Amen. Here in the UK it's even worse, especially for coders; various important punctuation keys have been randomly moved around compared to normal UK keyboards, and there's no sodding # key. But we do have that oh-so-useful subsection mark key, thank goodness. A key so useful it doesn't even show up in my post preview.

When you use a normal keyboard all day at work, switching to this braindead abomination of a layout in the evenings is a real pain in the posterior. My MBP is coming to the end of its lifespan, and the keyboard is the #1 reason I'm strongly considering going back to Windows for my next machine.

This all sounds like good wholesome geeky fun, but the guy is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, probably the most egregious and destructive patent troll in the world. Shun him! Shun him!

Does each book stand on its own fairly well? 'Cause I can't remember anything at all from the one I read.

Either read them all or don't, but don't base entire opinions off one book

So my options are:

1) Form an opinion of a series without reading any of them, or
2) Read all 10 books in a series before forming an opinion

Yeah, good luck selling that.

the 10 book Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is at least the equal of ASoIaF

That's very much a matter of opinion. Personally, ASoIaF has definitely gone downhill, but when it's good, it's spectacularly good. I read the first of the Malazan books, threw it straight in the trash, and would be perfectly happy to never read another.

"Why not just buy a paper version (to ease your conscience) and download it off BitTorrent?"

I've strongly considered doing exactly that. But in the long run I think it's better to support those authors and publishers who are doing ebooks right, in order to demonstrate to the others that there's a market there. Paper+piracy, insofar as it has any effect, seems more likely to discourage them from moving to digital distribution at all.

"From a purely pragmatical point of view, just buy books in formats for which DRM stripping tools are readily available at the moment."

From an arguable-equally-pragmatic but slightly more forward-looking point of view, just acquire books which don't have DRM in the first place. Webscriptions, indie publishers, Gutenberg & Co, whatever. Paying people for trying to screw you over is not inducive to progress.

Yes, you'll miss out on reading a good number of books you wanted to read. That's what makes it a principled stand; you're actually sacrificing something.

The really depressing thing about that is that the earlier script drafts had the humans' brains being used as a parallel computing engine for running AIs

Maybe they were worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit by Dan Simmons.

"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"? More irony: I'd never even heard of that, let alone read it, and from a quick Google it's the only story set in that universe that I haven't read. It's like rain, on your wedding day.

Obviously I'm not going to argue about the merits of that particular story - there are several of Bujold's peripheral and other-universe novels that didn't grab me at all - but I do think you were unlucky in your sample. The Vorkosigan books IMHO could serve as the dictionary definition of "a good compelling story with characters I can identify with".

The first couple of novels (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) are fine, but a bit Mills-and-Boone and not especially representative. The best of the lot to my mind are "Mirror Dance", "Memory" and "A Civil Campaign", but you'd be missing a whole truckload of backstory if you jumped straight in there. The best of the short stories is probably "Borders of Infinity".

There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader.

Oh, c'mon. Yes, Sturgeon's Law applies here like anywhere else, but are you really claiming that writers like Lois Bujold don't appeal to casual genre readers? Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga and not been utterly bowled over by it?

The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed

To be fair, that's a problem with some legitimate content as well. I bought an E-Reads title recently and it was just appalling - probably averaged around an error per (small) page, including one in the very first paragraph. It was very very obvious that nobody had even glanced at the text after scanning it.

assassination of a prince from memory

An Archduke, if you want to be picky. But nice analogy nonetheless. Like WW1, I think this is a fight that's been waiting to happen for a while now. Like WW1, the specifics of the flashpoint incident are largely irrelevant.

Unlike WW1, the two sides seem far from evenly matched this time. My gut says the pro-WikiLeaks side will get tired and give up; there's nobody paying them to keep going, and that matters in the long haul. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.

Buddhism has four genders - man, woman, ladyboy and hermafrodites

hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair

Personally, I care because when I pay money to Amazon for a Kindle book, I'm sending them an implicit message that I approve. That I consider it acceptable for them to be locking me in to their walled garden and stripping me of my basic consumer rights while pretending that this is normal and nothing has changed and this is still a "sale", no really, it is.

I do not approve. I do not consider it acceptable. And I do not believe that Amazon will ever grow an ethical backbone on this issue until they start losing sales because of it.

Paint or tape over the webcam lens. It's the only way to be sure.