Thing is, in EVE, you are not your ship - I have a collection of them, so yes, when I pop I go get another one for some payback if I can. I'm not in any way 'crippled' because I have spares - as many as a I can be bothered to outfit.

Trading sucks if what you do is buy goods at station x, move them to station y and place them on an NPC 'buy' order, like you would have done in Elite.
It's actually very profitable indeed if you're smart with your buy/sell orders - set a buy order in a trade hub, and sell the item at a small markup. Keep the orders just a bit apart, and each time someone buys or sells that item, you're making a profit. Not a big profit per transation, but actually a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time.
Direct hours:cash isn't that much fun, and ... well, grinding never has been, has it? Missions and mining in highsec are quite a reasonable return on isks/hours, but would it suprise you to find it's been 2 years since I last did either of those for profit? (I've done a few missions with an alt to get standing for factional warfare, but otherwise I've done none).
Have made money on industry and market, and in terms of 'isks per real day' it's not that great - I go do a couple of L4s and fill my wallet - but in terms of isks for time spent, it's superb - a couple of hours a week, and probably turning over about a billion a month, with a good profit margin. Enough to keep me in ships, despite being PvPing the vast majority of the time I spend online. (Not losing ships often, and thinking about cost/benefit ratios does help there too).
EVE ... isn't like other MMOs though. Lots of people hate it, because they just don't 'get' it. EVE is actually an RTS. Might not look like it, but it is. You've got resources to manage - isks, manufacturing materials, and other less tangible ones. There's logistics and supply lines. Intelligence and diplomacy. You've got 'unit' veterancy, morale and skill levels, and you've only got control of your own. And you've got leadership, and clarity of orders - and you don't automatically get to be 'commander' either - you need to inspire your troops to follow you.
In EVE, grudges, politics and diplomacy have a _real_ impact on the game, because they are the game.
To top it all off, you have a 'real' economy - market and industry are all player driven. You'll see prices on commodities and components shifting, day to day, with political changes, tactical variance on the field, and just what's 'cool' at the moment.
Which is in large part why EVE doesn't appeal to everyone - a lot of people come to it, looking for a game where they're told what the next quest is, and what to do next. EVE is not that sort of a game - to do what you think you should, is like volunteering to be the SCV in Star Craft. You gather minerals for the industrial machine, then get blown up and wonder what the point was. When what you could be doing is driving a Siege tank, flying a corsair, or a battlecruiser, or just being a Marine in a bunker screaming YEAH COME GET SOME!.
I've just passed 5 years of playing EVE, and I've still not got bored, any more than I could get bored of playing chess - each day I have a similar game framework in front of me, but I'm always playing against another player - or multiple players - and even if it's the same person tomorrow, then they can innovate, improve and just be downright sneaky, where a computer never really can.

1/ Learning skills don't do anything. You don't have to spend any time on them at all. If you do, they take days to get to an acceptable level (4/4 in each takes maybe a week in total).
2/ Flying a tiny little ship is lots of fun. Arguably more fun than flying a battleship. I've been flying a Merlin recently - a little piddly T1 frigate - and having much fun flying it, even after 5 years of playing EVE. Despite being able to fly really big ships, I rarely do, and find I'm flying cruiser sized hulls most of the time.
3/ You do catch up. There's only 5 ranks in each skill, once you've got there, you've 'caught up'. By then, you've probably overtaken most players already, as the 5th rank takes 80% of the time, where you can go from 0-4 in 20%. 80% of the benefit, 20% of the time. Even that doesn't make much difference though - square off two pilots, with one on 10x the skillpoints, and you can't predict who would win. The only thing that more skillpoints gives, is more options. It's like in other games, where you've leveled up to the level cap in one class, so you start a new character to find out what a different class is like. Only in EVE, you do it with the same character.
4/ It takes a while to hit the level cap on some of the top tier stuff. Yeah, that's so. So what? It's not like the intervening classes aren't interesting or useful or fun.

LEGO is an adjective. It is therefore not appropriate to pluralise as LEGOS any more than you'd pluralise "sunny day" as "sunnys".
C'mon Slashdot. Get it right.

No, not really. A nuclear powered ship is really not very much like a nuclear power station. You might as well compare to aeroplanes, because they both have a sort of spinny turbine thing.
Your design constraints are so very different that you'd be starting from scratch anyway.

10 years ago, broadband was uncommon. I don't think it's all that unrealistic myself.

And once upon a time, it was a dismal failure, as 'everyone' questioned quite why a company was trying to control them. Apples weren't bad products back then, they were just ... unpopular, because 'everyone' wanted control over their own stuff, thanks.
So it remained the preserve of the apple-fanboy, who would bleat about how Macs were the best thing ever, when more informed individuals pointed and laughed at their one button mouse, getting stomped hard whenever they tried to play an FPS, and getting burned on 'apple pricing' for equipment, because they had no choice about it.
I find it intriguing to note how the world has changed. Now it seems that the consumer market has expanded enough, that there's a steady influx of people who know no better, and do actually want to be told what they can or can't do. I'm not quite sure if that's a relection on recnet changes in society.

Dunno. Cute novelties are OK as long as the price is right. If the iPad is cheap, I'll buy several of them, wallmount them on a charger, and just use them as in-room web access terminals, for checking cinema times, and settling arguments with Wikipedia. Maybe watching a video or two, or just using them as an electronic photo frame.
Expect me to pay 'real' computer prices for one on the other hand, and ... well, I'd be wanting a real computer thanks. My 'living room PC' can be a cheap laptop just as easily.

You're a traditionalist :).
I prefer dead tree to PDA/iPhone, but I moved to eInk (Sony PRS-505) because it's lighter than a paperback in my pocket, and I can carry multiple books at once. Since then, I've found it more portable, easier to read one handed, and generally very pleasant to have a 'pocket library' that doesn't take up precious shelf space.

Depends a lot on the publisher. Some publishers don't have anything at all out. Some are charging more than 'dead tree', some about the same, some way less. I don't mind paying hardback prices, just for the convenience of _not_ having to carry around the hardback edition, but I do object to paying more for a book than I could pick a physical copy up for. (e.g. I'll play hardback price for 'early release' when the book would only be out in hardback, but when there's a paperback available, I don't want to be paying more than that).
Most of the cost of a book is in stuff other than the distribution, so I'm ok with them charging a useful amount for it, but I don't want to get ripped off either :).

I used to carry a paperback around with me wherever I went, and when I was done, it got 'shelved', and only a few special 'top books' get re-read particularly.
Now I carry an eBook reader around with me, and the books I'm done with, don't take up shelf space, nor do I waste paper. I think that's worth it.

I think you're missing what makes eBook readers good - it's not that they're a 'nostalgia gadget' it's that they have a passive display, like 'real' paper. PDAs capable of reading ebooks have been around for ages - 10 years back my Palm would do it just fine. The problem is with the display - an 'active' display is just harder on the eyes than a passive one. That's not something you can really address, just perhaps converge as tech gets better.

I read a lot when on holiday. I will probably demolish one book on the journey each way, and then one every couple of days whilst I'm on holiday. It gets quite heavy, especially if you want to ensure you have enough reading material that you don't run out (some authors write 'faster fluff'). So instead of 5-10 dead tree books in my suitcase, I have one eBook reader in my jacket pocket. The latter has my holiday selection, along with a collection of some favourites I like re-reading.

And if they do, that's fair enough. Don't get an eReader. For me? The reading experience is the critical thing in my eBook reader, and everything else is pointless fluff. Once I've got a vaguely good way to get stuff onto my device, and enough space/battery life, then that's it.
For that use case, eInk is the tool for the job.

I have used an eReader. Both LCD and eInk versions. And I would make the assertion that it _does_ matter a damn.
It's just more comfortable reading for extended periods on a passive display - maybe you have no problems with it, but personally I just cannot face reading 1000 pages on an LCD/TFT/CRT. Especially when I want to sit outside and read, where the active displays suffer from bright sunlight.