"Dearer than paperbacks" means they are priced far too high. With a paperback I can donate it to charity when I finish. Valuing it at used-book prices, I still get a 60% tax writeoff. Given a marginal tax rate of 50%, the book then costs me a net 70% of its face value.

I can't donate e-books, so for me to break even the price needs to be no more than 70% of the paperback face value.

I really appreciate the job you've done.

As a software developer myself (software engineering for environmental modeling; high performance computing), the one thing I do wish for is more "devel" and "static-devel" library packages.

Which is one of the bones I have to pick with RedHat, by the way: it feels as though they've gone out of their way to make cross-distro software development difficult.

See http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html:

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might...

...an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany...

There is an economic analysis out there (sorry, don't have the URL at my fingertips) that compares book authorship/publishing/reading in strict-copyright 19th century England with no-copyright 19th century Germany.

German authors, publishers, and readers were all far better off than English ones. The article explains the reason for this seemingly-paradoxical result.

And the reasons hold, I'm sure, for current DRM. FWIW.

Here's a very simple start:

Loser pays the legal fees.

If the plaintiff loses, he pays double.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivens . Basically, in cases of denial of Constitutional rights, the doctrine of sovereign immunity does not apply, and the individual bureaucrats can be held individually responsible. You might think of it as the "Nuremberg War Crimes" clause in US law...

He ought to sue those persons responsible, as individuals. Going all the way to the top. IMNHO, there is more than cause for him to do so. And he certainly has standing...

A few multi-million-dollar judgements against individual TSA agents and managers would do a lot pour encourager les autres.

See He ought to sue the persons responsible, as individualspour encourager les autres.

...and now if only I didn't have to deal with the (recent!) bugs in KDE4 and various video drivers that don't respect xrandr --fb ... --panning ... or xorg.conf/Display/Monitor/Virtual ... !

And put in correct support for all the KDE-bugs associated with xrandr --panning !!

I'm not running "old hardware" and all these KDE bugs, due to developers making incorrect X assumptions instead of actually knowing what they're doing, are the last thing keeping me from running KDE4.

FWIW.

...and is hard to build on non-*buntu systems.

I agree -- and I like the unified environment. That's why I use seamonkey.

Measure the amount of travelers time that TSA costs in waking lifetimes, and then tell me which is more deadly: the terrorists or the TSA. Run the numbers and you'll see that the TSA is the most deadly terrorist organization on the planet.

At least some nVidia drivers do not play well with legacy Motif/X apps (using lesstif or OpenMotif); RedHat does not play well with OpenMotif, for that matter.

And at the time, they promised us that 16:10 aspect ratio was the long-term compromise between the 4:3 that computer people wanted and the 16:9 the media people wanted. It shows that the media people are liars! (but we knew that already...)

Did you ever compare the output between 300DPI vs 600DPI vs 1200DPI laser printers (or 4800DPI Linotype)? It's definitely there -- and printer resolution is *way* beyond the resolutions we are discussing for monitors.

FWIW.