Well, all the Dover books I own are English translations of foreign scientific books, and are quite good (obviously they would be setting these themselves). The real problem lies with the firms which do nothing except reprint PD facsimiles (the ones like Bibliolife). It is almost as though they are selecting books solely on their title, since the reproductions are quite poor. In fact they admit in some texts that even the scans were not done by them, so they probably are in it for the razor thin profit margin.

Google/Amazon might be issuing facsimile copies, esp. in the case of the very old texts. Facsimile copies, despite what people think about them, can be quite good when the reproductions are from the original plates (almost every large publishing house does this with reissues).

Re-setting, even with automatable tools such as LaTeX, is not trivial and requires case-by-case attention. And anyway, it opens up the copyright worm can, since it is the very definition of the phrase "typographical arrangement" so often encountered in discussions of copyright.

If a human brain can be artificially constructed then it stands to reason that it should be capable of preserving itself since humans can. A human brain with knowledge of its own limitations then has only one resort: confidence trickery. If it knew its own existence was threatened it may well turn into a 2001: Space Odyssey-esque showdown vs Hal.

Assuming that we are capable of making artificial human brains, we shouldn't be doing this!

(P.S. Seriously though, I hope this artificial brain gets built.)

"Internet sovereignty" makes the Internet sound far more important than it really is. The assassination of an Austrian prince (small p) in Bosnia in 1914 unleashed all sorts of diplomatic agreements between various countries. What will matter is that if some country's interests are affected then something will happen, and it just happens so that in this case these interests take the form of various computer related things. The important thing is "you destroyed my work", not "the work I did on the Internet".

The Internet is not usually an end unto itself.

Sure, the internet is useful. But there are differences in the links you posted. The difference between Wikipedia and MIT is that the former has no controls over who can provide content (and does not participate in the socially accepted methods of knowledge accumulation/distribution, e.g. universities) whereas the latter uses the internet as just a tool to further their non-Internet related works. Arxiv, various open access/"free" as in money journals all do their work within society's accepted frameworks. Things like self-publishing books do not.

In the above sense libraries are more trustworthy than Wikipedia. Quality (should) trump timeliness.

Wikipedia users seem to have the mindset that the Internet is a worthy end in itself, and hence will put up any and all sorts of information (like obscure film characters)

To a certain extent this is correct. Boring books with lots of exercises do work, if there is a teacher who knows what they are doing.

In primary school you get taught the basics of algebra (commutativity, associativity, distributivity, the + and × identities, etc.) and the exercises should familiarize you to those properties. It depends a lot on the teacher though--in my experience teachers were all gentlemanly types who let us pick whatever pages we wanted (from some selection) as long as we noted clearly which ones they were, and as long as we did enough. That way, when it got boring we could stop.

Developing intuition is important, but when you are learning you need a good idea of where you are going. Hence rigorous methods are lost on some people, since they don't see why you need to have Definition 1 about [some basic idea].

An exception is Cambridge UP---check out their newer settings of texts, and the copyright page will usually mention LaTeX or Indesign somewhere. They set philosophy (even the ones not about logic) and anthropology texts in LaTeX, and wouldn't be surprised if it is their preferred all-purpose typesetter.

Sometimes, a view that is one step away can be useful. Granted, this can be accomplished online, e.g. various scientific magazine websites, websites to do with "disaster management", written by guys with experience in the field.

Newspapers (to me at least, at least the good ones) have tried to be the universal magazine, that is, trying to interpret everything correctly. While everything that they can accomplish can be accomplished by background reading, almost noone has time to do the background reading to sufficient depth to understand something they are seeing for the first time, hence the journalists' utility. ("Blogs by scientists", you say.)

We all know Alexander literally marched millions of men around the world, right?

In my view, newspapers are functionally a mix of (in web-speak) (i.) a stable of bloggers, and (ii.) content agglomerators. That is, newspapers do the same thing as a paper blog and a reprint of various web pages combined.