Soon the U.S. Congress will finally have something to look to help them understand (the much needed) modern IP legislation.

Finally. As a software developer, I'm in favor of anything that provides a deterrant to people stealing my work (IP, of which movies are an example). Seems to me everyone has gone crazy just because they like getting stuff free.

If a computer-as-a-copilot is dependable these days, I wouldn't mind if the copilot position was replaced by one of the flight crew who had some training in landing a plane, but did other work when the human pilot was "functioning properly." The idea of having only one person on the plane capable of landing it is a bit disconcerting. One heart attack shouldn't result in 300 deaths. However, I am not a pilot--perhaps it really is appropriate for a second person to be doing sanity checks on the pilot throughout the flight.

Neither Microsoft or reviewers made a credible case to me that it was worth paying money for. Windows XP was working just fine for me. The media buzz made me feel like I was having to pay for a shiny, new XP service pack, not an OS that was going to enable me to do things *I wanted to do*, but couldn't do with XP. The scary thing is that Windows XP is STILL working just fine for me!

Well, you never know. Comcast may be the only service available to his home.

Coincidentally, I was at my Sprint store West of Detroit last week and tested the download speed of the laptop they had out. It was about 220 kbits/sec. It must have been bursty, because the delays I was experiencing I judged to be "no chance I'm going to pay for this."

mmm. Apparently I am missing a key piece of information. When I go to upload my PDF at Amazon "for publishers", it does not give me the option not to convert. How do I publish my book so that it will rely on the "native PDF viewer?"

I am amused (annoyed at Amazon?) that people think the Kindle supports PDFs. Adobe created PDF to have a portable way of exactly representing documents. The Kindle converts PDF documents into HTML as best it can, and sometimes it does well enough. But PDF has Postcript rendering as an embedded capability, and HTML does not. All the math symbols in a book I am publishing (which I have in PDF format) do NOT convert either with Amazon's Kindle converter, or Adobe Acrobat 8's HTML converters. In other words, I would have to find all the unconvertable parts of the book and manually create images out of them. It's not what I call PDF support!