LOL! Oh to have mod points for you...

My buddy works in a factory that makes furniture. Guess what? They prefer iPads to the old notepads. It has reduced duplication of effort and sped up the entire workflow process by automating it. No need to wait until your floor check run (two or more hours) is over before heading back into the offices to get the data entered. It's all done from the floor.

Keep on trying to live out the old style. If it's not broke, fix it anyway because there's a much better way.

YMMV.

I don't know where you work but I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in the last 5 years which were actually necessary to do my job.

In the two places I speak of, there's a culture of sharing information via e-mail/PDF or, in my current role, via Google Docs.

I can't imagine going to a job which didn't act that way.

Call me crazy, but I bet that if we and everything we observed were made of anti-matter, we would just call it "matter". :p

Seriously, though, doesn't it have to be one or the other (since a mix will lead to annihilation)? I'm assuming the real question is why what we call "matter" managed to beat out anti-matter instead of a balance of both kinds being made at the beginning, which would then annihilate.

DNRTFA.

The publishers aren't the ones footing the bill for a major internet-connected business server operation ...

But it does get cranked into the price. TANSTAAFL: The customer pays for it somehow.

Good grief. Why did you wait UNTIL THE DAY they should be used to actually post about useful gadgets that require time to purchase, set up, and check out before use?

Now any of us who would have liked to obtain and use one of these gets to fret about how much BETTER the holiday could have been, rather than actually having the gadget operating and ENJOYING it.

TFA was updated two days ago so it obviously had been up for at least that long. A week or two lead would have been ideal.

This is right up there with not mentioning eclipses, meteor showers, and the like until the day of, or the day before, rather than at least a week back, so people who had forgotten about them have no time to arrange their schedules for a watch-it excursion. B-b

I'm pretty sure I can find something interesting to do with the extra years. :p

Ditto.

Even more so if, during the extra years, I am as healthy as I was at 20 (jogging as a normal gait) rather than at 65 (aching slightly all the time, pain in the morning, joints starting to fail, ...)

Coming from a line of people that typically lives to see birthdays numbered in the low nineties, I can say that even if I DON'T get any extra years it would still be a fine bonus to live just the rest of the same number without the inflammation and the impairment of body functions and healing due to cell senescence.

You draw this conclusion from a sample group of 2 with 2 groups? Not saying it is wrong but it seems more reasonable to conclude, from all the post here, that more data is needed to understand the issues that are creating the discrepancies. Furthermore, regardless of how genetically or socially predisposed a group is to avoid certain fields if that group represents a sizable portion of your society (i.e. women) then NOT having them in the work place can lead to some very bad internal social norms.

Charging as much for an ebook as a physical book is completely off-base. You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount.

On the other hand, a hardcopy book is an asset on which the publishers and booksellers can be charged an inventory tax. Thus it is often to their financial advantage to actually destroy them rather than hold them in the hope of future sales. Holding them effectively becomes a liability rather than an asset (though the tax man doesn't see it that way). This is one reason it becomes hard to find many books after a year or so. It's also a reason for deep discounts on books to clear inventory.

(Interestingly: Science Fiction is an exception. It has a track record of slow long-term sales - for decades - that makes it advantageous to hang on to physical copies for future sales.)

Electronic books don't have this problem. The publisher has only one copy (plus backups) and creates additional copies for sale on-the-fly.

As it is, much of the time you can buy a print edition cheaper than an eBook version on new releases...

When the value of the hardcopy book has actually gone negative, selling it for any price above the transaction cost is better than pulping it. Meanwhile, operating a major Internet-connected business server operation is not cheap.

Eliminate the inventory taxes on books, bringing the cost of holding onto a book until it sells down near the cost of the storage space and environmental control, and you should see a drastic change in hardcopy book availability and pricing structure. (Assuming electronic books haven't substantially displaced hardcopy by then.)

Did you actually read the article? The press release referred to in the summary and in the actual news articles (not the forum post you refer to) give current dates. The press release is for May 23, 2012. So, unsurprisingly, the reverse engineering for 40 year old tech has taken some time and has been continuously documented for at least the past few years but, CURRENTLY, Iran is claiming to be releasing it. That is news.