Or... blame both?

Breakdown: The lighted case gets its power from the connectors that hold the Kindle in the case. The unlit case has these two connectors physically connected even though there is no light. Putting the Kindle into the unlit case where the metal contacts are clean causes a short between the two connectors.

The ability to get power through those connector points was by design in the Kindle or the lighted case never would have been able to be designed the way it was.

It sounds to me like the engineer(s) involved with the unlit case did not communicate well with the Kindle engineers or vise versa.

In recent memory, the only times I have ever contacted a store was to see if they had a "must have now" item in stock so I could go there and buy it. For all other types of purchases where I know what I want I will shop around online, read reviews, and finally buy at an online merchant I trust (Amazon and Newegg being two examples).

If I don't really know what I want and am just "looking around" then I will often do that online as well as at stores. The problem with stores is that there is a "shipping & handling" cost of me getting in my vehicle and driving there and possibly still not getting what I want if it isn't there. I have a minimum of a 15 minute drive from home to get to a store front. I'm there in less than 1 minute online and don't have to pay for gas or deal with travel time.

The real issue as I see it is that online shopping removes a lot of overhead from the whole shopping experience. The smart stores will come up with an online storefront that gives people access to their inventory with a lower-cost shipping option. Most online portals to physical stores are a horrid approximation of the shopping experience you get at sites like Amazon and provide no real advantage, especially with Amazon Prime shipping ($80 per year for two-day shipping on many, many items and a $3.99 one-day shipping option).

On a side note, it isn't that hard to put your store up on a site like Amazon. And for the brick-and-mortar stores that don't want the added expense of creating/maintaining a good e-commerce experience, setting up a storefront on an established site could be a good choice.

I wish more local stores had an online portal. I like supporting my local economy but I don't like spending a 10% - 100% premium to do it. I spend $3 in gas and 30 minutes in time just to make one trip to "town". Yeah, I live out in the middle of nowhere.

Imagine the power to turn any cheese into Swiss cheese... !!!

Your head is a horse-cock dildo?

I vote we send in the Viking Kittens.

The vast majority of crap on 4Chan is not worth looking at... whether you're a girl, a boy, or something else entirely.

It would take a lot more than 15000 people to make an impact. Amazon probably has 100000+ people browsing their site at any given second of the day, especially this time of year.

Is Amazon selling that book or is someone else selling it through their site? Do you realize how easy it is to publish an ebook on Amazon?

What about the ISPs of ISPs? Will T1's get usage costs, too? Where does it end? Can the owners of the trunk lines charge for usage? Will the government start taxing Internet usage?

The scary part is that usage costs can trickle upstream very easy. You pay your ISP for usage and then they have to pay their upstream for usage, etc., etc., etc. How many times can the same data be charged for? This could easily cascade into an Internet meltdown. Especially if you consider other countries might be charged for their traffic to and from the US and the the rest of the world gets in on the game.

It's a doom and gloom scenario, but one that is very much possible.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It used to just be patched by them but politics has allowed it to be fully paved several layers deep.

Speak for yourself!

Wait... err... never mind. :p

My point is that many of you are being too hard on Amazon. You want to fight the real fight in this then fight the government, not the businesses. Businesses make decisions based on their bottom line (most of the time) so will "cave" as you say on what they perceive as a threat to it.

Beat up the government or those in it that make these kinds of threats and/or decisions. Simply put, yelling at the companies for doing what the government tell them to do will get you nowhere (or at least close enough to it).

Google has caved to the government on several occasions. What are you smoking?

I think many of you are being way too hard on Amazon for this WikiLeaks thing. Considering the US government considers WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, please name one US company that would have not caved. And then tell me what that company is doing to help WikiLeaks.