I think Rambus must be helping with drafting this legislation...

cartels often use the power of government regulation to do the work for them. A cartel is very different from a monopoly and benefit from the distinction. They have influence above a monopoly precisely because there exists a few in cooperative competition. In the US you have cartels in cars, telecom, media, and pretty much every other totally screwed up market segment. All of them use the power of government to screw consumers and restrict competition.

this is a really good list. I'd mod you up if I could for quality and conciseness.

GoF --> -1 Overrated. Not because of the book, but because of most of the idiots who didn't conceptually understand the applications after reading. Half the people who try to talk in patterns don't understand the difference between Command, Visitor, Chain of Responsibility, etc. They understand Singleton, and that's it. Of the people who can talk in patterns, a good 50% don't really know how to appropriately use them together in system and software architecture. Meaning, at best, 1 in 4 of those who reference GoF patterns are actually using the work to help in communication and design.

I think it's probably an important book in the history of Software Engineering (not to be confused with CS). The book unfortunately spawned at much bad design as it did elegance.

Preaching to the choir again... have to agree

That's why DNA has become so useful for classification. Much like this new family of birds, it had to come from someplace. If it is so genetically dissimilar to everything else, than a new family is great.

If it's just a funny-looking giant-panda-family relative then it gets a different genus and we figure out how to save it. If it's a racoon-family relative we see how quickly we can hunt the thing into extinction.