Also by 1986, gamers were fascinated with cool graphics and sounds that pushed the envelope of their C64s, as well as this interesting new console called the "Nintendo Entertainment System" with its distinctly unique brand of games. There wasn't a whole lot of room in the market for text adventures anymore. In the UK at least, Magnetic Scrolls' first text adventure, "The Pawn" was still a big deal at that time. Sure, the pretty graphics (at least on the 16-bit versions) were a selling point, but the parser was the other major aspect that got peoples' attention. (Though I read at least one dissenting review attacking it for trying to be clever at the expense of usability/predictability, as well as calling the game generally overhyped and illogical.)
But my point is that- at least here- there was still a notable market (and public attention) for text adventures at the time, arguably revitalised by Magnetic Scrolls' success and innovations deriving from their games' origins on the newer 16/32-bit machines. Perhaps Infocom were on the back foot in the face of this newcomer, or perhaps the US market lost its appetite for adventures faster than the UK did.
I'd say that the genre finally lost steam here around the turn of the decade. Coincidentally(?) that's around the same time that Infocom's then-owners Activision finally pulled the plug on the company (the name and IP were reused during the 1990s, but the "true" Infocom effectively died then).
If someone beams a signal into my space that has all kinds of hellos and please use me embedded into it, I'm gonna take advantage of that offer in the same exact way. Enough of this bullshit rationalisation. I doubt that the 802.11 specifications *ever* implied that the broadcasting of an SSID on an unprotected WAP should be interpreted as a "hello, please use me", as you imply.
Your argument is biased because you choose (IMHO quite deliberately) to read meaning and value judgements into them when in fact there is no such meaning- neither from a technical aspect, nor through social consensus.
And the social consensus bit is important; it's how a lot of things work. Do you ever look for a sign that says "I am a shop, please come in and browse?" before you enter one? No, of course not. Do you ever go into a restaurant, have a nice meal, and act surprised when you have to pay (like they just gave you a nice meal out of the goodness of their hearts)? No, of course not. But that's because there's a social consensus that tells us how shops and restaurants work that almost everyone in society understands.
There's no such universally-accepted social understanding yet (either way) with WiFi. Someone might have deliberately left the access point open. They might just not have secured it. Either way, I wouldn't be able to assume. And as a Slashdotter, I strongly suspect that you know this perfectly well. Your implication that one *can* interpret an open access point in a manner favourable to your argument is self-serving and misleading.
As for the "your waves are crossing my property", that's a different issue. There might- or might not- be some mileage in this, but it there's no straight answer. You can rationalise pretty much anything if you dissect it to some arbitrary level of detail or nitpickiness; (e.g. considering human beings as their constituent atoms). However, these are generally just pseudo-intellectual geek wankfests by people wanting to win arguments; I don't think that even *they* really believe them. Such nitpicking generally says *nothing* useful about human beings' values in interacting with each other- which like it or not, is what this thread is about, when it comes down to it.
Or "pwn3d" Nah.... 13375p34k is *so* 2004! Actually, I mean that- anyone notice that it's mostly died off now? It went from being everywhere a while back to having almost disappeared within a fairly short period of time.
I guess it's not surprising that something that reveled in its own obscurity and nicheness lost its appeal when everyone was doing it. On reflection, it's probably *not* a coincidence that it seemed to really die out just around the time that the mainstream press started running articles explaining those strange messages your teenage children were typing. That's so uncool;-)
I know we're on a slightly different system here, but they start at about £10 which is equivalent to $20, half the value of the vouchers that your government is dishing out for the switchover! As I mentioned elsewhere, that was probably a below-cost loss leader. Excluding that factor, the "true" retail price- including even the slimmest profit margin- is probably nearer £20 than £10.
how come you can get a DVB-T box in the UK for £10 ($20), which has features like interactive TV and an electronic programme guide (as required by the DVB standard) but these aren't included on the US ATSC boxes costing $50? As I said elsewhere (and should have put in this reply in the first place), the £10 boxes are probably being sold at below cost. £20 is a more typical figure for a bottom-of-the-line Freeview (DVB-T) box these days.
Freeview boxes can be had for a tenner ($20) in the UK The £10 Freeview boxes were almost certainly being sold at below cost as a loss-leader. £20 ($40) is more typical for a bottom-end box; which, all things considered, still isn't all that expensive.
If Apple buys AMD then they will have the complete hardware sollution for the Macs. Yeah, but this isn't like the PowerPC situation. IIRC (this might not be 100% accurate), back then Apple were suffering because the PowerPC line they relied upon was falling behind the x86-compatibles' performance. Motorola (or whoever) weren't motivated enough to improve them because they weren't their best-selling chips- IIRC (again), Apple were the main people using them, and that probably wasn't enough to justify expensive chip development. Nor would even that have justified Apple taking on the PowerPC development and manufacture themselves.
But that's all passed anyway. Now that Apple use x86, buying AMD simply for the sake of being able to do everything themselves seems like overkill. The x86 market is healthy and competitive, and Apple won't run into the problems they had with PowerPC. The only benefit I can see would be minor cost savings on the CPUs they were using in their own machines. Frankly, that's nowhere near enough to justify the risks and potential losses of getting into the microprocessor business, and I don't think Apple are that kind of company anyway.
Uh.. does anyone import american cars? When was the last time you (in the UK) bought or saw a product made in the US? Seriously, you hardly ever see anything marked "Made in the USA" or "Made in the United States" here these days
I remember thinking about this a while back and the only things I owned (that I could think of) physically made in the US were my disposable contact lenses and after shave(!) And now I notice that my latest pack of lenses (exact same brand/type) and the replacement bottle of aftershave (same type) are made in Ireland and Switzerland respectively.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot of American IP- for example, I'm typing this on Windows (inbetween faffing around with ndiswrapper on Linux, mind you!) and most films come from the US?
But actual manufactured goods? Nope. Most of the stuff you see on sale in the UK is either made in the EU or South-East Asia- especially China.
There may be a few US-made cars (as Somersault implies) sold here, but I can't think of any major sellers- possibly some of the "American" SUVs, I don't know, but certainly not the best-selling cars. (Plenty of American-owned companies though, like Ford, Vauxhall (AKA Opel, owned by GM) and Chevrolet (also owned by GM, until recently a niche brand here, now used on the cars which used to be badged as Daewoo(!))
Of course, this isn't necessarily as damning as it sounds- countries within the EU have an advantage when it comes to manufacture for the European market. So I'd assume that US-made goods were- for similar reasons- far more common in (e.g.) NAFTA countries. Also, as Somersault says, the US and European car markets are very different and I couldn't see a European-oriented model being made in the U.S. primarily for export; it's just not practical.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other areas where the EU and US markets are more similar, but we still don't see US-manufactured goods. IP yes, physical stuff no.
She later dumped me after an argument about me "ignoring" her (my phone was off because I was at my granddad's funeral). Did you tell her that was the reason your phone was off? If so, she sounds like an attention-whoring, self-centered and downright insensitive bitch who probably did you a favour by removing herself from your life sooner rather than later.
That's probably what he believes, but the effect of his work is that the victims of Creative's shoddy behavior can continue to use and buy Creative's shoddy products. I would normally say something similar myself- Daniel K no doubt started out simply intending to fix Creative's shoddy drives, where what you say applies.
However, it's now apparent in this case (and by this stage) that it wasn't simply a case of Creative being blase or cheap about fixing the bugs. On the contrary, they quite clearly and deliberately *didn't* want them fixed.
You know, I might have defended Creative on the basis that the guy modified their own drivers and got them to work on all soundcards. This would give non-Creative owners of other cards unpaid access to Creative's work, and possibly certain features (code or patents) which was licensed- i.e. not owned- by Creative for use with their cards alone. Possibly some of the features were only licensed (and paid for) for use with certain cards.
But that's the charitable view. In truth, Creative's behaviour smacks of deliberately breaking their older hardware under Vista so that people are forced to upgrade. I'm unclear whether they actually introduced deliberate bugs into the Vista drivers, but if so, this is reprehensible. I'd also be interested to find out how legal this is under various jurisdictions- probably 100% in the US (where they can get away with a 90 day warranty on a brand new laptop), not so sure about other countries, particularly within the EU.
If I had given more consideration to the fact that it was protected to avoid further attention I probably would have thrown the comment away. Yes, I should have thought about this, and having come across a post where the author was clearly unhappy with it having been made so public, I wish I hadn't done that now.:(
As for your second comment, I don't know if it was aimed at me. If this uber-passive thing what makes the Japanese happy (that's a big "if"), then fine; it just doesn't remotely appeal to me personally. Remind me not to get too excited about all those cute Japanese girls throwing themselves at me (*ahem*... and even if it was true, they'd more likely be chucking stones at me after what I said about them!)
"But anyone who says -- and believes -- that this is not a Microsoft world is deluding himself." And that delusional comment makes you a Microsoft fanboi. So basically your response is to take it personally, and throw the same criticism back at him without explanation (i.e. the child's "no you are!!!" response). And then you call him an MS fanboy (sorry, "fanboi"), which he must be because he pointed out something you find unpalatable? Pathetic.
Your original argument was piss-poor anyway; just because you have lots of PCs, none of which run Windows, doesn't mean that the world as a whole isn't very MS-centric. Hopefully that might change at some point, but it's certainly true at present, and you can't blame jhol13 or nutria for pointing that out. Oh no.... hang on, you just *did* try to shoot the messengers.
Though if that's the best argument you can come up with, you shot yourself in the foot instead.
I'm lazy and had already read it. Well, no shit- I had assumed that! The cache links were for *everyone else's* benefit.
It seemed strange to explicitly link to an article that was no longer there, unless the intention was to use the Google cache- but this was never mentioned (and if that were the case, why not simply link to the cache?)
Anyway, the article was interesting, so I guess I should thank you anyway! Honestly, I'd always assumed that the corpse-like passivity of the girls in those godawful Japanese porn flicks were an exaggerated fantasy of Japanese men, just like (e.g.) American porn videos reflect fantasy more than reality. If Japanese girls are really like that in bed... ugh. What a bore!
There was a great livejournal entry about a westerners experience in Japan:
http://supacat.livejournal.com/111072.html
but the user has since protected it. Don't know about you, but my first response to that sort of thing is to check the Google cache. Lo and behold:- Article.
The whole article is on the first page, but the comments are spread across five (the same article appears on all of them). I'll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader.:)
Sorry - they were made in China, at the former Maxtor factory. Quality at the facility is still hit or miss. One of the replacements showed a ton of errors from smartd on initial power-up, and failed completely (to the point of not being able to get any smart data) at the 40 minute mark. You'd think they'd at least test their replacements for 15 seconds, if only to catch the obvious pieces of contaminated crap... Eeugh.... are all the ones made in China (ignoring the badge) effectively Maxtors? And conversely, are Maxtors made anywhere else?
On second thoughts, it might just make more sense to buy another brand next time:/
That's just because they're newbies and haven't used the friends/foes tool yet. I've been on Slashdot for around six years, and am well aware of this feature. However, I've never used it and hence have no "friends" or "foes". Has very little to do with my sociability or lack of it- it's simply that I wasn't that bothered about using a feature/tool which happens to use those labels as a convenience.
For "friends" at the very least, the words don't even have the exact same connotations as they do in everyday use. If nothing else, Slashdot "friend"-ships are one-directional, as are foes; so although I have no friends or foes, I have quite a few fans and freaks.
Of course, most people using the system understand (I assume) that "friends" is really a convenient shortcut for "people whose views I would like to see given more prominence while browsing", and "foes" means the opposite. Otherwise, I'll have offended a lot of my "friends" my not acknowledging them;-)
Actually, one thing I remember about ME in comparison to Vista, is that it didn't last all that long (even MS dropped it somewhat like a hot rock), and that the previous options (win98) were still supported, followed not too long after by a somewhat worthy successor (win2k and, eventually, winXP). I know only a few people who had machines come with ME, and when those machines screwed up, 98 still worked. As I remember- and Wikipedia confirms- Windows 2000 (formerly NT 5.0) was originally meant to replace the "Built-on-DOS" versions of Windows (as well as NT 4.0, obviously).
Had this merging of the streams happened as planned, ME would never have existed. Obviously- for some reason- this was postponed and didn't happen until XP (NT 5.1) finally killed the DOS-based Windows. However, since ME only came out a year before XP, it must have been obvious even by then that it was a stopgap.
I forget the specifics of ME's launch, but I don't remember it being that big a deal or being presented as such. I always got the impression it was a minor (if badly) facelifted version of 95/98/98SE done for the sake of them releasing something new. Remember that since 95's launch there had been a couple of OEM-only enhanced versions of 95 (the second of which was far closer to 98 than the original 95), then the retail Windows 98, then 98 SE. Even if we'd known nothing about the impending XP, ME would just have been the latest version of 95 with a new grille design.
So my guess is that even before its launch, MS never planned on ME hanging around long anyway.
But until the name ACME becomes as well known as Apple for anything other than contraptions that it sells to Wile E. Coyote, it doesn't have the reputation, or brand power, that Apple does. It's worse than that. Everyone who's ever seen a Road Runner cartoon will know that Acme's products are unreliable and fail in dangerous-but-hilarious ways. They've got a lot of work to do to overcome that reputation...
When I pay money to participate in a game, I pay to participate on a level playing field. I don't want to be required to pay MORE money to keep the playing field level. Playing against bot-aided players diminishes MY playing experience and diminishes my desire to play the game. The short answer is: I care. FRY the cheaters. I think the problem was with the vector they chose to attack the bot creator with. It could reasonably be argued that while they should do something about cheating, their "infringement of copyright" approach was legally spurious and should not be encouraged.
(Disclaimer: I've never played WoW, and have no desire to do so, so I have no axe to grind either way, but it sounds fair that anyone caught cheating- and getting an unfair advantage, spoiling it for others- should have their account terminated).
I think these lawsuits would be a lot more interesting if there was a provision in the TOS that said something to the effect of "you may use a bot program for the extended monthly fee of $1,000,000 per month." [..] A court would have a hard time throwing that out. Unless you have some sort of legal background and understand the nuances of contract law under various jurisdictions, I'd suggest that you really *don't* know whether the court woulds- in truth- "have a hard time throwing that out".
There are such things as non-enforcable clauses, and I suspect that it would also depend how the contract was written and presented. However, as I'm not a legal expert, I'll avoid speculating beyond my knowledge and leave it to someone who actually knows contract law to comment further.
OTOH some time in high school (late 1960s) my schitzophrenic friend Tom prognosticated that some day we'd be playing records in our cars. I told him that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard; how would you keep them from getting scratched up? How would you keep them from skipping? He had no answers and didn't know why he thought so but was certain it would happen. But he turned out to be right, we now have CDs and afaik they don't make car stereos without CD players any more. Yes, but CDs aren't vinyl records, and if you were just talking about music in cars in general, they would already have had 8-track in cars by then, at least in the US. (8-Track never really took off here in the UK, nor (AFAIK) anywhere else really)
I guess it's kind of like that little windows XP search dog, and clippy. It doesn't really make the product work less well, but it's kind of demeaning to have a little cartoon character pop up and guide you through the process. I'm not the first to mention this, but what makes it really bad is the fact that you tick the box saying "No, I don't want that ******* animated dog", and to mark this choice they show an animation of him running off anyway!
to "ass-first" JavaScript. Well, since we're talking about body parts, I assume that O'Reilly put a guy on the cover this time because of the infamous case where the "Head First Design Patterns" model also turned out to be advertising a cream for itchy girly bits:-6
Every time Apple runs those "We're so hip and cool" commercials with that smug jackass bragging about how cool he is versus the fuddy-duddy old PC, they probably loose 10 potential future customers for every one short-term customer they gain. I still want to punch Justin Long in the face every time I see him in a film. Sounds like they hit a nerve.
Guess what, they aren't losing potential customers, they're pissing off haters. Big difference. "Pissing off haters?" Please! Talk about the adolescent fanboy mentality...
Although Apple may exploit their cliquey appeal for marketing, they're in the business of selling computers, not running a sports team, and it makes more sense for them to appeal to as many people as possible. It's unlikely that they'd engage in unproductive polarisation.
Personally, I disliked the British version of the adverts for similar reasons- because they so blatantly went for the image-based marketing, and tried to score easy laughs based on a stereotypical and dated strawman parody of the PC *image*. There's very little factual content in the adverts- it's not as if they actually made fun of genuine problems with the Windows platform.
What I particularly disliked was the implication (when it suited them) that the Mac wasn't an office machine. On the contrary, there's nothing stopping the Mac from doing all those mundane tasks as well as a PC (and you can bet that Apple wouldn't like it if MS killed off Office on the Mac). It's perfectly capable; but because they wanted to play up the "fun" aspects of the Mac and make the PC seem like a work tool, they downplayed that aspect to the point of lying by omission.
I think that advert came out around the time I was swithering about buying a Mac Mini. Still might, but it would be in spite of- not because of- Apple's lame adverts. (I also hate the folksy consumerism of their current Mac and iPod ads.) And if you're going to do the fanboy thing of saying "run off back to your Windows PC hater, we don't want you using Macs anyway" (translation; more tribal adolescent fanboyism).... whatever. While Apple's more zealous fans are one of the more annoying things about the platform, ultimately I'll decide whether I want a BSD-based computer with a nice interface or not regardless of your opinion.
(When replying to your other comment, I noticed I was on your "foes" list, but couldn't remember why. Still can't, but having read this comment, I'm guessing that it was because I took you to task under similar circumstances. Whatever... )
Slashdot Mirror
But my point is that- at least here- there was still a notable market (and public attention) for text adventures at the time, arguably revitalised by Magnetic Scrolls' success and innovations deriving from their games' origins on the newer 16/32-bit machines. Perhaps Infocom were on the back foot in the face of this newcomer, or perhaps the US market lost its appetite for adventures faster than the UK did.
I'd say that the genre finally lost steam here around the turn of the decade. Coincidentally(?) that's around the same time that Infocom's then-owners Activision finally pulled the plug on the company (the name and IP were reused during the 1990s, but the "true" Infocom effectively died then).
Your argument is biased because you choose (IMHO quite deliberately) to read meaning and value judgements into them when in fact there is no such meaning- neither from a technical aspect, nor through social consensus.
And the social consensus bit is important; it's how a lot of things work. Do you ever look for a sign that says "I am a shop, please come in and browse?" before you enter one? No, of course not. Do you ever go into a restaurant, have a nice meal, and act surprised when you have to pay (like they just gave you a nice meal out of the goodness of their hearts)? No, of course not. But that's because there's a social consensus that tells us how shops and restaurants work that almost everyone in society understands.
There's no such universally-accepted social understanding yet (either way) with WiFi. Someone might have deliberately left the access point open. They might just not have secured it. Either way, I wouldn't be able to assume. And as a Slashdotter, I strongly suspect that you know this perfectly well. Your implication that one *can* interpret an open access point in a manner favourable to your argument is self-serving and misleading.
As for the "your waves are crossing my property", that's a different issue. There might- or might not- be some mileage in this, but it there's no straight answer. You can rationalise pretty much anything if you dissect it to some arbitrary level of detail or nitpickiness; (e.g. considering human beings as their constituent atoms). However, these are generally just pseudo-intellectual geek wankfests by people wanting to win arguments; I don't think that even *they* really believe them. Such nitpicking generally says *nothing* useful about human beings' values in interacting with each other- which like it or not, is what this thread is about, when it comes down to it.
I guess it's not surprising that something that reveled in its own obscurity and nicheness lost its appeal when everyone was doing it. On reflection, it's probably *not* a coincidence that it seemed to really die out just around the time that the mainstream press started running articles explaining those strange messages your teenage children were typing. That's so uncool
(And my use of smileys is so 1990s too...)
But that's all passed anyway. Now that Apple use x86, buying AMD simply for the sake of being able to do everything themselves seems like overkill. The x86 market is healthy and competitive, and Apple won't run into the problems they had with PowerPC. The only benefit I can see would be minor cost savings on the CPUs they were using in their own machines. Frankly, that's nowhere near enough to justify the risks and potential losses of getting into the microprocessor business, and I don't think Apple are that kind of company anyway.
I remember thinking about this a while back and the only things I owned (that I could think of) physically made in the US were my disposable contact lenses and after shave(!) And now I notice that my latest pack of lenses (exact same brand/type) and the replacement bottle of aftershave (same type) are made in Ireland and Switzerland respectively.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot of American IP- for example, I'm typing this on Windows (inbetween faffing around with ndiswrapper on Linux, mind you!) and most films come from the US?
But actual manufactured goods? Nope. Most of the stuff you see on sale in the UK is either made in the EU or South-East Asia- especially China.
There may be a few US-made cars (as Somersault implies) sold here, but I can't think of any major sellers- possibly some of the "American" SUVs, I don't know, but certainly not the best-selling cars. (Plenty of American-owned companies though, like Ford, Vauxhall (AKA Opel, owned by GM) and Chevrolet (also owned by GM, until recently a niche brand here, now used on the cars which used to be badged as Daewoo(!))
Of course, this isn't necessarily as damning as it sounds- countries within the EU have an advantage when it comes to manufacture for the European market. So I'd assume that US-made goods were- for similar reasons- far more common in (e.g.) NAFTA countries. Also, as Somersault says, the US and European car markets are very different and I couldn't see a European-oriented model being made in the U.S. primarily for export; it's just not practical.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other areas where the EU and US markets are more similar, but we still don't see US-manufactured goods. IP yes, physical stuff no.
However, it's now apparent in this case (and by this stage) that it wasn't simply a case of Creative being blase or cheap about fixing the bugs. On the contrary, they quite clearly and deliberately *didn't* want them fixed.
You know, I might have defended Creative on the basis that the guy modified their own drivers and got them to work on all soundcards. This would give non-Creative owners of other cards unpaid access to Creative's work, and possibly certain features (code or patents) which was licensed- i.e. not owned- by Creative for use with their cards alone. Possibly some of the features were only licensed (and paid for) for use with certain cards.
But that's the charitable view. In truth, Creative's behaviour smacks of deliberately breaking their older hardware under Vista so that people are forced to upgrade. I'm unclear whether they actually introduced deliberate bugs into the Vista drivers, but if so, this is reprehensible. I'd also be interested to find out how legal this is under various jurisdictions- probably 100% in the US (where they can get away with a 90 day warranty on a brand new laptop), not so sure about other countries, particularly within the EU.
As for your second comment, I don't know if it was aimed at me. If this uber-passive thing what makes the Japanese happy (that's a big "if"), then fine; it just doesn't remotely appeal to me personally. Remind me not to get too excited about all those cute Japanese girls throwing themselves at me (*ahem*... and even if it was true, they'd more likely be chucking stones at me after what I said about them!)
Your original argument was piss-poor anyway; just because you have lots of PCs, none of which run Windows, doesn't mean that the world as a whole isn't very MS-centric. Hopefully that might change at some point, but it's certainly true at present, and you can't blame jhol13 or nutria for pointing that out. Oh no.... hang on, you just *did* try to shoot the messengers.
Though if that's the best argument you can come up with, you shot yourself in the foot instead.
It seemed strange to explicitly link to an article that was no longer there, unless the intention was to use the Google cache- but this was never mentioned (and if that were the case, why not simply link to the cache?)
Anyway, the article was interesting, so I guess I should thank you anyway! Honestly, I'd always assumed that the corpse-like passivity of the girls in those godawful Japanese porn flicks were an exaggerated fantasy of Japanese men, just like (e.g.) American porn videos reflect fantasy more than reality. If Japanese girls are really like that in bed... ugh. What a bore!
Article.
The whole article is on the first page, but the comments are spread across five (the same article appears on all of them). I'll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader.
On second thoughts, it might just make more sense to buy another brand next time
For "friends" at the very least, the words don't even have the exact same connotations as they do in everyday use. If nothing else, Slashdot "friend"-ships are one-directional, as are foes; so although I have no friends or foes, I have quite a few fans and freaks.
Of course, most people using the system understand (I assume) that "friends" is really a convenient shortcut for "people whose views I would like to see given more prominence while browsing", and "foes" means the opposite. Otherwise, I'll have offended a lot of my "friends" my not acknowledging them
Had this merging of the streams happened as planned, ME would never have existed. Obviously- for some reason- this was postponed and didn't happen until XP (NT 5.1) finally killed the DOS-based Windows. However, since ME only came out a year before XP, it must have been obvious even by then that it was a stopgap.
I forget the specifics of ME's launch, but I don't remember it being that big a deal or being presented as such. I always got the impression it was a minor (if badly) facelifted version of 95/98/98SE done for the sake of them releasing something new. Remember that since 95's launch there had been a couple of OEM-only enhanced versions of 95 (the second of which was far closer to 98 than the original 95), then the retail Windows 98, then 98 SE. Even if we'd known nothing about the impending XP, ME would just have been the latest version of 95 with a new grille design.
So my guess is that even before its launch, MS never planned on ME hanging around long anyway.
(Disclaimer: I've never played WoW, and have no desire to do so, so I have no axe to grind either way, but it sounds fair that anyone caught cheating- and getting an unfair advantage, spoiling it for others- should have their account terminated).
There are such things as non-enforcable clauses, and I suspect that it would also depend how the contract was written and presented. However, as I'm not a legal expert, I'll avoid speculating beyond my knowledge and leave it to someone who actually knows contract law to comment further.
Guess what, they aren't losing potential customers, they're pissing off haters. Big difference. "Pissing off haters?" Please! Talk about the adolescent fanboy mentality...
Although Apple may exploit their cliquey appeal for marketing, they're in the business of selling computers, not running a sports team, and it makes more sense for them to appeal to as many people as possible. It's unlikely that they'd engage in unproductive polarisation.
Personally, I disliked the British version of the adverts for similar reasons- because they so blatantly went for the image-based marketing, and tried to score easy laughs based on a stereotypical and dated strawman parody of the PC *image*. There's very little factual content in the adverts- it's not as if they actually made fun of genuine problems with the Windows platform.
What I particularly disliked was the implication (when it suited them) that the Mac wasn't an office machine. On the contrary, there's nothing stopping the Mac from doing all those mundane tasks as well as a PC (and you can bet that Apple wouldn't like it if MS killed off Office on the Mac). It's perfectly capable; but because they wanted to play up the "fun" aspects of the Mac and make the PC seem like a work tool, they downplayed that aspect to the point of lying by omission.
I think that advert came out around the time I was swithering about buying a Mac Mini. Still might, but it would be in spite of- not because of- Apple's lame adverts. (I also hate the folksy consumerism of their current Mac and iPod ads.) And if you're going to do the fanboy thing of saying "run off back to your Windows PC hater, we don't want you using Macs anyway" (translation; more tribal adolescent fanboyism).... whatever. While Apple's more zealous fans are one of the more annoying things about the platform, ultimately I'll decide whether I want a BSD-based computer with a nice interface or not regardless of your opinion.
(When replying to your other comment, I noticed I was on your "foes" list, but couldn't remember why. Still can't, but having read this comment, I'm guessing that it was because I took you to task under similar circumstances. Whatever... )