I know what you mean; I'm in the same boat. I plan to stay safe in the basement until the worst of this storm is over. Of course it's not likely to help much, since I'm in Iowa. Still, better safe than sorry, right?

Seriously though, I don't mean to make light of your predicament, and here's hoping the thing dissipates at least some before pounding the city.

I think what he said was that if he ever went to 3.0, it would mean he had gone insane and rewritten the entire thing in Visual Basic.

http://www.questionablecontent.net/random/winfail.png pretty much covers it.

I specifically didn't mention the Kindle. Mobi is atrocious, and Amazon cares more about the bottom line than presenting an acceptable reading experience. You're right, not everyone uses the same algorithms to determine hyphenation and line-breaking, but in my experience, ePub and the readers that use ePub (at least the Nook - I really can't speak for others such as the Kobo or iRiver readers, not having used them) do a better job than the atrocity in that article. Of course, none of it matters if the publishers don't bother putting a little bit of care into their e-books. I may have come on a little strong, but I believe e-readers are not all as bad as you and the article you linked are making them out to be. http://www.the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/nook.jpg is at least an improvement on the look of the Kindle's page, however I agree, it's not perfect.

Congratulations, you've just earned the "I don't know what I'm talking about!" achievement! All modern e-readers, when using their proper formats (generally ePub for pretty much anything worth using) handle line-breaking and hyphenation just fine, and unless you're reading from some badly OCRed plaintext copy, will look as good as the paper version. PDF is a bad format for e-readers, and you're a bad person for suggesting it.

Thank you for the clarification. I can see a "new loudness" button emerging, and as someone else said, portable players can do this automatically, it seems. It makes more sense to do the compression on the fly without damaging the original track than it does to master it in a way that makes one's ears bleed, so here's hoping the loudness war truly is over.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but hasn't this been around for quite some time: the "Loudness" or "Loudness compensation" button on stereos/equalizers/amps from the 70s and 80s? Perhaps it's a concept whose time has come around again.

Mr. Carrey? Is that you?

Funny, I've been using Linux to check out e-books from my local library for several months, at least. And B&N's DRM is just as easily defeatable as the ADEPT scheme. Please don't bother posting ignorant comments unless you've bothered to do a rudimentary search first. Hell, the page where you get the info for removing B&N DRM? It's the same as for removing ADEPT! Not to mention there are plugins for Calibre that make it a simple matter of dragging and dropping the DRMed files into Calibre, and getting wonderful DRM-free files out the other side, nicely organized, too.

Oh come on, it's not like everyone doesn't already know your real name. Just switch to Anakin Skywalker...

Of course not! Due process is a laugh, the court of public opinion is the only thing that matters anymore.

And for the life of me, even I can't tell if that's supposed to be sarcastic or not. Makes me a sad monkey.

You can always grab the ePub for that same $1 and use Calibre to convert it to a format the Kindle can use. I just bought it myself, looks great on my Nook.

Oh, absolutely no argument, HDDs are, if not more reliable, certainly faster than writable optical media, regardless of whether it's CD, DVD, or BD. My biggest issue was that you said HDDs were far cheaper per GB, which isn't really accurate. The benefit is that a HDD or USB flash drive is rewritable, but I definitely see a market for BD-R, especially as (or, I suppose, *if*) discs come down in price. This was about the cost for CD-Rs in their infancy if I remember right, and I probably don't. DVD-R as well. Dual-layer discs will likely continue to cost more than twice what single-layer discs do, unfortunately.

Oh, citations.

http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Quantum-Blu-ray-Single-Layer-Recordable/dp/B002LU80QS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308884257&sr=8-1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817130187&cm_re=bd-r-_-17-130-187-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817501067&cm_re=bd-r-_-17-501-067-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827118049&cm_re=bd-r-_-27-118-049-_-Product

Verbatim discs seem to be a little more expensive, but not drastically so. One of those is a cheaper brand that comes in at exactly $1/disc but still gets positive reviews. Drives are still fairly expensive at this point, but not nearly as bad as one might expect.

Going rate from a quick look is ~$1/disc for BD-R. 25GB. that's $40 to equal your sub-$100 1TB drive (usually around $70 or so), and 1/20 the price of that 16GB usb drive for 9 extra GB. Sure, it's not rewritable, but it's a whole lot cheaper than you're making it out to be. Yes, it's still a decent stack of BD-Rs if you're backing up a 1TB drive, but try using DVD-R and see how long that takes. It's not pretty at all. BD-R is being adopted faster than you think. Now I just need to get my hands on one.