Nothing beats Zotero, and AFAIK that doesn't work with Word. (In brief: a Firefox extension that recognizes citations to papers on the web and lets you add them to a list of references which can be exported to BibTeX.)

I'm not sure about ligatures, but it has a great equation editor: http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html

I don't think so. It's true that only someone else who has Lyx (or TeX knowledge) can modify a shared file, but since Lyx is free and easy to download, I don't see how that presents a problem.

You might as well say that you can't share Word documents with people who don't have Word. Except that Word isn't free, so that is a problem.

Why not turn the free reproduction of ebooks to your advantage?

Even the lowliest pirate will feel guilty about pirating an ebook they could have easily bought for $1. And since a download costs you nothing, unlike print books, you'll profit even at that ridiculously low price.

Sure, most of your customers will be curious people who buy things on the web for the hell of it, rather than the very small number actually interested in your field, but you might actually make more that way.

Meanwhile, Kurzweil and co. have been working on cellphone software that allows blind people to photograph text and have it read aloud to them.

Will that also be disabled? Or will the users just be sued?

Narrator: You wouldn't steal a spaceship...
Bender: Or would I?

Not limited to binary. Any base k number ending in 0 is a multiple of k (and therefore equal to k, composite, or both).

How long will it take for someone to combine a netbook with a digital ink screen (ala e-book readers)?

A few years ago South African university students started a similar project: Free High School Science Texts, because many school textbooks are printed outside SA and are too expensive in the local currency. It's limited to physics, chemistry and maths though, which I suppose limits reduces the chance of 'debate'.

For that I'd use a laptop or USB harddrive.

Not trees, algae. If oil is black gold, I think we'll soon be calling this green gold.

One advantage: you can slow them down. Humans can't post thousands of spam posts per minute. For a bot to mimic a human, they also have to avoid doing that kind of behaviour. While that doesn't eliminate the problem, it certainly reduces it.

Bicycles are great ... if the terrain around you is relatively flat.

Ballmer Peak

I knew there was a downside to being allowed to use Python...