Funny, my paper books never worked that way...

Plenty of books on Amazon still have reasonable prices. Just apply these two rules when looking at books:

-Don't buy if price is > $9.99
-Don't buy if price is > cheapest new paper version.

The publishers and authors who abide by those rules are still getting my money, and the ones who don't aren't... but that's no reason to pirate it. If you're not willing to pony up the cash for a book, then don't buy it, and don't steal it. Just do without.

I once bought an out-of-contract LG phone, whose screen broke a week after purchase. No, I didn't drop it. Neither AT&T nor LG would repair/replace it, so I went online and searched around and found that this model phone (the Neon) had a notoriously fragile screen, and that no one was able to get repairs for it, so I ended up chucking my useless $80 hunk of plastic in the trash.

After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it. Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.

Yeah, the new rule is pretty limited.

If you can get the ebook legally from Amazon, B&N, and iBooks, but only iBooks has TTS enabled, but you only have a Kindle, then breaking the DRM would technically be illegal, even though the only TTS-enabled copy won't run on your device.

I'd think it's because Apple is a scarier target. They were able to bully Amazon, but Apple has a top-notch legal team and a demonstrated disinclination to budge when pressures like this are applied.

What parent fails to mention is that since Japanese verbs are so regular, the language is incredibly resistant to forming new verbs at all. Instead, they borrow the noun and add the verb for "to do" on the end. The fact that "guguru" made it to verb status is due to both luck (it ends in an u) and the sheer force of Google's influence.

Now, my Japanese is far too rusty to figure this one out, but which form would you use to get the meaning "Here, let me Google that for you..." gugusaserareru?

Just a bit of empirical data here: On an iPhone 4 with the oleophobic coating, I traced an android-style unlock pattern with my thumb, and an oil trail was visible on the screen that showed me exactly the pattern I traced.

This makes sense, since oleophobic coatings do not prevent your fingers from secreting oils, nor from depositing those oils on nice glass surfaces. They only make it easier to wipe the oil away. It looks like this study took into account that smudges may be obscured due to phones generally living in pants pockets. I duplicated that part of the experiment as well, and the smudges were still clearly visible after a trip into and out of my pocket, so it's obviously not that much better at repelling oil.

Randomizing the points does sound like it would be a better lock system. You'd memorize a PIN, and have to trace from one number to the next, but the numbers would be in difference places each time. That would make it difficult to guess from either smudges or by glancing at someone entering the password (on the iPhone's lock screen, you can make a good guess at the PIN even if the person is holding the phone so you can't see the screen, just by watching their thumb.)

They do let you play with one of the Enigmas at Ft. Meade, and even have a pad of notepaper next to write down your plaintext and encoded messages.

What they don't let you play with is the limited run Japanese enigma machine, with kana printed on the keys. Apparently the Germans made a couple for the Japanese, but it didn't really catch on and they were never really used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese-enigma.jpg

If you happen to live near a public university with a good music school, you should be able to at least listen to the music at the library, even if you can't check anything out. You won't be able to rip it, though, since it's likely they'll put it in a player behind the desk and direct you to a listening station. /worked at the music library in college

How is that more impressive than the amount of people who coughed up $25 for a block of sliced wood pulp?

I always figured people were paying for a good story, regardless of the material upon which it's printed or displayed.