I use Spotify for streaming. The curated playlists are good, and the native chrome cast support is super helpful. As others pointed out, it is renting your music, but there is a lot more music that I want to listen to than I want to own. When I need to own a physical copy of the music, I go for the vinyl. Most new vinyl releases include a download code for digital files, which gets the best of both worlds.

In this case, Western is referring to Western culture rooted in Greece & Rome, spread throughout Europe, and was brought to the Americas. If you think about early people coming out of Africa into the Middle East, some of them went west toward Europe and some went east toward Asia, hence the Eastern and Western cultural labels. Here is a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

I use MusicBee on my media server. It is not open source, but it is free and maintained by 1 guy. The function that made me decide to use MusicBee is that I can define an "album" with more rules than just the music file's album tag. I have it set to differentiate between file types, so that the MP3 version and FLAC version of an album are treated as 2 different albums. It's got fully customizable library organization as well, with the familiar iTunes-like interface. I know it doesn't fit exactly into what the OP wanted, but I have been very pleased with it, so I thought it deserved a mention. http://getmusicbee.com/

I put bbPress on my site a while back. It doesn't have all of the features of some other boards, but it is free and pretty easy to customize. I was able to integrate the logins of my site, my blog, and my boards without too much hassle.

From my experience, pot (and more hallucinogenic drugs) can help me look at a problem in a different way and find a solution that I otherwise may have missed. However, this doesn't usually help me at the keyboard. When I am actually writing up the code, I do my best when sober.

I recall a story of Monsanto getting caught planting their seeds in unlicensed farmers' fields at night and then shutting down the farmer when the plants were found. I couldn't find a good source for this particular point in my quick Googling, but the comments on this article talk about it: http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/monsanto-illegally-plants-gm-corn-in-india/ . Additionally, Monsanto has been caught doing a bunch of other dirty business practices. Google "Monsanto Dirty" for a quick peak. (I'm not doing proper research, I know, but its past 5)

I looked all over my iPod Touch and didn't see a speaker or microphone. No bluetooth either (well, sort of). So you can make a call, but you can't talk to anyone? Am I missing something?

IANANeuroscientist (yet?, wish me luck), so I don't really know how science experiments on brains. Is it simple observation of brain physiology, or do they actually "zap" it a little and see what neural pathways are activated?
If it gets zapped, an interesting philosophical question arises. If consciousness is an emergent property of a neural network, then would activating a small network bring some small fraction of consciousness to a brain? I realize that if this was the case, it would be on a very low level, maybe not even comparable to the lowest vertebrates. I also realize perception is immeasurable, but if, while alive, I can retrieve a memory and re-experience a stimulus, could a dead brain "remember" things that had been stored to memory while living? Could new memories be created?

To all the monster movie fans that didn't enjoy it, I think I know why: It's not a monster movie. Just like 'Titantic' is not a movie about boats, 'Cloverfield' is not a movie about monsters. It's a love story, that takes place during a crisis, the crisis happening to be a monster terrorizing the city. So you get all the elements of the monster movie, but from the perspective of 1 person. The first person view helps connect the individual to the scene. Instead of watching people run from the monster, you are the person running. It gives an entirely different feel to a story. I liked it. :)