I appreciate very much having sane moderators.

But, I *hate* the disemvoweling! It just makes reading these (usually unworthy) comments 10 times as long and wastes so much more of my time than just deleting the comment would have taken. Maybe this is one of those "too precious" BB sacred cows, but I find it really obnoxious.

May I suggest doing what digg, slashdot and many other sites do and just hiding the comments that meet whatever medium-offensive threshold that currently results in disemvoweling?

Technically, it would be a totally trivial thing to do -- add an additionally CSS class like badcomment to the comment-content div with { display: none; }, then add a JS onClick to show the comment. Or have JS insert the text so it doesn't get included by search engines' indexes.

I dunno, I speak German and spent some time in Germany, and have seen this USAF slogan in TV commercials a bunch of times and never thought of this. It's a pretty weak link. "Above" isn't really how "über" translates, and the context is so different. Hearing the German national anthem played makes me instantly think of, well, the Winter Olympics, a lot more than WWII.

I think it's a pretty decent recruiting slogan, a nice connotation of one-upping the other branches of the armed services. It beats "an army of one."

I would definitely give it a free pass over, say, Moolatté.

I see that the downloader is not required for single songs (you can just download over HTTP), but is required for entire albums.

Since it's required, then it's good there's a Linux version (Free or not), but that just begs the question of why is it required in the first place? I can guess at the reason, but does someone know what it actually is?

I understand Amazon has to prevent abuse, so for instance there is a time window after purchase before the song becomes unavailable, and they need to be able to restrict access to users in particular countries. Are the record companies involved in negotiating these sorts of requirements (it makes sense that they would be)?

I can suggest of a couple of similar countermeasures that would be inadequate and still allow abuse -- restrict to the purchaser IP wouldn't work, restrict to user account/browser session wouldn't work, restrict # of downloads isn't sufficient by itself.

Sun has a very slick GUI downloader, all in Java, that works seamlessly for me on Mac and Linux (have not tried Windows, presume it works there, and Solaris/BSD), and doesn't require an install of any kind since it's just a .jar -- too bad Amazon didn't borrow this. I do not want a standalone app.

Hmmm, I am a dude (and NOT the kind that fetishizes women's shoes), and I've seen a lot of knit footwear before. Possibly the CRAFT piece was an influence, but I'd put more than even odds on it having nothing to do with it. The shape of the boot is different, the gauge and tightness of the knitting totally different, but I'll agree that the color design ("grab-bag") is similar. They're a lot more different than, say, two skateboard shoes from different companies. Like Kid #13 says, so often, similar-looking things just happen to be made coincidentally.

I also thought fashion was one of those "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" industries, where of course originality is prized over merely refining and improving, but the latter is just what it is, and people don't get on either "plagiarism!" or "IP violation!" high horses. (Unless you're talking knock-offs, but those are mass-marketed fakes, not designer pieces seeking their own independent recognition.)

But at minimum you can celebrate being a few years ahead of "haute couture"!

meh.

The map was pretty, but it doesn't really do anything that I could tell -- mousing over the dots doesn't even show the names of the cities, clicking them makes the page reload. And why is this map pushing all the content off my screen? And when I do scroll down, there's nothing there suggesting it actually deserves to be read. No content == for sure I will never visit again.

The super-wide fixed-width requirement is a terrible idea. Even people with screens that big don't necessarily like to browse with their browsers super-maximized. It *really* isn't hard to do things like use % sizes for things, obviously this is Flash content so it would scale perfectly if they'd done that.

I guess it's just a corporate branding site and they don't care about these things. Is the whole point just a fancy way of saying "Here is a list of our blogs"? Compare to something like EveryBlock which is doing so much more.

@Raisedbywolves, in fact SOP I think varies a lot depending on what equipment they're using and whether the baristas care. At least a few years ago when I last had a friend who worked there, they did have the double-shot head thingies (I don't know anyplace that doesn't), and always dumped the leftover shot if the order was a single or triple (policy was definitely to waste it and *not* let it sit around or get used in a drink). Actually, far from letting it sit, they usually didn't bother with a shot glass for the second shot and just let it go straight down the drain.

Coffeegeek, thanks, you made me laugh!

Coincidentally (or maybe not, given the tenor of these changes), I was talking to the barista in a starfucks a couple of weeks ago, and they had just had some downtime to install new push-button machines that supposedly make better coffee than the old ones. So, even the robots get retraining! Incidentally, the baristas were in the midst of some serious post-install retuning of the machines, which they had just gone in and were pulling watery shots the color of iced tea -- so there's still a lot of skill/attention to quality required by the job.

In WDC where I used to live, there are a lot of terrible copycat independents and worse chains like Cosi, so I often sought out the consistency of the Starbucks push-button. Not to say there aren't great places for coffee in DC -- Murky (of course), Swing's, Sip of Seattle, Stacy's and Greenberry just to name a few in my former stalking grounds.

I last lived in London in 1988, and there were at least a few of these around then. I remember being quite intrigued by them, as an 11-year-old.

I think there was/is some kind of timer (5, 10 minutes?) on them to keep them from being used by junkies/prostitutes, and then the door would open no matter what.

Back then, they were at least clean and shiny, so if they're stinky now it may have something to do with poor maintenance, or the inexorable decline of any public restroom. Perhaps the design wasn't so bad.

I don't think the old arguments about DRM really apply in the same way as they do with music. MP3s were widespread before Rio and others created the MP3 player market, which in turn had to exist for a while before companies tried to create digital music services. The CD is phsical media containing a digital copy of a song, and it's a snap to load the music from a CD onto an MP3 player. An iPod isn't much more than a Walkman that holds 1000 albums instead of 1, at least not the way most people use them.

But there's no way to buy a bunch of books and magazines and instantly load them onto a portable reader, or, likewise, to easily digitally distribute ("share"/"pirate") them. People care about DRM when it gets in the way of how they're used to doing things, but the eBook experience/market barely even exists yet.

A few packrats aside, most people are used to buying new copies of music, video, software and books when they wear out or get superseded by better formats. LPs get scratched, HD DVDs replace DVDs which replaced VHS, 5 1/4" floppies don't fit in your Playstation, books get old and lost. It's not as if a college English class studying Othello doesn't have to go out and buy copies because 400 years' of surplus copies are just lying around everywhere.

If I can be sitting in an airport, think "I want to read X" and a minute later be reading it on a great screen for less than half the cover price, that's really cool. I've played with the new Sony eBook reader that has the same screen as the Kindle, and the screen is phenomenal. I can actually imagine a mostly paper-free book future now.

The Kindle is too expensive for me, and there are a few kinks like screen refresh/flicker, but it's the best eBook reader/service pairing to date, I think. When it has, say 50% of the feature set of my PDA, it'll be really compelling.

In a world where music and feature-length movies can be and are easily pirated, to the massive economic detriment of publishers, I can't see book publishers committing the kind of harikari that DRM-free eBooks would mean. Not when ASCII is a millionth the size of video -- there'd be no need for BitTorrent, grandma could just dial in to AOL and email the book club her entire library as an attachment.