Congratulations! Best of luck!

Gotta love the "10-12 WEEKS" delivery estimate.

oops, for "PRS" read "LRF". I get my ridiculous DRM abbreviations wrong sometimes.

Too bad they skipped HTML, that would have been a real help -- one of the biggest missing features on the 500. More sellers support LIT than support PRS, and LIT is easily cracked and converted to HTML. One of the biggest annoyances of the 500 is having to convert books I buy LIT->HTML->RTF.

Most (but by no means all) modern Christian churches affirm the "moral" laws of the Old Testament (eg the Ten Commandments) but reject the "purity" laws (eg the dietary laws).

This is a slightly tricky distinction (in particular, it is a distinction that the source text utterly fails to make -- moral laws and purity laws were one and the same for most ancient cultures) and leave a lot of the laws in a fairly ambiguous state.

Speaking as someone in the mobile phone software biz -- bravo!

The most annoying thing about the three-way standoffs that you mention -- that keep replicating themselves, fractal-like, at finer and finer and lower and lower levels until you see echoes of them showing up in JSR specifications, media file formats, and the like -- is that these groups all have thinly-veiled contempt for one another.

The carriers believe that the handset guys are out to screw them -- any large-enough carrier starts to demand handset customizations for its own private random standards, see eg Vodafone selling basically stock Sony-Ericsson phones but with a slightly different set of root certificates for reasons lost to the mists of time. Cross-carrier handsets undermine these {Pick one: crucial well-intentioned bits of standardization / ridiculous attempts by carriers to control user experience}.

The handset guys of course hate the media companies -- both the media companies proper for the ridiculous ringtone racket, and the media patent holding companies that make you pay for a dozen licenses to implement mandated GSM standards. A half-dozen lines of code to downsample audio of the wrong format and your handset is patently criminal; run it on the wrong audio stream and you're in contributory-copyright-hell too. For a fun time some dull night, look at the differences between the MPEG-4 standard and the 3GPP video standard. The differences are trivial, obnoxious, and every one of them an intellectual property bonanza for someone.

The media companies, as always, wonder why technology is so insistent on moving forward. These phones should just be TVs duct-taped to the back of rotary phones, in their view. Probably with a coin slot on the back. The handset manufacturers' insistence on supporting MP3 was a huge war, which is why phone mp3 audio support only became ubiquitous a couple of years ago. Losing that battle has pissed them off no end. And they're still smarting from so many phones using SD cards without using the goofy "secure" fake-DRM features.

So these three guys who are propping each other up in reality are trying to screw each other -- hard -- behind the scenes. But they'll never break faith openly and start shooting: Each afraid that if he shoots first, the second bullet will be for him.

One of the recurring themes of the now-mostly-dead Policeman's Blog is that with all the cameras, British prosecutors just aren't interested in taking any case that doesn't have CCTV evidence. With all the cameras out there, magistrates and juries expect to see photographic evidence, and a prosecutor who can't deliver is going to lose.

This is one of the big dangers of surveillance -- ineffective surveillance creates demand for effective surveillance.

I lived on Blackwings for years, and only gave them up when I couldn't find them any more (little did I know it was because they were no longer being made). Every other pencil since has been a pale imitation; I only use pens now.

I'm with racerx here -- what on earth prevents these things from being manufactured? I know they had more parts and crimping than a normal pencil and so cost more to manufacture -- but that's why they always cost twenty times more than other pencils. Is it just that the community of ultra-rabid Blackwing fanatics is too small?

As a devotee of the Sony Reader, I have to say that if that product is any indication then real ebook readers with mass market appeal are not more than a few years off. The fundamental requirements -- a screen with good contrast without an eye-watering backlight, battery life good for half a dozen complete books, small and lightweight package -- are there. The only big downsides are software (broken PDF support, no html support, poor navigation) and those will be fixed in time.

(They've also got DRM, but it's in the modern fashion: A token gesture that allows them to set up a proprietary store, but that doesn't much interfere with real life.)

The fundamental requirement for a book is that Ta<Tb -- Time to Get Addicted to the book is less than Time Before Your Eyes Start Bleeding from the reading technology's limitations. A reader who's hooked on a book will keep reading even at the cost of staying up all night; a little thing like bleeding eyeballs from the ebook reader is no biggie. So a book that's slow to grab you, that starts off gently -- Moby Dick, say, which spends chapters dicking around Nantucket -- that book demands print. A book which grabs you by the neck and doesn't let go -- Blindsight, to pick the book most recently on my Sony Reader -- well, it could be written in yellow ink on the surface of light bulbs and it would still be read. Not to say that it's a better or worse book for that, but it's a different proposition.

Naturally, then, ebooks are starting out with fast-paced stuff like Baen's catalog of largely military sci-fi with a very small Ta. As Tb increases, expect to see higher-Ta books (and publishers in higher-Ta markets) start to take ebooks seriously. If they are smart, they'll follow the lead that the early adopters are setting: Keep the back catalog free, sell series as bundles, and stay away from DRM lock-in (either by avoiding DRM, like Baen, or as a second-best selling in every DRM format, like FictionWise, or as a third-best selling in long-since-cracked formats like Microsoft .LIT that can be converted to common formats with trivial tools).