Your argument is circular: because the invasion of Palin's privacy revealed wrongdoing, there's no invasion of privacy. But the hacker had no way of knowing what he would find. He just broke in on a fishing expedition. That is what makes it an invasion of privacy.
Using your own logic, I have every right to hack into your private files if I think I might find evidence of wrongdoing. Doesn't that wrongdoing negate your right to privacy?
I profoundly dislike Palin. The thought of her being one elderly heartbeat from the Presidency fills me with horror.
But she has a right to privacy. (As we all do.) Hacking into her private email on a fishing expedition for possible misdeeds is simply wrong.
And in any case, the information that's come to light is not all that important. Her legal penalties will be trivial, her political penalties nonexistent. Nothing north going to jail to bring to light.
Jeez dude, make some attempt to place the discussion in context. We're not talking about "TSA drones" and routine inspections on domestic flights. We're talking about Customs and Border Protection agents doing detailed searches of the contents of laptops being brought into the country. I'm not even going to try to answer your context-free reaction to my cheap laptop suggestion.
Basically, you're saying you can't trust an outside email provider to respect your privacy. If that's true, who do you trust? Your organization's own IT department? That's foolish. If you've followed the news at all, you've seen a lot of news stories about in-house IT providers failing to support their user's privacy, either because of sloppy security practices or actual snooping by IT employees.
Unless you maintain your own email server, you have to trust somebody not to look into your mailbox. If you have a good IT organization with a lot of smart, well-trained people working for, then it's reasonable to trust them with your email. But really, they're no more trustworthy than a big company with a reputation to maintain and deep pockets that make them eminently sueable. In any case, they're certainly more trustworthy than a lot of IT orgs I could name.
One other detail: the basic email protocols are not at all secure. So even if the server that stores the email is secure, there's lots of opportunity to have your email privacy violated. If your email contains info that you really don't outsiders to see, you should be using end-to-end encryption. And if you are, it doesn't really matter who your email provider is.
Your tinfoil hat is aimed in the wrong direction. Keyloggers are real enough, but most of them come from private individuals looking to steal your personal data. That's why God invented security software.
Or do you mean hardware keyloggers? If you're actually worried about a government agent sneaking into your office and installing a snooping device, then you're probably part of a major criminal enterprise, and certainly can afford that team of armed guards.
What sort of percentage of laptops that go through US customs do you believe get seized? If it's a lower percentage than the cost of a 'cheapie laptop' divided by the cost of replacing your current laptop, then your advice doesn't make economic sense
There's more to economic calculations than replacement cost. Even assuming everything is backed up, changing the computer system that you store your personal life on is a major hassle. I recently had the tablet I use day-to-day die on me. I hurriedly ordered a replacement, which took a week, and doing without my digital memory for that long was a major pain. Then I discovered that even though the new tablet had a disk with the same form factor (it was the next version of the one I had before) it used a different disk connector, so I couldn't simply swap in the old disk. So more hassle and lost productivity while I migrated all my applications and backed-up data to the new system.
Avoiding this would be well worth the cost of an old system from eBay, even if I never used it again.
Besides which, I'm seeing a lot of advice here which seems to assume that laptop confiscation is par for the course when you enter/leave the US.
I'm making no such assumption, and I don't think anybody else is either. Obviously they're not confiscating a significant percentage of laptops; if that many business travelers had that happen, the economy would grind to a halt. (Come to think of it... Nah.) But a small risk is still a risk.
If you're really worried, then put a password at boot and consider having a 'blank' user space account that you can load to show that it's a working laptop.
Now that is a really dumb strategy. Security people (properly trained ones, anyway) haven't applied the "it's a working system" test for years — you can conceal a bomb in a working device. These laptops searches are about child porn and "terrorist data" (whatever that is). Lame little tricks like a blank user only raise their suspicions. If you really want to avoid getting your laptop confiscated, you want to make it very clear indeed that you have nothing to hide.
When it comes to dealing with authority figures, people's egos seem to require them to engage in a lot of silly tricks to "fool" them. None of which works — cops have seen them all before. If you really want to make a cop go away, put your ego aside and be so obnoxiously helpful that the cop will be happy to get rid of you.
I'd say RTFA, except neither the submitter nor the editor bothered either. Google doesn't own GeoEye-1. It belongs to a company called (wait for it) GeoEye. Google only figures in the article because they're a big purveyor of sat photos.
According to briefing my boss gave me recently, Truecrypt would not help: If they really wanted to see your content they could ask you to show it to them or alternatively confiscate your laptop and decrypt it themselves. The latter would mean you would probably not see your laptop again.
If you do your encryption properly, it simply can't cracked by anyone not willing to expend a lot of expensive computer time — if at all. Encryption gets broken by user sloppiness, social engineering, or (depending on your tin foil hat status) undocumented back doors. NSA magic only works in the movies.
But you are right about one's laptop getting seized and disappearing forever. The possibility of that happening would keep me from ever taking my main laptop outside the U.S., period. The existence of an encrypted file system might raise their suspicions, but they manage to get suspicious even without that.
If you have to take a laptop abroad, go out and buy a cheapie you won't mind losing. And if you decide to put your vacation photos on the laptop, you should make a point of not hiding them, so as to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Having an ICE agent see what you look like in speedos may be an embarrassing and pointless invasion of your privacy. But a little embarrassment is something you get over; becoming a "person of interest" is not.
Unless your pictures are very sensitive indeed, and it would totally screw up your life if the wrong people saw them. In that case, the last thing in the world you should be doing with them is schlepping them around on a laptop.
We keep hearing this claim, always made by people who have obviously done no serious software development, open source or otherwise. It would make sense if most software projects involved one or two people. Then anybody who had access to the code base could fork it and create their own version of the project.
There was a time when a lot of software actually got made by individuals. (Interesting piece on NPR this morning about Richard Garriot. Mentioned that when he was a teenager, he wrote his first commercially successful RPG in his spare time over a couple of weeks.) But very few projects are like that any more, and MySQL certainly isn't. It's kept viable by the work of dozens of paid programmers and QA people. The contributions of customers, volunteers, and users of the free version are also essential. Any major software project is as much a community as it is a code base, and that's doubly true for open source.
Now, I'm not saying that the ability to fork has no value. It's just not as important as people seem to think. Most successful forks aren't intended to compete with the original project — and when they are, it usually means that the original project has imploded and needs a reboot with fresh leadership.
A more common reason to fork a project is to create something new. That's what Drizzle is about. It's not Aker's notion of "what MySQL ought to be." It's an attempt to address issues (concurrency, scalability) that not all DBMS users care about.
That's a positive thing, but it's still not the major reason for the Open Source. The "Power of Open Source" mostly comes from the fact that it's a good model for collaboration. If somebody has an idea for a cool new feature or thinks a certain bug really needs to be stomped on, they can just go ahead and code it. This has actually happened in projects I've been involved with (as a tech writer) several times. Once, when I was at Borland, a nasty memory leak in GNU libc was screwing up our project; our engineers coded the fix. More recently, I've been working for a server manufacturer that needed some new drivers and native Windows support for IPMItool; we paid a consultant to write the code, then donated it back to the original project.
It's worth noting that the Google search engine seems to follow much the same model, even though it's (very) closed source and only worked on by Google employees. Despite this restriction, the engine is designed so that lots of different people can code and implement new search engine feature without jumping through a lot of bureaucratic loops. That's why the search engine keeps sprouting new features with no advance notice. It's also why many of those features are very poorly documented — also an issue with most OS projects, alas.
This is all good stuff, but it's just basic science and teaching. Nobels in Physics are awarded for specific achievements that have been shown to advance knowledge. (Which is why people get their prizes for stuff they did decades ago.) What's Penrose done that falls under that?
That's a significant discovery, but doesn't really do much to broaden our understanding of the way the universe works. All they did was verify that other suns have planets too — something that's been widely accepted for centuries. Compare that with the following recent awards:
"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"
"for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance"
"for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"
"for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids"
In other words, you want browsers to treat sites with invalid certificate the same as sites with no certificates at all. Contrary to what you seem to think, browsers have never done that, and there's a reason. It stems from why SSL was invented. It was Netscape's attempt to sell online solutions that provided a level of security that institutions like banks could live with. And that meant coming up with a comprehensive solution that prevented not just packet snooping, but also man-in-the-middle attacks.
As often happens in the software biz, the product was designed to meet the needs of a few customers with a lot of money to spent. The needs of the small scale webmaster who just wants to protect a few passwords from packet sniffing were not considered. These webmasters didn't see this as an issue, because using self-signed certificates had no real consequences, since they weren't usually subject to MITM attacks (I emphasize "usually") and their users treated the resulting warning dialogs as part of the constant technical noise (are you sure that you want to delete that file? are you sure you want to install that? you last accessed your online account on...) that computers users have been trained to ignore.
What was fine for those webmasters was not fine for the people for whom SSL was actually invented. They need users to actually pay attention when somebody is trying to get them to accept a self-signed certificate. And that's what Firefox provided.
Firefox's solution is not really different from the warning mechanisms browsers have had all along. It's just harder to ignore. Yes, it creates a usability problem. But there's a simple solution to that problem: web masters can stop using self-signed certificates. It's not that big a change, and it leaves an important security advance in place.
The warning is not ridiculous. An SSL connection doesn't derive its security solely from the fact that it's encrypted. It's equally important that the web site actually belongs to the entity it claims to belong to.
No, I take that back. It's a lot more important. How many identity thieves rely on packet sniffers? And how many rely on phishing? The ratio must be something like a million to 1. And any phisher can create a "secure" web site.
It might be convenient if there were a separate mechanism for sites that need to verify their identify, and sites that just want an encrypted connection so hackers can't sniff passwords. But there isn't. The inconvenience isn't a big one, because setting up a certificate just isn't that hard. The only reason nobody does it it because of the useless mechanism (those little approval boxes all computer users are programmed to ignore) that makes the whole certificate mechanism a joke.
Somebody needed to invent a mechanism to make sure that naive users don't open security holes. Somebody at mozilla.org invented one, and it works. The fact that it's a PITA is proof that it works. Deal with it.
Yes, every few months, but most are over uninhabited areas and don't get seen.
This one will come down over the Sudan. Not exactly a major metropolitan area.
My first reaction to the headline ("Asteroid" and "Collision Course" are not exactly innocuous keywords) was that something really serious was up. Even more serious than the argument over a certain politician's lipstick. Now there is news here (it's really cool that they're getting better at predicting this stuff) but it's nowhere as big a deal as the headline, or even the summary, suggest.
Objects of this size would be expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere every few months on average but this is the first time such an event has been predicted ahead of time.
This detail got left out of the story summary, making this sound like a bigger deal than it actually is. This is a routine, mundane event — only the prediction is newsworthy.
RTFA yourself. I don't see anything there about previous attempts that failed. And it answers your question: the craft would not "act like a sub". It's just an airplane that can be submerged for brief periods. So it wouldn't have to deal with the pressure issues of a proper sub.
To a non-naval person, this may sound like a submarine, but I doubt that serious pigboat enthusiasts would accept it into the club. Just as my ability to hold my breath for 30 seconds doesn't make me a frogman.
Einstein's changing his mind about a theoretical concept is hardly comparable with what Penrose did. He didn't simply restructure a theory. He tried to rationalize a completely new model of the physics behind human intelligence. This model is popular in some circles because it seems to re-assert the concept of free will. That has a lot of implications outside physics: psychology, ethics, artificial intelligence, etc. When you come with a theory with those kinds of implications, you really have an obligation to make sure your ideas have a solid foundation. And there's a lot of good arguments that Penrose didn't do that.
Now, it's true that the physics prize is awarded for a specific achievement, not for being a good scientist. But there's a lot of science going on out there, and I doubt that half the work that's Nobel quality makes the cut. You might think it a little unfair that a particular achievement doesn't rate a Nobel just because the comittee doesn't want to recognize bad science by the same guy. But given the number of deserving nominees, excluding somebody from the cut because they're guilty of bad science is not unreasonable.
When I was writing the above paragraph, I went back and re-read the post that started this thread, so I could refer to the scientific breakthrough the poster thought was Nobel-worthy. He didn't have one. His argument for recognizing Penrose was based on the fact that Penrose was Hawking's mentor and had also written some good popular science books. Significant achievements, but not what they hand out Nobel Physics medals for. Anybody have some more relevant accomplishments to cite?
Slashdot Mirror
Never said it was.
Your argument is circular: because the invasion of Palin's privacy revealed wrongdoing, there's no invasion of privacy. But the hacker had no way of knowing what he would find. He just broke in on a fishing expedition. That is what makes it an invasion of privacy.
Using your own logic, I have every right to hack into your private files if I think I might find evidence of wrongdoing. Doesn't that wrongdoing negate your right to privacy?
I profoundly dislike Palin. The thought of her being one elderly heartbeat from the Presidency fills me with horror.
But she has a right to privacy. (As we all do.) Hacking into her private email on a fishing expedition for possible misdeeds is simply wrong.
And in any case, the information that's come to light is not all that important. Her legal penalties will be trivial, her political penalties nonexistent. Nothing north going to jail to bring to light.
Probably not. There are cheaper ways to fabricate a dildo.
Jeez dude, make some attempt to place the discussion in context. We're not talking about "TSA drones" and routine inspections on domestic flights. We're talking about Customs and Border Protection agents doing detailed searches of the contents of laptops being brought into the country. I'm not even going to try to answer your context-free reaction to my cheap laptop suggestion.
Basically, you're saying you can't trust an outside email provider to respect your privacy. If that's true, who do you trust? Your organization's own IT department? That's foolish. If you've followed the news at all, you've seen a lot of news stories about in-house IT providers failing to support their user's privacy, either because of sloppy security practices or actual snooping by IT employees.
Unless you maintain your own email server, you have to trust somebody not to look into your mailbox. If you have a good IT organization with a lot of smart, well-trained people working for, then it's reasonable to trust them with your email. But really, they're no more trustworthy than a big company with a reputation to maintain and deep pockets that make them eminently sueable. In any case, they're certainly more trustworthy than a lot of IT orgs I could name.
One other detail: the basic email protocols are not at all secure. So even if the server that stores the email is secure, there's lots of opportunity to have your email privacy violated. If your email contains info that you really don't outsiders to see, you should be using end-to-end encryption. And if you are, it doesn't really matter who your email provider is.
Slashdot has one of the best discussion systems there is.
I say again, huh?
Your tinfoil hat is aimed in the wrong direction. Keyloggers are real enough, but most of them come from private individuals looking to steal your personal data. That's why God invented security software.
Or do you mean hardware keyloggers? If you're actually worried about a government agent sneaking into your office and installing a snooping device, then you're probably part of a major criminal enterprise, and certainly can afford that team of armed guards.
What sort of percentage of laptops that go through US customs do you believe get seized? If it's a lower percentage than the cost of a 'cheapie laptop' divided by the cost of replacing your current laptop, then your advice doesn't make economic sense
There's more to economic calculations than replacement cost. Even assuming everything is backed up, changing the computer system that you store your personal life on is a major hassle. I recently had the tablet I use day-to-day die on me. I hurriedly ordered a replacement, which took a week, and doing without my digital memory for that long was a major pain. Then I discovered that even though the new tablet had a disk with the same form factor (it was the next version of the one I had before) it used a different disk connector, so I couldn't simply swap in the old disk. So more hassle and lost productivity while I migrated all my applications and backed-up data to the new system.
Avoiding this would be well worth the cost of an old system from eBay, even if I never used it again.
Besides which, I'm seeing a lot of advice here which seems to assume that laptop confiscation is par for the course when you enter/leave the US.
I'm making no such assumption, and I don't think anybody else is either. Obviously they're not confiscating a significant percentage of laptops; if that many business travelers had that happen, the economy would grind to a halt. (Come to think of it... Nah.) But a small risk is still a risk.
If you're really worried, then put a password at boot and consider having a 'blank' user space account that you can load to show that it's a working laptop.
Now that is a really dumb strategy. Security people (properly trained ones, anyway) haven't applied the "it's a working system" test for years — you can conceal a bomb in a working device. These laptops searches are about child porn and "terrorist data" (whatever that is). Lame little tricks like a blank user only raise their suspicions. If you really want to avoid getting your laptop confiscated, you want to make it very clear indeed that you have nothing to hide.
When it comes to dealing with authority figures, people's egos seem to require them to engage in a lot of silly tricks to "fool" them. None of which works — cops have seen them all before. If you really want to make a cop go away, put your ego aside and be so obnoxiously helpful that the cop will be happy to get rid of you.
I'd say RTFA, except neither the submitter nor the editor bothered either. Google doesn't own GeoEye-1. It belongs to a company called (wait for it) GeoEye. Google only figures in the article because they're a big purveyor of sat photos.
If you do your encryption properly, it simply can't cracked by anyone not willing to expend a lot of expensive computer time — if at all. Encryption gets broken by user sloppiness, social engineering, or (depending on your tin foil hat status) undocumented back doors. NSA magic only works in the movies.
But you are right about one's laptop getting seized and disappearing forever. The possibility of that happening would keep me from ever taking my main laptop outside the U.S., period. The existence of an encrypted file system might raise their suspicions, but they manage to get suspicious even without that.
If you have to take a laptop abroad, go out and buy a cheapie you won't mind losing. And if you decide to put your vacation photos on the laptop, you should make a point of not hiding them, so as to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Having an ICE agent see what you look like in speedos may be an embarrassing and pointless invasion of your privacy. But a little embarrassment is something you get over; becoming a "person of interest" is not.
Unless your pictures are very sensitive indeed, and it would totally screw up your life if the wrong people saw them. In that case, the last thing in the world you should be doing with them is schlepping them around on a laptop.
We keep hearing this claim, always made by people who have obviously done no serious software development, open source or otherwise. It would make sense if most software projects involved one or two people. Then anybody who had access to the code base could fork it and create their own version of the project.
There was a time when a lot of software actually got made by individuals. (Interesting piece on NPR this morning about Richard Garriot. Mentioned that when he was a teenager, he wrote his first commercially successful RPG in his spare time over a couple of weeks.) But very few projects are like that any more, and MySQL certainly isn't. It's kept viable by the work of dozens of paid programmers and QA people. The contributions of customers, volunteers, and users of the free version are also essential. Any major software project is as much a community as it is a code base, and that's doubly true for open source.
Now, I'm not saying that the ability to fork has no value. It's just not as important as people seem to think. Most successful forks aren't intended to compete with the original project — and when they are, it usually means that the original project has imploded and needs a reboot with fresh leadership.
A more common reason to fork a project is to create something new. That's what Drizzle is about. It's not Aker's notion of "what MySQL ought to be." It's an attempt to address issues (concurrency, scalability) that not all DBMS users care about.
That's a positive thing, but it's still not the major reason for the Open Source. The "Power of Open Source" mostly comes from the fact that it's a good model for collaboration. If somebody has an idea for a cool new feature or thinks a certain bug really needs to be stomped on, they can just go ahead and code it. This has actually happened in projects I've been involved with (as a tech writer) several times. Once, when I was at Borland, a nasty memory leak in GNU libc was screwing up our project; our engineers coded the fix. More recently, I've been working for a server manufacturer that needed some new drivers and native Windows support for IPMItool; we paid a consultant to write the code, then donated it back to the original project.
It's worth noting that the Google search engine seems to follow much the same model, even though it's (very) closed source and only worked on by Google employees. Despite this restriction, the engine is designed so that lots of different people can code and implement new search engine feature without jumping through a lot of bureaucratic loops. That's why the search engine keeps sprouting new features with no advance notice. It's also why many of those features are very poorly documented — also an issue with most OS projects, alas.
Access to channels of communication is "minor"? Would it seem more important if we called it "freedom of speech"?
Attention! "Overratted" is not shorthand for "fuck you"!
This is all good stuff, but it's just basic science and teaching. Nobels in Physics are awarded for specific achievements that have been shown to advance knowledge. (Which is why people get their prizes for stuff they did decades ago.) What's Penrose done that falls under that?
That's a significant discovery, but doesn't really do much to broaden our understanding of the way the universe works. All they did was verify that other suns have planets too — something that's been widely accepted for centuries. Compare that with the following recent awards:
In other words, you want browsers to treat sites with invalid certificate the same as sites with no certificates at all. Contrary to what you seem to think, browsers have never done that, and there's a reason. It stems from why SSL was invented. It was Netscape's attempt to sell online solutions that provided a level of security that institutions like banks could live with. And that meant coming up with a comprehensive solution that prevented not just packet snooping, but also man-in-the-middle attacks.
As often happens in the software biz, the product was designed to meet the needs of a few customers with a lot of money to spent. The needs of the small scale webmaster who just wants to protect a few passwords from packet sniffing were not considered. These webmasters didn't see this as an issue, because using self-signed certificates had no real consequences, since they weren't usually subject to MITM attacks (I emphasize "usually") and their users treated the resulting warning dialogs as part of the constant technical noise (are you sure that you want to delete that file? are you sure you want to install that? you last accessed your online account on ...) that computers users have been trained to ignore.
What was fine for those webmasters was not fine for the people for whom SSL was actually invented. They need users to actually pay attention when somebody is trying to get them to accept a self-signed certificate. And that's what Firefox provided.
Firefox's solution is not really different from the warning mechanisms browsers have had all along. It's just harder to ignore. Yes, it creates a usability problem. But there's a simple solution to that problem: web masters can stop using self-signed certificates. It's not that big a change, and it leaves an important security advance in place.
The warning is not ridiculous. An SSL connection doesn't derive its security solely from the fact that it's encrypted. It's equally important that the web site actually belongs to the entity it claims to belong to.
No, I take that back. It's a lot more important. How many identity thieves rely on packet sniffers? And how many rely on phishing? The ratio must be something like a million to 1. And any phisher can create a "secure" web site.
It might be convenient if there were a separate mechanism for sites that need to verify their identify, and sites that just want an encrypted connection so hackers can't sniff passwords. But there isn't. The inconvenience isn't a big one, because setting up a certificate just isn't that hard. The only reason nobody does it it because of the useless mechanism (those little approval boxes all computer users are programmed to ignore) that makes the whole certificate mechanism a joke.
Somebody needed to invent a mechanism to make sure that naive users don't open security holes. Somebody at mozilla.org invented one, and it works. The fact that it's a PITA is proof that it works. Deal with it.
Yes, every few months, but most are over uninhabited areas and don't get seen.
This one will come down over the Sudan. Not exactly a major metropolitan area.
My first reaction to the headline ("Asteroid" and "Collision Course" are not exactly innocuous keywords) was that something really serious was up. Even more serious than the argument over a certain politician's lipstick. Now there is news here (it's really cool that they're getting better at predicting this stuff) but it's nowhere as big a deal as the headline, or even the summary, suggest.
All we have do is drill in ANWAR. Problem solved! Stupid tree huggers.
Without the sensational headline, who would care?
Objects of this size would be expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere every few months on average but this is the first time such an event has been predicted ahead of time.
This detail got left out of the story summary, making this sound like a bigger deal than it actually is. This is a routine, mundane event — only the prediction is newsworthy.
RTFA yourself. I don't see anything there about previous attempts that failed. And it answers your question: the craft would not "act like a sub". It's just an airplane that can be submerged for brief periods. So it wouldn't have to deal with the pressure issues of a proper sub.
To a non-naval person, this may sound like a submarine, but I doubt that serious pigboat enthusiasts would accept it into the club. Just as my ability to hold my breath for 30 seconds doesn't make me a frogman.
Einstein's changing his mind about a theoretical concept is hardly comparable with what Penrose did. He didn't simply restructure a theory. He tried to rationalize a completely new model of the physics behind human intelligence. This model is popular in some circles because it seems to re-assert the concept of free will. That has a lot of implications outside physics: psychology, ethics, artificial intelligence, etc. When you come with a theory with those kinds of implications, you really have an obligation to make sure your ideas have a solid foundation. And there's a lot of good arguments that Penrose didn't do that.
Now, it's true that the physics prize is awarded for a specific achievement, not for being a good scientist. But there's a lot of science going on out there, and I doubt that half the work that's Nobel quality makes the cut. You might think it a little unfair that a particular achievement doesn't rate a Nobel just because the comittee doesn't want to recognize bad science by the same guy. But given the number of deserving nominees, excluding somebody from the cut because they're guilty of bad science is not unreasonable.
When I was writing the above paragraph, I went back and re-read the post that started this thread, so I could refer to the scientific breakthrough the poster thought was Nobel-worthy. He didn't have one. His argument for recognizing Penrose was based on the fact that Penrose was Hawking's mentor and had also written some good popular science books. Significant achievements, but not what they hand out Nobel Physics medals for. Anybody have some more relevant accomplishments to cite?
And I'll stick with my tablet computer. But both really use up batteries quickly. With E-Ink displays, battery life goes from hours to weeks.
For me, the closed architecture, tiny displays, and high prices are all deal breakers. But it's still a fundamentally a better way to read an E Book.