You are so right. The first mobile provider to offer roaming charges that are as as low as even *double* what I pay at home, will get my business immediately. As it is, the roaming charges (I am mainly interested in data) are so prohibitively high that I disable data as soon as I get near the border. The provider loses out, I lose out, and it's only the suckers who sustain this deeply flawed business model.

I would mod you up if I could; you are right on the money. Here is an interesting article from yesterday's Observer (UK Sunday newspaper). It addresses the same issue basically.

I usually find that a generous cleaning of the windshield will send enough water over a tailgater to get the "drop back" message across.

The only spam that gets through to me these days is typically content-free - it doesn't appear to be advertising anything, often the body is completely empty. As the sender won't have had any acknowledgement, what on earth is the point of that kind of email?

Actually, there is a Tivoli product that does more or less exactly what the OP asks for: IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Dynamic Content Delivery

I take the view that by downloading a copy someone else has made available, you are not personally infringing copyright. The person who makes it available has done that. Your action in downloading seems to me to be entirely equivalent to finding a copy that someone has left on the bus.

So I say download the e-text and read it, but under no circumstances should you re-distribute the copy you downloaded, because that would clearly be infringing on someone's legal copyright.

If you wish, you can write to the author and say you enjoyed it (if you did) -- that's just normal respectful behaviour and no different to what you might do if you had bought a first edition in hardback.

Under the circumstances I see no need to make any payment to the author, since neither she nor her original publisher seem to be motivated to earn further payment for the work.

FWIW I'm in my mid '50s.