Are you sure about that? When you buy something that's 4.99 your total is 4.99?

I just bought something small to double check, and I am not charged tax. Maybe it depends on the state?

Yea, I've never been charged tax on the Playstation Store.

Alright, I'll give you that. That should really be a no-brainer for anything. So kudos for that.

USB is less proprietary than Bluetooth? I'd say they're the same. At least with the PS3 you can have either type of input. It isn't like you have to use a Microsoft keyboard with it. Again, hard drives is non-first party storage is nice. I apologize for not thinking about it because I don't actually use my PS3 to game on.

Eh, I guess. At least my model supports PS2 BC and SACD, both of which they've dropped (and are totally proprietary) so forgive me for having a negative view of their trends.

I have definitely been charged tax for all my Playstation Store purchases.

When I had my Playstation Account "shipping address" or whatever located in NYC, I was charged tax on ever PSN purchase. As an experiment, I changed my address to my parents' house in Georgia, and have never been charged tax again.

If I had only known that earlier... all the money I spent on taxes at this point could have purchased another game.

I am in Florida, and have never been charged tax, either.

MS isn't USB though. It's proprietary USB. PS3 is a lot more open in this regard than the 360 ever will be, IMO.

Need to change my address then. I have been paying tax so far.

Just claim it as a tax deduction some how. Talk to your accountant to see if you can link the purchase to any work related stuff you do.
Helps if you work in a games/electronics shop.

Exactly. I really don't understand how anyone could honestly claim that the PS3 is more closed and proprietary than the 360.

We've been through this before. Some states charge tax on PSN online purchases, others don't. Some one speculated that it's based on whether there's a Sony Style in your state, but that's not right since there's one at Ceaser's and I don't get charged tax here in NV.

What's a "sales" tax?

Wal-Mart here doesn't charge sales tax at B&M for either Wii or XBL point cards. Not sure about PSN cards.

Proprietary USB? Can you elaborate on that? I haven't had any problem with keyboards or our iPods yet on it.

Also, I don't recall saying the PS3 was more closed than the 360, in fact I don't recall directly comparing them. All I said originally was that I would be surprised if Sony supported 3" discs. Color me surprised.

Try using the G25 on the 360.

Meaning that Sony is much more open in regards to USB devices (3rd party controllers, adapters, etc.) than MS is, by a long shot.

Any word about Shattered Moon yet (I think that's the name, some sort of build defense positions to defeat an army of space bugs)? Looks like it could be fun, but I thought it was supposed to be out last year/fall...

I'm looking forward to that one myself.

Two different places I've read over the last few weeks say it'll be out this Thursday. Of course, that could change yet again.

I think it's called Savage Moon and as Chew said it's supposed to be out this Thursday.

Well after a few days of fiddling with the PS3 I've returned it. There were just so many things that seemed neat on paper, but didn't add up to much. The PSN, while free, is so damn slow. Nearly every game that I would want to play I've played already on my 360, and the three games I'm relatively interested in don't make it worth it (Uncharted, MGS4, and Little Big Planet).

It was a phenomenal Blu-Ray player, and I may re-buy it as a Blu-Ray player if it ever goes down in price, but I think my money is better spent elsewhere.

Wow.

When I originally bought my PS3 player at the end of '07, I had primarily bought it for the Blu-ray player with the games being a perk. At the time, I said I would probably not buy but a few games and might just borrow games from people I work with the have PS3's, if I really wanted to play more.

Since then, the PS3 has become my foremost gaming platform (I have all the Nintendo made systems, but no Xbox systems) and I buy games like they are going out of style. I used to play all my FPS on the PC and I even prefer playing them on the PS3 now. ... plus we have gotten just about everyone I work with to buy PS3's and we all buy and play the same games.

I never had any slowdown when using PSN. You are talking about the playstation network right? Just asking because you stated it was free and that is like stating amazon.com is free or that wal-mart is free to go around and look at stuff but you still have to pay for the stuff you want. So I was thinking you might be talking about something else that actually is slow like home.

PSN encompasses everything online with the Playstation, not just the store (which is the PSN Store).

That said, downloads up until recently had been horrendously slow, haven't really played online in a while but when I did I lagged out more times than not.

Exactly, I'm talking about downloads off of PSN. I didn't expect everything to be free. Downloading home, a 77mb file, took an hour or two. Downloading the system update was so terribly slow, I canceled it, then downloaded it off their website and installed it with a flash drive.