I'm not your parent, but:

Because the last remake WAS the one with Christopher Reeve.

No, the last film remake was Superman Returns, staring Brandon Routh.

On the flip side you'll see some weird stuff like stores that won't let you order on the Sabbath. B&H Photo Video, one of the best camera stores in the US, is like that. They have a big, well designed, online ordering system. However it won't let you order on the Sabbath. You can browse, but if you try to place an order, it won't allow it, you have to wait, it won't queue it into the system. The servers don't get the day off, but they aren't allowed to take orders :).

Huh, I've noticed that, but never knew why (but never been dedicated enough in the answer to investigate). Thanks for the information. :-)

There is no such free service and UPCs are not U.

The second reason is interesting, and is sort of the biggest objection I could think of (I was considering homemade stuff).

However, the "there is no such free service" is not, because while that remains true states cannot require internet vendors to collect sales tax. It is a requirement of the bill that states would need to provide such a free service to require tax collection.

And if a business in such a State sells something to someone living in Kenner LA, they'll have to be able to figure sales tax for LA, Jefferson Parish, Kenner, and such sales tax holidays as might be applicable on any particular item at any particular time...

No, not really. If LA wants Amazon to pay LA sales tax, then LA must make freely available software or a service that will do said calculation for Amazon (and if said software gets it wrong, Amazon will not be liable for the difference).

I'm not entirely convinced that said system will always be easy to implement, and PRMan (I think that's the name of the poster) in a reply to a different post of mine points out an interesting privacy issue that I'm not sure what the answer is (/if there is one). But at the same time, I also think it's certainly conceivable that the law will impart a relatively low burden in terms of implementation cost.

Though again, I don't feel strongly one way or another about whether the law is "right" or "wrong".

Try telling that to anyone that works in tax with multiple states, they wouldn't stop laughing at you.

Care to elaborate any? Because theoretically at least, all the complications of what items are taxed at what rate are not in the hands of the retailers; they just integrate with a free service that provides that information. I haven't looked for anything like this, but I haven't heard any actual explanation of why such a system would be complex (e.g. "matching up UPCs is hard" or something like that).

I'm not saying it isn't, just that I'd like to know more.

First, many valid searches are also valid URLs. You likely never encounter this if you don't have a local intranet that you go to.

My contention is this is mostly just a problem with the decision procedure for what to do: if browsers were better about de-prioritizing search in favor of treating things which could be a URL as a potential URL, almost all of the problems with this I think would disappear. You'd have to do a very minor amount of effort if you wanted to do a search for a single word which was also a valid name on your internet.

Second, many typos of otherwise-valid URLs are indistinguishable from non-URLs and become searches. This can get confusing and also in the worst case leak some private information.

This is an interesting argument; actually I think it's one of the most convincing I've seen in this thread.

Third, there's the search provider. ... you can add explicit text-based prefixes

If what you mean is what I think you mean (e.g. "g foo" can search google for foo, "w bar" will search wikipedia for bar), those prefixes are exactly why I like the combined bar as much as I do. I like it rather more than Firefox-style search providers in the search box. (And yes, Firefox supports keyword searches as well, as does Opera.)

Fourth, even without search in there the address bar is already multifunctional. Merging in search means that search terms must be wiped out after searching...

I think this is a minor problem which is outweighed by the benefits (like reduced clutter and, in practice, too-small search box). ...and the current address must be wiped out to search.

This I don't see as a problem at all; or at least no more of a problem than the fact that you have to wipe out the current address to go to another address now.

Durrr, what? What you're talking about appears to me to be entirely orthogonal to the issue of whether the address bar searches or not, unless your contention is going to that URL will actually lead you to a search page.

It's not like when you type in a URL you get sent to to a Google page that says "hey, this is a URL, I'll do a silent redirection to the URL". It's the client side that decides whether it just navigates to the page or goes to the URL.

ooh! I know, the user is wanting to search for those on google!!

I entered both of those URLs along with an IP which is actually accessible to me into three different browsers (Chrome, Opera, and Firefox for Linux), and not once did I get a search. Opera and Firefox did add an explicit .com at the end of http://intranet/ and went to http://www.intranet.com./

I also tried just the IP addresses without the http:/// prefix, and not one of them led to a search page.

The only thing that did was entering "intranet" on its own. But turning on troll mode (though "troll mode with a point") for a second, that's not a URL; http://intranet/ is the URL. Your browser is already applying a heruistic (prefix the scheme) to arrive at the URL. After all, who's to say you didn't really intend https://intranet/? In some sense, all the browsers are doing in that case is applying a different heuristic that goes to a far less related page.

[1.] You can adjust the relative size of the search bar and the address bar manually. [2.] And it could have been done automatically.

(1) Yes, but that's extra work and can't be done from the keyboard (at least AFAIK). (2) I conceeded that point.

You only need one shortcut to switch focus to the either one, it just happens to be a different shortcut for each (as it should be)

Um, that's not a good response, because I disagree on the last assumption.

[1.] The firefox search box allows you to select different search providers already. and [2.] your keyword searches could have been incorporated there instead.

(1) I did mention that. Access isn't as good IMO. (2) Also conceed that point.

But hey, are we talking about how things are, or how they could be? Because if we're talking about how things are, then my first and third objections definitely currently apply. If we're talking about how things could be, then I submit it's also possible to make a combined bar work well enough that it addresses basically every concrete (i.e. not "they shouldn't be combined!") objection in this thread.

Either the guessing algorithm is dumb, and annoys the user, or it is really sophisticated, in which case it took probably away a huge amount of developer manpower to implement in a way that pleases both the "I want to shop for something vague" vague user and the "Shit, the system is down, we are losing $100,000 a minute, and this shitty browser is trying to do a search, which he can't do since the connection to the internet is down, and locks up while waiting for the time-out, instead of just going to the web fronted for the NAS!!".

I don't completely disagree with where you're coming from. I definitely recognize the conflict between "attempt to be user friendly and do a good job most of the time" and predictability (this is not even remotely the. only place it comes up), and I'll admit that I fall a little more on the first side than many power users. But at the same time, I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a problem with "try DNS and if that doesn't work then search".

For instance, take your example. If your browser freezes because the internet is down and it can't hit the search provider, then it has bigger problems than URLs vs searches. And it wouldn't be not going to the NAS front end in such a situation if it didn't try to search; it would be not going to the "server not found" error page.

(And of course, that policy isn't what happens now with browsers, but it's also not a fundamental problem with the combined bar.)

In the comparison with ls and cat, a unified search/url input in the same GUI element you would basically have to type something like "http://xxxxx" to go to an url ans something like "search://xxxxx" to do a search, wo work like the CLI

But here's the thing: You can! What you say is already the situation! (Sort of.)

If you type http://url/ it will go to that URL and not try to search. And if you set up a keyword search and use it, then it is unambiguously not a URL (with a different syntax than search://, but same idea).

In fact, the broswer is already applying a heuristic when you enter an address -- it'll prepend http:/// After all, "google.com" is not a URL if I'm a dick and pedant. In some sense, the only thing that's changing is what sorts of heuristics are applied to things which aren't explicit URLs and aren't explicit searches in order to figure out where to go. I mean, take the internet in 20 years. Maybe it'll be the case that HTTPS is universal, and when you type in "example.com", your browser will assume you mean "https://example.com" instead. And that'll break things too! But that's okay, because "example.com" is fundamentally not an unambiguous request even now.

Can't do that by mashing keywords into the URL bar (as far as I know).

You can.

In Firefox, go to any website you want to set up a search for, right click on the search box, and choose "add keyword for this search". If you add, say, a keyword of "g" on Google, then "g foo" in your address bar will search Google. In Chrome, you'll choose "add as search engine."

Why am I focusing on "stuff" instead of the command? Hello! because that is what you are acting on. entering data into a command line is pointless without a command to run.

IMO, the line between data vs command is blurrier than you make it out to be. From some point of view, typing "example.com" into your browser is giving it data. But I'd argue it's just as reasonable to look at it is a command -- "go to example.com". I think this is even stronger with searches: "g blah" is a command saying "search Google for blah". So I think that it's not so outrageous for me to compare entering whatever into the address bar of a browser to entering "emacs" vs "ls".

The thing is, you already have full access to a perfectly useful search tool in the search box (on firefox). ... This is a thing that has NO positive benefits, only negative.

There are at least three benefits, though admittedly two of them are merely deficiencies with the current implementation in Firefox:

1) Having a unified bar means that I can see both long URLs and long search queries. In Firefox, if I copy and paste an error message or something like that into the search box, it will almost certainly be too small to view the entire query. [This deficiency could be remedied by having the search box expand to cover most of the URL as I'm typing stuff into it.]

2) Having a unified bar means I only have to learn and use one shortcut for changing focus to the bar. [This deficiency is very minor, but fundamental.]

3) The address bar keyword searches actually work better for searching than does the search bar IMO (not for everyone, but I suspect many power users would agree) because of the ability to set up keyword searches that use multiple search engines. In Firefox, to change what search provider is used I have to use alt + the arrow keys to change what I want. I can far faster type a couple letters and not worry about what the program is doing. (In addition, adding new keyword searches is easier in my experience than adding a new search provider.) [This deficiency could be remedied by supporting keyword searches from the search bar -- but at the cost of either introducing yet another ambiguity or requiring them.]

Sorry, substitute "national sales tax" for "internet sales tax" in my comment.

wonder what part of "national sales tax" you missed. Everyone gets to pay sales tax on internet purchases going forward.

The part where that didn't happen.

As I just said in another post, there's no "internet sales tax", just the ability for states to require internet retailers to collect sales tax on sales to residents. If a state has no sales tax, there will continue to be no sales tax.

(I make no statement on whether the federal bill/law is good or bad, just that the name "internet sales tax" is apparently incredibly misleading.)

The "national internet sales tax" is a stupid and incorrect name for what happened, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the bill.

What they got is for Congress to say (or is it still a bill? I forget) that states can require Internet vendors to collect sales tax for remote sales to those residents. There's no "internet sales tax", it just moves the burden of collecting sales tax on internet purchases from the residents (who will often not pay and is basically unenforcable) to the retailers.

In other words: if states were to get rid of the state sales tax, then Amazon wouldn't be collecting any either.