Actually last I looked my mothers job used it. it integrated into the rest of their software package so that addresses and route planning could be done easy.

Not sure if they currently can use it but since bing maps like google maps requires internet connections probably not. Not every where they travel have 2G service let alone 3G.

What gets me is why doesn't google or bing maps have an offline mode?Cache a couple of states or even just counties.

Parental responsibilities are owed to a child and cannot be waived by a parent.

There's a certain advantage to the online or delivery based grocery stores. They don't need to manage as packaged and portioned product as the traditional grocery stores.

Take meat for example.

In a traditional grocery store, there's hundreds of cuts of meat that are packaged up into individual portions sitting in a refrigerator waiting to be picked up by some consumer. There's a good chance that it won't be picked up and will eventually need to be tossed. Also, storing cut up meat isn't as efficient as say storing an entire side of beef/whole chicken/pork etc..

With the on-demand grocery, the side of beef is whole until an order is placed and then that side is cut up as per the orders that are needed. So if you need 50 steaks, you cut up exactly 50 steaks. Compared that to the traditional store in which you have to base that days sales on historical numbers and predictions rather than actual orders.

If you as a meat-dept manager guess that 100 steaks will be sold on a thursday and only 50 are sold, you're going to lose money. With the online butcher, you only cut up 50 steaks. In this case you're much more efficient as you have less product waste.

It's the same with any other type of produce, also the shipping of produce from warehouse to grocery store via truck induces more issues around bruising/spoilage/damage etc. If it's sent to your house directly from the warehouse, then that's one less organization that your product has to pass through, thereby enabling you to have a better product. I'm also sure they'd allow you to refuse product say if for example, eggs were damaged.

The problem with the online is the same one as the movie rental business started out with. The impulse buy. Grocery stores are great at this, you walk by the steak counter and decide "this looks good, i'll have steak tonight". Online didn't have this ability as you had to wait a day or two to get your steak. Netflix had this problem vs. rental stores as you couldn't just do an impulse "movie night" if they had to ship you a dvd. Now with Netflix-streaming you can have a 'movie-night' as an impulse b/c the movie is provided to you the same day.

I can't agree with this. You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright. It is a paradoxically impossible question. If you put the punishment for copyright infrigement at a "reasonable" amount - say, 10 times the price of the CD/whatever it comes on, then it costs more to chase the punishment than it does to get it back. If you put the punishment at a level where it potentially becomes financially feasible for the copyright owner to chase it down, then it is an asinine figure for the actual infringement.

It's funny that you consider multi-million dollar companies like Walmart, Best Buy and Target to be "mom and pop"

The problem that I've always had w/ SIM cards is that they have only a fraction of the capabilities of one's main phone. On the phone, if you are storing the different numbers of a person, as long as you are storing it in the phone memory, you can, under his/her name, store Main#, Home#, Work#, Cell# and Pager#, However, if you wanted to save something like that on a SIM, the SIM would take it down as 5 different numbers, and looking @ them, one wouldn't have a clue.

In between, I used to notice some stores carry flash memory cards w/ a SIM form factor - think Sandisk made them. What exactly were they - could one use them as SIMs, albeit w/ memory to do the things mentioned above? I notice that they seem to have disappeared from the market.

Anyway, having a SIM that one can switch b/w phones is a good thing, but if moving the well organized phone#s will be a pain, I honestly don't see the advantage. I wonder whether the RUIMs in CDMA phones get over this limitation, or are they still hamstrung by it? If this capability was there, then CDMA would genuinely be a better alternative to GSM. I do prefer CDMA myself, since the voice quality and reception is generally better, and I typically don't use phones to access the internet, nor do I think wireless modems are an economical way of surfing the internet, as opposed to Wi-Fi.