Strangely enough, I agree with this. I'm definitely not against taxes in general and sales tax specifically, but it doesn't make sense to me that a retailer should be required to lift a finger to help a state government from which it gets nothing in return. Those taxes are not going back to Amazon; those taxes are going to pay for things like police and schools in the community in which the *buyer* resides. And yes, the buyer is the one actually paying the tax, but it is ridiculous to expect a company outside of the state to pay any of their own money (in time and effort) to do the work of collecting that tax when they have no say over whether and how that tax is collected.

The states' beef is with the buyers, the actual payers of the tax, who then see the benefits from those taxes. They should be the ones required to collect their own taxes, not the retailers who will never see a dime of the money they spend collecting the tax come back.

This is really no different than what the RIAA is doing. It's the same mentality; if you can't get recourse with the people who you actually should be going after, then just go screw somebody else somewhere up the chain instead.

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

Oh, this is bullshit. We put up with it because we're conditioned to put up with all manner of mediocrity, lies, and incompetence in this country. This is only one example of it. Our leaders are another, but WE voted for them.

People always want to put the blame on someone other than themselves. But the people who are responsible for this kind of crap in this country are US. We are responsible because we expect it and we do nothing about it.

If we don't want to put up with shit like this, then we should be electing people based on how they specifically say they're going to respond to these kinds of shenanigans. But we don't. Instead, we vote for people because it looks like they have a nice family in TV commercials, or because they're against teh gays, or because they claim to adhere to some poorly defined set of values (ie. "family values", "conservative principles", etc.).

THAT IS OUR FAULT.

When you see 6-10% of people undecided in the final days of a national election (as was the case in 2008), what does that tell you? It doesn't tell you that we have a bunch of independent thinkers, as those people and the media will claim, it tells you that we have a bunch of people in this country who aren't paying any attention at all. Not only do they not understand the candidates' stances on the issues they care about, they don't even know the broad ideologies of the parties they belong to - they can't even make an assumption based on party affiliation or label. These are the people that often decide our elections.

And when you couple this lack of paying attention with the ridiculously low voting rates we have in this country compared with other democracies, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Ironically, the places you need GPS the most are the places there is no cell phone coverage. As much as I like my Android its my Garmin that goes into the backpack.

In other words, the way you personally use your GPS device must be the way everyone else does, right?

You talk about putting your Garmin into your "backpack" and using it where there is no cell phone service. That's sounding to me like you're taking it hiking out in the back country. Which is fine, but that is not what most people use GPS for these days, nor is it what Google Navigation is intended for. It's intended for use while driving. (Indeed, many GPS devices produced these days will not work when off-road.)

Most places in the United States where there's a road, there's cell phone service. No, maybe not on some rural route in Idaho, but certainly in the most populated areas. And while it may seem counterintuitive, it is actually more helpful to have GPS for car navigation in the most populated areas than it is in the least, the reason being that there are so many more roads, which means so many more turns. To get from my store in Manhattan to my home just outside the city - a distance of approximately 14 miles - requires something like 45 different maneuvers and the use of about that many different roads.

Now, the REAL killer app for Google Navigation, which will be apparent to all eventually if it isn't now, is free cloud-provided live traffic. Most current GPS devices that provide traffic info (and remember, they all force you to pay for it in some way) do it the old fashioned way, usually by subscribing to a service that's taking call-in reports from local police or utilities, or even individual commuters. This info is always old and often wrong. Google Maps' traffic is live, taken from the cloud. Right now, my wife and I have gotten into the habit of having our GPS hooked up and having one of our phones out with Google Maps loaded up to check traffic on our route. (Remember, this is New York.) And it's always right, but there's currently no easy way for us to do anything about it when our GPS device guides us into a "red" traffic area. (We can press the "detour" button, but that doesn't really guide us around traffic, just a pre-set distance.)

It's going to be amazing having free live traffic data integrated into Google Navigation. The only thing I haven't seen is whether there's a way to tell the app to "avoid traffic" when constructing a route, or to "detour around traffic" if traffic develops along the way. But that should be pretty easy to add if they haven't already; just another little algorithm.

And that's the *other* great thing about this - free updates. I had to pay $80 for map and interface upgrades to my Magellan Roadmate 2200T, and while it was worth it, they only ever produced that one update and I sure would have liked it to be free. Especially considering that the update itself has its own problems, which I have now just had to live with - for example, it now messes up the side of the street destinations are on about half the time. No way to fix this except to buy a new device with new software on it. It also constantly drives me into a dead end when I go to my mother's house - the map is out of date. Again, no more updates are coming - gotta buy a new device. Waste of money.

I think "hard sci-fi" writers who fail to recognize that not all sci-fi is about technology and its effect on humanity are rather short-sighted.

I agree, and another argument you could make is to imagine our current lives being imagined by sci-fi writers 200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?). Most of them probably *would* have focused on our technology, and maybe some of them would have gotten some of it right. And there are stories to tell about how the internet or the cell phone has altered the way we live, but honestly, do you really think about these things throughout an average day? You use your technology, but you're mostly thinking about how to get into the pants of that girl you've got a crush on, or you're thinking about how school or work sucks, or you're thinking about drinking a Shamrock Shake. The technology you use can be a means to these ends, but it's not the end itself.

Most current sci-fi is, like most media in other genres, a form of realism. It's not an attempt at predicting the future of technology or asking "what if?" or related existential questions, it's an attempt at looking at what real life might be like for people in various situations in the future. Nobody in the real world of Star Trek, except maybe a few intellectuals back on Earth, is going to ruminate on how flux capacitors have changed the way we live, or on what happens to your soul when you use a transporter. Most people are just going to use those things and not think about it, the same way we all drive cars and communicate on cell phones and write blog replies on laptops now without thinking much about it. This is just our lives.

A perfect example of this would be the use of guns for self-defense and home defense. You'd think, from watching the news, that a law-abiding citizen who legally carries a gun has never stopped a crime.

No, what you'd think - if you actually read more news than you obviously have - is the truth. That statistically, law-abiding citizens who carry guns are much more likely to be shot dead - often with their own guns or those owned by their loved ones - than law-abiding citizens who don't.

You are a perfect example of those who believe journalism is a bullshit profession because your own personal views are not reinforced by the news you read. But the problem for you is that your personal views are not supported by day to day facts and events, and this is what you're reading about. While I doubt any journalist has ever said or written that a gun-toting citizen has "never" stopped a crime, statistically it is much more likely that they will be a victim of gun violence than the opposite, and that is likely what you are reading about - because it just happens a lot more often. Journalists can only report what is happening - it's not their job to make up facts to suit some bias. That is in fact what this thread is all about.

Gotcha by a minute!

What? You can get warez somewhere other than newsgroups? My lawn...get off it!

Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.

The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.

All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about looking at a screen and picking something off a "ribbon" at the top of a bar over a bunch of text and images? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.

And there is just no reason to have to learn a new system when we have all already learned how to use menus. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in Word because of the stupid ribbon, and I've basically given up on the whole app because of it. I used to use it for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Wordpad for most other things that I can't use Notepad for. (My version of Wordpad still has menus; I didn't realize there was a version with the ribbon. Now I know to avoid it.)

You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to use menus, but smart enough to learn a whole new system that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.

There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)

And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.

All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.

Pedestrians could just cross the street at crosswalks when it's indicated that it's safe. You know, utilize the safety precautions we already have in place instead of mandating that cars make noise.
My car already has a device installed to warn pedestrians when it is unsafe to cross. It goes beep beep when I push on the middle of my steering wheel (actually mine shorts out my electrical system, but you know what I'm getting at).

I can confirm personally that the North American launch model is also affected by the YLOD issue, as I had my PS3 reflowed a month ago to cure its YLOD.

No, you can confirm that your own personal PS3 broke. That's it. You cannot confirm that there's some systemic problem with launch US PS3's.

I also have a launch PS3 and it's fine. Does that mean I can "confirm" that there's no YLOD problem with US PS3's?

Old Strats are popular for a reason, too.

Was gonna say the same thing.

I'm inclined to believe the "nobody has made a better violin in 300 years" argument because I know from my own personal experience that nobody has made a better electric guitar than those early Fenders in 50 years either.

Actually, strike that - I'm sure that both arguments are overly broad, and not really what any of these people actually mean... 1950's and 60's Fender guitars all have a particular tone to them that just can't be precisely duplicated anymore (be it a Strat, Jazzmaster, or whatever). That doesn't mean that the current ones suck, or that you can't get really, really close to that old tone if you try really hard, but if you do want *that* specific tone, then the easiest way to get it is to just buy an original Fender.

I would doubt very much that classical music aficionados really consider the Strad the only violin worth listening to, more that they associate it with a particular tone that they like and that's very hard to duplicate today. Ditto for electric guitars - there are some great-sounding modern guitars on the market today making some great music, they just don't sound like guitars of yesteryear and that happens to be the sound a lot of people want to duplicate because that's the sound most associated with the kind of music they want to play. Rock bands of the 1960's were using guitars made in the 1950's and 1960's. Classical musicians in the 1600's and 1700's were using violins made in the 1600's and 1700's. So I think a lot of it is just trying to duplicate what people consider an "authentic" sound for a particular type of music, it's not that one instrument or another is the "best" or that you aren't perfectly valid in preferring something else.

But different instruments are better or worse for different things, and just like trying to play the Beatles with a Schecter Hellraiser is not going to sound quite right, I would imagine the same is probably true for some people when talking modern violins and certain types of classical music.

However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.

The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.

As a guitarist, I disagree with this conclusion. The mistake I think you're making is in equating the fact that these people couldn't hear the difference with a conclusion that the difference therefore can't be heard. I don't think that follows, anymore than it follows to say that because somebody can't tell the difference between a Sizzler steak and a carefully prepared Wagyu steak at a fine restaurant means there is none.

I think a more reasonable conclusion is to say that a lot of people who consider themselves to have refined ears, don't. But that doesn't mean there aren't objectively measurable differences in sound quality, assuming you brought in equipment that was sensitive enough.

I say all this because as a guitar *player*, I, like the violin players in your example, can easily tell the difference between guitars of different makes just by listening to them, and I can do it with near-100% reliability, at least for the most popular makes and models. A Strat and a Les Paul don't even sound close to similar, for example, and an American Strat doesn't even sound like a Chinese Strat (though it sounds closer than a Les Paul). I guarantee that 99% of the rest of the world, though - even many rock music lovers - could not make these kinds of distinctions. There is a difference between knowing what a Fender Strat *is* and knowing how it *sounds* - the latter requires actually using one and then using other models and comparing it, or at the very least actively listening to others doing the same, repeatedly. (And by "actively" I mean really paying attention to this specific facet of the music, what guitar is being played when.)

So I would say that this has more to do with having a trained ear or not than with whether or not there are real differences in sound. If the players can so easily identify the differences, then there probably are differences, and not just in playability. They're the ones that hear these things the most, and also develop the "sense memory" to associate a particular tone with a particular instrument. That's a unique skill that most people never develop.

That's your blind test, right there.

Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".

What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.