C'mon samzenpus, is it really that difficult to post your crap to idle instead of slashdot's main page? I swear you screw this up at least once a week.

This was only added in the recent (early Feb) patch though, it was not always there. The early Feb patch did a fair amount to downgrade the exploration/world aspects of the game, between adding Retry (which they had previously been strongly against) as well as making the "collectibles" (smashables) glow extremely gaudily. HEY LOOK OVER HERE SOMETHING YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO COLLECT DON'T JUST DRIVE PAST IT. It really bothers me that even the billboards you've already smashed continue to blink bright red with an effect that looks like a clipping error.

I don't know why people always do this comparison.

Apple is not a convicted monopolist. Microsoft is. There's a big difference.

Have you looked at the Sony PRS-505? Both my fiancee and I own one (I bought one for her as a present, and borrowed it so often that I ended up buying my own), and it satisfies most of what you're asking for. It's not technically "open", but there are examples of people modifying it anyway, and it doesn't require any proprietary software to be installed on your PC. You plug it in, and it shows up as a drive, same as a USB key would. Put the books in the right folder and you're done.

It supports quite a few formats natively, and there's a wonderful open-source program named calibre that will convert/format many other things to the best formats for it. Battery life is great, reading 3-4 hours a day it'll easily last over a week without charging. I'd at least give it a look, I don't really have any complaints about mine.

One thing to note is that Sony has put out a new model, the PRS-700, but it's generally considered to be inferior to the 505. They modified the screen to add touch capabilities and a backlight, and it's not nearly as nice to read on.

This is often referred to as "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy". To quote, "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge." Or also, "Cowboy Bebop at His Computer".

Yep, you sure did kill that. Apparently leaving out half of the text doesn't help.

My favorite part is IBM offering to give their laid-off employees their jobs back... in India.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000389

There's a pretty sizeable collection of funny/clever server names on Stack Overflow here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262657/the-coolest-server-names

Someone spilled idle on the front page again.

And it wasn't even samzenpus this time.

samzenpus has done this multiple times, he seems to be pretty bad at posting stuff into the correct section. Either that or (like other people have suggested) it's part of a plot to test us and see if we'll put up with this site slowly turning into digg.

I know I won't hang around when that happens.