Hey, if you are listening.. 9.5" color e-ink please..

Come out with one of them, ill buy 2 more simple touches as a thanks..

Well, most of us have 2 eyes...

Looks terrible in the store.. You telling me its not bad in the flesh?

Competition is good.

On a personal note i prefer the simple touch nook over kindle due to native ePub support. And the hardware just 'feels' better. ( yes, that's an abstract opinion )

Now, if they can come out with color.. And get rid of the gloworm version of the simple touch..

Well with cable being a shared resource, they cant guarantee it anyway.

Really, if they don't want to preform their duties, get rid of them. There are other people that would gladly do their part to advance scientific research and not whine about it.

They need to grow up and stop being babies, what 'working conditions' did they expect being stuck on the top of a mountain i the middle of nowhere?

Ummm if you haven't noticed blender is opensource, it came from being closed source where it sat languishing until the community ( me included ) bought the source and its development/use exploded.

Openness is NOT the problem here. Marketing however, is.

This old model will slowly come back. Since software these days does everything you want, why buy upgrades? Going to get worse as things move towards cloud hosting and not local installs.

So often 'new features' are just rehash of old features or just marketing.

They have to keep the cash cow going somehow.

Paranoid much? They only make copies of the data to process off-line, they don't insert themselves into the data stream to do it in real time.

Blocking at the router means that I don't have to tweak several hosts files, plus it covers my Android devices that don't have easily accessible hosts files, but do have pre-installed Facebook apps that call home every night with huge permissions that send who-knows-what, and can't be uninstalled. (When I finally rooted the tablet, I did some cleaning.)

I refuse to use Facebook and block it at the router. If that means that I can't use some idiot's site that requires it, so be it. So far, I think it's been a net improvement on my browsing experience. On many of these sites, the comments are the content. I'll take my content elsewhere.

I blocked Facebook.com at the router. I'm sure that they have other methods, but all the pages I access that make little tracking fetches from Facebook are sucking mud. (It's the same with doubleclick: Is it the end of time yet? No? Stay blocked! I don't care who owns them now.) It does mean that I can use Facebook or see the fascinating pages of other people. Oh noes!

Even the simplest home router can do that. They usually have a parental site blocking feature.

What's interesting is that our Prime Minister effectively admitted in parliament (by refusing to answer in a situation where "no" would have been a far better answer for him and one he would have given had it been true)just 2 days ago that the GCSB (or NSA wanna bes) have been funded by the US to the tune of millions of dollars.

So what did they buy? probably a Prism to put in our fibre access to the rest of the world. And I guess enough of a back channel to send it all to the US. I can see now why the second pacific fibre was nobbled because they wouldn't accept the use of Chinese infrastructure - wouldn't do to have some other country's backdoors in the routers rather than the US's.

Do they have the same protection up there as we do down here in the US?

It may not be millions ( or could be ) but it will still be worth the change to be rid of the upgrade cost next year, and the year after.... Also training is a one time cost.