Yes!!!

And AT&T DSL, with per-keystroke latency that I've measured as high as 17 seconds, is awful!-- much worse than a 300-baud modem. It reeks!/EM.

With paperbacks, my typical behavior is to buy the book, read it, and then donate it to charity (at a retail used-book valuation) for a tax write-off. Given my marginal tax rate (state and federal combined), the net cost of the book is about 65% of face-value.

With E-books, I can't do that "donate to charity", so the face-value is the net cost, which seems to be about 10% under the paperback price.

E-book prices need to come down by at least 25% in order to become economically competitive for me.

I can't donate e-books, so for me to break even the price needs to be no more than 70% of the paperback face value.

As a software developer myself (software engineering for environmental modeling; high performance computing), the one thing I do wish for is more "devel" and "static-devel" library packages.

Which is one of the bones I have to pick with RedHat, by the way: it feels as though they've gone out of their way to make cross-distro software development difficult.

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might...

...an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany...

German authors, publishers, and readers were all far better off than English ones. The article explains the reason for this seemingly-paradoxical result.

And the reasons hold, I'm sure, for current DRM. FWIW.

Loser pays the legal fees.

If the plaintiff loses, he pays double.

He ought to sue those persons responsible, as individuals. Going all the way to the top. IMNHO, there is more than cause for him to do so. And he certainly has standing...

A few multi-million-dollar judgements against individual TSA agents and managers would do a lot pour encourager les autres.

I'm not running "old hardware" and all these KDE bugs, due to developers making incorrect X assumptions instead of actually knowing what they're doing, are the last thing keeping me from running KDE4.

FWIW.