I was thinking of getting one of those to plug a USB IR transmitter into, and using my iPhone as a universal remote.

Huh. Yeah, that's a good idea.

OMFG that thing is amazing.

Yep, the Kindle is all DRMified. It sucks, and is one of my major complaints. Doctorow is probably right. iTunes went DRM free, but only after years of having DRM. Eventually, I expect the Kindle will do the same and release books in unprotected MOBI format (the azw files are basically just mobi files wrapped in DRM). It's not there yet.

It's one of the few arguments against the Kindle that doesn't make me all stupidly defensive of my favorite electronic gadget ever, because it's a huge flaw.

You CAN read unprotected Mobi files on the Kindle, just like you can play MP3s on the iPod. You can also get a large selection of books out of copyright, for free, from Feedbooks or other sources. The main difference between the Kindle store and the iTunes store (which I mostly boycotted until recently) is that there's no real viable source for getting unprotected current material on the Kindle, since, unlike music, we can't rip books using our own BOOK-ROM drive on our computer. So we're more stuck in the DRMed store, unless we only want to read newspapers, blogs, fanfic we convert ourselves (for free, the 10¢ charge is only if you use the Kindle's wireless to do it), and books made 90+ years ago or written by Doctorow.

And at least with iTunes, I had a way to get those DRMed files into a way I could take them away, if I wanted. Sure, only a certain number of times, but I COULD burn them to a CD and walk away with them, just like my other CDs that I'd bought in a store. Kindle, you can't really do that with like books you bought at a bookstore, can you?

Kindle, you can't really do that with like books you bought at a bookstore, can you?

Not unless you feel like investing in a hardcore paper scanner and some really good OCR software, and don't mind ripping your books apart.

Or, if you meant in the other way, like my re-read is implying - no, there's no way I've found yet to change a Kindle-purchased book into paper. It's a very closed system. Like I said, I doubt that will last forever, but it is the way for now.

I'm trying to work out how to force a browser to refresh its css. I've sent header information no-cache, must-revalidate and an expiration date in the past. But no dice. I have to manually refresh the page for the updated css to be included.

I looked around a bit and this [link] looks promising.

I looked around a bit and this [link] looks promising.

Huh. That kinda' clever. I was thinking you could change the name of the css each time you want it to refresh, but figured that would be too much of a PITA.