That's wonderful as long as Amazon is still in business. Yeah, you can say that Amazon staying in business is probably a safe bet, but shit happens. For the average user unDRMing their already DRMed books isn't much of an option, and if Amazon goes tits up for some reason or decides to shut down their Kindle service then they can say byebye to all their stuff the second something happens to w/e devices they have their books on. DRM free content doesn't just let you access stuff across a number of devices now, it lets you actually hang onto your digital content past the life of w/e service and the life of whatever format it was in originally.

I think he sold it because he valued the money more than he valued the right to do what he wanted with the script.

Find and watch "The Phantom Edit." That, and a few other tweaks, make the movie a million times better.

No, you can avoid a monopoly by going without it's services or products. You might end up either slightly inconvenienced, or living like a cave man, or dieing from some horrible disease because said monopoly makes some drug that you need to not die slowly and painfully, but you can avoid it. Think "Matrix" with this. As long as you technically have a choice, it is all good and wholly acceptable. The second you don't, there are issues. Of course, some of us live in the real world. Where "I can technically disassociate myself from these bastards" doesn't really work out to much of a choice.

Don't quite keep up with social networking crap, but doesn't Diaspora have a similar feature to this, or am I remembering something wrong?

Whoosh!

The same way it was a myth with PalmOS. I see the Android/iOS battle going down the same way too, even with Apple being the sole vendor of iOS devices.

...the same thing happened with Boxee and Hulu after Boxee supposedly had Hulu's blessing to integrate Hulu into Boxee. A little while later, Hulu Desktop was released. I guess the networks want people using their TVs to watch their on the actual TV channels.

I'll have to disagree with you there. 6.06, Dapper Drake, the original LTS release (that they took 3 extra months on) was superb in every way, and (at least for me) an improvement over the previous release in stability and features. Then the next release was rushed out the door after three whole months of development, and is the one release I ever wholly passed up. The Latest, Greates, and Most Shiny is what Ubuntu is about. It was meant to be a more current version than w/e Debian's current release is, while still offering people a more stable system than if they used Debian testing. If you want slower and more stable, go with Lenny. Or wait until Squeeze is released, it should be sometime this year.