I moved a lot in recent years. Will move again in 3 years time (has to do with the job). Turning all that paper weight and volume into digital files and the adjustable font sizes are the real killer e-reader features. Instant dictionary look-ups when reading a foreign language also a huge bonus, although I reckon there is less people that benefits from that.

I think there are a lot of digital hoarders. Just like the people who just hoarded mp3/porn/videos in their computers, now some do that with books as well.

I believe most of those downloaders were not going to be customers anyway.

You clearly never studied math at university level. Proofs can be written in different ways, some easier some harder to read. The choice of which theorems to include and which to leave out also means a lot. Having good exercises lists is also part of being a good book. Sometimes, some math techniques lose relative importance, because their applications lose relative importance.

Also, in older books it was prohibitively expensive to include many figures or graphs. Equations were also expensive to typeset, so older books have less equations. Even the choice of how to write equations was different (as typesetting a large fraction of many variables was much more expensive than just doing "alpha^2 beta bla bla * / ( \int_{x=0}^{1000} gamma bla bla bla)" on a single line of text.

When I was in university, I used books written by the professor teaching the course itself. That happened with 3 different professors.

One of them would let us have the .PS file of his book and print it out ourselves (actually, many of us had access to his LaTeX files). A second required us to buy his book or check it out of the library. The third guy was a very senior man, who had already been legally retired but couldn't care less and still taught all sorts of Analysis courses (mostly functional analysis). Many of his books were not in print anymore, but regardless of being in print or not (he still owned the copyright to all of them) and had clear instructions on the university copy shop that anyone at anytime could make a copy of them.

Not all scientific authors are like (Oxford's?) Atkins ("Physical Chemistry") who made a small fortune selling textbooks.

> Apple can try what it wants but if anyone makes a simple complaint, Apple is going to lose. Even this new thing is meaningless. In Europe, you got two years warranty at least. Take Apple to court, you will win since the law leaves no room for interpretation.

Some people prefer not having to take a seller to court in order to have the law honored. Most people do not have the time nor the inclination to bring a random seller to court. So this matters because it settles the record straight for all consumers without any of them having to bother much (other than paying for the taxes that bring both the law and its enforcement).

Perhaps if you are a lawyer or has lawyers as close friends of family, "taking someone to court" is going to be easy, but it sure as hell not as trivial as "coming back to the shop where product was bought and handling in (without any arguing) for repair".

This story is also about Apple not publicly acknowledging that they had to honor a 2 year warranty and doing that by default as well.

I think it does matter what is Apple's stated default warranty duration. There is a difference between having a certain right and having this right being effectively respected without hassles. I don't doubt that before this you would be able to get the 2 year warranty honored, the question is whether that would take a visit to the shop, or if that would take pursuing a legal complaint of some sort. Perhaps you if are a lawyer, that is trivial to do, but if you have no idea how to bring them into legal compliance (say, you are an expat and don't even speak the local language correctly), it can be a real PITA.

Think about getting a refund for your Windows license because you refused the EULA and the EULA tells you to talk to the seller to get your money back. Regardless of your legal merit, shops -in general- won't reimburse you for your Windows license. People that go as far as getting a lawyer involved get their money back (and get a Slashdot story), most people don't bother.

The only issue with that is that people keep repeating it since about 1997. (I use Linux as my *only* OS since 95 ;-))

+1000.

Most FOSS projects are eternally locked into a cycle between effective version 0.3 and 0.6. One they reach 0.6, people decide to rewrite everything, because of a new library, new paradigm, or just new developers who can't be bothered to deal with the old code. Then the actual version is increased, but the effective version goes back to 0.3.

Features are dropped, working stable code is deleted, and the bozos^H^H^H, er, devs start all over while users are left in the rain.

That is why even people who CAN / WOULD bother to download and install a different OS (than the one that came with their computers) are not bothering with Linux.

People who have to fill government provided PDFs have to 'edit PDFs'. Your government may not need that, but for me I either fill PDF forms (and get to keep a digital copy) or I need to print and fill. Guess which one I prefer?

Dosing a "minor issue"? I'd say that dosing (necessary to cause certain effects) is a fairly major issue for anything you consume. Water will put you in a coma after drinking a high enough "dosage" of it.

What was the worse medical consequences you ever saw in a person due to caffeine addiction? What about the worse medical consequences due to cocaine addiction? Get serious.