LMAO...what a laughable bunch of boggy snot! There has never been a less intuitive and more valuable-screen-real-estate-robbing and memory-thieving interface in the history of gui computing (even more important when one is surfing the web, especially on small-screen small-resource netbooks. It was bad when Microsoft did it. It is even worse in a browser when most users seldom use menu commands anyway. Who cares about aero-glass special effects anyway? No future donations from me to Moz (or any other developer) if they attempt to take this on. If they do take it on then at least have the courtesy to keep it exclusively on the Windows platform.

I don't think that Amazon is picking up the tab on the connection. Some of it may have been priced into the Kindle, but I am betting that some percentage of every purchase goes to Sprint for the bandwidth used to deliver the purchase.

With the exception of point 1 and 4, most of what you are writing is patently false. 2. You can load a book on up to six Kindle devices. You can send an issue of a newspaper or magazine to any of the devices and they will be readable on each of them, ï 3. Your book purchases do not depend on having an active Amazon account. 5. You can return any ebook purchase to Amazon within 7 days for a full refund. 6. That is a problem with your library system and with the publishers, not the Kindle. The Kindle can read many, many book formats. You can also purchase download free books from many sources. There is nothing to stop library systems from creating subscription or time-limited access to books, other than the book publishers and author associations. I would say that you are the one who should get cracking and write some letters!

That is true for the converter that Amazon uses if you send PDFs in for conversion. However, the Kindle DX has a native PDF viewer which does not require conversion. It does a remarkable job. I can even read my electronic versions of Scientific American, other electronic magazines, and my academic journals with no conversion and no problems at all.

At the University of Washington and many other institutions we are increasingly implementing laptop bans in the classrooms because the students are browsing Facebook and MySpace instead of paying attention to lecture. Normally I would argue that a person's computer is their own to whatever they wish. However, the screen-flashing from the constantly changing Facebook pages is distracting to other students who can see the screens. I have even observed students watching movies during lectures. I would argue that your students will find many other things to do with their computers in your classrooms that do no include learning. Besides, exactly what is it that you are trying to teach them that they could not otherwise learn without the laptops in the classroom? Clearly it is not proficiency with word processors. Most undergraduates in our classrooms don't even know how to create page headers or page breaks in their Word documents.