I just returned my BFG card and got it replaced a few weeks ago. It was only a couple of months old when it failed. Not the quality I expected from such a big-name company.

So who is making quality graphics cards and standing by their warranty these days?

It might lead to more sales, but not from me.

I won't buy them, and I won't try to download any of these games, even if they ARE successfully cracked. Besides being illegal, it would just give UbiS*** ammo for their claims that they are losing sales to pirates.

Don't buy and don't download cracked games. Maybe then all these idiot companies will get the message.

Then don't tell me there's a problem with my reasoning. Tell me that you are pointing out how it looks on the other side. There is a difference.

How does the existence, or non-existence, of middlemen affect my perceived value?

I see a hardcover at $20 - $30. I get a physical copy that can be used anywhere without special technology. I get the right to resell it when I am done with it. A hard drive crash will not delete it. To me, that has value.
A $14.99 digital copy that has none of these advantages seems to me to have little value. That perception does not depend on middlemen, or the cost of paper. It depends on the usefulness of the product. Whether or not the publisher and author save costs by publishing electronically is not my problem.

Considering the fact that you get no physical copy and are encumbered by DRM, it seems to me that fair pricing is as follows:
$9.99 for the period when the only physical copy available for sale is hardcover,
$4.99 once the paperback comes out.

Anything above these prices is, to me, a rip-off.

This explains why I have never purchased an e-book, yet the bookshelves in my home are overflowing.

I fail to see that this will do much good when the bittorrent protocol is blcked on many ISPs (including mine).

Bnetd was created to bypass Blizzard's cd key check so people could play pirated versions of Starcraft online.

No. That was just ONE of the things bnetd did. And the reason it bypassed cd-checks was because (as I read some years ago) Blizzard refused to provide the info that would have allowed the programmers to check cd-keys. The PURPOSE of bnetd was to create an open server product that would address many of the shortcomings of Battle.Net

Now, I have some sympathy for BLIZZARD not wanting info about their cd-key algorithm to become public, but the bnetd developers DID try to cooperate with BLIZZARD on that issue.