I thought about going that route, but had a horrible suspicion that the installed base is what publishers look at when deciding how and where to release ebooks. From that perspective, the fact that you're keeping your Kindle clean is irrelevant. It's another Kindle, and as such is another argument for them to release with DRM since that's "obviously" what customers are happy with.

Shrug.

IMO, anyone who bought a Kindle has already made a pretty clear statement that they're perfectly happy with DRM and willing to reward it financially. What do they expect?

What on earth are you wittering about? DRMed video *is* encumbered. Occasionally that encumbrance is justifiable. My beef with DRM is that you don't own the things you "buy". With rentals there's no pretence that you're buying anything, hence no problem. What's your point?

*Could* be used for more, sure. *Is* used for more - no, not for anything significant.

The view that you present suggests that you've sunk a fair amount of time and effort into something that was clearly a pointless, dead-end technology from the start, and you're really really REALLY pissed off about it. I might sympathize if you weren't being quite so obnoxious.

I see absolutely no need to make the browser do everything that Silverlight does. I don't object to plugins in absolute terms. I object to one honking huge plugin that sets itself up as a platform-within-a-platform.

The rest of your post seems to be arguing against the voices in your head, so I'll leave it there.

DId I say it was? I don't have anything against DRM for video rental; in that context I'd even call it sensible. My point is that if (as seems to be the case) the only traction Silverlight has got is in playing video, that niche would be much better served by a smaller and far less general plugin.

Do you not understand the concept of "attack surface"? Do you not think that a general-purpose platform maybe has a larger one than, say, a dedicated video player? Or are you just trolling, as your tone suggests?

The idea that a general-purpose applet platform, with all the attendant security risks, is worth keeping simply to play DRM-encumbered video strikes me as utterly daft. It's like keeping a rabid rottweiler in your kid's playroom so that they'll have something to draw.

Please, please swap apartments with my current neighbour.

I think you've misread TFS. The journalists are not doing the suing. The suing is by "20 public figures". The journalists are the villains of this story, and are employees of Murdoch, who is the villain of pretty much every story.

He was talking about scanning a book he bought.

Yes, using a scanner and OCR software. Which will produce lots and lots of errors.

I'm pretty sure you're forgetting something important, and I'm pretty sure it's proofreading. Which should take a lot longer than 20 minutes, unless you want your readers to hate you.

Also, PDF is completely unsuitable for ebooks. Ebooks are mostly about text. PDF is a graphics format. About the only place where it ever made any sense was portable printing; otherwise, it's like those sad "websites" you saw in the late 90s where each page was just a big GIF.

And I've yet to see an automatic PDF-to-EPUB conversion that didn't blow goats.

Not the same thing at all. Suppose you've never heard of Fred Bloggs; "Fred Bloggs is a nigger" is still offensive, whereas "Fred Bloggs is a thief" is not. "Freeloader", like "thief", is only derogatory because freeloading, like theft, is generally accepted to be a bad thing. So whether or not it's appropriate depends very much on whether it's accurate.

In the case of the headline, barring some truly embarrassing bug in the app in question, the term is accurate: the only people who are going to be "shamed" by it are indeed freeloaders. If I told a random person on the street that I believed they were a thief, then yes, I'd expect them to be insulted, because they probably aren't. If on the other hand I told a convicted thief that I believed they were a thief, they don't really have a leg to stand on.