enbiggen seems perfectly cromulent.

think if people actually went and read the CONSTITUTION they would see that copyright exists for a reason - to protect the creator, to make it profitable to create, and to enbiggen a vibrant creative economy.

Article 1 Section 8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Doesn't say anything about making it profitable or about the economy, rather congress may make laws granting exclusive rights for a limited time to promote progress in the arts and sciences. If you want to try and profit, that's your business not congress's. Maybe our current congress has it backwards.

Something similar to that experiment is done every year. In many parts of the world people live in crowded conditions with close contact to pigs and chickens. A small number of people become infected with H5N1. A few die, most don't. If you did the experiment that you describe, you will probably end up with results similar those in the paper - people would get ill; maybe a few would die, probably from Al Qaeda medical care. If you want to be a terrorist, cheap explosives are more cost effective.

I wish I had mod points today. You would get them all. Until this post, this has been a fact free discussion.

I think the problem is just the opposite. There is so much great music, from all time periods, available right now that we're in some sort of golden age of music. There's always something new and exciting to discover, so why limit yourself. I listen to everything from Gregorian chants to hip-hop and my personal opinion is that the stuff being produced right now in any genre that you can name is as good and as anything from any past period. It's just different because it's built on what came before. Of course, there are giants like Coltrane or Beethoven, but new giants will always come along and revolutionize music.

Me too. I'm an old geezer and I mostly listen to streaming rather than stuff I own. I subscribe to a couple of streaming services and usually listen to radio streams like WFMU while working. My main complaint against the commercial streaming services like Rhapsody is that tracks will disappear. You can create a playlist and tracks will occasionally become unavailable because the music company has pulled the songs from the service.

Insane? Perhaps. But even if she's not, she really needs to learn about this little writing technique called paragraphs. Perhaps, she needs also someone to clue her to that fact that using lots of phrases in caps makes you SOUND TOTALLY BATSHIT.

I use a chainsaw.

That reflects my experience. I work in academia now. It has advantages over the other two in many ways, but the squabbles seem to be over more petty issues (joke: why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low). When I worked in a government research lab, there was a high degree of camaraderie, especially among the science and tech folks. There was definitely dead wood in the bureaucracy, but there's plenty of that in corporate world. There was essentially no dead wood in the labs that I worked in. YMMV. When I was in startups, the principals seemed to be dedicated to the making the organization work, but to much of the rest of the crew, it was just a job.

Next CNN editorial: Does watching TV programs on the internet cause brain damage?

CNN makes their money from cable. Is it all that surprising that they would have an editorial bashing the competition: video games and looking at junk on the net? I wonder if they ever had an editorial asking if watching TV news makes you paranoid?

Yes, if I only had to pay for the 3 channels that I actually watch instead of 250 that I don't watch in order to get those 3 channels.

WTF? No matter what the story is about, over the past couple of weeks an AC makes one of the first posts decrying the evil done by Google. Slashdot headline: "Bad People Kick Kittens." First post: Slashdot cares about kicking kittens, but what about Google driving around taking photos of kittens? Is someone paying to trash Google on /., or does some lone guy just hate Google and lurk on /. all day just to bad mouth them?

It used to be that the magic words were "abracadbra" or "presto chango", but now the new magic words are "national security". Those words hypnotize judges into giving the government anything it wants. It seems to even work on corporations: Google, ATT etc.The NSA is the Fight Club. The first rule of the NSA is you don't talk about the NSA

It leaves me wondering exactly what kind of security system we really have. It seems to be some unholy tangle of secret government combined with corporate indifference to laws and civic responsibility. Ike warned about the military-industrial complex. Today he would probably be warning us about the national security-corporate alliance that has taken root in the US. We pay for the NSA, but we don't get to ask about what they do. Our representatives oversee them in secret, give them money in secret (we can't see the "black budget"), and don't talk about what they oversee. Is the money worth it? Who knows? You and I will never find out. Is the NSA spying on US citizens? You and I won't get a straight answer. Does the government issue death warrants for US citizens without due process? You bet, but we are not privy to those decisions until CNN announces it. Is Google assisting the NSA? My guess is yes. And I'll bet everyone else, ATT, Microsoft, etc., at the top of the food chain is also. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain for both sides. Customers and stockholders don't care and you can't prove it because the government will invoke the magic words.

I wish you hadn't posted that link. I just wasted 10 minutes looking at pictures of bad tattoos. BUT, it's still better than wasting 20 seconds every time I watch a DVD

The ad and TV industry only has itself to blame. The amount of advertising minutes in typical hour show keeps increasing. Flip around channels at random and you have a much higher chance of landing on an ad than program content. I pay Netflix and Amazon to watch shows rather than put up with constant interruption at key dramatic moments by loud and annoying ads. Dish seems to want to give their customers what the customers want. Maybe the ad and TV industries should try and treat viewers with a bit more respect and they would get a bit more respect in return.