You need to work real hard in an American company when your a coder. Especially if it's a company that saw huge returns on one of their programs. The greed has set in. Get your asses in gear. NOW. Or; or... we'll ship these jobs over to India or China!

This is just more of the same fundamental change going on at CBS. In those days, we were an open; in your face with our fundamental beliefs nation and it was reflected in the broadcasting. CBS along with NBC is on a campaign to remove some of the religious toned stuff that influences what is broadcast. They're not apparently looking to censor religious shows, but the tones that it influences in their shows that they air now. That's a house of cards that will come down eventually; and may already be showing signs. NBC has almost nothing left in it for viewers if you rely solely on the polls. Their news departments have pretty much collapsed them. CBS is hanging on because it has some talent still and they are what is keeping them afloat. It sure isn't Katie Kouric.

So; what you are suggesting is that once these are sold to an end user, they go to the grave with that user??? How silly a model that is.

The business model by which they are relying has died a couple years ago and isn't coming back. I don't know who is running the show there, but they obviously have a complete and total disconnect from the world. The only possible way to recover from that business model is to exclude all of their stuff from the likes of ITunes, Rhapsody, Napster and others, and try to force everyone to buy through their "chains" or channels. Not going to happen. Artists by which they have contracts with, will have a legal means to break the contracts and move on somewhere else that is supporting them.

This might be the method they use to bury the thing in the sand so that they can simply walk away from it forever. Then it's someone else's headache.

If Steve Ballmer is still at Microsoft, everything they say and do is a lie!

In a sheepish grin kind of way; this is correct. However not all media that I want is available on CD or at least inexpensively. Many times I buy only the tracks I want and skip the rest. But; it is a valid point, and I do have one serious whopper of a music CD collection. :-)

I would "get with the times" however after years of coding experience and software test, we know there are newer things out there but my MP3's are all archived at 320, and stereo, none of the VBR crap, and other stuff. Quite stable, and can be used easily to reproduce a DA track to burn a new CD from if ever necessary.

Granted itms is new and supposed to be the "cat's meow", but I prefer for my archives something known stable and you can't deny that 320 bit MP3 is well stable. Oh; and yeah, look Ma';... No DRM.

Fact is that I like Itunes a lot and have an iPOD. HOWEVER!!!!....

When I purchase from iTunes, I download it, burn it immediately to a CDROM, label it, catalog it, and also use Winamp to re-rip the CD back in; fully titled and all, and store it as a MP3 usable on any device.

Simple solution. Now if Apple takes that feature away, bye bye Apple!!!

I guess this is now where the litigators for the RIAA are beginning to think; Paybacks are hell. Especially since I'm sure that money has moved to offshore banks and other places where the government could not even find it, assuming it came down to some form of mini-anarchy regarding this litigation as a whole.

If it did manage to over take Yahoo, my suspicions are that the only way Microsoft can accomplish that would be to install this as the default search and push it down with Windows mandatory updates and over ride the users default settings. Many users know nothing about their computers and can't change it back without calling a geek, so Microsoft would stand to win here. There's a word for this but it escapes me about now.. :-)

The fact is that there are many "coders" out there working on corporate sites that will only work around IE and it's active-X controls. It's no wonder they manually apply updates via managed server, and disallow updates to IE because it breaks their enterprise application code; and we don't want any over-worked enterprise coders now do we??!! :-0

The very next thing that will happen is that they will now begin to deny that it even ever happened at all. It was a news story concocted to make headlines and drum up republican support for President Bush. See the liberals are blaming EVERYTHING on former President Bush.

Now you know why I no longer bank with Capital One. They not only are really not concerned at all with their security, but they really could care less about you; their customer. I had nothing but issues with them and just closed everything up and moved on.

And all those silly little electro-magnetic devices under the craps and roulette tables are legal???

Good luck with that. Simply place your fingers over the speaker holes and fire away. Your fingers muffle just about anything; even the ringers on many phones.