I use the Netgear WNDR3700 which works quite well with OpenWRT

The WNDR3700 is great if you don't mind 5GHz ranges of approximately a 10' radius of the router (why would you buy a simultaneous dual-band router and not use the 5GHz frequency?). I replaced my 3700 with a Linksys/Cisco E3000 because of that, and have been happy with the E3000 ever since. I do run stock firmware (shut up), but DD-WRT is also supported. OpenWRT lists the E3000 in the "Possible but not being worked on" section of its supported router list, so if OpenWRT is a requirement then you're out of luck here. OpenWRT apparently does not like any Linksys/Cisco product that's newer than ~5 years old.

I've also heard good things about the new E4200, but it's a work-in-progress at DD-WRT and as mentioned above OpenWRT won't go near Linksys/Cisco stuff, so consider what that's worth.

Worse, Slash'EM is already the name of a (real) rogue-like (game). Obviously these guys are trying for a witty or clever play on "rogue-like" and "slashem", but it just comes off as confusing and lame.

I always think that if I left iOS ...

But I can't help but think their patent tax on Android and others is too much about the money rather than preventing products being sold.

Which would you prefer? $5 going to Microsoft for every Android phone, but you can still buy Android phones? Or not being able to buy Android phones at all? Microsoft is doing the former. Apple is doing the latter. In this case, I'd say Microsoft is doing the more respectable thing. They're not trying to shut out competitors from the market. They're not even trying to seriously hamper competitors ($5 really isn't that much, and it seems that where they can they choose patent trading instead of licensing fees -- it's really HTC's fault that they don't have anything they can trade other than money).

Between Microsoft and Apple, it seems pretty clear that they could entirely destroy Android (at least in the US) through patents if they so desired. Apple is trying to do just that. Microsoft is not. If you won't use WP7 because of that, it's hypocritical to continue to use iOS.

I signed up because I was under-employed and needed the work and money. It was only slightly better than working for Supershuttle. Most of the people at TSA need to feed themselves and pay their bills too and most often couldn't get other work. I'm sorry you can't see past your comfort and personal sense of entitlement which you imagine to be moral high-ground, but can you honestly say if you had no better options that you would rather starve than serve as a TSA screener?

You know who else "just needed work"? Nazis. At the Nuremberg Trials it was determined that the "Superior Orders" defense (or, "I was just following orders") is not sufficient to escape punishment. Every TSA agent is responsible. Every single one. I don't care if you needed to eat, or you were just following orders, or you didn't make the rules, or whatever. You chose to go along with it, so you're just as culpable as the corrupt government agency itself.

The TSA can't exist without screeners. If every screener stood up and said, "No, this is not right. I'm not doing this," the TSA would simply cease to exist. Not immediately, of course. They'd probably bring in the military to replace the screeners, maybe even arrest everyone who said, "No". But it would be the last straw. The TSA would become political suicide, and it wouldn't be long before it was disbanded.

Putting money in the pockets of lower wage earners is not waste and helps the economy and boosts social stability. On the other hand, putting money in the pockets of the super rich at the expense of the lower wage earners does quite the opposite.

I'd rather tax dollars pay people to dig ditches and fill them back up so that the next group can dig the ditches again. It's entirely make-work, but it'd be more meaningful and productive than the TSA.

You forgot Fox News providing 24 hours of hate 7 days a week. Orwell's two minutes of hate is nothing anymore.

By old I was simply referring to something that was created before people moved to word-processors and where the author's original work was not done in a digital media. Perhaps Frank Herbert's Dune (1965?) is a good example.

I haven't purchased Dune yet, but they did just release a 40th anniversary edition that sells for something like $20 as an ebook (robbery!), so I hope they spent time cleaning up the presentation. I have heard that Tolkien's books suffer horribly from the same issue, with lots of mistakes and even simply missing words. In that respect, the darknet is a better source, especially when it comes to revered classics like LOTR or Dune. People who care actually spend time cleaning up and fixing issues, comparing line-by-line with the actual physical books. Which is what the ebook editors should be doing, especially if they want to charge $20, but they're obviously not.

As to book piracy, last year (I can no longer find the link, sorry) a publisher commissioned a study to see how badly piracy was hurting sales. It takes two or three weeks for a book to hit the Pirate Bay, so the researchers looked at sales figures for a month. They were amazed at the results -- rather than a drop in sales, there was actually a sales spike. That publisher, according to the article, is now rethinking his strategies.

That's normally the way of casual piracy -- exposure breeds sales. But measuring time-to-PirateBay is a poor metric for ebooks. Torrents are good for larger files, like music albums or videos or applications. Ebooks are tiny, often less than 1MB. In other words, they're perfect fodder for filelocker sites (megaupload, rapidshare, etc). A simple google search for "title epub rapidshare" or similar will likely get you everything you could ever want in terms of pirated books. So even though it may take a week or two for books to hit pirate bay, they're usually available elsewhere day 0 (or even earlier, depending on the level of early access people may have).

Minor addendum -- I got the resolution wrong for 6" eink devices. They're 600x800, not 480x800, which puts the PPI at 167ppi. That'll teach me to recite data from memory :)

Books can be replaced for less than 2 cents. I went to the parents house for father's day, and ended up with 24 books, and I already owned six of them in the home collection.

Not all books, unless you're counting on your parents providing them for you, or being able to pick them up at the local yard sale (hope you like trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy ...)

I have to confess I dangled the hook you bit on about about the lake. {snicker}. But hey, I drop a five dollar book in the lake when the canoe rolls, but how much is it going to cost when you roll with your reader in the lake??

Well, that depends. Considering when I'm on the go I read on my phone, I'd be more careful than to let it fall in a lake. But if I felt that was a real possibility I'd have paid for an insurance plan (SquareTrade would cover that scenario).

Add to that, i have a book in my collection called Magicians of Gor.

Tell me the resale value of your device file vs my hardcopy. :)

According to the internets, I can get that book for $8.50 from Sony (or for free if you know where to look ...). I'm not really worried about resale value, since I don't "invest" in books.

What is wrong with PDF? It is actually my preferred format. It supports annotation, bookmarks, highlighting, and is an open standard. PDF 1.5+ files can be reflowed to fit small screens. What's not to like?

It's not a full standard (like Microsoft's .NET, only a subset of PDF is standardized). Flowable text requires manual intervention (tagging) that most PDF authors don't do, assuming they even put text in the PDF rather than just use images of text (the latter is all too common). Even when you do have proper flowable text, other elements don't flow nearly as well. You can't change font faces on the fly, or margins, or other layout functionality that should be user-controllable.

Epub, on the other hand, is a complete open standard, essentially being a subset of HTML and CSS in a ZIP container. It has its own flaws, such as lack of MathML support (complex equations will generally be represented by images), but for 99.999% of books it's a better solution.

More importantly, PDF vs. EPUB is more about doing layout the "old way" vs. the "new way". The old way is paper-centric, where designers have pixel-perfect control of every piece of the layout, down to kerning of the fonts if they wish. This is great when you know exactly how your content is going to be viewed (for example, it will always be printed on A4 paper). PDF represents magazines, paper flyers, paper books, desktop publishing, etc, or essentially the print world. EPUB, on the other hand, is built from web standards. It's designed on top of markup that was initially created to empower the end user. You get all the standard buzzwords, like separation of content and display, that you would if you were building a web page. For narrative books, it's pretty straightforward to make the swich from PDF (paper) to EPUB (digital). Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.

To look at it another way, back in the 90s when everybody was just starting to write web pages, a favorite method for graphic designers was to composite a layout in photoshop and then chop that up into multiple images laid out in a table (or worse, use image maps!), just as they would do if they were creating a magazine or flyer layout. Those sites were horrible. They wouldn't scale if you needed to change font sizes to make them readable, they wouldn't flow with the size of your browser ("Best viewed at 1024x768" my ass!), and they eventually broke once the box model was standardized and it turned out that Internet Explorer got it wrong (oops!). You don't see those kinds of sites today, web pages that attempt to replicate the exact look of a paper product, and the reason is obvious -- the web is not paper, and trying to force it into a paper design is painful for everybody. Ebooks are the way, and designers will learn sooner or later that they can't shoehorn their paper designs into an ebook and have it work.

there will always be economies of scale at play when manufacturing physical objects

Nope.

I guess you look far enough into the future, a Star Trek replicator-like device that can scavenge raw materials "for free" from thin air is theoretically possible. Of course it's highly unlikely anything like that will exist in the next few centuries or so. Until then, economies of scale will rule, as the cost of buying 10lbs of raw materials for your personal 3D printer will be much higher per pound than it would be if you were buying 100,000 tons of raw materials for a bulk manufacturing process. Changing that would require infinite resources available for little or no work. For now, that's fantasy, while ebooks are reality.

I can read a book wherever and whenever I want to. I won't lose a library and have to buy a new thing to read it again if it breaks, the rechargeable battery dies, the lcd goes, I drop it into the lake I'm fishing in, and the many other ways to destroy the device. Hell, I'll never have to wait for the book to recharge, get infected from the online delivery system, or lose a book because the mothership beams it back up.

In Short, a book is an asset, a drm laden electronic device that is owned by the manufacturer t'isnt.

So buy DRM-free books. They're out there. Or read books out of copyright, like those provided by Gutenberg in multiple formats. I'll concede the battery charging point (though eink devices last for weeks at a time on a charge). For the rest, if you're managing your ebook library properly and avoiding DRM or liberating DRM-laden books, the only other possible issues are physical damage that could just as easily ruin a paper book (like dropping it in a lake).

The funny thing is that you can get anything from bygone eras made new. That will continue to be true for books. As I said, I buy and prefer ebooks myself. But your claiming paper books will be marginalized to the same extent as a buggy whip chimes a tune rather like those claiming a paperless office was near at hand...

Ignoring the possible development of replicator-like technology (with essentially "free" raw materials), there will always be economies of scale at play when manufacturing physical objects. Can you get buggy whips made today? Yes, absolutely. Are they as cheap as they once where (adjusted for inflation)? Not at all. Why? There's much less demand, so fewer are made. When fewer are made, it costs more per individual buggy whip. So if you could've gotten an old buggy whip for $2 in 2011 dollars, you may have to pay $20 to get one now. Today, you can buy a mass market paperbook for $7. In the future if you want that same physical book it'll cost you $20-30. If you're willing to pay that, great. Pay it.

Oh, and that whole "paperless office" thing? Yeah, it's pretty much happened. Not everywhere, and certainly not for every industry, but at least where I work as a software developer the times I've had to physically handle paper have been few and far between (and usually related to dealing with arcane and esoteric reimbursement policies that still require physical receipts). The fanfare was premature, but it's basically happened anyway. And this will be the same -- someone will eventually claim, "Paper books are dead!" to which a large number of people will reply, "Nuh uh!" And then a decade or so later, without any pomp and circumstance and without anybody really noticing, you'll stop finding paper books for sale. All of the brick & mortar book-only stores will have shut down or converted to other merchandise, you'll no longer find romance pulp novels at the supermarket, and you'll be lucky to find a handful of 5 year old overpriced Tom Clancy books at airport terminals. For all intents and purposes, the paper book will be dead, and when you look back on it, it'll seem like it was the most seamless and natural thing ever. Don't believe me? Ask Tower Records, as this process is in the late stages for music on CD. Or Borders, for that matter.

I think the real component of the story you are missing is the future ease of creating custom physical objects.

It may be easy, but that doesn't mean it will be cheap. Why would I spend $8 of raw materials for my 3D printer to make a book when I could just read it in digital form? No doubt people will do it, but it will be a novelty. "Hey, look what I can do!" <prints out entire works of Shakespeare> ... "Meh. Won't be doing that again."

Anyone who enjoys reading will still collect physical books for a long time to come. I like to buy digital books, but physical books still accumulate anyway... that's just how it is with books.

Way to generalize, bro. I enjoy reading, yet I've entirely stopped collecting physical books. Same with the girlfriend, though she's still a little reluctant and buys one or two paper books a year. There are very few books that are not available as ebooks one way or another, even the Harry Potter books that J.K. Rowling is so notoriously against making available as ebooks (and honestly, the "darknet" versions are way better than what the hack publishers would put out anyway, if she'd let them).

Plus of course they look good in a house... to a point, but that's back to really avid readers like physical books too.

Personal taste, and/or pretentiousness. If you think that you need books to complete the design of a room, print out some covers and paste them on cardboard boxes. This ranks up there with, "I like the feel and smell of paper," as one of the most ridiculous reasons to avoid ebooks.

But that's okay. Even today people still need buggy whips for novelty horse and carriage taxis, or the Amish, despite the fact that the horseless carriage made them obsolete. You can still buy vinyl records (and CDs), even though there's no reason not to buy music online anymore. Thus you'll still be able to get your paper books in the future, if you really have to have them. Just be prepared to spend a considerable sum buying them.

Older books (as in pre-word processor) on Kindle (not singling out Amazon, I'm sure iBooks and other digital stores share the same problems) are flawed. I've read a bunch of reviews of older books and there are common complaints regarding frequent typos from OCR.

You're doing it wrong. You should download old books from Gutenberg directly. They're available in multiple formats, including Mobi for Kindle, and they're generally high quality and well-edited (even when they start from OCR sources). There's no reason to get old books from Amazon, and especially no reason to ever pay for those old books. That's how people scam -- grab a bunch of Gutenberg books, rip off the Gutenberg text, add a fancy new cover, and charge $2 on Amazon and other stores. Easiest money ever, because there are suckers like you who will pay for it.