It gets even more absurd when you consider that this whole discussion really is not about "lending e-books" but rather lending e-book readers . These publishers are placing these limits even though the libraries have a limited number of devices they are handing out (far fewer than the books they carry).

From what I read, none of the articles mentioned just having the library load the file onto your preferred device. So, obviously, they are speaking in general terms to confound the issue again.

There is friction: Libraries can only afford to have so many e-book readers on loan at any given time. In addition to that, they have to pay for all the books they loan on those few devices -- no matter how many times they lend them. Plus, for the publishers, they have to purchase books at least twice (one physical and one electronic). So, libraries are spending more, and the publishers are using this to once again bamboozle the public into seeing them as the victim.

Good point. I think RMS' concept is not out of touch with the times so much as out of touch with convenience. He has shown time and time again that he is willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. In my opinion, the world needs more such people.

From what a friend claimed, it did involve massive lists, though. Evidently, Stalin approved the executions of hundreds of people a night by name. I had known that he stayed up all night during his schooling to read numerous books per night, but I had not known that he was such a micro-manager. In any case, mass executions are generally supported by accounting systems: the better the accounting system, the more victims. Stalin was hardly the only one to use an efficient accounting system to kill millions in the last century. The existence of this information is threatening because we cannot know what will be in the imaginations of the Stalins of the future.

As I imagine that is the purpose of Slashdot and as I started reading this discussion with that in mind, what would be a good solution to this problem?

Does everyone have to become a phreaker to protect their privacy? Would new laws help? How could an individual "stick it to the man" (especially if that "man" were a hundred billion dollar behemoth like AT&T)? Could a social practice, such as hundreds of people buying unlimited plans and swapping phones permanently or frequently, mitigate the effects of this? Or is the human race just doomed?

I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?

I think there is a difference between the tracking the grocery store is doing and the tracking a phone company is doing. At a grocery store, it is completely voluntary. Customers do not have to have tracking numbers (I, for one, have never had one). If they do choose to have their purchases tracked, they are "paid" for it in discounts. And that tracking is limited to what the customers purchased and perhaps the store they purchased it in.

Cellphones, on the other hand, are tracking your physical location at any given time. No announcement is given, and customers get no discounts or other rewards for using cellphones. In fact, cellphone companies, while creating and probably selling this valuable data, are constantly looking for ways to charge their customers more money for service. In addition to all this, in the US, all or nearly all of the major cellphone carriers were complicit in sharing this information with the federal government unlawfully and pushing for unconstitutional laws to back out of it.

Online tracking is often not connected to one's real identity. In fact, this is why so many people are alarmed when they talk about being able to identify people by their habits. It is getting more and more difficult to remain anonymous, and that is obviously a threat to privacy. Cellphones are always tied to identity, even more than Internet access. A cellphone is with you wherever you go and whatever you do. Connections to the Internet can be made and severed, and there is no way to be certain that a given individual is behind a given computer. With cellphones, again, this is not the case. People occasionally loan their cellphones to other people, but not with near the frequency with which people borrow others' computers (Corporations are trying to change this with dumb Internet devices like the Ipad).

So much more private and individually traceable information is available to cellphone carriers that it could almost be separated into its own league of privacy discussions. As more and more people access the Internet through their cellphones, the shift away from privacy will be even more dramatic and frightening than it was over the last decade. If anyone is considering a privacy Bill of Rights, it should start with the cellphone carriers. They are probably the biggest single enemy of privacy the public has ever faced.

Worse yet. They may choose to discontinue the product and all support for it or break it with an update -- as they have done repeatedly in the past. If Google discontinues Android, any or all of the companies currently distributing it can continue as before. Google cannot pull the plug on Android. WinPhone7 can be destroyed whenever MS chooses.

And all that is assuming that it will be usable enough for anyone to care. If older versions of Windows Mobile and WinCE are any indication, no one will.

As for illegally copied software in MS products, who could ever know? As they keep their source code secret, you can never know if they are infringing or not or what it will mean if they get caught. This is why all this anti-FOSS stuff is so absurd. FOSS is clean, and anybody can check. No MS software can make that claim because their source code is not available to public scrutiny. They are the true communists -- people supporting a system of autocratic secretive control supported by barely believable lies.

This is unfair to Google. I have plenty of gripes with Android, but these two were not Google's fault. First, nobody considered the header files to be copyrightable material. As one poster above pointed out, people in the FOSS community laughed when SCO made such a claim just a few years ago. If it was not an issue then, how can Google be wrong now? They did not exactly strip out the copyright notices in the kernel source and call it the "Android Kernel®", did they?

In the case of the Java problem, Google could not have anticipated that Sun would be bought by a hostile company that would try to rob them using copyrights. Sun, for all its faults, was pretty reasonable about Java. The new owner, on the other hand, is predatory and crooked. They see an opportunity to hit Google up for some cash, and they are taking it. To blame Google for being a victim of lawyers would be like blaming victims of a natural disaster for living in a place where no natural disasters had struck yet.

Is this Privacy Bill going to protect us from DHS border searches? Since this administration has been so pro-ACTA, I think they should certainly review their opinions on privacy.

I have just wasted the last 24 minutes loading all that Scribd garbage on this slow connection only to find that downloading the document requires a Facebook account. Why is this document not on the Open Internet, I ask? If an Open Internet is what is wanted, why use closed and privacy assaulting services like Facebook? What happened to HTML?

Scribd is only giving me the first 3 pages (of eight). I cannot download the page without identifying myself. Scribd is absolutely full of advertising -- probably three quarters of the time I just wasted loading the site. What is Free or Open about that?

I do not know if this was pointed out elsewhere -- I am certainly not going to read all the comments to find out -- but this post contains a rather large error in relation to copyright. The Slashdot post says:

Monica Gaudio, a recipe author who discovered her recipe has been published without her knowledge. [Emphasis mine]

However, the Gawker article says:

Magazine Editor Steals Article, Tells Writer 'You Should Compensate Me!'[Emphasis mine]

IANAL, but by my understanding of US copyright law according to statements of such people as Jessica Litman, recipes are not subject to copyright as they are merely a set of facts. Copyright does not cover facts. It covers creative works. Cooking may be an art, but the documentation of a set of procedures is not. So, if the "article" is merely a recipe, Cooks Source is completely correct about its own materials -- although they used entirely the wrong language to express this and made incorrect statements about the Net and copyright law.

I believe the Slashdot post should be amended to avoid this error as it confuses the entire issue. If, of course, there is some reason why the word "recipe" was used instead of "article", Slashdot should be the first to point out the errors in the other publications.

Does this mean we can finally have Skype protocol built into Pidgin? I would love to stop using Skype's crapware.

It does not matter if people want Linux or not. People are supposed to have a choice in a Free Market. It was what the 1776 Revolution was fought for and why you call your government a "democracy" today: Free choice. When MS removes all choice from the market by putting pressure on OEMs to, for instance, not sell computers without operating systems or forcing OEMs to place signs near all an OEM's public displays saying, "It's always better with Windows!", MS is abusing its monopoly power.

You are probably a troll, but for the record, I am not so much a fan of Linux as I am an incensed victim of M$. Microsoft has violated every law a software company can, and the legal things they have done have been equally immoral. They hate liberty, individuality, and free choice. They thumb their noses at the government and bribe crooked public officials, like the US's last president ("campaign contributions" -- that anti-trust lawsuit sure went away quickly, did it not?). They advocate central control of information and ownership of all ideas by large corporations (All your base...). They spy on users (WGA anyone?). They appear to have initiated frivolous lawsuits and abused the court system (one word: SCO). They are enemies of the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States and Human Rights the world over (DRM supports third party invasion of your private computer and limits your ability to speak freely online).

If there were more choices than Linux out there, I would most likely experiment with them. I would love to see Haiku actually work (BeOS was another unfortunate victim of MS's OEM manipulation). However, as things stand, there are few Free choices in the software world. Macs are controlled by a company that has a worse track record for vendor lock in (To Jobs, "free" means "free to buy more Apple products"). The mobile world is full of non-free operating systems. Even Android is more of an assault on Freedom than support for it.

So, you tell me, how can I in good conscience support an amoral, law-breaking, malicious software company just because the general public is ignorant of that company's behavior? Is following the crowd so important that I have to give up all of my morals?

I am a fanboi. I am a Freedom fanboi. I believe in the Constitution, human rights, and Liberty -- especially Free Speech. Why should I financially support the enemies of these concepts? Further, why do you?

Yes, but they are about twice the price of netbooks on Amazon, and they have spinning platter drives. They are not available to the public in the sense that nobody that does not regularly deal with Linux would know about those. MS successfully eliminated the Linux netbook from the mass market.

When I bought my EEE901, I predicted that this would happen, and it was exactly as I predicted. Unfortunately, I did not buy more than one. I regret that more and more every day.

While the iPad may have been a nail in the coffin, the death of netbooks has been obviously on the horizon since MS changed its tune and began to "support" them (MS support == embrace, extend, and extinguish). When the first EEEPC came out, it was a cool device: SSD storage, lightweight, better than average (for laptops) battery life, and it could fit in a fashionable woman's purse. These devices were extremely useful for science, diagnostic testing, playing, reading, etcetera -- in fact, these were the first real instance of mobile computing. Laptops were bulky, expensive, ran hot, and had terrible batteries. The first year of netbooks was somewhat of a golden age.

Enter M$. Now, what do netbooks look like? I checked last week, and it is now impossible to buy a netbook without a spinning platter hard drive. Linux netbooks are almost completely unavailable. I checked Amazon and Newegg. Both listed Linux netbooks that were "no longer available". The available netbooks are no longer much lighter or more convenient than traditonal laptops. In fact, battery life is about the only selling point they have left.

I figure it was just a matter of time before the public came to realize that netbooks are just about the same as laptops now, so they have to go somewhere else to search for convenient mobile devices. The fact that so many people are rushing to the iPad is just more proof that Steve Jobs -- bastard that he is -- is a genius at predicting the right time and climate to release a product. Just as people are fed up with MS ruining the very concept of the netbook, we have the iPad: long battery life, nice screen, hardware accelerated video, light and portable, all the things that MS has taken away from the netbook.

While anyone who buys Apple products is still a jerk, I think MS owes the hardware manufacturers and the public an apology for destroying a lucrative sector of the market and a useful product for people to use. Unfortunately, running to Apple is not an unreasonable choice. This just proves the harm that comes from monopolies being allowed to exist.

I am not interested in wasting my time with MS software of any flavour. My gripes with MS software are an order of magnitude greater than those few that I listed for Ubuntu.

I love (or perhaps loved) Ubuntu. It works better than anything I have ever used (yes, that also includes Mac's lockware). My love for Ubuntu is the factor that compels me to complain. Ubuntu is still better than any other disto, and I would like it to stay that way. I have lived many years with the rougher edges of the Linux desktop, and now that Ubuntu has the chance to be literally better than any other OS (not to mention distro) available, I do not want to see it destroyed by oversimplification and proprietary crap like Mono. Freedom does not have to be ugly and inconvenient.

Why is Ubuntu still clinging to an install CD while all the other distros are using DVDs? Again, Ubuntu is not Windows, and it is not made by MS. Why follow MS's weak design choices?

If Ubuntu claimed that a CD version could not include OpenOffice and instead included Abiword, I would not be arguing. But the GIMP is almost as central to Linux as Gnome or KDE. It is a staple, like rice or bread. Without it, the desktop will be "undernourished".

Ubuntu also is not Puppy Linux. It does not take up a mere 100MB of disk space. It does not run on 20 year old computers. Why should the default install not include the best and brightest of the Linux world?