My Father-in-Law and I are both IT Professionals who are also serious literary geeks. We both have similar views to yours on the benefits of physical books. We also have noticed that there are two type of "Geeks" out there -- the "real" geek and the "cool" geek. The cool geek is the guy with all the newest gadgets and a "phone" that does everything except make him coffee in the morning, they buy the tech because it's "cool". The real geek wants a cell phone that is just a cell phone, but does it's job better than any other phone out there, the real literary geek will most likely never switch to e-books unless they are dragged screaming and kicking the entire way because physical books are "just a book" but it does what it is meant to do, and so far it does it better than any e-book out there.

I have not read the Article, however what I find interesting is that no one has mentioned standard deviation. The standard deviation for an IQ test is +/- 15 points. This means that a difference of 4 points is, quite frankly, nothing. I do not smoke but I find it funny how certain groups of people are using IQ tests to make themselves feel superior, which is all these "studies" basically amount to. A previous study showed that Atheists had higher IQs than religious people, however the difference was, once again, well within the standard deviation. As a side note the article for the Atheists article also mentioned something about Liberals vs Conservatives. Show me a study in which more than 100 non-smokers/Atheists/Liberals score 20-30 points higher than smokers/Religious/Conservatives and then you've got yourself a theory, otherwise, there is nothing to see here.

Sadly, I don't think you're far off the mark there. I am not a member of PETA or anything like that but the thing that really irritates me about animal abuse is the animal can not speak up in its own defense.

Ahh, yes, forgot to mention that. We do use a Windows environment.

The compile into an .exe is only a requirement so that it could be automated to run as soon as the backup/robocopy is done. If this is possible using Perl, maybe by making the .bat file call something else which would in turn call the Perl code that would also work. My programming skills are rudimentary at best, so if this can be done that would work out great. Thank you for the suggestion.