This is one of the primary reasons that radio stations have to say their callsigns at required intervals, so pilots can identify the station should they have some sort of insturment failure which allows them to tune in, but not know what they are tuning into.

That's interesting. But when I was doing radio, the station ID was required once an hour, as close to the :00 as possible, usually within 2 minutes either way. With that kind of timing, I don't see how it would be much good for a pilot in distress, unless the distress conveniently started around :55 or so.

That's not "putting in another way", it's two completely different points.

OK, I thought the reason for the "outrage" was that people were listening to stuff that the RIAA didn't want them listening to (a leaked U2 album), and CBS was able to identify these people via their last.fm logs. My point is, why would these people do such a dangerous thing when they know that last.fm is owned by a major media company? I could see it being not too unreasonable if last.fm was independent, but as things are, it seems to be just asking for trouble. Similarly, for CBS to not pursue this would be troublesome for them, since I'm sure they don't want their last.fm property to get a reputation as a hangout for pirates/downloaders/etc.

Ah... I know I have lots of records on CBS (UK/Japan) and Columbia (US), but I guess those are mostly older.

It looks like there's an effort to revive the CBS music brand, though there are so few artists that I don't see why they would go to the trouble of checking out last.fm users' logs.

Still, I would be suspicious on principle. I can imagine CBS being friendly with other big media companies, including RIAA music companies...

If last.fm sold out to CBS for 140 million pounds, why should anyone be outraged if CBS is using the last.fm user info like this? CBS is one of the major labels controlling the RIAA actions. Why wouldn't they do this? Or to put it another way, why would a user stick with last.fm after it sold out to a CBS?

As Martin Amis wrote, "Indian motorists are not required to use their lights after dark, though they may flash while swerving if they wish; they are obliged, however (or so it seems), to sound their horns whenever they see anything at all, mobile or stationary, animate or inanimate."

Oops, maybe you're right, I got my info here, specifically the "Gross Profit (ttm): 24.74B". I should have thought about that a minute, USD 25B in profit sounds way too big. My bad.

$25 billion in profits last year. Yep, that $31 million fine is staggering.

At least according to this helpful chart... Military Language Conversion Chart

C and C++ are the same way. In basically all 64-bit implementations, "int" is a 32-bit data type. In fact, in some of them, "long" is a 32-bit type too. The only thing that must be 64-bit is the pointer type.

http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html