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they're flying a fleet of 50 planes, doing dragnet surveillance by spoofing cell phone towers. Okay. When it comes to these people, benefit of the doubt is not something that should be extended.

But those planes are circling Mall of America, for and the article says they only "trick pinpointed devices", like the roughly 11,000 and roughly 100,000 shoppers.

I mean, probably maybe one of them is a terrorist, especially since organizations like PETA, Greenpeace, and other environmental activists have all been classified as terrorist organizations by the government. Anti-war organizations have also repeatedly been lumped under the terrorist umbrella.

So probably someone in the crowd of a tenth of a million people probably has some degree of support to those organizations, so they all need to be recorded. Just in case.

Great job opportunities in just about every industry?

Check. We were rated #1 Best Place To Live by Money magazine in 2006.

Excellent ethnic cuisines from around the world?

Check. Due in part to larger populations of Hmong, Mexican, and African immigrants. We may not have the sheer volume oh NYC, but per capita we do just fine. Minneapolis also has the most off Broadway theaters per capita in any other city except NYC.

Stores where you can pretty much find anything?

Apparently you have never heard of Mall of America before? If you can't find it there, it probably isn't sold anywhere. 520 stoes in 2.5 million square feet of mall hell.

Groceries delivered to your door?

Check. There are at least 5 different places that will deliver to where I live.

Great bar scene

Check. What the hell else do you think there is to do here, especially in the winter? We also have a music scene here that blows most cities away. Just ask Craig Finn from the Hold Steady.

gorgeous women of all kinds

Probably not as varied as NYC, but we do just fine thanks.


Our public transportation isn't the greatest, but it is getting better. And we are also the #2 most bike friendly city in the US, right after Portland.

Oh wait... you must live near this place. I can't think of any conventional mall that would support such an overabundance.

Reading just the headline "Humans are Causing Global Warming" presents an interesting point itself. 6 billion plus people milling about would generate (I would think) a massive amount of heat by kinetic motion. I remember hearing that that big ass mall doesn't even have a heating system, people provide all the heat it needs. On smaller scales, my house gets hot enough when the family is over for Xmas that I have the heat off and windows open.

So, wouldn't it be possible, given the atmosphere above us acting as the enclosure, that all of us down here are rasing the temp?

Not a single of your itemized demands will be met due to the inability of even the BEST retailer (the retailer of your wet dreams that seems to have been made exclusively for GabrielStrange) can compete on price. It gets no more logical than that.

Do you know what an inventory burden it is keeping anything you'd ever dream of in stock at any given time? Tower tried this for years (yes, the majority of product on their floor, in terms of dollars and units, is devoted to what they call in the biz "deep catalog") and have now obviously failed. Amazon can do "deep and wide" because they have a warehouse the size of the mall of america and the package freight handlers (UPS, FedEx, etc.) now have their operations down to a well-honed science. All you are missing is immediacy, which is what iTunes promises.

They can't play up their ability to offer instant gratification because the ability to carry the "blubber" of a fully-stocked deep catalog rode on the backs of the "Britney, Limp Bizkit, BT, Pink, or any other top-40 "artist"" that you rightly denigrate.

We can hem and haw about this that and the other, but once the critical mass of hits buyers left the building for Napster and MP3s, the support infrastructure weakened and is now collapsing.

This is not mass ignorance on the part of the retailer (although, they were always vulnerable as middle-men). The high prices accumulated like a snowball as the "product" changed hands. Granted, during the boom years, greed was riding high and $20 IS waaaaay too much when technology is supposed to be paying consumers back through efficiency-induced lowered operating/production costs.

You want immediacy? iTunes (and their ilk) and Kazaa. You want to play the old game but retain wide selection? Amazon. You want a retro experience from the "good old days?" You neighborhood shop will do:

Rasputin's; Plan 9 - not the OS :-);

A-

The Mall of American in Minnesota has a Legoland (that's what we call it, anyway), where you can also scoop your own legos out of bins. The prices didn't seem too exhorbitant, either.

It looks like The Mall of America is still going after teenagers--this time, 15-year old Megan Dickinson was caught giving away 1,100 articles of clothing that she had shoplifted over the past year. At the maximum statutory damages for felony larceny, this makes Megan's liability at least $825,000, at most a mere $165,000,000. Naturally, The Mall of America benevolently offered a $3,500 settlement to avoid these moderate, legally sanctioned damages. As we can hardly forget, The Mall of America has already used this technique to settle with a 12 year old. Megan's unsurprising take: 'Yeah, it seems ridiculous.'

It looks like The Mall of America is still going after teenagers--this time, 15-year old Megan Dickinson was caught giving away 1,100 articles of clothing that she had shoplifted over the past year. At the maximum statutory damages for felony larceny, this makes Megan's liability at least $825,000, at most a mere $165,000,000. Naturally, The Mall of America benevolently offered a $3,500 settlement to avoid these moderate, legally sanctioned damages. As we can hardly forget, The Mall of America has already used this technique to settle with a 12 year old. Megan's unsurprising take: 'Yeah, it seems ridiculous.'

It looks like The Mall of America is still going after teenagers--this time, 15-year old Megan Dickinson was caught giving away 1,100 articles of clothing that she had shoplifted over the past year. At the maximum statutory damages for felony larceny, this makes Megan's liability at least $825,000, at most a mere $165,000,000. Naturally, The Mall of America benevolently offered a $3,500 settlement to avoid these moderate, legally sanctioned damages. As we can hardly forget, The Mall of America has already used this technique to settle with a 12 year old. Megan's unsurprising take: 'Yeah, it seems ridiculous.'

Come on, people! I can understand trying to be helpful and all - but don't jump to conclusions about something you know nothing about.

I know what you mean.

On a slightly different angle, my wife was going through the Mall of America doing some shopping. I don't recall what my eldest son did wrong at the time, but my wife placed him in time-out and stood nearby waiting for him to finish wailing before actually starting the clock.

A woman stranger approached and tried to comfort him, which just caused him to shriek louder. My wife told her he was in time-out and asked her to leave him alone. For some reason, the woman started berating my wife for mistreating him and tried to get him to come with her.

My wife--who was trained in high school and college to sing opera, and has a LARGE voice when she chooses--yelled at her to "let go of my son!" Needless to say, that woman experienced immediate attention from everyone in the area, as well as mall security, who arrived in short order.

This is clealy a better experience than yours, since the person who barged into the parenting of another got a demonstration in why that's not a good notion.

Yeah, haven't any of you been to that mall in Minnesota!? Silly Europeans. BTW, we did that "society of states" European Union thing over 200 years ago. Hint...it works.

I am feeling a bit trollish today...

I got my Linux version of Quake3 from a retail store, just after it was released. (yes, the actual linux version with tin box and everything...)

The store clerk said they couldn't keep it on the self. Yup, they were selling like, 5 copies a week.

And this was at the Mall of America, not a low trafic mall by any means.

Putting out a retail version of Quake3 was a nice test, obviously it told them that the market wasn't ready yet. But every now and then you do see Loki games on store shelves. MicroCenter had them for awile. I've yet to see newer titles like Tribes 2 show up though.

Oh well, TuxGames is a great store. :)