When the original Kindle came out, people complained it was horribly expensive. Whenever Amazon released a new model and/or chopped the MSRP, people complained it was horribly expensive. When it went under $200 people bitched that there was no reason for it to sell for more than $150. When the Wifi model came out for $139 people complained that there was no reason for it to cost more than $100. Now the Wifi can be purchased for $114 and people are going to come up with any excuse to complain about the price, ads or both.

I am 100% convinced that even if Amazon gives it away just for the cost of shipping (free if you are on Prime), people will still bitch and moan about the stupid ads.

I have owned two Kindles (awesome, cludgy), two Kindle 2s (awesome, period) and currently two Kindle 3 Wifi (awesome, keyboard sucks). All of our previous Kindle devices were sold to friends for a reasonable price, and all of them are (that I know) still up and running today, and each and everyone loves them.

Both my wife and myself adore this device, for people like us that read a book or more per week these devices are extremely practical. The Wifi model uses so little power that it freaks me out whenever I realize that I actually need to charge it.

With Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) you can deal with the book problem the same way you would use iTunes to catalog music and video. It is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. I have personally used it for both OSX and Windows for a few years and it has never let me down.

The video problem is much harder because the tagging is nowhere as mature as what we have available for music. What really drives me nuts about this is that there is no consistent way to apply parental ratings to content in a way that it is recognized by OSX and Windows. This keeps me from sharing my videos across the home network since there is no way I can easily block certain videos from my son's Xbox and his iMac. I would have to manually set play lists, which is a lot more work, it would be nice if I could tag content as PG-13 or above and let the Xbox use its built-in content ratings mechanism.

Same as Unicorns to Leprechauns.

What carrier? I have installed at least 3 so far with no issues, this is a Samsung Intercept (2.1) with Virgin Mobile USA.

The problem with Mass Effect 2 is the stupid crew achievement and the way you easily confuse having the full crew AND having the full crew trust you, which is how you can even access the decisions that will let the full crew survive. When you spend a few dozen hours playing a game and you think you just nailed the ending, only to find out that you lost a couple of your crew members because of some obscure choices you made 15-20 hours ago, it can be frustrating. A lot of my frustration with this game came from just that lousy achievement, I was willing to live with the ending because I had not met all of the crew criteria.

Fallout New Vegas at least tries to warn you. There are two major missions that only come up to hint at you that if you head towards a certain direction you will antagonize a specific faction (there is one for NCR, one for the Legion). Some people may not be able to tell that what they are doing may indirectly annoy one of the big factions, so these two missions sort of help them notice. Mass Effect 2 is a lot more subtle than this, and the ending comes as a complete surprise.

If you would consider upgrading it to Windows 7 you will get parental controls that are simple to control. You can set allowed access times, game access based on ratings, and which apps the child can/cannot run.

Set the machine so it can only browse pbskids.org, which should keep him busy for hours. If you do this at the router level then you don't have to worry about the kid being able to defeat the filter.

I have a 12-yr old with autism, and as soon as he was curious about computers (5 yr old or so), that's how I dealt with it. My only beef with parental controls is Youtube, which refuses to use proper ratings. Instead it takes into account the age (minimum 13) of the account holder and it refuses to show content flagged as objectionable if the viewer is not at least 18. The problem is that the child eventually runs into content that hasn't been flagged yet, which is annoying as hell. Except for the youtube issue, pretty much everything else respects the parental ratings. Firefox for some reason didn't like to play nice with these in OSX 10.5 and 10.6, but Safari is fine. I haven't checked if this is an issue with Windows 7 too.

The other thing I did is I setup his mac in the living room, facing a wall. My wife keeps her laptop at a spot in a living room that is in a direct line of sight of his, so all she has to do is look up and she can see what he is doing.

And yeah, *my* laptop is set so I can see HER screen and his. She's clueless about computers, so I have to keep an eye on hers as much as the 12-yr old.

Left eye it is, and I kept switching to the left eye even if I was consciously trying to force my right one to take over.

I have no idea, but based on how it was impossible for me to shoot the A1 properly right-handed, I guess my left eye is dominant. I can shoot pistols ambidextrous, but if I shoot Weaver then it is lefty. As for that cast-in deflector stub, its usefulness became obvious the day I got that casing stuck under my eyeglass and my drill sergeant was so furious that I was not issued the clip-on deflector that he had me turn in the A1 and exchange it for an A2 (the first one with the cast-in deflector).

As for "lefty" rifles, I have seen bullpup rifles that let you pick if you want the brass to be ejected left or right.

I don't know, we lefties have spent so long in a right-handed world that we adjust to some things without even noticing. I am 39, and to this day I can't even sign my name with my right hand, but I bowl, bat and golf right-handed (yet I throw balls lefty), I am ambidextrous as far as cutlery goes, I use the mouse with my right hand and I shoot firearms lefty (not fun learning to shoot with an M16-A1 that required a clip-on "lefty" brass deflector, forgot it once and was rewarded with a hot casing stuck between my face and my eyeglasses). It is extremely rare to find an adult that is a pure lefty.

What build/os? here's the best I could get from Windows 7-64:

Chrome 7 dev (had to manually turn on GPU acceleration): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfgbvlguaI/AAAAAAAAOoc/dCc-Tj6IgUo/s400/2010-09-08_150824.jpg
FF 4 Beta 5 (as is): http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfgccSWk1I/AAAAAAAAOog/Wg6qzEH3_fk/s400/2010-09-08_150943.jpg
IE 9 platform preview (as is): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fPLo8aIju-A/TIfga8sAWVI/AAAAAAAAOoY/MW51u3pV53M/s400/2010-09-08_150745.jpg

Yes! The thing that appeals to me the most about using Gmail is that searching through 5+GB of old emails won't make everything in my machine slow to a crawl. Even with the free Gmail account, you can up the storage to 20GB for $5/year, and that extra space is available from other Google services connected to the same account.

If you want to have more flexibility, sign up for a Backupify account, which can backup Gmail pretty well. As a bonus, when Backupify stores your backups they are kept in plain text format, so you can always pull these and move them elsewhere without having to worry about issues with Gmail's storage formats.

We got two Kindles here, it is just too convenient to have the books available anywhere. With two of us in the house reading so much, we already had one wall covered with bookshelves and it was starting to get out of control (those things are dust magnets). Now all of our purchased eBooks are kept in a convenient location, we don't even have to worry about losing a book because the device fails.

Even if I forget the Kindle when I leave the house, I can use the Blackberry client and pull whatever I was reading. The flexibility I get outweighs any concern I may have had about DRM and lock-in.

Yup. I put 50 hours into Red Dead Redemption for the 360, then Amazon paid me $40 for my used copy (they are currently offering $32.50), they even paid for the shipping.

And yes, it's an Amazon gift card, not cash, but I spend so much at Amazon that to me it is the same as cash.

That's 50 hours of entertainment for a little over $20. I would not be able to do this if I bought a full game download for the console. At least in the 360, you would only be able to play it in the original console that was used to buy it, or with the original Live ID used for the purchase.