Turn in your Geek card. The corrected quote is:
"I reject your reality and substitute my own"

Also applicable to Ahmedinejad when the election results came in.

I completely disagree. Buying an item you don't intend to actually use is sending the wrong message. You're rewarding the book publishers for their insane DRM when you should be discouraging them.

Finding pirated books can be a pain in the ass. If they're going to force me to spend time looking for a copy with bad proofreading and odd line-breaks, I'm going to ask for a refund on the money I spent on the book. Or better yet, just not spend it in the first place. Its not that I'm unwilling to buy ebooks, its that I value my time and spending 10-60 minutes looking through various websites/peer to peer applications is more valuable to me than the cost of the book in the first place.

And for the record, I've spent just under $1000 at Baen's online store over the last 3 years, because the books there are unencumbered by DRM and are easy to find and buy. I'm more than willing to buy books if I'm given a fair deal. It just seems that a lot of book publishers are so scared by the piracy boogieman that they piss off their real customers.

Naw, that's a feature. They're training you to recreate the human wave attacks used in WWII after they run out of funding for rifles.

This is the major question, and I can't seem to find any info about it. If the books are sold without DRM Google is in a position to force other online publishers to follow suit, but at the same time fewer publishers will want to list books with Google (due to percieved losses from piracy). It seems like more publishers are wising up to the fact that DRM is only hurting them, but there is still a long way to go before all books are available in non-DRMed formats. I suspect that Google will end up using the middle ground again and allow publishers to choose whether the books are DRMed or not, which means that all the major publishers will continue to try to make DRM work.

The basic issue is that all major eBook readers can handle a large number of non-DRMed files, but only 1 DRM format. If you can't find the book in that specific DRM format, you're out of luck. Typically, these are specific to the company that puts out the reader (i.e. Amazon's kindle format, Sony's reader format, etc.). The Sony store is expensive and has a limited selection. Amazon has a much better selection, but not perfect and is often expensive as well. Fictionwise has a mediocre selection (seems to be better than Sony in my area of interest), but their DRM doesn't work with the two most common kinds of ebook readers (the Sony and Amazon ones).

Since they're not going to put out their own version of an ebook reader, I'm hoping that Google will go without DRM so that I can use their store with my Sony Reader. If not, I'll end up pirating books again and end up with free but often badly formatted books after spending 4-5x as much time looking for the book as I would with a proper store. I've already tapped out Baen's back catalog of interesting books (spent close to $1k getting the ones that looked interesting) and I read books faster than they can publish them. I'm willing to buy books online, I just can't find someone to take my money and give me something that works. Yes, this frustrates the hell out of me. I refuse to buy books then pirate them because it sends the signal that DRM is acceptable. If you're going to make me spend time looking for crappily formatted books due to fear I'm going to steal something, I'm not going to pay you for it. I don't like the fact that this means authors don't get paid, but I'm more than happy with the fact that publishers don't get paid because of this.

Exactly. I like Heroes, but I refuse to watch it as it comes out. When every single episode has a "to be continued" cliffhanger and you have half a dozen or more stories in the air at once, it is just too dang annoying to wait a week between episodes. Seasons 1 and 2 I watched on the NBC website. This last season I just finished watching on Hulu (much better interface, no surprise there). At 3ish episodes a night it took about a week, and was much more enjoyable and understandable than stretching it out over half a year.

Not sure about the exact size of the Kindle, but I carry my Sony Reader around in my pocket a lot. My pants tend to have pockets on the large size, and it can be a tight fit, but I do use them. Alternately, both my lightweight and heavier jackets have interior pockets that will work, though the heavy one is a tight fit.

Exactly, but you did miss one other feature. Size matters. Try putting your netbook in your pocket, or holding it in your hand without resting it on something. Readers are small enough and light enough that they are in a completely different class of portable compared to a small notebook computer. Its a similar comparison between an ipod and a netbook, since both of them play audio just fine.

So... if you want something with crazy battery life (1 week or more), small enough to fit in a pocket and light enough to hold in your hands indefinitely you want an e-book reader. If you don't mind recharging 1-2 times a day, carting a small bag around to hold your notebook and setting your notebook down on a convenient surface to read books, then don't bother with an e-book reader.

Many of those have DRM that is just as bad. I know the Sony readers have it from personal experience, and the Sony store sucks a heck of a lot more than Amazon. Of course, they all read a variety of free formats without DRM as well, as do all the readers I know about. The problem is not that the readers handle DRM, its that online stores are selling books in a variety of incompatible and restrictive formats. The Sony store sells books that are DRMed with a format only readable on the Sony e-book readers. The Amazon store only sells books readable on the Kindle. As an owner of the Sony e-book reader, I cannot buy e-books from Amazon. With a Kindle, I could not buy books from Sony. This fractures the market and turns e-books from "any book ever written (within reason)" to "any book your manufacturer bothered signing a contract with". This fractures the market and destroys much of the usefulness of an e-book reader. The sole reason I recommend the Kindle to people is because the Amazon store seems to have the best selection, I dislike some of the features of the actual reader itself (i.e. I don't see downloading books over a cell phone as a feature, since you have to pay for it with higher priced books and a short battery life if you forget to turn wireless off).

Of course, there are stores out there that sell books in a non-DRM format. Baen was one of the first publisher to do this and I have bought a lot of books from them. However, they are a small fraction of the books published today (3ish new books a month, all sci-fi or fantasy) and the same seems to hold true for the other stores I've found. Fictionwise seems to come up in conversation a lot, but only some of its books are DRM-free, and the 6 times so far I've gone looking for a specific book from them, they've had it only in DRM encumbered format. And since Sony doesn't want to release its DRM scheme, none of their DRM formats will work with my reader. I just added up my order history for Baen, and I've spent $936 on their e-books over the past 3 years. I'm more than willing to pay for books, but there are a lot of e-books out there where people simply refuse to take my money.

The alternative to all of this, of course, is to pirate books. This is generally a pain in the ass and can result in some poor quality books, but there is a lot more available this way than there is from legitimate non-DRMed books. I haven't found a specific site that works well for downloading books. Many of the major torrent sites have large collections of books available for download, but they can be pretty spotty and the quality is... variable. There will often be issues with the lines being too long for the reader, and wrapping in weird ways or with extra spaces between lines. There are some that are perfectly fine, but it is often a crap shoot. On the other hand, the first time I got frustrated with Fictonwise's DRM only books, I found a collection of sci-fi and fantasy that was 9 gigs. A good portion of that was scans of graphic novels, but you can fit a mind-blowing amount of text into even a small part of a 9 gig compressed file. Once I downloaded that, my first stop for new books is Baen, and the second stop is my hard drive. Its rare that I bother looking for anything else now. I still check for some new releases on various websites, but more often than not I'm disappointed in the results. I'm not going to pay $18 for a book that has been out in paperback for 6 months. And that was just the one book lately that _was_ available.

Though I may have got off track a bit, I think the real problem here is not that readers can handle DRM, its that online stores are fucked up. I could easily have spent an extra $1k on books if they were available in a format that works in my e-book reader. The fact that publishers won't allow those formats is the problem, not the fact that a specific reader has DRM for file format Y, but not Z. They're just asking everyone who doesn't have their specific e-book reader to pirate the books, instead of selling good quality versions for sale with reasonable fees and an easy to use system to download what you want when you want it.

The "flashing neon sign" effect is unlikely without a malfunctioning LED control. While you refer to negligible startup and stop times, I don't think you understand just how small they are. Many dimmable LED lights don't actually dim the LED at all, instead they turn the LED on and off around a thousand times per second - much faster than the eye can distinguish. This has two major advantages: the on voltage is constant and the duty cycle allows easier adjustment of brightness.

With a constant on voltage, you can set it to the most efficient voltage to produce light or the easiest voltage for your power source to produce and it will stay pretty close no matter how much or how little light you want from it. If you compare it to old style incandescent bulbs, at low voltages they start putting out mostly non-visible light wavelengths and their color shifts dramatically. The heat of an LED will shift the amount of on current slightly, but it should be a fairly small effect in a properly controlled circuit (in an improperly controlled one, you end up with fried LEDs as the heat pulls more current which makes more heat).

The duty cycle adjustment also allows much more consistent light output. LED light output is mostly dependent on current, which is exponentially related to its voltage. A small shift in voltage can thus result in a huge shift in current and thus light output. Good current sources aren't all that easy to produce, especially variable current sources (FETs are often modeled as current sources, but the model isn't perfect). However, by varying how much time the LED spends turned on vs. turned off you get a dang close to linear function of brightness. If the LED spends all its time on, its 100% of its possible brightness. If it spends half of its time on, it is 50% of its possible brightness. If it spends 12.5% of its time turned on... you get the idea.

Of course, there can be slight flickering issues if you don't turn the LED on and off fast enough. And the control circuitry does draw some small amount of power. And the heat of 100% on vs. 25% on will cause some drift. And... well, lots of small things. Its still a heck of a lot easier than getting a variable current source properly tuned to the LED's forward bias voltage and the in-line resistance, especially including all manufacturing variances.

Unfortunately, this isn't economical. Utilities are one place where monopolies are inevitable, we just need the government to put real limits on them because they are so prone to abuse. Or heck, nationalize the infrastructure, then rent it to service providers for a fee to cover maintenance.

Based on some numbers I heard a while back, the basic problem is this: It takes about 40% of the people in an area subscribing to your cable service in order to make up for the cost of installing the wires in the first place. You'll never get 80% of the people in an area to sign up, and they'll likely never split evenly between two services if they were available, so a second cable company in the same area is just a recipe for both companies failing.

However, for things like phone service and internet access, there is a way around this problem. The "must have X% of people signed up" only applies to the actual infrastructure project, the wires to everyone's house. If there were a real split between the infrastructure company and the content company (i.e. government controlled infrastructure or government mandated breakups of current companies) then you can have fully equal access for ISPs to everyone, and consumers would actually have a choice for their service provider.

There are some issues that make this difficult and not really as straightforward as I presented, but I think it is the only real hope of giving consumers a choice. You might end up with some sort of limits from the local infrastructure, but local bandwidth limitations tend to be much less of an issue from what I've seen.

I thought it was "you break it, you buy it". Though now that I think about it, that also sound surprisingly likely.

Of course.

... then we start pumping in lead! (figuratively, of course)

If a friend is at your house, are you going to loan them your phone to control the TV?
Are you going to get every child in your household a phone, just to control the TV? Even if they're 3 or 4 years old?
Alternately, are you going to buy a phone, just to leave it sitting around where it can control the TV?
Are you going to burn through your phone's battery (from using its backlight) much faster than normal, or use a device that chews through a couple cheap batteries a couple times a year and doesn't let you miss important calls because your phone is dead?
Are there issues with answering the phone and then pausing/muting the sound so you can actually talk to someone?

For some people, many of these issues won't matter. For everyone else, smartphone apps are not the answer.

Correct. Not having a back light is actually a good thing for military uses. I work a few offices down from some of the guys on this project and talk to them occasionally. At one point, one of them suggested adding a back light to it for night operations to an army guy, and he was firmly against it to avoid any light that might give the position away to an enemy. When asked how the user would use it at night, the response was something along the lines of "That's why I carry night vision goggles around."