You are missing the biggest part of the $10 debate. Amazon is paying certain publishers $14 wholesaler per title, then turning around and selling the title for $10. Why? Because they are willing to use the books as loss leaders to drive sales of the Kindle, which gives them more strength to negotiate for a lower wholesale price later down the road.

The publishers are whining because at $10 it lowers the perception that the contents books are worth a lot of money. They don't want you to think ebooks can be discounted perpetually until they sell for a buck a title.

Amazon is whining because they are paying the agreed on price to the publisher and it is their business how much money they are willing to lose per title as long as it drives up Kindle sales.

Us ebook buyers are whining because it is borderline price fixing, which is illegal in this country. And while rare titles should command a price, there is no way in hell that a mass release title needs to cost more than $10 for everyone involved to make money.

And yes, the two biggest losers here are going to be the mom and pop bookstores, which are going to be relegated to used bookstore duty only, and the small authors, who are getting sabotaged out of creating grassroots interest in their works since obviously the big publishers aren't interested in marketing them but have no trouble sabotaging new channels that allow them to do the marketing on their own.

I own two Kindle 2s. DRM only means I can only buy protected content from Amazon, I am free to import content from other sources without involving Amazon in the process. Amazon has yet to interfere with any third parties selling content for the Kindle as long as they don't attempt to use their proprietary DRM scheme.

It is one hell of a reader, and in an emergency Whispernet is a nice backup to have. During Snowmaggeddon here in DC I was getting better network performance from the two Kindles than from our AT&T cell phones (probably you can't compare the network traffic between these two, ever).

By the way, two of the most popular tools used to generate content for the Kindle, Stanza and Mobi Pocket creator, are both owned by Amazon. Or you could use Calibre.

Worried about generating DRM-free content for Kindle readers? Release your content as MOBI/PRC or PDF and that should do it, at least until Amazon feels the burn and issues a patch allowing Kindles to read EPUB.

The biggest problem that the Kindle faces is not the DRM, it's the tug of war between Amazon and publishers that want them to raise their $10 price point for new books.

Very true. I personally know two PhDs, the nicest people I have ever worked with btw, that were brilliant only within the very narrow field of their specialty. For anything else they were a very short step above stupid.

After using it for a few minutes I got a link to a preference that makes lite the default site. And you have the option to keep a bar on top of the screen that lets you toggle between the two sites.

I can confidently tell you this after two decades of programming: learn as much math as you can possibly handle. The more the merrier. Algebra, calculus, differential equations, numerical analysis, the works.

Of all of courses I took for my bachelors, the one I remember the most vividly, that was both fun and hard as hell, was numerical analysis because it was the first time after 2+ years of being miserable with my calculus courses that I took a math course with immediate, real world application.

If you can also get some logic for programmers, even better. My school's philosophy department had logic courses aimed specifically at engineering majors instead of forcing us to take the general (what we called poets') version.

It is knowledge that is general and very portable, you can apply it to almost everything that you will ever do as a programmer. You simply can't go wrong.

Your microdot idea is downright evil, I love it.

Yes. And that is a variation of the classic canary trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap): copies of classified documents that are not 100% identical. When the leaks surface, you can trace the original recipient of the compromised copy. I like the thing with the maps because it is the kind of thing that makes the violator look like a complete idiot, and it's impossible to defend in court.

Back in the dot com days there was a company that was probably called Freepc.com or something really similar. There was no gimmick: you filled a really long marketing questionnaire, and if you fit certain profiles you were sent a free PC. It was yours to keep as long as you surfed the net X hours per month (it was very low, probably 10 hrs) and you kept whatever made Windows 95/98 or whatever it had to display the ads.

I signed up for it and yup, they sent me one at zero cost to me. It was a cheap Compaq with a 15 or 15 inch monitor. But what the hell, it was free!

The screen was setup so about 800x600 was usable, with the rest of the 1024x768 full of ads. I set it up for my wife and it worked pretty good for as long as we had it. The ads were displayed based on your marketing profile. Most of the time the ads were very relevant.

Eventually that company died, and they gave us the computers because it was too expensive to have them shipped back and disposed through a liquidator. As soon as they went belly up, it became my testbed for SuSe, which it ran really damn nice for a long time. It wasn't fast, but it was very usable.

Mine talks like a parrot, but he won't have a conversation with you unless it is to get something that he wants (when you think about it, most kids are like this). If you take out the autistic meltdowns and the scripted language issues, he is your typical smartass tween that thinks that the world revolves around him.

This is not a troll. While we parents with real needs are delighted to see this kind of product, we are a tiny market. The bulk of the interest for this kind of product is going to be overbearing control freak parents.

Hell, had the technology existed my own mother would had chipped the way they do now with pets.

The struggle is to know he is out. He is a master of sneaking. One day I was sitting at my desk, and I could see into the living room. He figured out the field of vision, moved right beyond that, then calmly broke the Charlie bar.

If I had some kind of perimeter alarm, I would have known he was getting out of the house. Instead he ran about 1/8th of a mile, into a busy 4-lane, where my wife AND her mother were driving back home from the supermarket.

Yes, his own mother saw him run into the street. In her mind she almost ran him over. The worst part of the episode is that I was completely awake and was not even absorbed with what I was doing. I was simply sitting at my desk.

When he is 18 I may be forced by law to seek guardianship. I am responsible to keep that child alive until he is 18, maybe 21 if Virginia state law is weird about it. If I have to be his guardian, I will have to worry about this until he is older enough to understand that cars do run over people.

I had all of our 30+yr old windows replaced with brand new, energy efficient windows. Since they were doing this for all units in our condo complex they asked if there was anything else special we wanted to get done at the same time. I asked if it was possible to get window locks that require a key.

Sure, they said.

I ordered two per window.

What did he do? He figured out how to defeat the Charley bar lock in the sliding patio door. In a fit of rage I took a couple of screws and drilled them into the sliding door base, so it is permanently closed.

Fast forward a month or two: he figured out how to disassemble the keyed locks in the windows, we caught him at 2AM, thunderstorms and all. He had the window already open, we only caught him because he couldn't pick which shoes to wear. I drove even more screws, this time into the window frames.

After so many years living in constant terror of the kid bolting out and running under a car, I don't give a shit how much it costs.

As a parent of an autistic child with escape artist tendencies, I would love to have this kind of watch. That is, assuming that my kid will wear it for more than 5 minutes in a row without trying to cut it off.

My kid is 10 and incredibly fast. He doesn't understand the concepts of safety and fear, and is constantly figuring out ways to break our locks to go out wandering alone (he's even done it at school, which was actually a bit funny because he took off running in front of the principal, so for the first few minutes there was a gaggle of huffing and puffing teachers and secretaries chasing through an apartment complex until the cops arrived). A watch like this, combined with some kind of alarm could help us keep him alive and unharmed until he is 18.