Sorry, I have no interest in reading a book on a LCD.

Why? Are your eyes that special?

I think what you really mean is that you have no interest in reading a book an a PC monitor. That's understandable, PC monitors have shit resolution (in the proper "pixels per square inch" or "ppi" sense). A standard 15.6" laptop screen at 1366x768 has a pixel density of just barely over 100ppi. That's painful for reading. The same 15.6" panel at 1920x1080 just barely goes over 141ppi. People blame the backlight, but they're wrong. The problem is the pixel density. Anything less than 150ppi is painful to read, and really 150ppi is the bare minimum without some extra "smoothing" technology (like eink, where the pixels are not fully uniform).

Some common reading devices and their pixel densities:

• Non-retina display iPhone/iPod: 320x480 @ 3.5" = 165ppi
• Retina display iPhone/iPod: 640x960 @ 3.5" = 330ppi
• Most Android devices are 480x800, with common sizes being 3.8" = 246ppi, 4.0" = 233ppi, 4.3" = 217ppi
• 6" eink readers like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc are 480x800 @ 6.0" = 155ppi (note that eink works better at lower ppi than LCDs to create smooth letter forms, so this isn't as bad as it sounds
• Nook Color at 600x1024 @ 7.0" = 170ppi
• iPad at 768x1024 @ 9.17" = 132ppi, which is too low for reading on an LCD

Try a high-density screen or eink and you might actually like it.

1. There is a standard for ebooks that everyone can agree to. (i.e. not the epub/mobi/PDF/Custom Apps, other stuff format wars we have now).

This is mostly the case now. Every modern physical ebook reader (Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc) supports EPUB with the sole exception of Kindle. Either Amazon will eventually bow to standards, or the Kindle will ultimately become irrelevant. Format changes have happened before. Barnes & Noble successfully switch from PDB to EPUB. Amazon could do it, if they wanted to. Right now they're in a market position where they don't need to. Of course they're also very, very careful about always referring to their offering as "Kindle books" and never "ebooks". These are not intended to be generic ebooks readable on any reader. They're Kindle books, only readable on devices with Kindle software.

PDF is evil and needs to die as an ebook format. That's already happening, especially for narrative literature. The remaining hold-outs are technical books and designers stuck in a paper mindset. The former will change as the epub standard evolves. The latter will change simply with time, as the old guard retires or dies and are replaced with people who understand how to layout books digitally (if you want a corollary for this, look at the web -- it's been a very long time since professional web sites have had "Best viewed at 1024x768 in Internet Explorer" recommendations, because the old paper-based designers who wanted pixel-perfect control have retired or died, or finally evovled).

Custom apps are simply money grabs, and will die as generic readers become more widespread.

2. The DRM is gone and/or and things like resale are easily allowed with ebooks.

There's plenty of movement on this front. All of the major stores allow publishers to sell their books without DRM. The old-guard publishers are the ones requiring DRM now, and they will eventually be forced to follow the example of the music industry. It's just a matter of time at thi point.

3. ALL books are available as standard eBooks conforming to the conditions above.

This is probably the biggest hurdle. The Gutenberg project produces high-quality epubs, but they can only handle copyright-free works. So long as there are luddite authors like J.K. Rowling who refuse to make their works available in ebook format, you will never be able to hit 100% coverage. But of course like all things, time will solve this one. In a generation or less, any author will find it unthinkable not to offer ebooks. Assuming they're even able to do so if they wanted.

4. eBook readers are cheap enough that basically everyone has them.

Compared to what? But there are two ways to look at this one:

• Do you have a smartphone? You now have an ebook reader. Every major mobile OS (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc) has at least one ebook reader. Kindle's on every platform, for example. But what if you don't have a smartphone (despite it seeming like everybody and their dog has an iPhone or Android device these days)?
• Dedicated ebook readers can be had for well under $100. Kindles are available for $114, and Nooks for $140. While that sounds like a lot, it's really rather cheap and a one-time fee. How much would you pay for paper copies of the entire Gutenberg library? Several orders of magnitude more than $100, as a low estimate. Unfortunately ebook prices on current titles are not that good (this will have to change over time), but if you read 20 free books that on average would've been $5 for a paper book your reader's paid for itself.

5. The price of eBooks drops to represent their approximately $0 per unit production cost.

I agree, yet disagree. Ebooks still require editing, cover art, layout, marketing, etc. All you really get to save in the production area is physical printing, and when major publishers print paper books they do so in bulk at wholesale prices. That means that per book you might have $2.00 in physical production cost for a $25 hardcover. All the other costs would still apply to ebooks.

That said, ebooks are a different market. There's no short-run hardcover, followed by cheaper trade paperbacks and then even cheaper mass market print runs. You don't need to recoup all of your costs up front, so you could afford to price a book lower than hardcover and still make money. Publishers haven't fully figured this out yet, and with the advent of agency pricing last year I suspect it will be some time before they fully realize that their fundamental business has changed. This, like so much other stuff, will change in time as the old way of doing stuff dies off with the previous generation.

The immediate benefit that ebooks have provided, however, is access to independent authors and books that would not have made the cut with the big publishers. Remember, print runs need to be large to be profitable, so if you have an author that's good but you estimate can only sell 10,000 books and you need 100,000 to make the print run feasible, you're not going to sign them. But with ebooks, there is no print run. Authors can publish independently, working with freelance editors, cover artists, doing layout themselves, etc. There have been many articles on Slashdot and elsewhere of authors hitting it big with $0.99 books and thumbing their noses at traditional publishing houses that rejected them time and time again. But this is also hard work. There are many authors who don't want to do any of that and just want to write. For now, they're sticking with the traditional publishers, but again over time that will change as new media publishers like Smashwords and even Amazon cater to this market of authors.

In short, it's not all doom and gloom. It will get better, it's just going to take some time. The publishing industry today is about where the music industry was a decade ago, fighting tooth and nail against "pirates", not really "getting" the digital distribution model, charging outrageous prices for poorly-made, DRM-laden crap. It took time, but the music industry finally got it, and today you can buy DRM-free high bitrate MP3s (FLAC would be better, but I'll let that slide) from pretty much any store and play them on any device. Come back in a decade and see what happened to the publishing industry and I suspect it'll look about the same as what happened to the music industry.

Electronic only media can be altered retroactively. People in power don't like history? Re-write it.

Paul Revere warned the British that they couldn't take our arms by shootin' guns and ringin' bells. We don't need digital-only media in order to rewrite history.

I've converted entirely to ebooks (more specifically, entirely to epub ebooks). I still have my old paper books I bought years ago, but I haven't purchased another paper book in years. I read on my phone and my Nook Touch.

Short term, the huge amount of copyright-free books available from Gutenberg and others provides a wealth of reading material, and all of the major DRM schemes have been cracked so you can "liberate" your purchases (the only one that hasn't is Apple's FairPlay for ebooks, and that's because nobody gives a crap about Apple's store). Long term, the ebook industry is going to have to follow the music industry's example, getting rid of DRM and charging fair prices that are equal to or less than the cost of physical media (as opposed to ebooks today that are routinely priced above even hardcover prices).

Oh yeah, and ebooks should never be provided as PDFs. PDF is not a valid ebook format, and is an insult to the reader.

With windows mobile you get multitasking, copy paste, thousands of apps you can download for free off the internet. Ability to easily write new apps in winforms on any old visual studio you have laying around. And a ui that's totally familiar. With WP7 you don't. Which is why I just bought a windows mobile device. And now that they've started talking about Windows 8 and coding it in html5 I would guess we can stick a fork in WP7.

Out of your entire list, the only one you got right was multitasking. WP7 has copy paste, thousands of apps you can download for free off the internet (the Zune marketplace is technically on the internet, durr), and easily write new apps in Silverlight on any old visual studio you have laying around. In fact, WM6 development actually requires you to buy Visual Studio Professional or above and does not work on the Express SKUs. The WP7 SDK includes a copy of Visual C# Express and will integrate into other VS2010 SKUs. The UI for WM6 is only "totally familiar" because it hasn't significantly changed since 2003. Except where it has, because of 3rd parties like HTC skinning it with their predecessor to Sense, but not fully skinning it so that there will always be places where the old, ugly, 2003-era UI pops up. Surprise!. And the WM interface is very much geared towards stylus-based touch, with tiny touch targets that are next to impossible to activate with your fingers. And it wasn't until the very last one or two phones that you could even get a capacitive screen (resistive screens suck) and even though those screens could support multi-touch, the OS couldn't.

If you really want Windows Mobile, the answer is "get an Android phone". If you bought an HTC HD2, put Android on it. It runs great.

Just out of interest, why? The law sounds a bit strange, probably an old law based on some safety measure of the time?

It's a political job-making law. Everybody needs gas. If you can't pump your own gas, jobs must be created to hire someone to pump it for you. If you want to run a 24/7 gas station, that means you have to hire several gas pumpers to cover all shifts, have multiple pumpers on hand during heavy usage hours. Each gas station could probably generate 5-6 extra jobs, which could mean thousands of jobs across the state.

Of course it's just make-work. No value is added by paying someone to pump your gas. It just costs the consumer more money and time than they would've spent otherwise.

When I called to inquire about their service, I specifically asked if they had a bandwidth cap.

Of course, I found out right away that they DO have a bandwidth cap, 250gb per month. My account page has a meter on it.

Technically they didn't lie to you. You asked about a bandwidth cap (aka, throttling), and their negative answer was correct -- Comcast doesn't do any throttling. They do, however, have a well-publicized download cap. If you pay them for a 50mbps connection, you'll be able to use all of that bandwidth (target sites permitting, of course) to download up to 250GB of data during a month.

Maybe it's splitting hairs, but you didn't do your research properly (you "heard" they had a download cap, but you didn't go to their support site and look at their very detailed FAQ about it?) and you asked the wrong question. Nobody to blame but yourself.

Them: "Hi, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of your milkman's, newspaper boy's, dogsitter . . . they all told me that you are, like real smart with computers. Mine won't start . . . it seems to start, but then the disk screams, and nothing happens

You're doing it wrong. Right there, you should've hung up the phone. You can tell them they got the wrong number if you like, but fuck that. Personally, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves before hanging up the phone, so just hanging up is civil in my book.

These are people who would never dream of asking a mechanic to fix their car for free or a plumber to fix their pipes for free, so why is it okay for them to ask you to fix their computers for free? And if you're like me, you're not actually in the computer repair business, so I wouldn't even accept money for it. But then I learned from a very young age that you have to be able to say "No" and mean it, or you'll just get walked on by people like this. I weaned my family off of using me for tech support over 15 years ago, I'm sure as hell not going to do it for a complete stranger.

Grow a pair and stop being a doormat.

As a WP7 app/game dev, I think the platform is stellar. For apps, it's trivial to make things smooth and impressive that integrate well with the look and feel of the rest of the phone. And that look and feel is miles ahead of what I've seen on Android and even a lot of iPhone. It's also trivial to go crazy with it and make something really unique that doesn't integrate at all, though that would probably be harder to get through the app verifiers.

Microsoft has always been great at building developer tools, and the Windows Phone 7 SDK is yet another example. Silverlight is a natural fit for apps, and XNA works well for games (modern games haven't gone straight to the hardware for at least a decade -- the power comes from hardware acceleration, and the phone provides that).

That said, not all is well in Windows Phone 7 land. The SDK has some very arbitrary limitations, like not allowing you access to the camera except through a task that spawns the stock camera app. No AR apps for Windows Phone 7 Series Phone Smartphone phones. Barcode/tag scanning apps are still possible, though inefficient, as they have to spawn the camera task, wait for you to take a picture, wait for the app to resume, and then process the saved picture. I could scan five barcodes on an iPhone or Android phone in the time it takes WP7 to scan one.

No doubt the SDK will get better, but that's too little, too late. WP7 was already so far behind, it couldn't afford to launch without parity with iOS and Android in areas like direct camera access. These are things that are simply expected to be available these days, and not having them is a huge limitation that will prevent developer adoption.

And just a quick note on the games front -- independent developers only get XNA access, but major third-party developers can write native code (and access Xbox Live, just like Indie vs. Arcade games on Xbox). In other words, Unreal or RAGE tech on WP7 is just as possible as it is on iOS or Android. It's just that it's not going to come from the 14 year old programming in his room upstairs.

if I may say so the most user friendly

You may say so, but that doesn't make it true. Care to back it up with facts, or at least anecdotal evidence? Note that being 100% "libre" (or "free", as the rest of us say) means that many wifi adapters simply will not work, you can say goodbye to any decent GPU hardware acceleration, and more.

Or just learn what Fitts' law is so you won't have misguided thoughts such as these.

That only applies if you run your browser maximized. If you run it windowed, the tabs do not extend to the top of the window in Firefox or Chrome. Running a browser maximized at 1920x1080 is not only a waste of screen space but also a subpar browsing experience since most websites are still focused on 1024x768-optimized layouts.

IMHO, while I prefer tabs on top, I also prefer to use F6 to focus the address bar. This does not work with tabs on top in FF4 because Firefox treats F6 as "frame focus" and not specifically "address bar focus". It works in tabs on bottom because the address bar is the first focusable item in that frame.

Take a look at any documentary about food production. You will see a sizable portion of the food go to waste. Ever watched how corn gets stripped from the cob? I'd wager a good 10-20% of waste here alone (and we're not even talking about any other point of the production process, just the part where the corn grain gets stripped from the cob, nothing else. You will notice something similar during flour production.

A quick search would've provided you with links to back up your data, or to refute it. For example:

Some of the major factors that affect the quality of combining operations include: weather, skill of the operator, conditions of the field and crop, adjustment and condition of the combine, speed of forward travel, width of combine header, feed rate of the material through the combine, variety of crop, type of combine and the attachments used.

Mentioned elsewhere in the article, ideal efficiency is 3% loss, with averages "closer to" 10% (implying the range is probably more like 5-15% loss rather than 10-20% loss). And don't think farmers aren't keenly aware of this and will do just about anything to increase their yields. These are machines that cost the equivalent of a nice house in most places ($250,000 on average) and if there's a newer model with higher efficiency then most farmers will trade up to the latest and greatest. Even a small increase in efficiency over several years could cover the cost of the equipment.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- farming is one of the most advanced areas for technology, biology, chemistry, etc. These are not slack-jawed yokels trotting behind horses. Even the average family farmer works > 1000 acres with only 1 or 2 people and has technology the rest of us have only dreamed of. GPS when it was otherwise only available to military and government applications, satellite maps, sophisticated data collection sensors to track yields, self-driving vehicles, market tracking tools that rival anything wall street brokers can think up, etc. Of course it's also a metric pantload of physical labor, long hours, and a livelihood that is directly affected and threatened by "acts of god" the rest of us would completely ignore (a hail shower might dent your car and cost you $500 in repairs, but it could ruin a farmer's entire crop and cost him $100,000 or more).

With Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) you can deal with the book problem the same way you would use iTunes to catalog music and video. It is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. I have personally used it for both OSX and Windows for a few years and it has never let me down.

I love calibre for ebook management, but I wanted to post a pre-emptive strike. Calibre uses a database for metadata and the filesystem for book storage. However you really need to let calibre "own" the directory tree where it stores its library (or libraries, with recent versions). If you go mucking about trying to rearrange stuff, or if your OCD nature requires books to be organized in a different way than what calibre wants, you're going to break it. For all intents and purposes, the directory structure calibre creates is a database and you need to keep your grubby little hands out of it.

Also, recent versions of calibre have support for "empty" books, so you can put all of your paper books in your calibre library alongside your ebooks and manage your entire book library from one location.

Trolling is a art

Note that the header and sidebar stay fixed in place if the window is wide enough. There's a body class called "narrow-view-port" which turns off under those circumstances.

That's like the complete opposite of good design -- when screen space is at a premium, waste it with bullshit. Then, when you maximize it on your 1920x1080 screen, go ahead and stop wasting the space where it no longer matters. That's the second most retarded thing I've ever heard.