For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.

Wrong. A bigger better sensor is never overkill. Every geek has lusted over the scene in Blade Runner where Deckhart sticks a photo in a scanner and "enhances" his way into revealing plot clues. Or countless movies where the orbital spy camera zooms in to read a license plate. When it comes time to crop or zoom, there is no amount of detail that is too much.

Being beta usually means something is missing.

Beta is supposed to mean feature-complete (for the version that it represents) but probably still buggy or lacking in performance. Alpha is supposed to mean not yet feature complete, which is what I interpret "something is missing" to mean.

Of course I know that language evolves but we still need terms for what Beta and Alpha originally meant and since I've seen nothing to take their place I'm going to continue to be one of those old curmudgeons that insists on them having their old meanings. This is one area in which Google is screwing things up and I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop.

As someone who does not believe in the magic bearded man in the sky and has been pestered for years by those who do, I say to them: please stop. It got old a long time ago, and nothing you say will make me worry about being punished by a supernatural booger man for my failure to adhere to modern human interpretations of ancient human originated scripts.

Don't tell the people here on Slashdot, tell the people who are pestering you. If they're friends or family of yours, they should be willing to let the matter be in order to keep the relationship. That doesn't mean that they'll never mention God in your presence, since God (whether God exists or not) is an important part of their lives, but pestering and pressuring you to convert or believe or what have you should stop (or at the very least become very intermittent). The key, though, is to actually confront them with the issue instead of sitting there looking uncomfortable or peeved. Tell them that you are not interested in God or their religion, you do not believe, you will never believe, and if they cannot respect that and stop trying to get you to believe then you will spend your time with other people who will.

Well if the poster complaining about being bothered is anything like me, it's not his friends or family that is the problem, so not "hanging out" with them won't solve the problem. The problem is that the pestering comes in the form of legislation (like California's Proposition 8) and in school board rulings and in countless other little ways that we have to waste our time, money and energy fighting against.

Agreed, I could've fallen for this myself. I got a ticket about a year ago in a city I didn't live in, and lo and behold, it had a website on it for paying online. Ticket looked official, but on second thought, I couldn't be sure, having never seen one from that city before. I blindly typed in the URL... I'd like to believe I would have picked off a phishing scam, but still, I took the first step.

Which suggests the best way to distribute these might be to go near some touristy place and put these on cars with out of state plates.

"prices as low as 69c" means 10% at that price, the majority of selling tracks at $2.50
There'll be plenty to whine about.

There will be three prices: $.69, $.99, and $1.29.
According to the keynote, there will be more tracks priced at $.69 than at $1.29.

It'd be nice if one could upgrade their existing purchased DRM'd songs for the non-DRM.

According to the keynote, this will be easily done. When they went DRM-free for the EMI catalog, iTunes offered an option to pay the (then) 30 cent price difference per track and upgrade all songs that you had previously bought.