Damn, didn't mean to post that as AC. Oh well!

Hmm, I read the series when I was 14 or 15, and I remember liking it. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't go back and try again, however.

They're $99 on Amazon, and pretty great. I had some SE-110s before, but on those the cable doesn't go over your ear, so it's pretty prone to being tugged on, and eventually one side failed. The 215s don't have that problem, sound great, and come with a variety of rubber or foam earplug things.

Sure, but how many of those 22,000 downloads would have been actual purchases had the people not been able to download? And I mean purchases of *new* books, not used. I suspect less than 1/4.

I buy books, often (train commute), and probably 75% of those are used books. What's the difference, *to the author*, between me buying a used book vs. downloading an ebook? Absolutely nothing. The author is not losing money at all - they'd never have earned it in the first place. I like Jim Butcher, I've read (and purchased) quite a few of his books, but this is the same kind of bogus math that the RIAA uses.

The whole "Sten" series is excellent. I'm surprised it doesn't get more notice, there's a lot of really great stuff in there.

I also have a few others (some of which I've posted elsewhere):

"On My Way to Paradise" by Dave Wolverton
"Armor" by John Steakley
"Synners" by Pat Cadigan (basically anything by her, but this is my fave)
Anything by Stephen Brust, especially "Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille" and his "Vlad Taltos" series
Zelazny has been mentioned a lot, and of course "Amber" is great, but I quite liked "Jack of Shadows" and "Doorways in the Sand"
Lots by Walter Jon Williams such as "Angel Station", "Hardwired", "Aristoi", and "Implied Spaces"
YA books by William Sleator, especially "House of Stairs" and "Singularity" and "The Interstellar Pig"

I'm sure there's more but I can't think of them right now.

I was such a Sleator fan when I was a kid! Those were all excellent.

I love Walter Jon WIlliams' "Angel Station" especially. His "Aristo" and "Implied Spaces" are also fantastic.

Damn, I was trying to get through reading this entire page of comments just to see if anyone else had mentioned "Armor" because it's the first thing I thought of that fits this category - fantastic book, one of my all-time favorites.

I'm also glad you mention Brust, everything that man writes is gold.

And you also mentioned Titan, Demon, Wizard - excellent stuff that I've been meaning to obtain and re-read for years. And I certainly love Amber :)

I do want to mention one of my own though: "On My Way to Paradise" by Dave Wolverton.

Do a little web searching. I found it at Amazon, among other places.

I'm not a user of Windows Phone, but I did just port an Android app I've written to WP7, and in doing so, I learned quite a bit about it... From my point of view (been an Android developer before the first phones were released), it seems like WP8 will be very nice, but WP7 is still lacking in a lot of ways. A few things I noticed:
    - there's not a whole lot of useful multitasking you can do right now, so complex apps that use background services are right out.
    - you can't disable the on-screen keyboard from activating when a text box is focused, so if you have a box that the user can select text from or position the cursor in, you always get the OSK covering half of your UI
    - the screen layout designer is difficult to work with, and doesn't seem like it has many features for supporting different resolutions, MS sure does love their absolute-positioning grid layouts
    - there doesn't seem to be a debug log viewer available in the development tools... or maybe the OS has no logging at all?

I suspect an end user won't really notice a lot of my complaints, but they're there, and the whole experience was a bit disappointing to me, despite my preference for C# over Java.

Nope, I agree, I really didn't enjoy reading the book, despite some of the concepts being interesting.

Right, you're ok with Apple spying on you but not AT&T or Verizon? Fascinating.

Enjoy the rest of your life :)