This debate is largely irrelevant to most people who don't have high end gear (particularly headphones which can be disturbingly revealing). It really comes down to your specific situation and equipment. I have run endless double blind tests with lossless files and LAME encoded MP3s (at -V2 and -V0 VBR quality) and I can safely say that I can't tell the difference between those formats. 128Kbps AAC and MP3s are a different story. I could hear discernible differences with those bitrates against the lossless versions. With Amazon and iTunes now offering DRM-free 256Kbps files, I find the issue nearly moot.

I say "nearly moot" because I refuse to regularly pay out a minimum of $10 for digital albums that don't have the overhead of printing liner notes and pressing CDs. But I have purchased several Amazon $5 albums and even an iTunes album that was $7 that included a high resolution PDF of the liner notes.

As a result, I still buy most of my music on CD and vinyl and archive the files to Apple Lossless and rip those to LAME -V0 VBR MP3s for actual listening. Why keep a copy of large lossless files if MP3s are good enough? Chalk that up to my fear that one day I may want to transcode those lossless files to a new format that improves compression and maintains transparency or storage prices for DAPs and media become so cheap that I might as well just use the lossless versions as my primary playback files.

Score:4, Funny. Someone w/ mod points please get this to 5.

Don't mod this down. The AC hits the nail squarely on the head. I've had to disclose my SSN number anytime I've signed a contract with a mobile carrier (and I've been on contract with most of them at one time or another). The real issue is why they are allowed to keep this information past the time it takes them to run a credit check. Most consumers "consent" to this when they sign that absurd multi-page TOS that not only gives the carrier the right to keep this information indefinitely, but also allows them share it with "trusted" partners.

My wife's personal information was stolen a few years back when a large public university in California had an internal database breach. The only "recent" contact she had with the university was a 4 year old grad school application for a program she wasn't even accepted to. Why the university felt a need to hang on to her information long past the time it would have provided any usefulness to the application process is a mystery, until one considers the value of that data for other purposes.

If anyone is interested in learning more about the sorry state of protecting one's own digital identity, I highly recommend reading "The Digital Person: Technology And Privacy In The Information Age" by Daniel Solove.

Maybe now Firefox will now run in "IE" compatibility mode so I can "correct" all my CSS 2.0 compliant code to render correctly on Redmond's browser.

A 6-month exclusivity on Sprint means many people won't purchase one right away. That's a shame since I think it fits the definition of a "smart phone" much closer than anything else out there right now, including the iPhone, which I happen to own. I don't have a problem with subsidized hardware in exchange for extending your contract, but why limit it to a single CDMA carrier?

Palm needs to get the pre adopted in large numbers and at a quick pace, otherwise it might be left behind as a promising also-ran to the myriad of Apple, RIM, and Android phones that will be out by the time the pre makes it to other major carriers in the US and abroad.

3G coverage is spotty at best, and as others have mentioned, sometimes full 3G bars doesn't even provide data.

Problem has gotten so bad that I have turned off 3G altogether when I'm at home as call reliability is improved and I can just use my Wi-Fi connection for data. I could have just kept my 1st gen iPhone and lived without GPS.