I absolutely agree. And don't forget JT-65, which is an absolutely amazing mode for pulling extremely weak signals out of noise. It's in many ways the ultimate geeky hobby and there are so many ways to be involved. I wish I had gotten started years ago.

Virgin Galactic. Suborbital flight, only.

When my wife was studying for her BS in nursing, she had to take a course in which nonsense like "touch therapy" and such was discussed in a completely non-skeptical way. She was horrified and so was I.

Most of my favorite magazines are British. I long ago stopped bothering with Time and Newsweek, which have been dumbed-down to complete irrelevance, but The Economist is still a great magazine. I'm a car and motorsports enthusiast and love Motor Sport, Autosport, Car, and Evo, too. The quality of writing and photography far outstrips most US magazines.

The original Apple II had Integer Basic in ROM but floating point basic (Applesoft) had to be loaded from tape or diskette unless you had the optional Applesoft plug-in ROM card. The II+ had Applesoft in ROM.

The article didn't say that all professionals are graphic artists. But graphic artists, web designers, photographers, musicians, film makers, etc., are professionals and have traditionally comprised sizable portion of the market for Macs.

Yep, the touch model without ads would be the direct competitor to the Nook Simple Touch, and it's the same price.

The oddities to me are the new, cheaper model Kindles with no keyboard and no touchscreen. Seems like that might be a bit clumsy.

And it's pretty nice, too. It takes a screenshot and allows you to highlight what items you're talking about in your note.

An extremely rich guy who probably made his money in business and could very well be helping other people buy homes, too, by employing them.

Definitely Lightroom. It makes mass IPTC tagging trivially easy. Great for other things, too. It's completely revolutionized my photography workflow.

I just got a Nook, took, and I'm quite happy with it for the reasons you mention. I also kind of like supporting a brick and mortar store that gives Amazon a bit of competition. The latest software release has helped speed it up quite a bit. The menus are now quite responsive.
 

The dilemma is that Facebook can be very useful as a marketing tool for pro shooters. For example, I'm a motorsports photographer and I do have my own website. But there are a lot of teams and drivers on Facebook. It's a great way to get exposure for my work but their sill rights-grabbing TOS makes me very reluctant to put my work out there.

The main problem here is the claim of the right to sublicense. As a professional photographer, if taken literally, it would mean I would be unable to offer an exclusive license to anyone because FB can sublicense.

I know a lot of photographers who are very reluctant to post their work on FB because of their idiotic TOS. And, potentially, FB could be very useful as a marketing tool for photographers.