Because I don't have to have the phone *on* me, I just have to have it *near* me, which it almost always is. It's on the desk in the apartment, it's in my pocket, it's on my desk at work, wherever. It's a secondary display/interface that I don't have to have a hand free to use, don't have to fumble with on the subway, and don't have to walk across the room to read. It's a convenience, but kind of a nice one. A split second glance at my wrist to see if the email that just arrived requires my immediate attention, one-button canned replies to text messages so I can tell the friend waiting for me at the airport that I'm on my way, etc.

Clearly you don't live in a large city in the U.S. where mail frequently disappears, often found months (or years) later in a dumpster or a postal workers basement. I'll take the same 99.99% delivery rate and the near-instant turnaround possible with email, thanks.

Idle developers are the devil's playthings. If you've got programmers on staff, they're never going to say 'Hey, that's pretty good, we're done.' Their continued desire to draw a paycheck requires them to constantly fuck with stuff that works until it doesn't, so then they can get paid to fix it.

Careful you don't fall off that high horse.

I'm a frequent and long-term Amazon customer (their first year, I even got some swag from them for being an early adopter). I rarely buy something on Amazon because it's cheaper, and when price is the deciding factor, it's between Amazon and another online retailer, not between Amazon and a local retailer.

I'm picky about what I buy, and I do not miss at all the days of walking into a retail establishment with the goal of buying a specific (shoe, gadget, book, whatever), being told that they don't have it in stock, and then either having to settle for something less than I wanted, deal with being upsold by some sales rat, or wait for them to order it and deal with another trip to the location. I don't miss at all the days of the $5 trip on the subway to buy an $8 book, assuming there was something at the bookstore that appealed to me when I got there.

Governments that think that levying sales taxes on online companies will magically cure retailer woes are morons, because for the people that are buying the stuff, it's selection, convenience, and then price. Physical stores are always going to lose the first, quite often the second, and at best tie on the third. And I bet the guys stocking the local supermarket would be happier with a full-time with benefits job at an Amazon warehouse than where they are now.

Retailers are middle-men. Good ones offer services and experiences beyond the mere exchange of cash for goods, but they're still middle-men, and if the internet has taught us anything, it's that it eats middle-men. Record stores, game stores, drug stores, book stores...

Nature also takes 40 years to give me a two-by-four.

For one thing, it's a lot harder to spy on you when you're on your private yacht.

Myth is a monumental pain in the ass and has nowhere near the 'fire and forget' utility of TiVo. Unarguably more powerful, but that's not an issue in 99% of the living rooms. And streaming is nice, but most don't have an easy quick rewind, can't be downloaded for offline use, and are often of lesser visual and audio quality.

Horseshit. It's almost certainly of no interest to anyone outside academics. Our ancestors didn't give a shit about history, and we turned out ok. Look at any really old European/Mediterranean city, and you'll see new construction piled on old construction every couple centuries for hundreds or thousands of years. If you think it's that important, than you pay for it. Your attitude is exactly why government is the problem; tons of power, no willingness to assume responsiblity.

Almost assuredly. Every contest no matter how trivial has 'Must be 18 years old to enter' in the fine print.

A 747 gets terrible gas mileage for a car, too.

Clearly you're either 7' tall or don't spend a lot of time at parades if you think looking at everything from a 5' eye level in a crowded place is going to improve things.

I've only had my Pebble for a few days, but I'm finding it pretty convenient when I'm out and about. A lot quicker when I'm walking somewhere, or on the subway, to glance at my wrist to see if I need to respond to an email right away or if it can wait. And the (currently) rudimentary music controls are convenient, too. It's still in a primitive state, but hopefully the developer community will come up with some killer apps for it. Time will tell if it becomes useful enough to survive past the toy stage and become a regular fixture on my arm.

We'll have to hire white people to follow you around to trip the cameras.

I agree that there's a reason we have free public libraries. I'm not suggesting that the need for free public libraries goes away. I'm suggesting that what the need for a physical presence and tangible books is going the way of the vinyl LP and the record store.

Posting a semi-releveant Wikipedia article isn't much of a counter. The Kindle is a delivery mechanism. I can already check books out of the local library on it without ever spending another $1 at Amazon. But the selection sucks, because instead of buying digital copies that will never wear out, and will never be returned late, won't be unavailable because the only copy is at branch X instead of Branch Y,etc, they're buying dead tree versions. Digital distribution could dramaticallt expand a library's reach with the same resources.