"Why not just buy a paper version (to ease your conscience) and download it off BitTorrent?"

I've strongly considered doing exactly that. But in the long run I think it's better to support those authors and publishers who are doing ebooks right, in order to demonstrate to the others that there's a market there. Paper+piracy, insofar as it has any effect, seems more likely to discourage them from moving to digital distribution at all.

"From a purely pragmatical point of view, just buy books in formats for which DRM stripping tools are readily available at the moment."

From an arguable-equally-pragmatic but slightly more forward-looking point of view, just acquire books which don't have DRM in the first place. Webscriptions, indie publishers, Gutenberg & Co, whatever. Paying people for trying to screw you over is not inducive to progress.

Yes, you'll miss out on reading a good number of books you wanted to read. That's what makes it a principled stand; you're actually sacrificing something.

The really depressing thing about that is that the earlier script drafts had the humans' brains being used as a parallel computing engine for running AIs

Maybe they were worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit by Dan Simmons.

"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"? More irony: I'd never even heard of that, let alone read it, and from a quick Google it's the only story set in that universe that I haven't read. It's like rain, on your wedding day.

Obviously I'm not going to argue about the merits of that particular story - there are several of Bujold's peripheral and other-universe novels that didn't grab me at all - but I do think you were unlucky in your sample. The Vorkosigan books IMHO could serve as the dictionary definition of "a good compelling story with characters I can identify with".

The first couple of novels (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) are fine, but a bit Mills-and-Boone and not especially representative. The best of the lot to my mind are "Mirror Dance", "Memory" and "A Civil Campaign", but you'd be missing a whole truckload of backstory if you jumped straight in there. The best of the short stories is probably "Borders of Infinity".

There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader.

Oh, c'mon. Yes, Sturgeon's Law applies here like anywhere else, but are you really claiming that writers like Lois Bujold don't appeal to casual genre readers? Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga and not been utterly bowled over by it?

The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed

To be fair, that's a problem with some legitimate content as well. I bought an E-Reads title recently and it was just appalling - probably averaged around an error per (small) page, including one in the very first paragraph. It was very very obvious that nobody had even glanced at the text after scanning it.

assassination of a prince from memory

An Archduke, if you want to be picky. But nice analogy nonetheless. Like WW1, I think this is a fight that's been waiting to happen for a while now. Like WW1, the specifics of the flashpoint incident are largely irrelevant.

Unlike WW1, the two sides seem far from evenly matched this time. My gut says the pro-WikiLeaks side will get tired and give up; there's nobody paying them to keep going, and that matters in the long haul. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.

Buddhism has four genders - man, woman, ladyboy and hermafrodites

hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair

Personally, I care because when I pay money to Amazon for a Kindle book, I'm sending them an implicit message that I approve. That I consider it acceptable for them to be locking me in to their walled garden and stripping me of my basic consumer rights while pretending that this is normal and nothing has changed and this is still a "sale", no really, it is.

I do not approve. I do not consider it acceptable. And I do not believe that Amazon will ever grow an ethical backbone on this issue until they start losing sales because of it.

Paint or tape over the webcam lens. It's the only way to be sure.

I can still write C code in emacs and compile with the same makefile under gcc if I wanted to. I can still call the same POSIX libraries.

And you can still write C code in Notepad and compile with the same makefile under nmake if you want to. You can still call the same Win32 libraries. They haven't gone anywhere.

The marketing is all on the shiny new stuff, sure, but nobody's forcing you to use it at gunpoint, any more than they're forcing you to switch to Ruby on Rails or Erlang in the FOSS world.

Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.

A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but these days I'm not so sure. Even if you would have stayed away from templates, virtuals, exceptions, RTTI and other features that obviously impact size/speed, I can think of several possible reasons to stay in C:

1. C is the lingua franca of languages; if you write a module in C, pretty much everything else can call it without too much effort. A C++ API, on the other hand, can't easily be called from anything except C++ (and preferably C++ built with the same compiler and options). Yes, you can hide your C++ implementation behind a C interface, but that's not free.

2. C++ tooling is improving (LLVM's Clang in particular looks very promising) but basic text-processing tools work a lot better for a language without overloads etc. Think grep, ctags and the like.

3. C++ is a huge language, and people tend to settle into their own subsets and idioms to make it manageable. For a solo project that's fine. For a big group project, especially one without a recognized benevolent dictator, it's a recipe for pain.

Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.

I've seen that factoid quoted before, and never understood it. If Ford thought he'd benefit from a 40-hour limit, why wouldn't he just impose a 40-hour limit on his own employees? Why lobby for legislation that would grant the same benefits to his less-enlightened competitors?

Surely the hard-headed capitalist approach would have been to let the slave-drivers put themselves out of business through lower productivity.

First, this isn't Adobe Reader, thank Zod. It's Google's own implementation.

Second, I have (entirely speculative) doubts that the bundling of Flash is happening on its own merits. I suspect a quid pro quo was agreed, whereby Google bundles Flash and offers moral support against Steve Jobs, and in return Adobe extends Flash to support the new WebM video format. This extends its reach to (most) users of IE and Safari, neither of which will be adding native support.

Getting enough people to use your social network so that you reach the critical mass Facebook has is the tough part.

Or maybe just the luck part. I think a kind of weak anthropic principle applies when talking about network-effect successes. They succeeded as a matter of a posteriori necessity, because otherwise people wouldn't be sitting around talking about why they succeeded.