I have, and love, a gen-2 Kindle. Use the 3G support all the time, but not for the general purpose browser.

I travel extensively (100,000 miles a year or so), and us the Kindle as my primary method of reading books (1-2 books a week on average). I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in an airplane seat while they finish boarding the plane, and remembering that I'd like to read a particular book - or see someone carrying a book that I'd like to read - or see a review of a book in the in-flight magazine that I'd like to read - and I can jump on the Amazon store, purchase it, and have it downloaded in less than a minute. That's a big feature for me.

Admittedly, there are others that can get by without the 3G support, so it's great that they're offering both options.

If you're in Berkeley,...limp, greasy...fits...Berkeley...perfectly.

Couldn't have said it better myself. :)

There's another option entirely - we know the limitations and are OK with it.

I own a Kindle, and was well aware of the DRM restrictions before I bought it. Sure, there are lots of people who have plenty of perfectly legitimate gripes about the DRM, and it *will* restrict them from doing things that they want to do. So they don't purchase it... fine. No problem.

I like the Kindle, and the DRM doesn't prevent me from doing anything I want to do. I wanted an easy way to buy and carry books with me when I travel, and the Kindle does that for me. I don't tend to re-read books when I'm done with them, so if the Kindle service suddenly died, I wouldn't be too broken up about it. Sure there was the initial investment in the reader - but at least for me, the cost was reasonably trivial. I mean, I spend more on bar tabs in a month than I did on the Kindle. The fact that the books I purchase and read are a bit cheaper in electronic version, I've probably saved 25% of the cost of the reader in the few months I've owned it. After a year, it's a break even proposition if you're only looking at the total costs. But for that initial investment, I got the convenience of the reader and the opportunity to read a whole lot more than I would have otherwise. Win-win, in my book.

I really think, at the moment, that there are, in reality, too many, you know, excessive, unnecessary, and redundant commas, typically, in this quote.

They're using Netcraft to prove their server count - which reports on IP addresses. Just because there are 50,000 IP addresses responding to port 80, doesn't mean they have 50,000 boxes. The shared hosting arrangements can easily have dozens and dozens of "servers" operating on the same physical box.

Yes, it's still impressive... but not as impressive as it would first appear.

Some vendors would beg to differ...

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

I'm aware Shanghai isn't a country. The parent offered "Shanghai" as an entity with good rail. My point was that it's much easier to have a well-run, efficient, fast rail system when the scale is smaller.

Wait, were you talking about flying in the first example?

If you're getting anal probed for an hour, you're doing something wrong. I fly about 50k miles a year, and it's rare that I spend more than 10 minutes these days getting through security. On the occasions that I have to clear a major airport at the rush (try leaving Washington Dulles on a Thursday afternoon around 4:00pm), it might take 30-45 minutes. On the whole, however, my average security wait time is somewhere in the 15 minute range.

I'm not a huge fan of the security theater at the airports these days, but they've gotten their act together pretty well in most places to get you through quickly.

It's actually very clear....

Europe doesn't have any one entity controlling their rail. Each country and/or cooperative group handles their own and does it well. You couldn't efficiently run an "Amtrak" kind of system that covered all of Europe.

In the heyday of rail travel in the United States, you actually had a pretty similar system. Lots of competing, regional rail systems that you could choose from depending on where you were and where you were going - just like you do in Europe today. Because each region is relatively autonomous, they can do their own region well and let someone else figure out how do the others.

Once you put one big mess of an organization in charge of trying to run it all, and making the profitable regions subsidize the unprofitable ones, the whole thing spirals out of control.