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It's obviously true just from browsing numbers alone... but there's articles like this that say the same thing (in the phone/phablet world).

It's not just freemium that attracts jerks. Free in general does.

Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper, talks about his development process and business decisions relatively regularly, and I recall one of his posts regarding his decision to drop the free version of his app. If you scroll down to the "Undesirable customers" heading, you'll see some of his talk about the sorts of stuff he noticed as a trend between the free and paid versions of his app.

Though he doesn't out-and-out say it this way, his point is basically that people attracted to free are cheapskates who tend to have unreasonable demands and a sense of entitlement. I'm inclined to agree as well. Having people pay even a buck or two makes them much more invested and filters out a lot of the riffraff who you'd rather not be dealing with.

So, it's not just in games where you get undesirable types with a free-product business model.

If facts count at all in this disagreement, then the Aussies are correct.

Anytime you have a long network hop to your data, it is at greater risk for downtime and inaccessibility. This is a fact, not a political thought.

I live in the USA and work in IT. I would not host my data in Australia unless I wanted to have times when it was inaccessible and was willing to put up with clogged networking.

Heck, I'd like to host my data outside the USA too .... just to prevent the US government from feeling they deserve access to it, which they do not.

More and more countries need to only store data in the USA for end customers who are actually located inside the USA. I'd try to keep my infrastructure outside the US too based on FBI server-grabs. The FBI has grabbed entire racks of servers because they were too lazy to figure out which specific server was believed to hold the "offending" data. The other 3000 websites were gone and I read that after a year, the servers were still not returned. Too bad if your company data is "close" to some supposed "bad guys" - they take and figure out the issue later.
* http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/22/0217200/fbi-seizes-servers-in-virginia
* http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387447,00.asp
* http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6830514157
* http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10220786-240.html
and the recent megaupload seizures
* http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

A Canadian service provider was caught up in a raid like th
is and immediately contacted the US-FBI special agent to be told they were too busy to work with them.

The US government is arrogant based on these actions and others.

If I were in Australia, there's no way that I'd host data in the USA for non-USA-based users.

What I've been doing is creating my own ebooks from websites that have a lot of material that I need to read. I just can't read on a monitor if it's a large amount of text. This is what I do: either use a conversion website or Sigil.

Another good tool is calibre, which, among tons of other functions, such as being an e-library manager and providing the ability to automatically strip DRM out if you're so inclined (and manage to find the 3rd party plugins required), allows one to automatically download new blog entries and transfer them to an e-reader on a regular basis. As for individual long web pages, I really like Instapaper, configured to send the pages I queued to my Kindle once a week (it provides a daily option too).

Instapaper is great for this type of thing: http://instapaper.com./

http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6830514157

Marco Arment explains his version of the situation in his blog. Basically, the FBI has this "drug bust" proximity to the evidence must also be evidence mentality to executing a search warrant. Anything unrelated to the crime could have been loaded on adjacent servers. Did they only need one search warrant for DigitalOne?

from what I can tell they are the same event.

http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6830514157

What it doesn't say is whose dozens they took down / stole. The wording of the correct. It doesn't say "dozens of computers, servers and bank accounts associated with the culprits", does it?

http://blog.instapaper.com/

Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.

To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.

When I'm reading through a page, if I come across a link that interests me, I open it in a new tab in the background.

Try Instapaper It also syncs between your iPad/iPhone and your desktop/laptop.