Brakes

I read a lot of stuff on disc brakes.  Lots of opinion an anecdotes out there, but no a lot of hard data.  I didn't want to deal with hydraulic brakes - simply too much mess to consider Anyway, I decided to go with the Avid BB7, which has been (sort of) the standard touring bike disc brake (according to various blogs). It's common enough that there shouldn't be problems getting parts.