You clearly don't work in IT. Software doesn't work that way. If the datatable is shaped like this:
Customers
--------------------
name, cust_id, credits

Items
--------------------
Cust_id, song

Then your system would work. But it probably is not organized like that. That's very inefficient. What if the items table is like this:
Items
--------------------
Pinfloyd - the wall Y/N?
Pinfloyd - the Division bell Y/N?
Pinfloyd - Live Y/N?

Each of those Yes/No's only takes up 1 bit of space. It's either 1 or 0 on the datatable.
Now what if you and your brother both own "The wall" ?
How do they reflect that you now own 2?
What if you're 10? And the song is for adults only?
What if you were previously banned from iTunes?!?!

There are 1000 ways to store this data and only a few lend themselves to easily transferring songs from one person to another.

you've no idea what you're talking about. This is a contract dispute between the ISPs, Netflix and the peers (mainly Level3) They all get this hairy, and there's always a lot of bullying going on. The difference here, and what's new is that Netflix has gone full retard, gotten the public and the government involved. If they continue, this will not turn out well for them, the ISPs or us.

You want government enforced net neutrality? Do you think they'll be neutral about porn? "Terrorist" activity? Anti-government sentiment? Once the governments fingers are in your business, they never, ever, come back out. Poison is the cure.

I used to work in and run call centers for years. (don't anymore, but I manage software that's used in them in some ways) They want to make money off you. You want them to do what you want? Cost them money. The following works every time, I do it myself.
The key is to:
A: Do not be reasonable or polite, they count on that. Remember you're in the midst of a con. The person you're talking to is reading a scripted con, that they relies on you being polite and normal. Being not polite and not normal ruins the process.
B: Do not get upset or use poor language, that's a free ticket to hang up on you. Passive aggressive is the key here.
C: Waste as much of their time as possible.
D: Never let them put you on hold. That gives them a mental break, this is a test of endurance. They've been it for hours, you're fresh and can eat chips and drink soda while you ruin their day.

For example, if you want to disconnect.
Comcast: Thanks for calling in... long nonsense fill speech later... How can I help you?
You: I would like to disconnect my service effective immediately, if you waste my time and/or do anything other than disconnect me immediately, I will request a supervisor, I will accept nothing less than a supervisor, I will not allow you to put me on hold, and I will make this call miserable for the both of us until my service has been satisfactorily disconnected.
*at this point 90% of agents will just do it and take the hit on their stats to not deal with you, but if they wont, read on*
Comcast: I'm sorry to hear that sir, but I will have to transfer you to our disconnect department...
You: *cut them off* Please get your supervisor, do not put me on hold. Thank you.
Comcast: But my supervisor can't...
You:You're wasting both of our time, call your supervisor over, I'd like to speak to them immediately. Inform them that if THEY can't disconnect my service, I'll be asking for their manager as well. This will continue until my service is disconnected, I will not be put on hold.

I doubt the supervisor will even get on the phone. Continue down this path, ask for higher and higher level supervisors. There is a chance you will run into a hardass. Don't worry, take down his name, hang up, call back, get someone else. You're shooting for the weakest link. You will find it, they will get sick of talking to you. You'll ruin their stats for the night and they will eventually just say "Screw it" and give you what you want. Their stats are the only measure by which they keep their jobs. You're a loss either way by acting like this so eventually they'll take the hit on the Sale/disco instead of letting you screw up their call times or keep the manager from browsing Slashdot. Remember, the person you're talking to doesn't hate you, doesnt like doing what they are doing and doesn't care if you buy anything. They are required to keep their average call times under X minuites, to make Y sales per month, to have under Z disconnects. Make it clear which stats they are not going to be able to save on this call and which ones they could make up for them on... namely, this could be a very short call and they could stop talking to you, who's clearly unhinged sooner.

And finally law enforcements wet dream of being able to remotely disable your car becomes a reality. If you think this is anything but that, you're very naive.

Yes, because the single payer systems in Europe of trouble free right?

I'm not saying we don't have an issue, but your 1 step solution is a joke. The same corruption, greed and poor administration that afflicts us now would continue in the new system. It would just include all the problems of government waste and politics as well.

The problem in the US is states have enacted their own laws governing what treatment is required by law. So states that are pro-patient rights oppose allowing patients being able to seek insurance outside of the state as that would be an end run around their laws. As a result, patients cannot for any meaningful patients rights groups of a large enough size to make a difference in the healthcare market. There aren't enough doctors because younger doctors can make more money doing plastic surgery and other cosmetic specialty work, and the older doctors get pair so much they only feel the need to work 2 days a week. Tuition to medical schools in this country is borderline insane.

This is a very complex issue and throwing black and white solutions at it while calling your opponents stupid will get your no-where.

I thought I'd provide some anecdotal evidence for the sake of argument. I've worked at 3 major telephone companies/ISPs over the years and have been involved in installing phone and data lines at multiple power companies across the country including 1 reactor. In every case the power company had a standing police that basically boiled down to "No data enters the facility" It used to be a rule that "no copper entered the facility" but that changed with the advent of fiberoptics. I don't know if this is a law, or just a common security practice, but in the dozens of facilities I've worked with they were all air-gaped. Again, this is anecdotal, I don't know if this is done everywhere, but I certainly found it reassuring when I saw it.

On the other hand, I did work with a local municipality once that opened and closed the local damn with a single copper pair running between the control house and the damn. When the damn overflowed and flooded that copper pair rendering it inoperable, they were furious with us because we wouldn't "fix it" I had to explain to a local community leader that our field techs are not trained to use scubba gear and had we known the safety of the entire community was riding on a single $12/month copper pair we'd have likely suggested an alternative solution.

This has interesting implications for the entire industry. Mainly because they'll now need to restructure their systems to deal with moving an asset from one account to another as well as deal with when one user ends up with 2 of the same media. It may seem simple from the outside but if they've never prepared for these problems it could be a major headache for them now.

"They used sophisticated malware!"

What a joke. And let me guess, they're offering free credit monitoring for up to a year! It's completely inexcusable that they waited over a month to report this. I hate to see the feds get involved in anything, but this is getting ridiculous. These incidents should result in fines in the tens of millions, minimum. Then they'd take security seriously. Most serious security efforts aren't even all that expensive. It's getting all the people and systems in compliance that's the issue.

You can have literally any mix of frequencies you want. Because of the research I put into getting my wifes issues taken care of I became very adept at lighting and such. So I expanded into Fish and Corals. I was able to get a proper frequency mix that represented diffused light at about 20 meters down, which turns very "Actinic"
Here are what actinic light looks like: http://www.advancedaquarist.co...
The water filters out certain frequencies and turns the light bluish/violet.

Then I decided that, with the extra fixtures to try and show my kid how tomatoes/peppers/etc... grow. So in the dead of winter we planted a small garden in our spare room. In that case I was able to dial in specific frequencies used by chlorophyll. That light was oddly red/green/brown. But it worked like gangbusters. I had huge tomatoes when there was still ice outside. Unfortunately when I moved those outside they didn't produce as well. I think they were weak because of their pampered indoor upbringing.

Now I've been eying LED lights. With those you can literally pick any spectrum you want. You can put in LED's for very specific wavelengths. If you were going to go that route, I think what you should do is try and figure out what the spectrum of light is that falls on northern Africa. That's where humans started out, so it would make sense that we're designed for whatever spectrum lands there. What I found out when I was doing the Aquarium stuff was that depending on where the plants you're growing came from the light could be totally different. The spectrum that falls on us up here in the north is different from what falls on the equator.

I love linux as much as anyone on here. But I'm not about to pretend the sky ain't blue just to support my argument. Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly. The only notable exception is Android. If they tried to just push their own Nix flavor at government types, I'm not surprised that they got complaints. I've never seen a Linux GUI environment that wasn't a tacked on joke. You're still required to go to the command line to do anything meaningful. Control panels that fail at even the most basic tasks, and on and on. If Linux is to ever take off as a desktop environment, someone will need to do a complete overhaul like Google did with Android.

Now queue all the people ranting about how the public is just dumb and don't know how to use Linux. To you I say, you're right... the public is dumb and don't know how to use linux. Yet those same people can use Windows. See the problem? You can have an IQ of a slice of Bacon and still get your mail open in Windows... that's how easy it has to be. Make Linux that easy and you'll have something.

It's called a sunlamp. My wifes got Seasonal affective disorder, and we could never afford one of those ridiculous lamps they charged a fortune for at the doctors office soI built my own lamps. Now with the advent of the CFL bulb in the US I can put out 30,000 Lumens/m2 for under $100/meter and the power consumption is not that bad at all. The average amount of sunlight at sea level (diffused by the atmosphere) is about 10,000 lumans. So yes, you can get a sunburn off the lamps I build. The key is to enclose the entire lamp in a box, with clear plexiglass at the bottom to let the light out, and then put exhaust fans on it to dissipate the heat.

If Mr Assange would like me to turn his room at the embassy into the tropics, he can pay for my plane ticket and materials and I'll be there strait away. He could literally grow a palm tree in his room by the time I was done. I've nothing against the man, but this is a BS excuse.

It's been going on in music since recording started.

If you're not an artist, if you're not a musician, it's easy to listen to something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

and assume plagiarism.

The fact of the matter is, in music, There really is nothing new under the sun. You can't write a "new song" period. Every chord you use, has been used before. Every rhythm, every melody. In that case, Satriani knows what he's doing is BS... that guys always been a jerk. But the reality is. all music produced by all musicians is just a subtle variation on music they themselves heard elsewhere.

One of the most accused bands of all time was Led Zeppelin... why? Because they are, in essence, a blues band. And "The Blues" consists of probably less than a dozen melodies done a million different ways. Dazed and Confused, for example, is just one long Blues jam session. Phish, the grateful dead, The Black Crowes, they're all just Blues Jam bands.

I do Blues Jams all the time (you go to a club, walk on stage and just play) and I learned a trick a long time ago from a music teacher. I have 2, literally TWO, songs that if I know the root of the song... lets say A (most blues songs are in A) I just play one of those 2 songs in that key and viola, I'm playing along and it sounds great unless it's a couple of screwy songs I've run across.

In bluegrass, most songs are just some combination of the C and G chords. With maybe D thrown in. They usually don't even change key! Mostly because the standard tuning of a Banjo is Open G. If I jam with a Banjo player I just immediately star playing something in G and we're on our way.

I'm sure visual arts the same way, though I don't do painting or anything. All arts just minor variations on a theme. Over and over, throughout history. Occasionally you get several divergent themes that seem unrelated, and then you have a Genius that brings them all together and creates something that, at the time, seems entirely new. Like the guys at the turn of the century that took guitars and used them to play soul and gospel. Both existed before, but the 2 combined created the Blues.

Modern Example:
Devin Townsend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Imagine Deathmetal combined with Opera, Yani, carnival music, and... um... showtunes?
Yes, on the rare occasion I get to talk about music on slashdot I'm plugging my favorite guy.

You clearly don't work in sales. A Sales person working for Daimler would think the following of your points:
1 through 4: Don't care, never let the stupidity of a customer get in the way of you and their money.
5) Sane people don't work in sales.

Trust me, Chicago is worse. The thing is, Chicago corruption is efficient. You pay this person X and you get Y. Very simple and strait forward. Things get done. It's an infection but it's not killing the host. What I've seen of New Orleans is corruption that doesn't work. Things don't get done.

Real engineers do everything.