It's not difficult to figure out why PDFs are targeted.

1. Most big corporations and academia use PDFs for everything from forms to memos to sending photos of last week's retreat.
2. Most big corporations and academia hire super-specialists that can, for example, diagnose a medical issue that occurs in 1 in 10,000,000 people within 5 minutes, but these people cannot function in the larger world and have no time, patience, or idea of what to do with these things you call "files."
3. Most of these aforementioned corporations and academia will have ridiculously oversized bureaucracies that can agree to standards once every 15 years, are easily swayed by easy solutions, such as those advertised by Adobe, and don't really know or care about whether anything gets done so long as the policies they set 15 years ago are followed to the letter.
4. And yes, Adobe makes awful, bloated software that's full of security holes and doesn't get patched for weeks or months after those holes are made public.

In other words, the issue is roughly 25% bad software and 75% PEBKAC.

...welcome our new all content, all service providing do-no-evil overlords.

This is because the average person probably isn't thinking much farther ahead than what he'll have for lunch tomorrow. By the time he realizes he won't have anything for lunch tomorrow he's no longer in a position to do anything about it.

It's taco time!

It's not even illegal then if the government sanctions your monopoly.

Obligatory UserFriendly

...otherwise hardware vendors would fail. By us here I mean the folks who assemble computers from individual parts because the stuff sold pre-assembled is garbage hardware with garbage bloatware pre-installed. So I don't see how 90% of the PC market will ever be portable platforms, let alone netbooks.

Nationalism doesn't count for nearly as much as it did during the Cold War. Big business owns government, big business is multinational, and big business is connected with big business. If India or China put a permanent settlement on the moon before the US it'll be only because big business found a cheaper, more desperate labor pool there.

And it's a great way to cull excess population without the social stigma of war...

Back in my day we strapped our TI-82s to our hairy forearms with duct tape and we liked it!

As far as I can recall from when I tried version 4 a long while ago, Bibble doesn't allow for much pixel pushing. Has this changed in 5? Was it always there and I had just missed it? Without these fine adjustments it doesn't matter how well Bibble handles the raw file because you still have to use another image editor in the end and that leads you to GIMP and loss of nearly half your bits.

The judge in that trial was owned by corporate interests. Probably not so in this one.

I'd mod up parent post if I had the points. It's great seeing a case like this take one small step forward, but unfortunately it's a bit like skipping through a minefield where the mines are politicians and public officials whose pockets are lined with MAFIAA money and the minefield ends miles away. I don't think we're gonna make it.

So after churning out a decade's worth of craptastic software somebody more or less important finally caught on to their scam? This only a few short years after the general public caught onto their scam, causing a drop in sales and consequently bringing on cries of, "Oh noes! PC gaming is coming to an end!" and, invariably, "OMG PIRATES!" I'm guessing we'll see a few more years of EA squandering its IPs, putting out bug-ridden, graphically intense, empty gaming rehashes of previously successful games before all of its investors and high level crooks move on to start the cycle over again somewhere else.