... Yeah. I use the Kindle app for fun reading and use the Stanza app to read books I've bought from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Since the advent of Fatherhood six years ago, my time for casual reading dwindled and dwindled to the point that the only time I really had for reading was while I was on the can or sometimes before bed.

Since I started reading on my phone, I've read more "fun" books in those two months than I had in the previous 2 years. Sad, I know, but it's true. I thought I'd hate reading on my phone, but it's really quite a natural reading experience for me. I don't skip around a whole lot, though. I know some people like to flip back and forth to re-read dialog and plot points. The Kindle app does allow for "dog-ear" bookmarks, which I used while reading Anathem.

Anyhow, just like the phone itself, or TiVo, I suspect that people won't get it until they get it. I know that makes me sound like a jerk, but some people just don't like change.

I don't really care about the DRM thing for nontechnical books, incidentally. I do re-read "fun" books every couple of years, and I'd be annoyed if my kindle books weren't around in 3 or 10 years. On the other hand, I'm not broke, and the convenience of always having my book in my pocket far outweighs any potential downsides in my mind.

You'll note, on the page to which I helpfully linked, AT&T recommends the Global Data plan.

My thinking was that I'm already paying quite a premium for our iPhone plans, and paying that much more just to be able to check email or whatever was stupid. We were in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, so I knew we'd find wifi of some sort. This plan might not work so well in other places with less prevalence of open access points. YMMV VWP IANAL HAND

AT&T Roaming Info:

"Data usage pay-per-use rate is $.0195/KB , except in Canada where rate is $.015/KB."

2 cents/KB. That's $20 a MB!! Emails a few times and google maps here and there adds up to a few MB quickly.

As others have noted, there have been plenty of data-roaming horror stories, but I guess it still hasn't occurred to everyone to look this stuff up before traveling. My wife and I went to Scandanavia earlier this year, and we made sure to turn off data roaming and only used wifi when it was available. We also used occasional text messages to communicate with one another, rather than calls. $0.50/text, but still cheaper than calling.

I think the choice was more like "pretty, possibly brain-damaged, but ALIVE" and "face ground off by asphalt and DEAD".

I have personally witnessed two motorcycle accidents... In the first one, the guy dumped his bike while making a tight turn at a rain-slicked intersection. His (helmeted) head hit the pavement hard. Probably wouldn't have killed him, but he would definitely not have been getting up to ride after that without a helmet. Second one, the poor bastard hit a deer at about 70mph. Cut the thing right in two, and he slid on the highway for a while. I stopped to help him, and I saw up-close how badly chewed-up his helmet was. Lucky for him he wasn't one of those assholes who rides wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt. His gloved hands were a bit bloody, his knee was probably broken, and his helmet had been worn down in one spot so far that I could see the internal layers. But he was alive.

I know you were talking about older bike helmet designs, but I hate to see anything that could give no-helmet idiots more fuel for rationalizing their stupidity and selfishness.

Wow. If I had mod points today, I'd use them. Sadly, the best I can do is write this post with a recommendation that someone mod the parent up. It's quite a dense little rant, but I have to say that it's one of the most enlightening and insightful posts I've read on /. in a long time.

Thanks, AC (now git off mah lawn!).

It seems that we are talking past one another, or engaging in some weird exercise in pedantry. You keep claiming that my position on the question of God's (or leprechauns, etc.) existence is somehow based in faith. That I believe in their nonexistence, based on nothing other than my personal desire for my position to be true. If this were the case, I would agree with you that I am somehow a faithful atheist.

All that having been said, my position is not based in faith. It is based in pragmatism. I do not, in fact, believe, have faith, hope, pray, desire, etc. that God does not exist. I simply assume it is so, just as I assume likewise that neither leprechauns nor unicorns nor Zeus nor ghosts nor astral power centers exist. There is no evidence for these things, therefore I do not give any credence to the idea that they might exist. This is very, very different from a faith-based position, in that were solid evidence for their existence to be presented, I would happily change my outlook.

My original point, several posts ago, is that I will agree with anyone who says that it is possible that God exists. It IS possible! It's just unlikely, to the degree that it's irrelevant! Even if there is some higher power responsible for the creation of the universe, the idea that said power cares a rat's ass about whom I sleep with or whether or not I cook the flesh of a beast in its mother's milk or whether or not I attend church every Sunday is preposterous.

The reason I take a firm stance on this, rather than some wishy-washy "well, I don't really know, no one really knows, that nutjob who wants to stone my sister for having sex before she's married MIGHT be on to something, or at least it's OK in his religion" is that I am deeply troubled by the acceptance of a belief system which encourages uncritical acceptance of dogma and discourages logical evaluation of evidence. In the end, if one is not buying in to all of the baggage of a religion, then what's the fucking point? Either you believe that your god or gods want you do do shit to keep them happy and give you eternal life, or you don't. A vague belief in some higher power is harmless, but it's also useless.

I have a generator in my basement (well, my garage, anyhow). And my next-door neighbor is kind of a cow...

How does one test for the (non-)existence of Unicorns or Leprechauns? They're magical. If they don't want you to see them, they won't appear to you. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that they don't exist.

What is an Atheist's claim, exactly? I am an Atheist. I am not claiming anything untestable. I am simply asserting that the logical position with regard to the potential existence of something for which zero evidence has been found is to assume that it does not exist.

You keep asserting that my disbelief is based in faith. I do not have faith that there is no God; I simply do not have faith that there is a God. Furthermore, the question of whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to my daily decision-making process. Perhaps God does exist, somehow, in an unobservable state. I have seen no evidence for the existence of God, however, and you seem to concur. In the absence of observable evidence of God, then is it not logical to assume that for all practical purposes, there is no God?

Try substituting Leprechauns for God in the above paragraph, and see whether or not it becomes any more palatable to you. If you are truly agnostic and unable to assume, for all practical purposes, that God does not exist, then your feelings should not change at all when you consider the potential existence of Leprechauns. In other words, a true Agnostic would claim that it is unknowable whether or not Leprechauns exist, and accept either position. I suspect that if you're honest with yourself, you don't really believe that you need to see proof of the nonexistence of Leprechauns to assume that they don't exist.

No, not really. This is a tiresome strawman argument against Atheism. Are you keeping an open mind about the possible existence of Unicorns? Leprechauns? The end of the world in 2012 as predicted by the Mayan calendar?

As an Atheist, I am simply living my life without belief in the Divine. I don't know with certainty because it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of something unobservable. In the absence of any tangible evidence of the Divine, however, I can confidently assume that at best, it is almost certain there is no Divine, and at worst, it is irrelevant to my daily life.

What does keeping an open mind about the potential existence of God mean to you? Are you hoping to hedge your bets somehow? Are you hoping that when you get to the pearly gates, if they exist, that you can tell St. Pete that you weren't an Atheist, so you should still be OK? Or are you just uncomfortable with the idea that rejection of belief in the supernatural puts you in the minority and on the wrong side of a whole lot of potentially scary people with a shared delusion?

So, are you saying that my lack of belief in leprechauns or brownies or unicorns is not rational, but merely convenient?

I am an Atheist. A- (without) theism (belief in the divine). I don't believe in the Divine. Do I pretend to have proof of the non-existence of God? No, I do not. I don't need it, any more than I need to prove that any number of mythological creatures do not exist.

It's really quite simple. I simply do not believe in that which can not conceivably ever be observed empirically. Making up supernatural explanations for that which we have not yet come to understand through science is convenient, and lazy.

Wow, man... That is .sig-quality. I won't steal it, but I will remember it. Thanks! :)

Strictly speaking, I think you will be hard-pressed to find very many so-called atheists who truly believe (i.e. have faith) that there is no God (in the judeo-christian sense or otherwise) or gods. Throwing this out as an argument against calling oneself Atheist is an exercise in pedantry.

I am an Atheist. Do I pretend to have iron-clad proof of the non-existence of God or gods? No. I do live my life as though it is true, however. Practically speaking, it might as well be true. It does not trouble me to assume that there is no God any more than it does to assume that there is no invisible pink unicorn standing behind me, judging my soul as I type this. It is illogical to assume otherwise! Once one opens the door to the possibility of one supernatural being, the only logical progression is that ALL beliefs based on the supernatural must potentially be true. And that's an express train to crazytown.

I used to share your discomfort with the concept of atheism vs. agnosticism... As I grew older, though, I began to see that agnosticism was a much less useful state of being. If one is truly agnostic, then one ought to feel compelled to give equal weight to all systems of knowing. I believe that accepting a personal state of functional atheism requires more up-front intellectual honesty, but in the long run produces much less cognitive dissonance.

WTF is up with the commenting system lately? All my paragraphs are smushed together, even though each is correctly bracketed within <p>tags</p>...

RAAARGH!
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Legally, there is no reason in the world that you (or I, or my dog) can not port ZFS to Linux and run it ourselves. The licensing issues only come into effect when you want to DISTRIBUTE your work as binaries. The idea that the FSF would sue someone for linking ZFS and Linux together in their basement is so fundamentally misguided that I would be shocked if this weren't a /. discussion.
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Let me underscore this point: GPL ONLY COVERS BINARY DISTRIBUTION! The goal is to prevent someone from taking GPL-covered code, compiling it to binary, and then redistributing it without accompanying source. The CDDL and GPL are fundamentally incompatible in such a way that it is quite difficult if not impossible to distribute binaries derived from mixed CDDL/GPL code without violating some clause of one or the other license. I won't claim to have an expert-level understanding of the details, but I work with several people who do.
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Now, as for why "someone" doesn't distribute some magical patchset which will allow you to build a ZFS-enabled Linux kernel... It's because "someone" doesn't feel like keeping up with the massive amount of work required to maintain said patchset against ZFS and Linux kernel changes. The work would not get nearly the amount of exposure and testing necessary to make it a first-class filesystem option, and so would languish as a hobby/experiment with not much payout.
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Much better to just focus on btrfs. Or wait and see what happens after the acquisition completes.