I've done commuting by train from my farm in rural Oregon to a town that was merely CLOSE to one served by train. It's not easy. I wrote up my experiences here: http://www.hightechwriting.com/amtrak_commute.html Far from reducing one's dependence on cars, this method requires TWO cars: one at both ends of the train trip.(Get in car #1, drive 45 minutes to the Amtrak station at Albany, Oregon, take the train to Vancouver, Washington, get in car #2, drive 20 minutes to Sharp Electronics.) Since car #2 spends 7 days a week at the train station, it should be low-value but still reliable. This worked pretty well for me, since I found driving the entire distance dangerously exhausting, but it shows just how screwy using public transportation can be if you don't live in the city center.

Yes, that's the original idea. The old system was good because the author got one more 28-year inning if he felt like going to the trouble of filling out a form. Usually, this didn't happen -- in the author's mind, the work was already abandonware by then. If we'd kept the old system, non-renewed works written in 1981 would be entering the public domain today. To attempt to find the right term, you'd want to look not only at the income curve but the abandonware curve -- how long it took the artist to become convinced that the work had no further financial potential. You can't alter copyright law successfully if you freak out all the artists.

The old 28 years + optional renewal was a brilliant system. Abandonware entered the public domain after 28 years. The vast bulk of copyrighted material is abanoned well before this. The tiny fraction of material that's still making money after 28 years could be renewed for another 28. Also, you don't have to hire detectives to find out when an obscure author died, just to figure out whether a work was in the public domain or not. The old system was better.

Lighting Source (http://www.lightningsource.com) charges 1.5 cents per page plus 90 cents for the cover. They're the biggest US print-on-demand printer. A 300-page book would thus cost $5.40 to print. Normal industry rule-of-thumb is for retail price to be 5x the printing cost (retailer and wholesaler markup, royalties, risk, profit, etc.), or $27. Don't know why Blackwell's price is 2x this.

I write user manuals for network equipment, and IT guys are just like toddlers. They slap in a piece of equipment, do the usual things to it, and only if it doesn't work do they engage their memories about what they've been told about THIS box, as opposed to some internalized archetypal box. That's why it's so important to make interfaces work the way people expect them to, with your special secret sauce elsewhere. Car makers figured this out ages ago. All cars have a steering wheel instead of joystick or a rudder or whatever, because people are going to get in and go before they stop to figure out the controls.