...How about some retailers -- especially so-called "specialty" retailers -- actually keep some products in stock for people to buy? It's becoming ever more common now that "this 'online thing' is the hot new fad" that physical retailers don't actually have any of the items I'm looking for available to sell to me. The story is, "well, that's an online only item so we can ORDER it and have it shipped to the store by next week..."

If I wanted to order whatever item, I could order it my damn self. The reason I didn't order it in the first place is because I want or need it now. This is especially a problem with things like computer parts, connectors, and cables -- Things that aren't just some shiny tech object I want to have in my hands right now, but stuff I need to actually fix somebody's computer. I also have big problems with this with outdoor and camping equipment, and sometimes auto parts. Ordering in the product doesn't help me when there's a hole in my tent or the car's in pieces in the driveway.

Moreover, some places' websites are getting better about listing which items actually exist in their stores for you to buy (Target) but others are absolutely terrible in this regard (Sears, Kmart), and extra special hateful mention goes to Wal Mart, who have taken a step backwards and made it MORE difficult to use their site to figure out what items are online only or in stock in a store when you USED to be able to do so easily. (It also doesn't help that they removed SKU and UPC numbers from their website in the wake of the old barcoding scandal in the midwest last year or so, even though this information was often the only way to make select clueless Wal Mart employees reliably go in the stockroom and find the item you want which was inexplicably never put on the shelf.)

In many cases, I will happily pay a little bit more to A) have the gizmo, part, or repair item now, rather than next week, and B) have someplace to return it to without having to pay shipping, jump through the Flaming Hoops of RMA, and wait another two weeks if the item turns out to be FUBAR. I already refuse to buy hard drives mail-order from anyone, as it is such a pain in the ass to get the online retailer to authorize a return and cough up a working one when just one drive out of the batch is invariably dead on arrival. The computer parts chain stores around here will price match reputable online retailers on hard drive prices if the prices aren't identical anyway, so the difference is moot.

While I'm complaining, the final insult perpetrated by big box retailers that drives me nuts is putting away "seasonal" merchandise or, more commonly, sending it back to the distribution warehouse when they decide you don't "need" to buy it. Okay, I can understand the need to use seasonal shelf space for movers like Christmas items and so forth, and having worked in hardware store retail for years and years I had to do similar things. But in our case we put the current seasonal stuff in the prominent shelf location and just moved the out-of-season merchandise to a less prominent spot and probably shelf it in a much more compact/less appealing manner (to save space) because invariably someone wants to buy a heater in July or, (as I tried to do just a few days ago) buy a garden hose reel in January. I can, of course, buy either of these items any damn time of the year online if I want to pay to have a hose reel or whatever shipped to my door. I once had Target REFUSE to sell me a fan in the wintertime even though they had one in stock in the stockroom according to their point-of-sale system because it was "out of season" and might "complicate their inventory." I didn't need the fan to keep cool in February; I needed it for ventilation.

If retailers want online places to stop eating their lunch they need to get their collective shit together, not make up new and useless private label products. Private label products already exist, and already suffer from the phenomenon that's going to shoot this initiative full of holes wherein whoever is contracted to make the product (because Target/Wal Mart/etc. have zero manufacturing capability and will farm this task out to a third party, probably in China) will instantly figure out that the same private-label item can be called a different "brand" and sold online, minus the overhead, minus the middlemen and licensing costs, for cheaper than the physical retailer. If some contracting agreement legally prevents this, the supplier's uncle's cousin's bother's manufacturing plant over in the next province will copy the product and do so instead. Exactly as already happens today, with private label products that already exist. Surprise! This idea isn't new. The only difference is putting the new-and-trendy smartphone stamp on it, and people like me were comparison shopping on our dumb phones, PDA's, laptops, and (gasp) telephones via the yellow pages long before anyone in supply chain management had a clue what a smart phone even was.

I'm sure there's a lot more prior art even than that. My N900 can do this via the touchscreen. You can also switch apps any time when anything else is going on by pressing ctrl + backspace, which even breaks you out of things that are "supposed" to be full screen only. It doesn't predate the release of the original iPhone, but I think its release and certainly its development predates the filing of this patent.

Harken back to the dark days of the original Windows CE/PocketPC based smartphones, many of which had touchscreens (like the PPC version of the Treo) and all of which supported multitasking and had nothing preventing you from tapping Start and going on your merry way to do something else while in a call.

Even my old Samsung R450 let you do limited stuff while in a call, like get at your address book, notes, and calculator.

Beyond that, I have decided after the "we're going to try to prosecute people who watched the Geohotz video" episode that Sony would get no more of my money. I've bought a lot of stuff from them brand new -- PS1's and 2's, multiple, games, controllers, two PSP's. Then this is how they treat the people who pay thier bills. No thanks.

I'll buy a priced dropped PS3... a used one, after the price drop makes them even cheaper still. I'll buy my games used, and if Sony goes download-only with the next thing (or this one -- you know they'd make a pach that disables playing game disks and force you to go download-only if they could get away with it) they'll count me out.

The fundamental difference between your movie theater analogy and everything else is that nobody in their right mind goes to a restaurant or bar just to listen to the radio. They go a a restaurant or bar to eat and/or get drunk. You aren't charging people to get in just to listen to the radio; If you ARE charging a cover for your bar for people to get in, it's for the DJ or band you've got live in the building.

Nobody pays a trucker to sit in a cab and listen to the radio. They pay the trucker to drive the damn truck. Whatever he listens to in the process is his own damn business, especially considering the trucker has no audience other than himself.

Isn't broadcast radio already paid for by advertising? I thought the process went like this: Advertisers pay radio station, who uses a portion of said revenue to pay for licenses to broadcast songs. Beyond that, I fail to see how it should matter how or where anyone within broadcast range tunes in. The local recording industry already has their money. If they want more, maybe they should renegotiate with the radio stations or pull their licenses and start their own radio stations, cutting out the middleman.

Beyond that, I believe they can very well fuck off. How the hell are they going to enforce this, stick a microphone in every truck cab to hear what the driver's listening to?

Partly for all the reasons listed above in detail by everyone else who has already posted. For instance, we have toll roads for a reason. And I already get taxed for highway maintenance in my regular taxes, not to mention the exorbitant titling and registration costs to the tune of hundreds of dollars every year I have to renew, not to mention mandatory insurance (how much do the insurance companies get taxed for supporting road use, I'm guessing none?) gas taxes, sales tax, and ridiculous fees tacked on to every traffic ticket. Here is why ELSE it won't work:

I am, just like lots of other people in this country, a delivery driver. I use my own vehicles for work. I put a lot of miles on them, and I make money doing it. Currently, the miles my car travels are tax deductible as a business expense. This is because it already costs me money just to work: Nobody reimburses me for gas, and when I get a string of no-tippers on any given day this prevents me from basically depreciating my car and working for free. (Because, due to previous governmental meddling, we are in the same class as waiters and therefore our employers are allowed to pay us FAR less than minimum wage, and therefore 100% of them do.)

There are two kinds of delivery driver in this world: Punk high-school kids who drive around in the summertime or between 'real' jobs for a couple of months to make a few bucks, and us professionals who have been tough enough not to be chewed up and spit out by the bullshit that is the modern American experience. (Complete with crime, corruption, and personal peril. Accept no substitutes.)

Let me tell you something about professional delivery drivers. We are, to the last man, batshit fucking insane. Not only is it the only way to survive, but it's the only way to make money. You would HAVE to be cracked to make a living driving your own car into the middle of the ghetto with somebody else's pizza and a light up sign on your roof that says "rob me" twenty times a night. But we do it. We do it because the trademark of the professional driver is that we don't take shit from anybody. Not the customer, not the punks on the street, not the boss, not the police, and sure as fuck not some swine in Washington who can't figure out how to pay their goddamn bills.

If this passes into law, two things are going to happen: Of course, everyone else in the world is going to whine and moan on the Internet and in newspaper opinion columns, and many hands will be wrung with nothing done about it. But meanwhile, there's going to be a traffic jam on the beltway; A line of cars as far as the eye can see, each emblazoned with a sign: Domino's, Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, more Chinese restaurants than you can count. There will be fucking taxicabs in there. Stretch limos, and private tour buses. Every one of those vehicles is gonna have one pissed off professional driver behind the wheel, and they're all going to be headed to Washington D.C. to personally strangle whoever is responsible for this bill.

And we're not gonna take "no" for an answer.

Given that cartridge based games seem to last about a bazillion times longer than optical disk and in most cases are much more durable, I would favor a return to cartridges. Especially considering I have Atari VCS games that still work perfectly ('70's) and PSX games that despite being carefully stored and handled do not due to data layer oxidation and other factors (early 2000's...) I think the results really speak for themselves.

Cartridges can be repaired and are much more resistant to abuse - a cart with a cracked case will still work (possibly with the addition of some duct tape) but a cracked optical disk is invariably toast. Cartridge shells can be replaced, contacts can be refurbished and cleaned, and also very importantly - game save data can be kept on the cartridge, with the game. No more "my memory card is full, but I don't want to lose any of my 100% completion RPG saves!" sort of scenarios. Also, cart mechanisms can be made with no moving parts, or at least parts that need to move during operation (loading and unloading are different stories) leading to lower power consumption and higher reliability. Hands up anyone with a Playstation of any generation with either a dead laser, spindle motor, or both?

Got an Atari 2600 as well, and that's about as far back as I go. If you're not willing to stretch the definition of "computer" quite that far, I've also got a TRS-80 portable, a Commodore Vic-20, and a Timex Sinclair (1000) kicking around, all of them still working.

The Vic-20 is the only one I actually use for anything meaningful, as I've got a tape drive for it and all the trimmings. I also have the calculator-roll plotter/printer, but I have no clue where the spork to find ink for it, so mostly it's useful only for making noise.

My front-loader NES can boot games without even pushing the cartridge down. It confuses people, but I love it so.

A Q-tip smear of automotive dielectric grease on all of your cartridges whenever you first buy or clean them goes an incredibly long way towards keeping them all working flawlessly... I can take nearly any NES game off of my shelf of about 100 and slap it in the machine to have it work first try. I have one copy of Mario 1 that's worn down to the point of being a bit wonky (but that's okay; four other copies are hanging around to replace it with) and my copy of Snake Rattle n' Roll refuses to work no matter what I do, even if what I do involves lots of alligator clips, a different NES, a or even a pirate off-brand NES. I think one of its chips is fried.

Oh well.

You mean like people already do with World of Warcraft pirate servers?

I sort of use something like this today, in the gritty old present day.

In my car I've got one of my old PDA's mounted instead of a GPS device. It's rather firmly permanently mounted to the dash until you take all the bezels off and unscrew it from the back, so I consider its risk for theft fairly low. Also, it's not mounted in the usual look-at-me GPS area but down by the driver's side kick plate.

Anyway, I have it there because I use Pocket Excel (don't laugh) to keep track of all my invoices and orders for the day. I also have a mapping program installed, and obviously it uses GPS. I've successfully used it to defuse two frivolous traffic tickets by less-than-scrupulous police officers: Once by making it a policy to keep all of my GPS logs, and once by happening to have a hotkey for the note taker "record" function bound, so I could easily and silently (also legally, in this state!) record everything the lying police officer said.

I've also seen on DealExtreme and other places some always-on, rolling-record capable video cameras for mounting wherever, and I've been tempted to pick one up and mount it in my car, police car style. Mailing a CD-R every month to the local precinct with video of their police officers flagrantly breaking traffic laws would be optional, but probably a lot of fun the first couple of times.

Remember: Big Brother is only bad for you if you are not personally Big Brother!

That's an interesting point, but a traffic ticket generally isn't regarded as a criminal offense (except I guess DUI stuff, but that's a whole 'nother league) and there is no incentive to keep yourself out of a holding cell until your court date.

If you are arrested for anything else under the sun you are not REQUIRED to pay anything just to get the case to court. If you want your ticket to go before a judge for any reason you are required to pay the state money, up front, that they will be slow in returning (if they ever do). If you go to court for any other reason that is NOT a flagrant revenue grab by the state, standing before a judge is free.

It may be legal with enough lawyerific wrangling, but it's still not kosher, right, or even vaguely legitimate.

In my state, they DO need two pictures to prove that you ran the light. All of the red light cameras around here overtly take two pictures (with flash, even during daylight hours!) and you're "supposed" to receive the pictures along with your ticket in the mail. And, yes, nearly all of the camera equipped traffic lights here have noticeably and demonstrably short yellow lights, where the state mandate (and possibly federal DOT, 'do it this way if you want your highway grants') is three seconds, some of the camera-lights in town are as short as one second!

The process is highly automated and it's fairly obvious that there is no human oversight. The enticement not to contest the ticket or call the state out on anything is the (frankly, highly illegal) practice of my state demanding court costs up front if you take the ticket to court, to be refunded if you win. I'm fairly sure that violates the innocent-before-proven-guilty clause in both state and federal constitutions.

Story #1: I stood behind a gentleman in line at the DOT one day who was (this is important for the story) a fairly dapper black man who owned a very nice Harley, which I admired out in the parking lot. I saw him ride it up. He brought with him his mailed-in ticket, showing both pictures of someone on a bike running a red light. A skinny white man, with no helmet, wearing a wife beater. On a street bike (think crotch rocket, not a Harley). After pointing out his bike and skin color to the clerk (and I vouched for him; I saw him ride the bike up) the ticket was quietly erased. Obviously, no one had looked at the photos and even the computer system had gotten the license plate number wrong.

Story #2: I got "nailed" by a traffic light camera that I KNEW had a short yellow light, from watching other people get caught by it. Instead of going through the yellow, I stopped at the line and let the light turn red. A full three seconds or so after the light went red, the camera flashed me twice. I anticipated the stupidity well in advance, and was not surprised when a ticket turned up in the mail nearly a month later. It contained ONE photo. I contested and took it to court, to discover the "court costs up-front" policy mentioned above... I demanded to see the second photo, as the camera clearly and obviously took two. The state clerks were very cagey about this, first claiming it was "not necessary" and then claiming it "didn't exist," there was only one photo. To his credit, the judge pointed out that it was the law to present both photos, and he would decide what was bloody well "necessary" for the proceedings. The second photo was produced... Showing my car in exactly the same position, stopped well behind the white line, as it was in the first photo. Oops! In this case, clearly there was some human oversight which decided to lie about the evidence.

No one from the state was punished. I got out of the ticket (obviously) but it took them nearly four months to return my court costs.

Story #3: A friend of mine, who is somewhat cheeky, reported getting out of his automated camera-ticket by demanding to confront his accuser. As there was no paper trail as to who (if anyone) reviewed the ticket or entered the complaint to the court, the case was dropped. (This is why when a cop writes you a ticket it has a lot of flowey language to the effect of "I, [name of officer] do duly swear under oath of perjury that I observed, etc., etc." The cop is acting as your accuser, and entering the charge as TESTIMONY to the court, which is important. A camera can not testify, only a person can testify about what the camera captured.) I imagine this loophole will be legislated around as soon as someone tries it in every state.

This just goes to show that the world is finally listening to what I've been saying for YEARS, namely we need to ditch all this tied-to-a-carrier smartphone BS and bring back the PDA. Small device, pile of processing power, able to run general purpose software, buttload of storage, touch screen, go.

Screw netbooks. When can I buy a proper PDA again? Something about the size of a stack of 3x5 cards with nice, high-res touchscreen, maybe one of those trendy slideout keyboards, Wifi, Bluetooth, decent amount of storage, and a memory card slot? That can run an actual web browser and other arbitrary apps? And with battery life that doesn't totally suck, and that's not a freaking phone tied to a contract and service agreement and which will refuse to work without a valid SIM card?

Maybe something that can run SSH and remote desktop, run a REAL web browser (not Pocket Internet Explorer, like current WinMo handhelds/phones), play a couple of games, play back video, network tasks, etc.? My old Axim does all of the above except the web browser part; Apparently nobody is interesting in making a mobile web browser that doesn't run on a damn phone. I don't need a damn phone-tied-to-PDA. I already have a phone.

How about turning out some new models that are a bleeding 4:3 aspect ratio, instead of 16:9? Nowadays it seems every LCD panel in the world is a repurposed HDTV unit. Those of us who lots of coding and document work tend to prefer monitors without a squished vertical aspect and a bunch of wasted horizontal space (especially considering 100% of the universe uses 8.5x11 or A4 paper that's taller than it is wide, and document design reflects this format).