As a paperwhite owner, my device is almost always in airplane mode. Load books on it via Calibre over a USB cable and charge it every couple weeks. A modest investment of time and effort will thorougly break the "vice-like grip on the content" you referenced, but probably not for your father.

This... is retarded enough to loop all the way around the spectrum and land squarely on awesome.

This is where the thread needs to stop.
Really!

Are you naked in them?

They're not worthless, we all just pretend "they are needed to help with the general order of society". They're like a figurehead we can all point to. You know who maintains the general order of society? Me. You. Walk down the street and look around you. Those people are the ones who determine how we all behave. In some circumstances, with a very limited local and temporary effect (cop pulls you over or tells people to get out of the street) a cop can make a change, but only because he's carrying weapons and body armor with backup on tap. Really we all are the ones in charge. What happens when we all abandon the rules we know we should follow? I think it's usually called a riot.

They do serve a purpose, but I think it's really important to realize what that purpose IS before supposing that changing the police force will drastically change the people they police or society at large.

Who says it's the only one? Maybe it's only special because it's not properly secured against this type of attack.

You say that like it's a bad thing.
YOU GET A LIGHTSABER!
All else is of secondary importance.

Well, I had to get to page two of a google search on "Walmart Makes Stores Close" before I started coming to articles with numbers from sources I'd heard about, but here you'll find this quote:
"A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.".

This article was interesting to read but for those averse to clicking the link:
"But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.
And depending on the type of business, the impact of a Walmart moving in can be much worse. Persky says that the per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile.".

Really, that's all the time I'm willing to invest in refuting the idea that somehow WalMart fosters a diverse / thriving / healthy business ecosystem.

lol, yeah, and +50 to everyone who gets it.

Now THAT would be truly useful. I'd choose that over dirt repellant paint any day!

Do you not see that your two statements above oppose each other?
Are you relegating arguments (presumably in favor of ideas) you don't like to /dev/null or welcoming them?

I'll let your own professed rejection of ideas you don't like speak for itself...

Are we talking hand to hand combat with a gorn or a vulcan?

While I happen to agree with you, I voraciously listen to NPR's intelligence squared because an intelligent debate is great to educate you on viewpoints other than your own. Maybe, for your own sake, you should reconsider?

I'm visualizing a car with sparkling clean paint and an opaque coating of dirt on all the windows...

Our (US) criminal system was carefully set up to respect the rights of the citizenry, even if this meant some of the "bad guys" slipped through the cracks.
What we're talking about here is a tradeoff between
(1) LEO's rooting through your phone because they had a gun and body armor and took it from you.
vs.
(2) Your information being secure until said LEO can compellingly convince a judge to give them permission to search your effects.

Maybe these hyper tech savvy criminals are a threat to the populace at large, but I'm much more concerned about the erosion of our rights.