Everyone talks about the hardware, Nook vs Kindle. Am I the only one thinking that it's the books that are important, not the reader? Let's face it, as an actual e-book reader the Nook and Kindle are almost identical and unfortunately that similarity extends into the realm of book pricing.

I only buy paperbacks, hardcovers are insanely expensive, harder to read and require two hands to hold, etc, etc...mass market paperbacks are $7.99. E-books are $6.39 which is a miserly 20% off. There are no printing costs, publishing costs, duplication costs, no incremental costs whatsoever for e-books, so why only a minuscule 20% discount? Both the Nook and Kindle are $259. If I save $1.60 per book I would have to buy 162 e-books just to recoup the cost of the reader (259/1.6). That's simply a foolish economic decision unless you want to buy hundreds of books.

With no bulk discounts, or free e-books with the purchase of a physical book or the abiliy to get free e-books for physical books that you've previously purchased, e-books are a very poor investment. That's not even getting into issues of format portability, when the Nook 2 comes out will PDB formatted e-books still be supported? What about e-pub?

For me, until there's a standardized e-book format and the books accurately reflect publishing costs (I.E. e-books are next to nothing in price because that's what they cost to make) this whole argument over readers is pointless.

If you're a competent programmer then nothing is unsafe, but obviously there are a lot of stupid programmers out there who make fundamental mistakes fucking with memory when they don't understand what they're doing. What Microsoft is trying to do here is to eliminate a low hanging fruit of software security that has led to hundreds if not thousands of buffer overflow conditions and associated vulnerabilities/exploits. This is a smart thing to do and has been mentioned elsewhere should have been done a LONG time ago. Also, this is just to be compliant with Microsoft's SDLC. It's not like the function is being removed from the C library. A secure development standard should not include functions that can potentially be unsafe, even if they only are 1/100 or 1/1000 times. Even the best programmers make mistakes.