (flash, holographic, etc). Although I'd love it if the RIAA and major music moguls were out of the picture so artists could get most of the money from their music themselves, I realize this is fundamentally unfeasible. Musicians will always need a broker, agent, manager, etc, as they cannot do all these jobs themselves. This means that profits will always be split between many people. The only way a musician could hope to run his or her own production is to only play at smaller festivals or do homemade recordings and sell them on a self-made, self-owned website.
I'd rather just buy tickets to local shows, though. They're more fun, more social, and more real.
I'm confused as to what the problem is here... I suppose each processor has an integer ID, ranging from 0-65535 (for a total of 65536 ID numbers). It seems like they simply filled the system to the maximum.