Your suggestion assumes all American kids have either 1.) A library within walking distance, 2.) Access to transportation.

The schools they attend have libraries, don't they? If they're not within walking distance, there's a bus that will take them there. For ~9 months of the year, your "problem" is sorted.

You can't use a tablet on the SAT

Back when I took the SAT, they didn't allow calculators. No scientific calculators, not even basic 4-function jobs. Graphing calculators weren't even on the market when I took it the first time in junior high, and they had only been around a couple years or so when I took it again in high school. Now get off my lawn!

Reading e-books two or three lines at a time on a 3.2-inche screen would turn anyone off of reading.

I did just fine reading ebooks from an iPhone 3G back in the day. If you can only fit two or three lines at a time on-screen, you're doing it wrong. It'll be less than you can get with a tablet screen, but it's certainly usable. The iPhone 4 was a nice step up (smoother text), and the tablets I've since picked up are better still (7" is plenty...I do most of my reading on a Galaxy Tab 2 7.0), but I still keep ebook apps on both tablet and phone, with bookmarks synced between them so I can get a little reading in if I have some time to kill.

The difference is that phones are small and you only need to stock a dozen models to serve most clients.

Only a dozen? Let's see... within the iPhone 5S range in the US, we have 3 different storage capacities (16, 32, 64 Gb) in 3 different colour schemes, with 4 different network setups (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile/unlocked). That's 27. 40 more for the iPhone 5c (5 colours, 2 sizes, 4 networks). The iPhone 4S is still for sale, but "only" 8 options there because it's 8 Gb only now - except the 3 larger ones are still under warranty, so make that another 32. Then we get the 4 and 3GS - but I'll stop there, because we're already at 99 different handsets for the iPhone alone, before we get into Android handsets! Call them $333 each on average, that's $33k of handsets you're mandated to store but not sell. That's insane - just to avoid a 24 hour wait to Fedex a replacement handset to you!? (Not to mention I'd rather have the replacement shipped to me next-day anyway rather than spend hours travelling just to collect it myself.)

Also, I seem to recall some of the Apple fan sites actually monitor stock levels in Apple's own stores - it usually takes a while for stores to have stock on hand after a launch (while customers buy up stock as soon as it arrives), then once a model is old they start running down stocks to avoid being left holding old kit. So, even Apple themselves don't actually carry stock on the scale the poster seems to be demanding, let alone 3rd party repair shops/vendors!

A few years ago, my MacBook Pro's Superdrive failed. Standard part they'd been using for years ... the Store would have a spare in stock surely? No, I had to wait a week for them to get one shipped from Panasonic ... then I was told I'd have to leave the MBP with them for up to another a week to fit it. Of course, by the time I add up the travel costs alone for 3 visits, I'd have spent the price of a brand new external drive, even before factoring in the c 10 hours of my time spent going to and from the Apple Store, so I told them to install the replacement drive somewhere it wouldn't fit easily and bought an external drive.

So, this legislation would be a hugely expensive "solution" to a trivial problem - and, of course, there's no guarantee that on the day your pink 32 Gb iPhone Verizon 5c happens to need replacing, someone else won't already have claimed that one replacement unit, so you can't have it anyway. Would the legislation somehow guarantee a quick replacement of the replacement by Apple, too? Or it would have to mandate everywhere having two of every handset, in case the first one's already taken ...

Appreciate it.

I know there are methods to remove the ads - but I have to say that when they planned this out they did it right. I've never felt a need to remove it from mine. They only show up on the home screen (where they are crazy small) and on my screen saver thing. When I'm reading there is no difference. I really don't spend any significant amount of time not actually "in" books on the thing so I forget about it. Every so often it will remind me to connect to wi-fi if I haven't done so in a long time but if it really helps keep the cost of the readers down I don't mind it at all.

I think that calibre plus the kindle means that I have access to pretty much everything. It's like having the worlds largest library in my home. And since I don't live in a country that has libraries with books in my native language that's a pretty nice thing.

And I have moved enough that I really don't want physical books much any more. There are instances where they are better but for anything I'd read as a paperback I much prefer electronic now.

I modded up some of our discussions (by our I mean our little(r) circle here) last week or something like that.

What's funny is the drive I found in the office is throwing some errors too so I just ordered a new one.

For $70 you can get a fantastic e-ink reader. The 6 inch kindle with offers is $69.

Team that up with Calibre on a PC and you are all set. That is how I do all my reading now.

Yep, once we hit 6 Mb per screen we should be all set... that's the speed compressed HD video moves at at most. Anything that moves faster than a 1080p screen can't be represented by humans that fast, until we get to 4Kx1080.

That's something that hit me quite recently: with an 80/20 Mbps VDSL2 line, I can honestly say it's "fast enough" for everything I do. My satellite STB has a semi-streaming mode, where it downloads a whole show and will start playing once it has enough to play through without pausing for buffering - and it always starts in seconds. Big downloads, I'm almost always limited by the far end anyway; they tend to take longer to install than to download anyway - so if I had the option of a faster link, would I actually get any benefit at all? Previously, I jumped on every increase: from dialup (pricey, even a 30 Mb download was an ordeal) to half-megabit cable modem (yay, I could grab hundred meg files overnight), to ADSL, ADSL2+ (nothing big enough to leave downloading overnight any more), 50 Mbps cable modem, getting a big improvement each time. (I even have the option of upgrading to 330/30 if I want, for a price ... and it really isn't tempting, in the way I would have jumped at any chance of better speeds before.)