If they still haven't fixed playback of raw H.264 files (without any transport stream or other wrapper), then I'm going to have to continue to stick with 0.8.6. This has been broken for a ridiculously long time now and no one but me seems to have complained about it. I love VLC, but it hasn't decoded "everything under the sun" in quite some time. I last checked the 0.9.9 versions on both Windows and linux, and both failed to play any of a set of H.264 reference videos. H.264 is pretty standard now, and the inability to play back .264 files is a fairly serious defect.

I'm not really sure I understand where your sense of panic or loss is coming from. You seem to think that suppliers of original content are about to become extinct based solely on the results of Googling your own book.

People who are pirating your book are not reading your book. People who are reading your book are not pirating it. Any engineer who seriously wants to learn about whatever's in your "Data Compression Textbook" is going to buy it and expense it to their company. They are absolutely not going to get on TPB and grab the torrent. I don't really get what you're worrying about here.

It's the same thing with everything else that is pirated. The people who are downloading pirated movies, music, books, or whatever are not the ones who would ever have paid for them if the pirated versions were unavailable -- it either costs too much or is of insufficient interest to that segment of the population to warrant the cost. The revenue you are losing to this channel is negligible. But it may serve as advertisement. If college students are downloading your book to learn about whatever unique data compression techniques you offer that aren't already freely available via standards documents or course materials, they may decide that they like your writing style and presentation (or not) and drive future sales when they actually have a career and money to spend on such things.

Apparently, you've never discovered new music or groups through downloading albums. That's the only way I find new groups that I like these days. And when I find something new that I like, I go out and buy it. If I don't, it gets deleted.

1) This is relatively old news which you could just as easily Google yourself.
2) I would have thought that the simple fact that they found exactly such an e-mail account and hacked it would constitute sufficient proof of its existence.
3) The whole point was that she was deliberately trying to avoid leaving any public records or documented proof, although she clearly did so in a horribly inept way.
4) but since you asked...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=3&pagewanted=4&adxnnlx=1221588185-c0NhbTON3/fDJJQww%20P%20bQ&oref=slogin

Here's the relevant bit from that article:
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a "personal device" like a BlackBerry "would be confidential and not subject to subpoena."

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account "when there was significant state business."

On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin's state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: "Frank, this is not the governorâ(TM)s personal account."

Mr. Bailey responded: "Whoops~!"