It does stop them from making money. They are not able to sell the lyrics now even if they want to, because the lyrics are already available for free from another source. Love it or hate it, the take-downs are the right thing. I really appreciate the lyric sites as a customer of the music industry because I don't have another good way to get the lyrics but truth be told they are getting your eyes on someone else's content and selling them to advertisers. They are leeches.

Buying congress people doesn't count as giving money to the government?

Was this article written by a Hollywood screen writer? Who is going to star in this one... Willis? Bullock?

Bollocks.

You know my post was a sarcastic comment about privatizing bribery, right?

The Brits came up with the concept, we just streamlined the process :)

By privatizing it, right? From what I read around here, the free market does everything better!

Well, I guess technically this would be giving regulatory power to your government then allowing your government to be sold to your local businessman for personal gain.

That's exactly what I was thinking -- especially when you think about the "stem cell burger" we were recently able to create, with a few harvested stem cells and some calf's blood.

Thanks for the clarification, but the anecdote still doesn't prove anything. There's lots of bad code out there in any sector.

Did it really take a lunatic to see that the gov't was doing this? Everyone (outside of slashdot) was OK with it when Bush was president and the patriot act was passed, why be so against it now? IMO Snowden didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, and I don't know why people are calling him a hero or traitor now when he hasn't really done anything good or bad.

Breathing helium can kill you much the same way that putting a plastic bag over your head can kill you. It stops you from breathing oxygen-enriched air which your body requires. It has nothing to do with whether the helium itself is damaging your body.

But wouldn't it make Earth unhappy if we shipped its hard-earned plastic to a neighboring planet's moon?

It's really sad how all those red-neck astronauts just throw their litter out the shuttle window, isn't it?

It's really sad that comments like these get modded "flamebait" isn't it?

Seriously, this is news for nerds. A nerd's response should be more along the lines of "Wow, it's pretty amazing some of the innovative things they're doing with all this data." It really is, too. Being able to take this data and turn it into something useful in a completely different way is a technical wonder. This is a data mining masterpiece.

Slashdot is not a political news site. This is not a political news topic. Can we get back to the real reason we're all here?

I don't know, but if this same guy wrote the hack instructions then nobody will ever figure it out.