Of course - this thing is cheap as a loss leader for Amazon's media sales. Amazon wants you to buy more stuff from them so the tablet's cheap. Apple wants you to buy an iPad (and the iPad margins are decent enough to do this) so they see iTunes music/books/apps whatever as a value add.

I don't think you know what easy means. For my iPhone, I drag ePubs into iTunes and either wait for the phone to autosync with iTunes or physically sync it myself. Done.

Calibre is easy (and I used to use it to sync with Stanza, until the iOS5 upgrade broke it, though Amazon just issued a last working zombiefied version) but it's still harder than using iTunes. Not a big deal to you or I reading slashdot, probably, but I could probably teach my parents how to work it with iTunes, I know I couldn't with Calibre.

Read a book called Orientalism by Edward Said. Your perceptions of Islamic views on sex are greatly influenced by the desire for your (and to some degree my) own culture to create the other, something, through opposition, by which it can define itself.

The most striking thing is how different this other was one hundred to two hundred years ago - Western culture was prudish, while Asians (including Arabs) were the ones of wild sexuality (think about our misconceptions of the haram, geishas, etc.).

I've been reading a lot of these insider books lately and I take them all with a grain of salt, whether they come to praise the politician or just bury them. However, it still says something about Palin that she couldn't name any national or international newspapers or magazines. Even if she flubbed the answer a bit after getting flustered if she recovered and answered something, she probably would have been forgiven (for that gaffe at least).

Not sure what you need iTunes for (since there are somethings alternatives can't do), but what about Songbird?

I think there are few, if no, great native iOS games. Angry Birds may be the exception (I don't like it much, but people seem to love it). Of the good games on iOS they mostly seem to be ports that fall into two categories. First, ports that work exceedingly well with touch controls. I'd throw Plants vs. Zombies in this category, maybe with Game Dev Story, and the Castlevania Puzzle game. The second category are games that don't work well with touch controls, but aren't too hobbled by them either. The port of Final Fantasy 3 falls into this category I would say, as do most good RPGs.

I'm an Apple fan and a user (though a realistic one). Rush Limbaugh is an Apple user. Not everyone who uses one is highly educated.

I'm a US law student studying in the UK. While I'm not specializing in tort at all, UK and US libel laws are pretty different.

Agh, the band is The Roots! They've had a ton of studio albums and were well known before becoming that piss-ant Fallon's house band.

Yeah. I'm not scientist, but I do dabble in this, and it's not surprising; a lot of the birds, including crows, ravens, and the parrot show strong cognitive abilities, even though they are "are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes."

In fact a lot of animals not close to our own species have been shown to have strong cognitive abilities, these birds for example, and cetaceans, especially dolphins.

It's not out yet. It'll be released today but as of me writing this (12:13PM EST) it's not hit the servers yet.

It'll upgrade the point number but not to the next major release.

Releases what?

Oh, you mean Apple releases iOS 4 today. iOS 4 will be released.

C'mon man, let's not ruin our language.

Whatever the current version of iPhoto is comes with your Mac. To upgrade you have to buy the latest version of iLife.

I'm skeptical of a lot of promises Apple makes, but I download Safari 5 now and after playing with it, I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm on Snow Leopard and moved from Safari 4 to the Chrome betas and to the release version of Chrome when it came out. I prefer Safari's integration into the system, but Chrome's extensions and speed make it my primary browser (but when downloading PDFs, visiting Hulu, I'd have to go back to Safari). Safari 5 may make be switch back again, depending on the extension support.

Reader works pretty well; makes reading multiple part articles far more pleasant. Even on sites that don't break articles into multipage monsters (Ars Technica) the reader version was much better. Even better than that printing from the reader version prints the reader version (I'm doing a research project involving online newspaper articles and now I can simply print PDFs of the Reader version to Yojimbo!).

It seems a fair bit faster than Safari 4 or Chrome for OS X. There's been a few UI changes, especially in Top Sites/History, but overall it's the same beast.

The deciding factor is going to be extensions. I depend on Rikai-kun, Gmail Notifier, and Adblock for Chrome (plus I use flashblock, but there's already a good version for Safari, Click to Flash). If I can get those (and I wonder if/how Apple will deal with Adblock) I'll certainly move back to Safari; the fit and finish on it is much better than even the release version of Chrome; Chrome often doesn't shut down correctly, has crashed occasionally (and while page crashes aren't supposed to bring down the whole browser, they've make the browser unusable enough to warrant a restart), text input glitches, and webpages with semi-dynamic content (like a message window and then the subsequent message sent page) not visually updating for several seconds.

There's a second tier of extensions I'd like to see; Google Calendar, Amazon wishlist, etc.; hopefully Safari's extension community will be large enough that those also see the light of day.