Nah, it's not a problem. They're not numerous enough to fight us, (but quite clearly this article doesn't tell the whole story...we only really need to worry about evil gorilla despots rising up and enslaving human and gorilla kind.
By the time the gorillas rise up to enslave humanity, we'll all have robot bodies, chainsaw hands, and the strength of five gorillas. What will really need to worry about is all the normal humans trying to kill off all the cyborgs.
Since the phones are subsidized by the service providers
The are subsidized by requiring you to pay for a fixed number of months of usage. Its part of the rebate contract. Modding the phone will not change this contract.
Considering that, why do you have to be locked in by the phone just because you're locked in by the contract? Its not like they can't enforce the contract without the phone.
This is not the same situation as Lexmark at all. In one, you're talking about buying something that was cheaper in light of the fact that you were going to give it back; in the other you're talking about something that was cheaper because you're buying something else at the same time.
A meta-configuration tool? No...that's just spin. This is just a (almost isn't) package manager that includes a scheduler and a template engine.
It doesn't look like it does anything you can't do with cron, rsync, your package manager and the scripting language of your choice easier (because you can get more features and support from the combination). Why would anyone actually need this?
Silly indeed. If you're looking to actually manage OpenSSH and most of the actual system tools without actually having to write that configuration tool (and you want to do it through a GUI), then you want something that can read and write configuration files.
For that there's the old linuxconf or webmin. Of course a lot of distros feel inclined to make their own stuff.
How is this "insightful" and not "flamebait?" Its like they'll let anybody moderate.
Oh well.
There are lots of countries that have WMD. The US government has no problem with WMD per se, just problems in the hands of those who might attack the US or its allies.
IIRC, Bush hasn't actually asked for the disarming of all these countries. He has asked that we take them out of the hands of nutcases who will use them as a first line of attack rather than a last resort; people who find ethnic cleansing an acceptable thing (he clouded the issue a bit by labeling them terrorists, but the reason they are terrorists seems clear enough to me).
The request itself, unlike the mechanism put in place to do it, seems reasonable enough.
I would contend that that is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, or even a good general test of aliveness.
If I shot you, you would still less entropy than your environment, but you'd be dead. This is generally true of all life - ending it does not greatly increase its entropy.
Further, it is generally recognized that current machines are not alive. For a test to be any good for checking for life, it needs some kind of exclusionary principal to remove machines from the mix. Your test does not do this. You also need to allow infertile individuals in your test, since quite clearly there are alive people who are infertile. These are two of the hardest boundary conditions for life tests to meet.
My suggestion (which is, of course, a repeat of stuff shown elsewhere and reproduced here merely as an intellectual exercise), which does do this, is to check for: 1) A class of things is life if it manifests information and spreads it via replicating chemical reactions. 2) A single thing is alive if it is has metabolism (i.e. constant chemical reactions that produce energy) and belongs to a class of things that is life.
Interestingly, under this definition a single virus is not alive. However, a group of viruses is still life. I think that this makes sense; a virus "lives" during the time when it reproduces, and at no other time. Further, it works in the other case; machines aren't alive because they do not exhibit replicating chemical reactions.
Only if you want it to be, and most people don't. There are both ascii and binary versions of these, and readers will generally be able to read both (I've never found one that can't).
Unlike BMP it doesn't have a pallette, which is a more important distinction: you don't have to create code for that if you have to write something that reads it.
PNM is perhaps the most obvious graphics format you can get, though - either in binary or text mode. There's no real reason NOT to represent the images in binary mode. Anybody with half a brain can figure out how to decode them.
Heck, the library I wrote to read, write, and manipulate them is about 100 lines of code, and that's in C++.
I note how carefully the definition does not mention "evolve" or "evolution". It simply says "adaptation to environment".
It's amazing what has happened to the US. IN this day and age we are still fighting ignorance every day.
Amen, brother! There are still those so ignorant and steeped in their belief in evolution that they consider "adaptation to environment" must always mean "evolution" - even when it refers to a classification that can apply to a single infertile individual. Clearly, an individual can adapt, but not evolve. We must stamp out the rampant ignorance; people have to actually know the properties of evolution.
That way, if they make a judgement about the beliefs of others, they'll be able to do so in an informed manner instead of blindly attacking what they don't understand. Can you believe that there are actually individuals who hold evolution as the end-all be-all theory of life origins and have never even heard that there are parts we haven't figured out yet? The ignorance astounds!
Am I ignorant? Am I a creationist? It's possible. Need I be either to find logic flaws in evolution and those who champion it without question?
A cell phone is a complicated device, and many of them can do many, many things.
You claim you shouldn't have to read the manual. Why not?
And why do you need a quick start guide? There's a table of contents, isn't there? You can turn to the page that lists what you want to do.
What makes one device less worthy of a menu than another? The only thing that changes is whether or not you need to read it.
After reading the manual to my first digital watch, I haven't needed to read another manual for a digital device with a small number of buttons. However, had I not read that first manual, I might never have gotten the idea. If I was less intelligent, I might not be able to abstract from that first manual to deal with all the phones, pdas, etc, and might have needed the additional manual to figure out how to do everything.
The manual needs to be there for all those situations where you can't figure it out, or if you're learning the general procedure for the first time.
Hmm...I'd like to meet someone who regularly used something like this but didn't understand how to use computers.
Are these people really all over the place?
My experience is that knowledge of math and the ability to learn how to use computers quickly go hand in hand (to a point; simple, practical stuff like this and computers ability seem to go hand in hand. OTOH, people who do the really high level stuff are often clueless).
No you can't. You have to use CGI and rerender the entire page if you're doing that.
You might as well use html if you have to redo the whole page anyway. Repeat this to yourself until you remember: WIRE PROTOCOL! WIRE PROTOCOL! WIRE PROTOCOL!
Its not for making a page! Its for moving data from server to client! Just data! Thats the whole point! And it requires javascript. Without javascript, you can forget all of it entirely.
complaints about "bloated" XML are meaningless outside of a context that takes the application's overall bandwidth requirements into account
Totally untrue! There's also the issue of latency and local computation time. The less time between the click of a button, and the reciept of data, the better it is.
The lower bound is very, very low, and every little bit helps.
Converting XML into HTML requires the use of a XSLT document, and some funky browser facilities normally.
Why not do it in straight HTML? Here's a few reasons not to: 1) Repopulating elements you've already got with new data is faster than re-rendering part of the page. That's the whole reason why you're using AJAX at all instead of just using CGI. 2) That can introduce memory leaks. 3) Then you need html generating code on the server side. You can speed up development time if you're not worried about the wire protocol (it's just supposed to work without you fiddling with it - you just put the structures out there and it takes care of the conversion). 4) You're not always generating elements. Sometimes you just want your page to change the way it behaves, and behaviours are generally written in javascript. So getting a new javascript variable is quite useful there. 5) Remember, you need two way communication. Are you going to be using a DOM parser on the server to read the HTML that is spit out by the client? And isn't that even worse than XML as far as efficiency and reliability?
It still seems to me that JSON-RPC is the way to go.
...use JSON-RPC instead. XML is longer and hard for a javascript interpreter to interpret. Why does everyone want to use it as a wire protocol? I've never understood this. It makes a lot more sense to me to just store everything as a javascript hash.
Anyway, unlike the almost most ajax libraries, which are at this point almost totally devoid of docs, the guy who wrote a JSON-RPC library actually tells you how to use it. If you've got java, its the way to go, I think. Here it is.
Personally, I'm a perl monger, so I use this lib, which isn't nearly as good, as you have to do most of the javascript stuff yourself. Faster than XML though, and its still rather trivial to turn a DOM object into a plain javascript one for use with JSON.
Too subtle, I take it, since this has been marked as "Offtopic."
"Knowing about hardware" and "knowing about software" are both incredibly vague things. There's a lot there. No one even scratches the surface of knowledge of either one. You can't just assume that anyone has enough knowledge alone to do either thing. The same can be said for treatment of people.
Further, OSs are very different just as people are different. Just saying "make it work for all OSs" is an easy thing to do, but not at all practical. Its about like saying "cure everyone."
The reference itself comes from a Monty Python sketch called "How To" where they gave a lot of very general and typically useless comments describing how to do things. One of them was a lot like the "cure all diseases" thing I've got here.
Make sense now, O none-too-bright moderator who marked me down?
Also, you might consider stopping all human maladies. Here's how you do it: Do you know anything about psychology or physiology? If you're good at one, get somebody who's good with the other to help you out. And make sure you cure ALL people (Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc..).
Yes. To be sure, I don't saturate the bandwidth most of the time. Its kind of hard to do so, because the other side is mostly the limiting factor.
The one reliable test I've been able to do is downloading from Sun.
I consistently get an average rate of about 600KB/sec. Of course, cable varies from place to place; cable quality and number of users varies highly as its really lots of little intranets all tied together rather than a giant one like it is for DSL, so its something you just have to try in your area to know if its any good.
FUD. I've had TimeWarner Cable since 1997 in Central Florida, but only for cablemodem, and not for anything else. The price hasn't gone up in that time, but the quality of service has gone WAY up.
I now get 5 Mb/s for $50 (it was $50 a month in '97 too), and that speed never changes.
A book is self contained (no batteries to worry about), Except that you can only carry a few at a time, and the light source isn't included, and can't put a big one in your pocket. So essentially a PDA will go where books can't because they're more self contained. You have to charge them every four hours or so, but thats a small price to pay considering how self-contained they are. The print has higher resolution than a PDA/ebook and thus is easier to read With text there is a point where no increase in resolution increases the clarity if the dot placement is precise (it is for PDAs, even though it isn't for books). That point is somewhere around 600DPI, which a great many modern PDAs can do. and has higher quality pictures,
it's not as fragile as electronics (drop a book, you're fine, drop an LCD screen, bye bye $100 or more), You have a point there. If you're looking at a book for the pictures, you probably shouldn't be using a PDA because you might get distracted by something shiny and drop it. Current PDAs have pretty tiny screens for things like, for instance, pictures. They'd be no good for displaying reference information - where you have to see a bunch all on the same screen, either. But we're talking about reading, not all of that.
Just dropping it isn't going to break it, though. I've dropped my PDA dozens of times, and mine is considered one of the more fragile ones. You'd have to drop-kick it, really. Even today, PDAs are a lot more sturdy than laptops.
books have higher contrast than an LCD screen making them easier to read in vary light conditions. This one can't even really be considered. You're kidding, right? I mean, exactly the opposite is true. PDAs have adjustable contrast; books do not. Books have black against off white, and that's about it. You can read a PDA in total blackness, while a book always requires a great deal of outside light.
There's a ton more advantages to paper over electronics that I'm not even mentioning. The point you put forth that I find even marginally valid is the one about fragility, which is one that will go away with time. I think I'm going to stick with my theory that the paper preference is mostly a romantic one.
Touch and smell can enhance pleasure for sure, but why wood? What makes the smell and touch of wood better than the smell and touch of a nice, smooth plastic PDA?
Its because of the memories invoked; because they take you to the quiet place in your mind.
If you started going into the books with a PDA, then the smell and touch of the PDA would take you to that place instead of wood. That is what I meant by subjective - the sense of pleasure that one derives from such things has no universal appeal, but is rather based upon past experience.
I want to have to do less, and just have it work when I'm reading.
I press one button to turn to the book, and one button to turn the page - and its a rocker, so I can turn it up or down with the same button.
The biggest problem with dead wood, to me, is that you can't fall asleep reading. You've got to 1) keep turning the pages, which takes a lot more work than the button pressing. It'll keep you awake. 2) turn off the light. The PDA will go off all on its own, but the light won't.
The PDA, of course, will be there tomorrow without system crashes because it is used (by me) for the simple purpose of reading (nothing else), just like the book. That kind of thing doesn't screw up a system.
A backlit PDA can usually set the light level to a pretty low lumen count...or off entirely. At the lowest light level, my bedside lamp will overpower my pda at its lowest non-off level so that I can't tell its glowing at all.
With the lights off, its much more enjoyable than reading with a flashlight ever was, because flashlight reflected off a book is still pretty bright with a standard flashlight.
It sounds like you just need a better reading device.
White-on-black text and reading in the dark only work when used together. If one prefers to read with the lights on, a diffuse-reflective rather than emissive surface is better. E-paper may provide that, of course. I'm pretty sure there's ergonomics research that backs this up, but I don't have any links handy.
I'm pretty sure its the other way around. Actually not quite; black background with things less harsh than white are generally the way to go - such as blue on black background. In any case, most PDAs can produce a lot more color variation than most books. If you disagree you can set your pda to use different colors than mine and see if its better for your eyes.
A book doesn't stop working if it gets bent, dropped, stepped on, dripped on, left on the shelf for a month, etc. A book with a few pages gone is still 99% operational; a PDA with a component (not even a major one, maybe it's a blown cap on the mainboard) gone is a complete loss. The only reason PDAs are as expensive as they are is perception that they should be. As they become more commonplace, the price will drop. Ruggedized ones will most likely become more common to keep things like you mentioned from happening. FYI, dropping, dripping, and leaving on the counter for a month have no effect on most modern PDAs.
There is no initial cost to books. A paperback is $5-$10, a PDA is at least a few hundred on top of that. A PDA is a few hundred instead of that. Without a distribution network, the price of books drops dramatically. If you read five books a month like I do, it's worth it after a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it's not a problem. They're not numerous enough to fight us, (but quite clearly this article doesn't tell the whole story...we only really need to worry about evil gorilla despots rising up and enslaving human and gorilla kind.
By the time the gorillas rise up to enslave humanity, we'll all have robot bodies, chainsaw hands, and the strength of five gorillas. What will really need to worry about is all the normal humans trying to kill off all the cyborgs.
Stinkin' humans.
Since the phones are subsidized by the service providers
The are subsidized by requiring you to pay for a fixed number of months of usage. Its part of the rebate contract.
Modding the phone will not change this contract.
Considering that, why do you have to be locked in by the phone just because you're locked in by the contract? Its not like they can't enforce the contract without the phone.
This is not the same situation as Lexmark at all. In one, you're talking about buying something that was cheaper in light of the fact that you were going to give it back; in the other you're talking about something that was cheaper because you're buying something else at the same time.
A meta-configuration tool? No...that's just spin. This is just a (almost isn't) package manager that includes a scheduler and a template engine.
It doesn't look like it does anything you can't do with cron, rsync, your package manager and the scripting language of your choice easier (because you can get more features and support from the combination). Why would anyone actually need this?
Silly indeed. If you're looking to actually manage OpenSSH and most of the actual system tools without actually having to write that configuration tool (and you want to do it through a GUI), then you want something that can read and write configuration files.
For that there's the old linuxconf or webmin. Of course a lot of distros feel inclined to make their own stuff.
That was the wrong article to show. It doesn't show the seedy underbelly of it all.
Here's the real skinny.
How is this "insightful" and not "flamebait?" Its like they'll let anybody moderate.
Oh well.
There are lots of countries that have WMD. The US government has no problem with WMD per se, just problems in the hands of those who might attack the US or its allies.
IIRC, Bush hasn't actually asked for the disarming of all these countries. He has asked that we take them out of the hands of nutcases who will use them as a first line of attack rather than a last resort; people who find ethnic cleansing an acceptable thing (he clouded the issue a bit by labeling them terrorists, but the reason they are terrorists seems clear enough to me).
The request itself, unlike the mechanism put in place to do it, seems reasonable enough.
I would contend that that is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, or even a good general test of aliveness.
If I shot you, you would still less entropy than your environment, but you'd be dead. This is generally true of all life - ending it does not greatly increase its entropy.
Further, it is generally recognized that current machines are not alive. For a test to be any good for checking for life, it needs some kind of exclusionary principal to remove machines from the mix. Your test does not do this. You also need to allow infertile individuals in your test, since quite clearly there are alive people who are infertile. These are two of the hardest boundary conditions for life tests to meet.
My suggestion (which is, of course, a repeat of stuff shown elsewhere and reproduced here merely as an intellectual exercise), which does do this, is to check for:
1) A class of things is life if it manifests information and spreads it via replicating chemical reactions.
2) A single thing is alive if it is has metabolism (i.e. constant chemical reactions that produce energy) and belongs to a class of things that is life.
Interestingly, under this definition a single virus is not alive. However, a group of viruses is still life. I think that this makes sense; a virus "lives" during the time when it reproduces, and at no other time. Further, it works in the other case; machines aren't alive because they do not exhibit replicating chemical reactions.
It is a plain text file
Only if you want it to be, and most people don't. There are both ascii and binary versions of these, and readers will generally be able to read both (I've never found one that can't).
Unlike BMP it doesn't have a pallette, which is a more important distinction: you don't have to create code for that if you have to write something that reads it.
PNM is perhaps the most obvious graphics format you can get, though - either in binary or text mode. There's no real reason NOT to represent the images in binary mode. Anybody with half a brain can figure out how to decode them.
Heck, the library I wrote to read, write, and manipulate them is about 100 lines of code, and that's in C++.
Amen, brother! There are still those so ignorant and steeped in their belief in evolution that they consider "adaptation to environment" must always mean "evolution" - even when it refers to a classification that can apply to a single infertile individual. Clearly, an individual can adapt, but not evolve. We must stamp out the rampant ignorance; people have to actually know the properties of evolution.
That way, if they make a judgement about the beliefs of others, they'll be able to do so in an informed manner instead of blindly attacking what they don't understand. Can you believe that there are actually individuals who hold evolution as the end-all be-all theory of life origins and have never even heard that there are parts we haven't figured out yet? The ignorance astounds!
Am I ignorant? Am I a creationist? It's possible. Need I be either to find logic flaws in evolution and those who champion it without question?
A cell phone is a complicated device, and many of them can do many, many things.
You claim you shouldn't have to read the manual. Why not?
And why do you need a quick start guide? There's a table of contents, isn't there? You can turn to the page that lists what you want to do.
What makes one device less worthy of a menu than another? The only thing that changes is whether or not you need to read it.
After reading the manual to my first digital watch, I haven't needed to read another manual for a digital device with a small number of buttons. However, had I not read that first manual, I might never have gotten the idea. If I was less intelligent, I might not be able to abstract from that first manual to deal with all the phones, pdas, etc, and might have needed the additional manual to figure out how to do everything.
The manual needs to be there for all those situations where you can't figure it out, or if you're learning the general procedure for the first time.
Hmm...I'd like to meet someone who regularly used something like this but didn't understand how to use computers.
Are these people really all over the place?
My experience is that knowledge of math and the ability to learn how to use computers quickly go hand in hand (to a point; simple, practical stuff like this and computers ability seem to go hand in hand. OTOH, people who do the really high level stuff are often clueless).
No you can't. You have to use CGI and rerender the entire page if you're doing that.
You might as well use html if you have to redo the whole page anyway.
Repeat this to yourself until you remember:
WIRE PROTOCOL! WIRE PROTOCOL! WIRE PROTOCOL!
Its not for making a page! Its for moving data from server to client! Just data! Thats the whole point! And it requires javascript. Without javascript, you can forget all of it entirely.
complaints about "bloated" XML are meaningless outside of a context that takes the application's overall bandwidth requirements into account
Totally untrue!
There's also the issue of latency and local computation time. The less time between the click of a button, and the reciept of data, the better it is.
The lower bound is very, very low, and every little bit helps.
Well, if you're really concerned about it, the techniques used for degredation apply equally well to JSON-RPC.
The real issue is why you'd use one over the other as a wire protocol.
Converting XML into HTML requires the use of a XSLT document, and some funky browser facilities normally.
Why not do it in straight HTML? Here's a few reasons not to:
1) Repopulating elements you've already got with new data is faster than re-rendering part of the page. That's the whole reason why you're using AJAX at all instead of just using CGI.
2) That can introduce memory leaks.
3) Then you need html generating code on the server side. You can speed up development time if you're not worried about the wire protocol (it's just supposed to work without you fiddling with it - you just put the structures out there and it takes care of the conversion).
4) You're not always generating elements. Sometimes you just want your page to change the way it behaves, and behaviours are generally written in javascript. So getting a new javascript variable is quite useful there.
5) Remember, you need two way communication. Are you going to be using a DOM parser on the server to read the HTML that is spit out by the client? And isn't that even worse than XML as far as efficiency and reliability?
It still seems to me that JSON-RPC is the way to go.
...use JSON-RPC instead. XML is longer and hard for a javascript interpreter to interpret. Why does everyone want to use it as a wire protocol? I've never understood this. It makes a lot more sense to me to just store everything as a javascript hash.
Anyway, unlike the almost most ajax libraries, which are at this point almost totally devoid of docs, the guy who wrote a JSON-RPC library actually tells you how to use it. If you've got java, its the way to go, I think. Here it is.
Personally, I'm a perl monger, so I use this lib, which isn't nearly as good, as you have to do most of the javascript stuff yourself. Faster than XML though, and its still rather trivial to turn a DOM object into a plain javascript one for use with JSON.
And, MSN Inc. would have to compete fairly with its competition from Yahoo and Google
You misspelled "go bankrupt within a month of it not being the default homepage."
Too subtle, I take it, since this has been marked as "Offtopic."
"Knowing about hardware" and "knowing about software" are both incredibly vague things. There's a lot there. No one even scratches the surface of knowledge of either one. You can't just assume that anyone has enough knowledge alone to do either thing. The same can be said for treatment of people.
Further, OSs are very different just as people are different. Just saying "make it work for all OSs" is an easy thing to do, but not at all practical. Its about like saying "cure everyone."
The reference itself comes from a Monty Python sketch called "How To" where they gave a lot of very general and typically useless comments describing how to do things. One of them was a lot like the "cure all diseases" thing I've got here.
Make sense now, O none-too-bright moderator who marked me down?
Also, you might consider stopping all human maladies. Here's how you do it:
Do you know anything about psychology or physiology? If you're good at one, get somebody who's good with the other to help you out. And make sure you cure ALL people (Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc..).
What could be simpler?
Yes. To be sure, I don't saturate the bandwidth most of the time. Its kind of hard to do so, because the other side is mostly the limiting factor.
The one reliable test I've been able to do is downloading from Sun.
I consistently get an average rate of about 600KB/sec. Of course, cable varies from place to place; cable quality and number of users varies highly as its really lots of little intranets all tied together rather than a giant one like it is for DSL, so its something you just have to try in your area to know if its any good.
FUD. I've had TimeWarner Cable since 1997 in Central Florida, but only for cablemodem, and not for anything else. The price hasn't gone up in that time, but the quality of service has gone WAY up.
I now get 5 Mb/s for $50 (it was $50 a month in '97 too), and that speed never changes.
A book is self contained (no batteries to worry about),
Except that you can only carry a few at a time, and the light source isn't included, and can't put a big one in your pocket. So essentially a PDA will go where books can't because they're more self contained. You have to charge them every four hours or so, but thats a small price to pay considering how self-contained they are.
The print has higher resolution than a PDA/ebook and thus is easier to read
With text there is a point where no increase in resolution increases the clarity if the dot placement is precise (it is for PDAs, even though it isn't for books). That point is somewhere around 600DPI, which a great many modern PDAs can do.
and has higher quality pictures,
it's not as fragile as electronics (drop a book, you're fine, drop an LCD screen, bye bye $100 or more),
You have a point there. If you're looking at a book for the pictures, you probably shouldn't be using a PDA because you might get distracted by something shiny and drop it. Current PDAs have pretty tiny screens for things like, for instance, pictures. They'd be no good for displaying reference information - where you have to see a bunch all on the same screen, either. But we're talking about reading, not all of that.
Just dropping it isn't going to break it, though. I've dropped my PDA dozens of times, and mine is considered one of the more fragile ones. You'd have to drop-kick it, really. Even today, PDAs are a lot more sturdy than laptops.
books have higher contrast than an LCD screen making them easier to read in vary light conditions.
This one can't even really be considered. You're kidding, right? I mean, exactly the opposite is true. PDAs have adjustable contrast; books do not. Books have black against off white, and that's about it. You can read a PDA in total blackness, while a book always requires a great deal of outside light.
There's a ton more advantages to paper over electronics that I'm not even mentioning.
The point you put forth that I find even marginally valid is the one about fragility, which is one that will go away with time. I think I'm going to stick with my theory that the paper preference is mostly a romantic one.
Touch and smell can enhance pleasure for sure, but why wood? What makes the smell and touch of wood better than the smell and touch of a nice, smooth plastic PDA?
Its because of the memories invoked; because they take you to the quiet place in your mind.
If you started going into the books with a PDA, then the smell and touch of the PDA would take you to that place instead of wood. That is what I meant by subjective - the sense of pleasure that one derives from such things has no universal appeal, but is rather based upon past experience.
Turning pages is too much work.
I want to have to do less, and just have it work when I'm reading.
I press one button to turn to the book, and one button to turn the page - and its a rocker, so I can turn it up or down with the same button.
The biggest problem with dead wood, to me, is that you can't fall asleep reading. You've got to
1) keep turning the pages, which takes a lot more work than the button pressing. It'll keep you awake.
2) turn off the light. The PDA will go off all on its own, but the light won't.
The PDA, of course, will be there tomorrow without system crashes because it is used (by me) for the simple purpose of reading (nothing else), just like the book. That kind of thing doesn't screw up a system.
A backlit PDA can usually set the light level to a pretty low lumen count...or off entirely. At the lowest light level, my bedside lamp will overpower my pda at its lowest non-off level so that I can't tell its glowing at all.
With the lights off, its much more enjoyable than reading with a flashlight ever was, because flashlight reflected off a book is still pretty bright with a standard flashlight.
It sounds like you just need a better reading device.
White-on-black text and reading in the dark only work when used together. If one prefers to read with the lights on, a diffuse-reflective rather than emissive surface is better. E-paper may provide that, of course. I'm pretty sure there's ergonomics research that backs this up, but I don't have any links handy.
I'm pretty sure its the other way around. Actually not quite; black background with things less harsh than white are generally the way to go - such as blue on black background. In any case, most PDAs can produce a lot more color variation than most books. If you disagree you can set your pda to use different colors than mine and see if its better for your eyes.
A book doesn't stop working if it gets bent, dropped, stepped on, dripped on, left on the shelf for a month, etc. A book with a few pages gone is still 99% operational; a PDA with a component (not even a major one, maybe it's a blown cap on the mainboard) gone is a complete loss.
The only reason PDAs are as expensive as they are is perception that they should be. As they become more commonplace, the price will drop. Ruggedized ones will most likely become more common to keep things like you mentioned from happening. FYI, dropping, dripping, and leaving on the counter for a month have no effect on most modern PDAs.
There is no initial cost to books. A paperback is $5-$10, a PDA is at least a few hundred on top of that.
A PDA is a few hundred instead of that. Without a distribution network, the price of books drops dramatically. If you read five books a month like I do, it's worth it after a year.