Scientology has been doing this for years, keeping Dianetics on the top of the charts. Members buy the books in bulk then send them back to the publisher - often in their original boxes - which are then sent back to booksellers.

At least ebooks make book laundering difficult and more expensive.

Okay, lets say there's a slick, smooth-as-snot implementation. The software is perfect, it works in any browser - even mobile- without plugins. User navigation is natural and intuitive, and it has a high frame rate even on obsolete devices.

Well you still haven't described 99% of the web. What do people use the web for?
1) Interacting with people. 3D chat stinks and always will. Even fully realized 3D worlds like MMORPGs chat has nothing to do with 3D, it's essentially IRC. 3D email's a looser. Email is best navigated as a list.
2) Finding information. But most information is best displayed as a 1 or 2 dimensional list. You can read pages of information, not 'volumes'. You're already looking at a virtual screen, watching videos or reading on a virtual screen within your virtual screen is a needless and distracting abstraction. And navigating a 1D or 2D space is much faster than 3D. Seriously, try finding the entry you're after in a 3D room full of Wikipedia. You don't want to have to look behind the article on Aardvarks to find the one on Abe Lincoln.
3) Porn. And having been around the net a bit I know there's some CGI porn out there, it's creepy as hell, and that isn't changing until people want to fuck at the bottom of the uncanny valley.
4) Shop. While I'd love to have full 3D fly-through of every product I shop for, it's not going to happen for several reasons. First, preparing 3D models of products that look as good as a manufacturer wants it to is incredibly time consuming and often futile. They'd much rather customers see a heavily photoshopped glossy product image. Second manufactuerres don't want people to have full 3D models of their products. It sets the intellectual property lawyers on edge.

Those 4 cases cover 95% of web use. So no, it won't ever 'take off'. It will always be a niche.

(Source: My experience working, for various clients on an alarming number projects that tried to do the things above in 3D, dating back to 1996. All of them were embarrassing failures.)

The vast majority of people/stores in San Francisco do us paper. I haven't noticed a change in the percentage of people who use reusable bags. In fact I rarely see people using reusable bags when I go to the store. (Possibly because the stores I go to are mostly walking distance and who carries around empty bags when you walk?)

Given that a) not many people use reusable bags b) it doesn't appear that there's been a change in the percentage of people who use reusable bags, and c) a higher incidence rate of disease, I'm going to say they're probably unrelated.

Except even the number of tasks is often variable over the life of the task.

Take for example loading a web page. It starts out as 1 task: Get a page from the server. Once you've done that, how many more requests will that first request generate? Impossible to tell. It could be none. It could be hundreds, and some of those can generate their own requests. (etc, etc.)

The answer is this: Some feedback, no matter how incorrect, is better than no feedback at all.

Also no problems with 4S and 6.1.

I wonder if some of these 'problems' are from the same people who refuse to believe that iTunes shuffle is random.

I know why /. posts these articles, to get lots of comments. All the comments are between fanbois and trolls. Which adds nothing to nothing.

Curiosity has 17 cameras, not one.

I mean, if you're coing to criticize, get it right.

I think anybody who doesn't want to lose data should be using more than one of the choices above.

VisiCalc was the first application that made a serious case for general business use. It sold more computers to more businesses than anything.

(See also: Lotus 1-2-3 and Appleworks.)

Dude, you went mainstream! You should be happy, isn't that what you always wanted?

Also no Unicode support.
It's a tech site from the 1980's.

Why do I have a feeling that on this online gambling site there will be a higher than normal chance of playing against a bunch of bots?

I don't think that word means what you think it does.

It's called almost every Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS in the United States. They have little kiosks where you can print from your phone or Facebook or Flickr or SD card or whatever.

And they don't have to support the infrastructure of a whole store by themselves. In fact they don't even have to be particularly profitable since part of the deal is you'll wander the rest of the store and buy stuff while waiting for your prints.

If you want to be properly pedantic it's pronounced "nihonshu". Sake pretty much means "alcohol" in Japanese. Walking into a Japanese bar and ordering sake is like walking into an american bar and saying "One alcohol, please!"

Why does software functionality depend on the date? Calculation issues maybe... but failure to lauch? WTF?

Some kind of half-assed copy protection or trial use. "Dude, you totally changed the date to get around our 30 day trial! No more software for you!"

Stupid, yes. But it exists.