If they drop Gmail and don't replace it with something suitably similar and I don't get to keep my email, that'll be the end of a 10ish year run for me.

Sad times. I really do like their email service (and google voice).

So, about 25 MPH (that's 40 km/h or 11m/s for the rest of you). First Harvard and Rowland got it down to 17 m/s and then Lene Vestergaard Hau figured out how to stop and restart it entirely.

TL;DR: Mission accomplished.

That must be why Apple's best selling MP3 players are the smaller capacity ones (by far), such as the shuffle, nano, and mini. I think it's you who needs to get in touch with reality. There's clearly a business case for MP3 players which don't hold an entire music collection--which was my only point.

Fucking moron.

Maybe 50-60 per week is plenty. The smaller iPods (nano, mini, shuffle) are among the best selling MP3 players out there. Having a huge capacity isn't everything to everyone.

Not everyone needs to or wants to put their entire library on an MP3 player at once, therefore, MP3 players do not "exist for the sole purpose of holding my entire collection". I replied to a person who made that exact argument, and it's demonstrably false. You only need 1 example to prove it false, and there's plenty of people out there who don't store their entire collection on an MP3 player. QED.

That was my only point, and you've totally whooshed on it.

But that website is atrocious suck. Top AND bottom panes which don't move and serve no purpose other than to obscure the window? What the hell is this shit?

You're a fucking moron. I give up. Not only do you lack reading comprehension, but you STILL missed the one and only main point that there exist multiple reasons to use an MP3 player. MP3 players do not "exist for the sole purpose of holding all my music" (where you must substitute every member of the MP3-player using population for the word "my"). The mere fact that there exist ANY other reasons to use an MP3 player invalidate that argument.

Jesus mothereffin' christ on a pogo stick. I've met rocks smarter than you.

Shortly after you fuckers took a $10M bribe to weaken your security. It would be the icing on the cake if someone died because of that.

As I just stated, it's not that bloody hard for me. I SAID that it might be for YOU, but it ISN'T for ME. How hard is that? FFS, reading comprehension. I'll quote the line again for you, since you seem challenged:

Do you see it this time? Do you need glasses?

You whooshed the point. I made two examples of reasons you could want to use an MP3 player for the purpose of showing that the argument "the SOLE purpose of an MP3 player is the hold ALL my music" is false when applied to a population. Nothing more.

Nitpicking at the fine points of particular CD players doesn't invalidate the argument, it just completely ignores the main thrust of it. I'm sure you can come up with a dozen other reasons to use an MP3 player. You must be at least that smart... I hope.

By that, you've demonstrated that an MP3 player does not exist solely to hold all of a music collection, and can, in fact, still be useful without holding all of a collection, meaning the argument that "the sole purpose of an MP3 player is to hold all my music" is false when applied to an entire population. That's what I gave 2 examples of other uses in order to debunk.

Who says I don't want to play a specific piece of music in a specific circumstance? I make a playlist, and hit forward and back to switch songs. That sure seems like playing a specific piece of music in a specific circumstance. It may not be the UI you like, but that's down to personal preference. Your tastes may shift so rapidly in a given week that you need access to everything, but mine change more slowly, thus I don't need to carry as much music in a given week to make sure I can listen to what I want to hear.

My point was that there are a myriad of reasons to use an MP3 player. I used two examples to demonstrate this.

Saying that the "entire purpose of an MP3 player is to hold ALL your music" is the argument I was debunking. The instant you come up with a reason to use an MP3 player besides "holding ALL your music", you've proven that argument false. I merely supplied two examples. It was intended to illustrate nothing more than the falsity of that argument.

Bollocks. To see why, let's do a thought experiment. If there was an optical disc and it happened to be able to hold all your music (insert a sufficiently large value here to satisfy you), but it still skipped if you ran through your n-second buffer, would you still be using it? Probably not. So right there, that's another reason to use an MP3 player, meaning "holding all my music" is NOT the "entire purpose" of an MP3 player. QED.

Secondly, most of us don't need to carry *everything*. I used to carry larger MP3 players, but recently switched to an iPod shuffle. Turns out, I don't care about carrying everything, because I usually only have a small subset of my collection I'm listening to at a given time. What I do care about is having something tiny and lightweight that I can clip to my shirt and not be digging out of my pockets to change tracks when my hands are greasy, or covered in paint, or whatnot. Clearly my use case is different from yours. This again means that "holding all my music" is NOT the "entire purpose of an MP3 player". QED again.

I can keep doing this, but there are a number of reasons to use an MP3 player, and your singular use case does not encompass "the entire purpose of an MP3 player".

Reading comprehension. You lack it. He suggested that people who archived in a compressed (implying lossy, in this instance) format would have to re-rip--NOT people who used FLAC. Stop stabbing your fingers into your eyeballs trying to be offended.

He was defending the use of FLAC, not ripping on it.

Sign me up! Especially if you're offering a discount on it because of all the NIMBYs!

Please stop using the front page as your personal blog. May you <insert-untimely-thing-here> in a <insert-energetic-thing-here>.