A female friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, is busy at the moment taking the final exams for her master’s degree. For the past two weeks, she’s been running to the university and back, making copies of her study materials at about 5 cents per page. Check out the pile of tree pelts that’s accumulated on my beloved colonial dining table:

There are probably hundreds of students over at the university right now who are doing the exact same thing. All told, that’s about 5000 pages, at a cost of over $100 in processing and copying fees, for each student taking the exams. Now, I wouldn’t presume to tell an institution of higher learning that they’re full of shit, but I can’t help think that it might have been a better use of their resources to distribute electronic versions of these materials. I mean, as long as they’re letting people copy them, why not try to keep the rainforest from getting chopped and cleared at the same time? Note the USB stick at the bottom left of that picture, which would hold 200 times as much information as the stack of folders it’s leaning on.

For purely scientific purposes, I combed a few BitTorrent sites to see if any of the textbooks my anonymous girlie was copying were available in E-Book format. Almost all of them were.

(plonk)

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