$499 at entry level. Unfortunately, it's saddled with a VIA proc at that price point.

"Simple, books cost less. For the price of a Kindle I could've gotten around 50 books. And those 50 books can be bought individually which makes it a lot easier on the wallet."

And the price of those 50 books, if purchased second hand or paperback like a normal person, would be less than half that of 50 obscenely overpriced books for the Kindle. Yay price-effective ebook readers. That said, a normal PDA or Internet Tablet and the Gutenburg project have a pretty strong case to be made for them, without the media transfer price.

Honestly, there's something to be said for this. Noise-cancelling or otherwise deafening headphones obviously shouldn't be worn in environments where you're going to be run over or crushed by otherwise audible devices or creatures - it's called common sense. I recommend these:
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR-Q22LP-Headphones-Interchangeable-Headphone/dp/B00008VIX2/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_1_2

Plus the vendor ships 'em with an extensible build of Linux and accessible shell prompt. Awfully, awfully tempting. They cost about $300 more than the equivelants from Buffalo and IOMega, but they get much better reviews. Frighteningly constant theme of the reviews is that the customer support royally sucks, though.

I'm not about to dig that far back, but this reminds me of a similar poll on /. - A poster there said that he always got the price of an extended warranty and didn't make the purchase. He then put the funds into a special reserve that he only touched when stuff broke for which an extended warranty was available. After a couple of years, he claimed to have hit the point where he never saw a deficit in this account.

Something worth trying, for those with a fair amount of discipline.

Like any ebook reader, you're not going to be looking at a normal sized page - strip 'em down to plaintext with pdftohtml on an OS with a name ending in X or Windows with Cygwin installed and convert THAT to the format for your reader. The page formatting just gets in the way. Day one stuff, that.

Walked into a GameStop the other day and saw that they had dedicated less floor space, and no wall space, to PC games than to any single console they sell. The trend seems to be echoed at many of the bigger Wal-Mart/Target style retailers, too.

It is not completely unrealistic to say that developers are largely abandoning Windows in favor of console gaming, embedded applications, web applications, etc. In the latter two, Linux is little different than Windows, and they enjoy much more similar market share. If you're comfortable doing your gaming on a console and settling for just the Id/Epic FPSes, you'd probably be comfortable on Linux. The application base is really not that different at all from Windows, and the more coherent package management systems of Ubuntu and Red Hat alike both make managing the desktop incredibly simple, compared to Windows.

The real question is "Will this be followed with cuts in the 750GB drive prices to reasonable levels?" That's what I'm banking on, this Christmas. If they dip to or below 20c, then they'll finally be useful, and they've been around for a few months/thoroughly tested.