OK, you hate the business model of publishers, so you want to do the unprincipled thing and read their stuff without paying for it and then rant about it. Instead of ranting you could find publishers whose business model you DO like--those that release DRM-free works--and be positive and support their business instead of ranting against those whose business you don't like, while benefiting from their labor. You would rather sink to the level of the publishers you despise. But it looks like you're okay with that.

"But DRM just does not work for consumers"? I don't buy that. The scores of DVD and Bluray players and discs that have been sold suggests otherwise, as does the number of Netflix subscribers and the number of Kindles sold.

DRM did not work for music for two reasons. First, network access was not as ubiquitous in the Napster days as it is now. Back then, if you wanted to listen to your music on the go, you needed a local copy. Now you can get one over a cellular network. Second, there were no business models around digital music back then. Now there are. Apple of course did big business in DRMed music tracks before finally removing the DRM.

Further, if you want to put your Kindle book on everything, you can. You can read it on a PC, iPhone, Android, or Kindle.

So you have the foresight to ask a lawyer what to do if pulled over "after having a few," but not enough foresight to realize that driving "after having a few" is dangerous?

You sir deserve what you get if you plow into a tree. Unfortunately your victims will not deserve what they get if you run a red light and plow into a family of four.

Heh. I told myself I should't care, so I bought a MacBook. I found the OS far from perfect, but usable. The screen however was unusable as I couldn't sit anywhere that had a big light source behind me--a window or even a moderately sized lamp. Seemed to be a huge step backward, and for what? I realized these things matter after all, sold the machine on eBay, and now I only buy enterprise class laptops because these are the only ones with the good sense to have screens that don't double as mirrors.

The DSLR does you no good if it is sitting at home, as it often will be because it is huge and clunky. The old quip is that the best camera is the one that you have with you.

Furthermore, the iPhone has a key feature that most camera makers have willfully ignored: network connectivity. It can instantly share photos with other people. This boost of connectivity, combined with a much more convenient form factor, trumps a marginal increase in photo quality for most people.

First I see people using Change.org to complain about Electronic Arts and its DRM; now this, a "petition" to ask Google to keep a product?

To me it cheapens the notion of a "petition" to use it for this. The Change.org homepage spotlights domestic violence, migrant workers, firefighters, and more.

It just seems whiny and self-entitled to me to gear up and "petition" a private company on such trivial stuff as an RSS reader, or DRM. Just find another reader. But, if Change.org does not want to filter out this crap...

"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers,"

Interesting, that is identical to the experience that I have with Debian. Even people on Arch don't need to "recompile the kernel to adjust this or that." But I hope he enjoys his Mac.

HTML, entirely on one webpage is available for every GNU project I have ever seen.

Stopped looking at WaPo front page some time ago because of the horrible stories there, but would read stories in it on occasion if linked or sent to me. Stopped reading WaPo entirely after this complete junk free internet story. I live in DC and local blogs are better news sources than WaPo for local news, and for national news there are plenty of other sources. WaPo is never anything but an utter waste of time. Too bad--newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein and all that.

Therefore, you routinely visit websites whose business models are based on ads?

It means you want something for nothing. You want to look at websites that cost money to operate, but you do not want to support them.

It's not stealing. It's not a crime. But it is childish and hypocritical.

"But I want to see the content." waa, waa. The grown up, principled thing to do would be to avoid websites that have annoying advertisements.

That's okay though. Everybody wants something for nothing. But the old "unscrupulous advertisers" or "I don't want to be profiled" or "I'm doing them a favor, I've been online since 1997 and I've never clicked on an advertisement, I'm saving them bandwidth" is just unprincipled crap. Just admit you want something for nothing rather than coming up with ridiculous rationalizations.

Wikipedia actually works reasonably well for articles like this. Just look at the end result: articles about Obama and Romney. These are detailed articles where nearly every assertion bears a citation. It is difficult to find something like this anywhere else, much less for free on the Internet.

What is no surprise after looking at articles like Obama and Romney is that the number of Wikipedia editors is dropping off. No casual user can expect to edit anything in these articles beyond the most trivial typo. To get anything into these articles requires the dedication and know-how to wage a long battle to get even a sentence in. With it being difficult to get anything into high-profile articles, and with many low-profile articles facing deletion by the notability nuts, casual participation is going to drop. What I'm curious about is what the long-term effect of this will be--maybe higher quality on some articles, maybe more subtle but pervasive cultural bias (the demographics of dedicated Wikipedians are not diverse) and maybe less coverage of things that notability nuts deem not notable.

Just use software that shares your philosophy, where updates don't remake the whole software package. Go with one of the less well-known window managers like Openbox or FVWM or even a minor desktop like XFCE. Build workflows around old mature tools like shells and terminals rather than graphical file managers. There are lots of projects that are not trying to become the next big thing, but none of them are associated with KDE, GNOME, or Ubuntu.

It's nice when the proponents of a piece of technology can be honest about its shortcomings and acknowledge them, rather than trying to sell their technology. It's the honest response vs. the fanboy response.

Problem: "It's too slow."
Honest response: "Yeah, sometimes it is slow. Here are the design compromises that make this slowness necessary. Furthermore nobody has volunteered the manpower to make it faster. If you need something faster, try x."
Fanboy response: "Yeah well, anytime I try to do something, it's fast enough."

Problem: "There's practically no static typechecking."
Honest response: "You're right, there isn't. There are ways you can deal with that, such as writing tests and thinking carefully about your code. The lack of static typechecking allows us to build a language that is better in this way and in that way. If you want static typechecking, try language x. Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to the way we did things, but it best suited our objectives and if your objectives are aligned with ours, consider using our system."
Fanboy response: "Yeah well, if you're relying on a compiler to catch all your bugs, you're in trouble."

I know there are a lot of C++ haters here but having read some of what Bjarne Stroustrup has written, he typically offers honest responses, not fanboy responses. I was impressed with an article on the Arch Linux wiki once for the same reasons, as it gave an honest response to "it takes too long to install" (which was something like "yeah, it takes awhile, which has advantages and disadvantages. Try Ubuntu for quick installs.") rather than a fanboy response ("quick installs, who wants that crap anyway, it will just give you a junk system.")

To be fair to GVR this was a short informal article; it may not be fair to expect him to expound in this kind of a format.

Using Adblock reeks of hypocrisy to me. "I like the content your site provides, and I like it enough to go to your site, but you choose to pay for your site through ads, which I don't like, so I'm going to block them."

I first thought of this when I used Adblock and I visited Distrowatch and a bunch of images were missing. It turned out that the site owner does things to deliberately mess with the folks who use Adblock with huge block lists. I thought about it and realized he is right. I like Distrowatch, it costs me nothing, yet I'm going to block the ads that support it? Not right.

Yeah a lot of sites have annoying ads. I don't visit them. I used to read the Denver Post's website. It has annoying pop unders. I stopped visiting. I have sent emails to other sites saying "I like your content, your ads are too annoying, so I stopped visiting."

I also pay for websites that have good content that is worth paying for.