Stakeouts and trailing cars don't require a warrant. If the police want to hang out on your street all day and follow you around, they can do that. This issue was discussed when the court was ruling on whether GPS tracking required a warrant.

So the courts WOULD be sympathetic if

The difference is that stakeouts/surveillance require proactive, labor intensive activity (you need 1 or more people to follow an identified target) and newer methods are wide nets that capture everybody preemptively.

I'm not pro-big brother, but in general what happens on public roads (and in view of public roads) is considered fair game. What is changing is the ability to capture and store that information on a large scale, and the impacts on personal privacy.

Mayor Bloomberg also announced that police would be "stop and frisk"ing individuals with a BMI over 30 to search for contraband oversized sodas.

The nice part of eMusic was that it was like crawling through the bargain bins at a record store... you pay $5 for 20 CDs, and if 2 of them are any good, you got a good deal.

A lot of whats on eMusic is utter crap (on the site because it has no other channels of distribution), not worth the $0.04 of hard drive space it takes up. And that was OK, because there's some good stuff in there, too. With unlimited downloads and a little paitience you could download 30 albums in a month and keep the 3-10 that didn't suck.

True, it has some good back catalogs (Epitaph, Lookout!, CCR), but it also has a lot of 2nd and 3rd rate stuff by 1st rate artists, especially in the jazz section, and how do you pick which of the 15 Miles Davis records is worth keeping? You donwload them all and listen.

Now, I am guilty, as I'm sure many of you were of hammering the site from time to time (especially as my subscription was ending). And maybe limits of some kind are in order.. but 40 tracks? Thats ONE A.C. album, which I was happy to check out under the unlimited plan (funny song names, crappy songs), but would be the only thing I'd be able to get in a month under the new plan. Same goes for a lot of the spoken word stuff... You couldn't even download ONE George Carlin double CD.

Sadly, this will be the death of a once good service