They are eating all of our hydrocarbons!

or

It's not man's fault for Global Warming, it's the damned oil-eating bacteria.

The real issue here is whose device the kid wants to play with. He doesn't want to play with *his* fisher-price (or other) Toy, he wants to play with *your* laptop, because he sees *you* using your laptop. The kid wants attention, not the toy. Put the laptop (or whatever) away, and get him involved with something you can both do together.

Having two boys, ages 2 and 4, I know that they do not want their daddy to pay attention to his toys, rather, they want daddy to pay attention to *them*.

"Some believe that dedicated e-readers are doomed in the long run to lose out to general-purpose devices such as the iPad" -- Not so fast. I specifically bought the mid-range Sony reader *because* it is a dedicated reader. They have trumped Amazon, and B&N with simplicity, specificity. I can swipe back and forth between pages just as if I was reading a book. I can read *way* more formats than the two other (main) vendors devices support. Does tethering to my computer bother me? Not in the slightest. Being able to download (ONLY FROM the vendor's store) over 3G wireless seems like more of a tether, to me. You're locked in, and that's just the way they like it. The sony I have has two memory slots, a DUO and a standard SD card slot. I can shove ~90 gigabytes of books into this thing (at present).

But that's enough of the features. You can read the specs for yourself elsewhere.

My point about the Sony dedicated reader is that it does it's job, it's simple job, better than the other readers. It's much like a Un*x program: small, specific, perfect for the job at hand. I want to read a book. I don't want to surf blogs, or play games, or fiddle with facebook. I can do that on my Evo. I can do that on my laptop, or desktop. Hell, I can even do net-based things on my Fios tv-box, now.

I bought one of these Unicopies about 8 months ago. I had torn through 4 cheapie-dell keyboards, their $14.00 variety, in the preceding few months. Crap. They felt great for about a week, then, bleh. Rubber.

The sound from these M-clones is amazing. It really lets my coworkers know that I mean business. It also lets them know that their shitty typing skills could use some improvement. I wear noise-canceling headphones, so the Click-Boom is muffled, if not totally eliminated for me. The poor bastards to my left and right can suck it down, get some Bose or Sennys.

Coming home from work, I end up on my Thinkpad. It's a difficult transition, from loud to quiet.

The thinkpad has a great keyboard, similar, I think, to the M. There's a definite resistance on the keys. I buy thinkpads solely because of the Kb & trackpoint.