"Being able to download (ONLY FROM the vendor's store) over 3G wireless seems like more of a tether, to me. You're locked in..." This is a misconception that I find annoying. I have a Kindle (a gift) and haven't had the 3G on in months. It may be true that Amazon _wants_ me to buy their eBooks, but I don't. I have books from Baen, authors' sites, Guttenberg, and publishers sites on my Kindle. It all became trivial when I found Calibre. "I can shove ~90 gigabytes of books into this thing (at present)." So? 90gigs of eBooks is absurd. I have about a dozen books on the Kindle now, which will last me a couple more months. (Some are books I love and like to have around and some are books I'll read and jettison). For a dedicated reader, built-in ram is usually plenty. Now, using a memory card to load books could be useful... Does the Sony support that? (I really don't know and just thought to wonder about it now, but suddenly I'm curious.) If I were to purchase an eReader, I might go for a Sony, but the Kindle is a really nice device as long as you honor Amazon's phantom lock-in.

I keep hoping that someday I'll read a Slashdot article headlined, "Is xxx doomed?" and the answer is... Yes!
So far... no.
Maybe we could see something like, "Is this the year that the Linux desktop doomed?"

I'm a "technofetishist" and so are many of my friends. We all think voting should be paper. It's a hell of a lot easier to fix the hanging chad bug than to build, debug, and secure a system like that.
I've heard people cite the ATM network when they talk about big, distributed hardware/software systems that anybody can access, and it works pretty well. It's a false-equivalence though. You get a paper statement at the end of every month (or online, immediately) which provides the paper trail. If my account gets hacked, I don't get the wrong president. And you have Visa, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, etc... all with a vested interest in it working properly. Compare that to the Democratic and Republican parties eternal war and they look like best friends forever.
eVoting? No thanks.