Posting a semi-releveant Wikipedia article isn't much of a counter. The Kindle is a delivery mechanism. I can already check books out of the local library on it without ever spending another $1 at Amazon. But the selection sucks, because instead of buying digital copies that will never wear out, and will never be returned late, won't be unavailable because the only copy is at branch X instead of Branch Y,etc, they're buying dead tree versions. Digital distribution could dramaticallt expand a library's reach with the same resources.

Prattlings from a worker in yet another doomed profession. I have several friends who work at libraries, and I'm constantly amazed at their delusions of relevance. More and more money spent acquiring multiple copies of best sellers rather than expanding the breadth of the library. Money wasted on video games and popular DVDs. A single years' budget could buy everyone in my city one of the subsidized Kindles. Lease the real estate to purchase e-books for lending. Instead, they're expanding the number of libraries but keeping the budget the same, so it'll mean more of the pie going for facilities and salaries and less on content.

It's absolutely possible. Tuition is $6500 a year for California state schools, $5500 or so for Florida, etc. The $10k+ figures include room and board, transportation, books at retail vs used prices, etc. You're going to have to have a place to live, food, and some way to get to work anyway, so those costs are a wash.

I absolutely concur. However, when the government won't give you an ATO unless the product is certified, you've got no choice.

TrueCrypt is great in most circumstances. But if you need (for example) FIPS140-2 compliance, you' need something more.

Vancouver is more expensive than Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco and Chicago (actually, more expensive than any US city except New York).. It's certainly possible to live in those areas with public transportation, local parks, schools, and supermarkets. But you've got to be rich or live in the crappy part of town.

If you make it desirable to live there, you're going to drive prices up to the point where only the well-to-do can afford it. But the well-to-do aren't going to mow the lawns, clean the toilets, haul the garbage, or teach the kids. So you end up forcing the people that will do those jobs out to the suburbs. .

The result is places like San Francisco that can't hire teachers, because they can't afford to live near their schools. And since they can't get good teachers, the families with kids are fleeing to the suburbs. Or Washington, D.C., which is on the verge of not being a majority-black city because gentrification is driving up property values. They've had to abandon residency requirements for municipal employees because they couldn't fill vacancies anymore, so even trying to force people to live in cities doesn't work. People are willing to accept a certain degree of misery in their daily commute in exchange for larger homes, bigger yards, better schools, and less crime. If someone is already willing to live with a 2-hour commute each way, there's not much you can do to punish him further.

Maybe the lure is not having to deal with all the Powerpoint happy middle managers that keep the program mired in bureaucracy. Just because 'the best and the brightest' want to leave doesn't mean there isn't a fuck-ton of 'mediocre and not so smart' left behind.

99.9% of those Linksys routers will have no need to run IPv6 in their effective lifetime. When did people develop this sense of entitlement that every little cheap-ass consumer product they buy ought to be future-proof?

I've used this feature on Steam several times. Start a long game of Civ 5 (huge maps, epic speed) and play till the sun comes up. Save to the Steam Cloud. Get stuck at work patching servers or something, fire up Civ on the laptop and pick up where I left off. But, it's my choice to save to the cloud or save locally, as it should be.

Normally, 8 inches of snow wouldn't be that bad in the Washington DC area,

You must be new here.

Actually, this is probably an improvement. Half the people in line already have their damn iPhones out anyway, paying more attention to someone's inane tweet than to actually ordering or paying for their coffee.

As opposed to the current President, who didn't finish his Senate term?

My T-Mobile Dash that the company pays for has unlimited data and it's substantially cheaper. :) But if I could get an unencombered iPhone, I might, if for no other reason than it would be one less thing to carry around. As it is, I'll wait and see what Android can do.