I've had not one but two kindle 3's (keyboard, wireless only) end up in this state: http://www.papaspyropoulos.com/my-amazon-kindle-screen-is-messed-up/.
They ended up this way after being transported in a backpack, INSIDE a protective cover, in the company of a few other books (not heavy tomes). There are no visible signs of physical damage on the kindles, yet they are made unusable by mere carrying around. You might guess that some very moderate pressure was applied on the screen by the other books but what is the point of a PORTABLE reader if it can't withstand such little pressure? Amazon replaced the broken item the first time around, but now the warrantee period of 1 year is up. I now consider these devices to be home use only, which is a shame. I've stopped assuming I can carry it around. I don't know if other e-ink screens are also suffering from this frailty or its Amazon's design. YMMV.
A second concern with kindles are the lack of .epub support, which isn't so bad thanks to Calibre's conversion capabilities. But it's still a minor annoyance.
Despite these concerns, I am contemplating on getting a Paperwhite or a Nook Glow. I love the display tech. Just wish these things would be more durable.

If you're stuck on windows and are sick of Adobe and FoxIt (yes that's bloated now too), I recommend Sumatra. It's gotten really fast with launching and rendering now, and as a bonus will open your e-book formats which I find is a logical addition to a document viewer. As long as you don't actually need the Adobe magic forms, Sumatra is the better, sane solution to just view pdf's and similar.

Diablo 3 was DOA. It is a hamster-wheel farming game revolving around the auction house with no depth nor creativity.
Summary: It's fun but too easy going through normal, nightmare and hell if you gather a party. Then you hit the inferno act 2 brick wall, and your only hope for punching through that is either the RMAH or something like 100+ hrs into cheese-farming spots like dank cellar (gold) or the ancient path goblin (rares).
I found myself wishing someone else would "play" for a while because the game part peeled away and it was revealed to be a stupid repetitive virtual item farming-trading game. I bought the game mid-May, and haven't touched it past June and don't plan to either. Gonna keep it around for a couple more weeks and then give my login info to the first friend who shows interest when I go back to school for TA'ing in september.

My completely subjective experience over a decade of broadband use is that when things are working normally I expect less than 50ms for ADSL, less than 40ms for Cable and less than 20ms for Fiber, within national borders in a European country.

Govts are restricting the internet with salami tactics. In Turkey you can find several levels of censhorship. Some you can circumvent with OpenDNS, others you need proxies/vpn. Then there is the opt-in censhorship of "internet profiles" such as "family internet" or "children's internet".
Every time they up the ante techies realized they could circumvent the effects rather easily, but many many more do not have the know-how.
So the most active knowledgeable users like us develop apathy because we are not really affected, therefore we stay passive, while for the vast majority of users the internet gets more and more restricted. Let's not fall for this complicity strategy.

I'm surprised no one brought it up but the comfort level of a west european train ride is amazing. You get leg room, you get a tabletop in front of you that is nothing like the plastic pos on a plane. You can walk about, visit the toilet and go get a meal whenever you feel like it. You get plugs and often internet for your laptops. If it's an overnight ride you can get a sleeper. A well organized train ride basically means the travel time is not wasted at all, in some sense rendering the journey free as in time. You actually can continue living on the train, with rest, food and work available. How does that compare to being stuffed in economy class or wasting away behind a wheel?

I think the best FOSS candidate for the task of replacing Skype is Jitsi (ex- SIP Communicator).
http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/HomePage

It supports SIP and XMPP (Jabber) fully, including GTalk. Has built-in zero-config ZRTP. Also supports the proprietary IM networks like MSN and Yahoo to various extents, Skype being the only exception with no support (as expected). Been using it for a few months and the nightlies are getting better and better. The 1.0 release could make a good splash on the internet.

Sounds more like "shared source" design to me, a collaboration between 50 companies. Nothing seems to be open to the public.
Unlike for example the Global Village Construction Set. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set/
"Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors."

The rapid release system was brought into effect to compete with Chrome's meteoric rise in usage share and stem the decline of FF. The stalling and loss of usage share of FF started way before this, especially during the long FF3 to FF4 transition, when Chrome was spitting out rapid updates. So no, FF is not losing users because of the new release system. The new release system is a response to the loss of users.
I especially find it hilarious when people complain about the rapid releases.. and then declare they will switch to.. Chrome!.. which has.. rapid releases !