I don't understand why this is so complicated for the businesspeople who are trying to develop eBooks to grasp. The strength of eBooks, are (primarily): The lack of size and weight restrictions on the library a person can take with them, and (for all practical purposes) instantaneous content delivery. That's it. Everything else about the experience is completely sub-par to dead-tree editions. Instead on simply capitalizing on those strengths, they expound the weaknesses by adding on these ridiculous usability restrictions. Really? The *last* thing I want to worry about if I have a book I want to share with somebody is whether or not I've shared it before, or who is "share-worthy" or... being the receiver, that there is now a ticking time-bomb attached to when I have to read this book. Seriously? Libraries lend books for longer than that; and I have books as both a lender and lendee that have been out for over 2 YEARS! What is going to happen is the lendee is going to tell the lender, "Oh, don't send it to me yet, I won't have time until after the holidays." ---Great, that throws the burden back on me, the lender, to get back with them in order to lend them a book that I've already read! What's far more likely is eBooks just won't get lent, full stop. Things they should have focused on were the things that the technology makes possible, for example let me as the owner "pull back" my eBook from a lendee. Instead, they've just made more aggravation for me. Now, I didn't major in business, but I'm pretty sure there's a class called Don't_Annoy_Your_Customers_101 that's required for graduation. It's ironic but, everything Kindle has done has made the old paper editions look just that much more attractive. So, I'll keep buying them too.

Just follow the money, anybody's who's making money from illegal advertisements should be rounded up and charged. And, it's not that hard because somebody is making money somewhere or they wouldn't be doing it. And if money is changing hands from one person to the next then there's a trail, and they can follow it.

Aside from using a technological tracker, this doesn't seem like it's any more an infringement of privacy than simply having the police follow you everywhere you go. Which they also do not need a warrant to do. Now, to attach a tracker to a car sitting in a driveway would be trespassing... unless the car was parked on a public street, or inside a garage.

Feature updates (or upgrades) aside, how can they produce a fix to a known problem and then demand that the customer pay to get the fix? In the midst of Toyota's recall PR disaster you would think that maybe somebody at Oracle would have a clue that maybe this is a bad idea. As for comparisons to Linux distro's those arguments don't apply because you're paying for the convienience of the distro in collecting all the updates and packaging them for their OS. In Linux, you can always go out and get the updates yourself directly from the package maintainers directly. --That's simply not possible with Solaris security patches. The only place to get them is from Sun. If they want to charge for "feature" upgrades, fine. But to deliberately withhold security patches is irresponsible and bad business.

I guess I'm objecting to the notion that being male is the norm.

Personally, I find the term "women monkeys" far more disturbing...