Why buy them all again? Just buy new books for your reader. It's not like the jump from VHS to DVD, where you had to keep with your VCR *and* the VHS tapes in order for them to be useful; keep the books unless you actually want to get rid of them, in which case you'd either have to buy them again or go without them, anyway.

I have several bookcases (and several more boxes) full of paperbacks and hardcovers, comprised of fiction, nonfiction, and reference, many old, many new, and even a few magazine subscriptions that have found a home on my shelves. I also have a Nook and my wife has a Kindle. Since owning the readers, we've begun buying ebooks for actual reading and dead tree purely for novelty; though, I do still prefer technical manuals in dead tree format, purely for the ability to stick my fingers between the pages of multiple sections and effortlessly flip between them, should I ever find myself needing the information on multiple pages handy all at once. I haven't found a reader that can do that quite as effectively as I can with a physical book quite yet; something like pinning specific pages to tabs would work, but nobody is doing it yet.

So many times THIS!

People! Keep your files locally! And keep a backup of those files in a remote (non-cloud) location! If you need to access them from literally anywhere, keep them in the cloud, as well; the worst case, then, should the cloud fail you and your home burn down at the same time, is that you have to restore from your remote backup. Better than losing your work altogether just because your cloud provider went belly up or had a RAID card got nuts and eat your data.

Well, it's not so much treating it as increasing it to levels that prevent the sufferer from spreading it to others.

Those problems are already solved for cameras in police vehicles. Apply the same solutions here.

Now, imagine having to scan it for each individual print, after waiting for the printer to finish with the previous user and make it's way to you. Rinse/repeat for every person on your floor.

From TFS:

So, instead of:

- send my job to the printer

- walk all of 10 feet to pick it up,

I now have to:

- send the print job

- wait for the printer to finish with the last person

- wait for the printer to get to my desk from $deity-knows-where in the building (and it's a big fucking building)

- wave some card at the printer

- wait for the printer to finish and go away.

Talk about "technology for technology's sake." I've seen drunk frat boys invent more useful shit than this.

So, what you're saying here, is that Wall-E was more prophecy than comedy...

Actually, I do, which is why I find the screenshot questionable - the only way to get such as screen in that exact format would be to deliberately try and hide your tracks (logging out, clearing the search bar before taking the screenshot, etc). Deliberation implies intent.

Again, deliberation - the narrative could just as easily be that someone created a fake account, sent a handful of tweets, then did the search/logout/paste trick to cover their tracks.

My point is, we don't know the truth, and being American I tend to default to the belief of innocence until guilt is proven, which the plaintiff has failed to do thus far.

If trust is "true/false," and trust is necessary to live in a society, Then why won't you give me your banking access information? You trust me, right?

Methinks, in this paragraph, you are conflating "trust" with knowledge. See, I don't "trust" a chair to hold me, because that would imply that I don't know the condition of the chair prior to sitting in it. I know it will hold me, because I visually (and perhaps physically) verified the integrity of the structure prior to sitting in it. Same with the air you breathe - you're not "trusting it to contain oxygen," you know it contains breathable oxygen. That's why you don't try to breathe underwater - not because you don't trust water, but because you know that there's no breathable oxygen in it.

"Verify, then trust," makes a hell of a lot more sense than the inverse.

Right, but you HAVE to take the new phone when you are up for it, or you leave money on the table. If you promptly re-sell the phone this might work out financially. (Or in the unlikely event that your phone wears out or breaks at exactly the same interval as your replacement schedule.) The payment plans are a much better deal (if the interest rate isn't too high), since the payment eventually stops. The subsidy in the old plans went on forever.

It does matter, as it's not the same thing.
One is open, honest, easy to understand and fair.
The other is impossible for the customer to interpret or manage and is thus extremely unfair.

The price and total data transferred may be identical, but the propositions very much are not.

That's what I've been saying!

"weird" as in "we don't talk about it in public, not "weird" as in "only a certain tiny subset of the population engages in this activity."

From what I've seen, even 70 year old Japanese grannies are picking up tentacle-porn manga, albeit not openly.

This gets my vote for Best Quote of the Day.

Better still is payment based on past performance. Whether he's a dowser or a geologist, how many times in the past has he succeeded as a fraction of his attempts? If dowsing is a crock (and I think it is) and study of geology actually improves the probability of finding water, then the geologist should win over time. Unless, of course, the dowser has actually acquired an intuitive sense of geology, and the dowsing rod is just a prop.

Of course, I doubt you will find a dowser who is willing to compare his success rate to a geologist.