Kismet automatically logs everything.

I disagree that it requires going out of your way to record the private data. I'm pretty sure that I have accidentally recorded private data in exactly the same manner that google has - I have had some other use for kismet, was running kismet and was walking around. It automatically logged everything. I realize after accidentally having left kismet running that I had collected multiple gigabytes of data, and deleted it. In my case, I was using kismet to check if I had burned out my wireless card, in google's case they were using it for wifi mapping. The personal data was a side effect.

If there isn't any runnable software left that will read these file formats then it is legal to break the DRM, plus amazon has already said that they would provide DRM-free copies if they stopped selling the kindles.

Simple solution - backups.

Seriously, storing books locally is trivial. Amazon lets you download books to your computer and if you plug the kindle into usb it shows up like an external harddrive or flashdrive. I keep dumps off all the books on my kindle on my computer and my computer backed up on a backup server. So I now have the copy on the kindle, the copy on amazon's server, the copy on my laptop, and the copy on the backup server. If one of those copies disappears I have it in each of the other locations still (especially because I keep the wireless off on my kindle unless I have specific use to have it on)

Just because they keep a copy in the cloud doesn't mean you can't keep a local backup. There are legitimate complaints about the kindle, "I must rely on amazon for everything" is far from one of them. (Even without the fact that most of the books on my kindle came from sources besides amazon which are DRM free)

There is a wide range of settings for those - I remember the few times I had lancets used on me (between about 8 and 15) I felt no pain. However, my dad also had put them on the lowest setting, a setting which would not work on his fingers.

I would say that it is possible to make them not hurt, depending on the person, however if you need to do so often then the scar tissue does make you need to use a higher setting which will hurt more. Also, that is assuming that you need no more blood than to test your blood glucose levels (that is all that was being tested in the few cases where I had one used on me)

It still depends on what department you are in though. I wrote up my homework in LaTeX for all of my classes since I learned it freshman year. In both departments (I was a math/CS double major), professors took me more seriously than other students specifically because of handing in homework written up in LaTeX. It was easier for them to grade and they recognized it and were thankful for it. So in engineering it might be getting smaller, but from a student's perspective, it is not getting any smaller in either math or computer science. Most of the grad students I know learned LaTeX early on in their master's program because it was just something necessary to know, if they had not already learned it as an undergrad.

Yes, you can load work from other sources. You can buy books from other places and load them on via usb, or have them emailed to your kindle. Amazon even tells you how to load books from elseware onto the kindle. The books (including pdfs and plaintext files) you load via usb are not put into the cloud. Personally my kindle 2 has much more from other sources than from amazon (and of those from amazon, only one was paid for). The device and the store are actually much more separate than people realize.

But it is an /optional/ feature, that they put out a press release for, put a big message on the amazon kindle forums about and are sending out an updated user's manual with. It is even a feature that defaults to off. They are telling people about it and letting them not turn it on. Otherwise it'd be terrible. It'd make sense as a complaint if they didn't share what they were doing. There's also the option of not updating the software if you care so much about keeping the kindle exactly as it is. The kindle store has problems, that doesn't mean that everything that amazon does with the kindle is a problem.

Actually, the toughbook tablets are smaller and only 5 lbs. The normal laptops are 8 lbs or so when looking at the fully-ruggeds. The CF-19 (and older CF-18) are actually surprisingly light, especially for the ruggedness. I remember about two years ago looking through Best Buy at the laptops just because I was curious how they were in terms of weight, and for actual laptops, there was maybe 3 there which were under 5 lbs. I use a CF-19, though not in that sort of environment. There's only a 10.4" screen, but if that's large enough, then it is a really nice machine, and a tablet.

My Kindle 2 has around a three or four day battery with heavy internet use. It's about two with some music and some internet use (by some I mean a noticeable amount but less than I would consider heavy use). From this experience it would be days. I've not seen a Nook but I'd expect it to be similar to the Kindle.

There are actually multiple IDEs out there for LaTeX that solve this problem, though I have found that once I learned the basics, they were unnecessary for me. I used Kile while learning LaTeX so I could look through the menus if I needed to.

There is also the part where if you guess the command you're likely right even. The commands aren't obscure.

Along with the shape of the finger, like the other commenter mentioned, there is also fingernails. Using my fingernail as a sort of built in stylus I can easily click on 5mm tall items on a palm pilot, and would expect to be able to reliably click on something 2-3mm in each dimension. It doesn't even require long fingernails, though it does require retraining yourself a bit to click and move with fingernails.

It does require some time to tweak ubuntu to run on old hardware - but talking about this being a time commitment is an exaggeration. While there would be reasons to install XP instead for familiarity, what software is to be used, or just to not worry about things, the amount of time it takes to get ubuntu to run on a 500MHz or slower machine is the time to look up a minimalistic window manager on google and then install it from the repositories.

I have run with an ubuntu install and wmii on a 300MHz machine with at most 128 MB ram. There is lag with things like firefox when you are talking about these old of machines, but it is useable if you need to and going to something like links2 removes that lag.

So yes, tweaking is required because ubuntu and many modern distros are not meant for old hardware. It is worth commenting that a small amount of tweaking can go a long way if you are fine with using fluxbox, a tiling window manager, or some other minimalistic window manager. In the situation which comments are stemming from the same amount of effort was put into making XP run as it would have taking to make the ubuntu install run at least as fast.