Here's a vital difference: These things are different for each person.
Sure, if you are attacking a specific individual, finding out his address, finding his house on Google maps and finding the front door is easy.
But what you can't do is sweep through an entire University with a list of common passwords and look where you get lucky. You need to actually do some research on the particular person, and that drives costs up considerably. Mass-hacking would be over.
Yes, you would have to exclude famous landmarks. But the training is a lot simpler. Compare:
With this scheme: "Pick a place that has meaning to you, personally, and that you can easily remember. Don't pick famous landmarks or other places that lots and lots of people would think about, but rather something personal."
With passwords: "Pick a difficult-to-guess combination of letters, numbers and special characters. Don't write it down anywhere, you have to remember it. But it can't be any actual word, or a permutation of a word. It should at best resemble randomly jumbled letters and numbers. And not too short. Yes, we are serious when we said you have to learn it by heart it."
Now I'm a security geek, and I don't understand much of the things going on in the brains of security-averse average Joes. But I would be surprised if he'd not nod his head for the first explanation and shake it for the second.
I'm an American, I might choose Westminster Abbey as my password, but I'm not going to select a random flat in London.
Really? How about if you were told - like with passwords today - not to pick famous places. You might pick a random flat in London. One that isn't random for you. Maybe the one where you laid that gorgeous black girl on your first business trip there?
And besides, even if you do pick famous places, you may have to be a bit more specific than that. You might pick Westminster Abbey, but not the whole building, but, for example the roof of the tower. That's a lot more difficult to guess.
This rivals one of the worst-ever schemes security schemes I've seen. A credit union I used to use would let you select a "secret question" from a drop-down list.
And there's the massive difference and everyone who ever did any work in security could've told them that. They arbitrarily reduced the keyspace dramatically.
Taking the whole world is still a huge keyspace, if you are specific enough (i.e. no taking of entire countries or cities or famous landmarks). Whatever place you pick will have meaning to you, but to everyone else it could well be totally random. And that's what the strength is. A list of sports teams, even if it weren't as pre-determined as your example, has meaning to everyone, not just the person that picked it.
Simple questions are too easy to be asked. To have an expectation of personal privacy, you'd have to be a person, right? I mean come on, you can lawyer-talk all you like, but that doesn't change simple, straightforward facts. Yes, I know that it is the job of lawyers to complicate and twist around simple facts until they don't look so simple anymore, but that's just a trick of the trade.
So no, corporations do not have personal privacy because they aren't persons.
Oh, also, in this case, they aren't private. They're a publicly traded company. Oops.
However, that is the case of "ISP doing its best to deliver all traffic as best as possible" that I was referring to. Priorisation according to non-technical criteria, on the other hand, means leaving that optimum that you worked so hard on getting to.
Write people an extremely hefty fine if they are involved in an accident while texting
Sure, that'll work. It only ignores one of the most well-known facts about human attitude towards low-probability, high-risk events - in less prosaic terms known as the "it only ever happens to other people" effect. Everyone thinks that he can handle it. Just like everyone on the road thinks the other people should go back to driving school.
One of the problems of things that distract is that distraction is not an effect noticeable by the distracted unless it is very strong. Most people strongly overestimate their ability to drive safely while just slightly intoxicated, for example. Driving simulators can do a lot to confront them safely with reality. Most people are shocked when they get out of the simulator because they thought they were still almost sober - when in fact their reaction times are already slowed down enough to make a life-or-death difference to someone else.
I'm very sure that all those who text while driving honestly believe that they can handle it. I would take bets they wouldn't even realize the problem after the accident. They'd probably tell themselves that it would've happened even if they had been paying attention.
It's not half as dumb as the summary makes it sound.
For security, what matters is the keyspace and the likelyhood of guessing correctly. The keyspace easily competes with alphanumeric passwords. It is dramatically reduced by the assumption that people will pick places with meaning to them, which means places they've been to. Nevertheless, it should measure up to passwords in security.
Different from passwords, though, the human mind is pretty well equipped to recall specific places. Arbitrary alphanumeric combinations, on the other hand, are amongst the most difficult things to remember and recall.
All the ISPs know they'll get whacked by their customers if they are doing something to significantly reduce user experience.
Bwuahahahahaha
As if customers would notice. And yes, I work at an ISP, I know what the fuck I'm talking about.
The key word is "significant". Of course you never do that. You add your degredation of service gradually, so their experience never really changes from one day to the next, and human beings are pretty much incapable of noticing a gentle slope. The only guys who have a chance of catching what you're doing are those who do measurements (a hand full of geeks plus some journalists) and those who return after a very long holiday or absence. Have a bullshit explanation ("additional quality ensurance on the lines does unfortunately introduce a negliegable amount of latency") ready for them.
The primary reason free market theory is not applicable to the real world is that it makes assumptions about both sides that are not true if they are humans. Free market theory is the Newton of economics - a pretty good approximation, but once you go outside of everyday experience, and get to huge corporations or split-second stock markets, it simply fails.
Yes, and you just about summed up what's been wrong with Germany for centuries: instead of taking personal responsibility and dealing with uncertainty, Germans want to have things spelled out for them as rules they can follow blindly and without having to think for themselves.
It's funny how only the A Cowards bring that argument.
Knowing what the rules are and blindly following them are not the same things and one does not necessarily follow the other. If you see them in such close proximity, that says a lot more about you than about 21st century Germany.
The Autobahn works because it was built with no speed limit in mind, so it is usually straight and curves are long, sometimes very long. In fact, we used to have something called "Richtgeschwindigkeit", roughly "recommended speed" set at 130 km/h (80 mph). It works because people expect you to be driving at speeds like that and above, and drive accordingly. Nobody who is sane would change into the leftmost lane at low speeds without making very certain that the road behind is empty.
I'm not a fan of speed limits, I enjoy driving at 240 km/h (150 mph) which is the top speed of most of the cars I rent. So I personally believe that lower speeds don't make driving safer. But you have to have the environment - the road must be built for it, the car must be built for it, and the driver must be used to the speed (things like keeping enough distance at speeds like that, etc.)
Well, if your speedometer is broken, you also can't tell if you are speeding or not. But the difference is that this is your problem and your responsibility to fix.
For alcohol, there are breathalyzers available. Some clubs even have them installed in my city, so you can check. Or you can simply play it safe and not drink and drive. The fact that you don't know your alcohol concentration is entirely your problem and how you deal with it as well.
Nice attempt at provocation, but missing the argument by a wide margin.
Having rules formulated clearly and unambigiously so you know for certain whether you are breaking them or not gives you assurance.
Blindly following every rule no matter what it is is not only not the same thing, it is probably not even in the same chapter in the book of life. On the contrary, a lot of people in this world knowingly and intentionally break rules to make a point - see the jewish blockade runners of today. If they hadn't known the rules, or if the rules had been so soft that nobody were able to say what exactly it was that they were doing, the whole action would have lost a lot of its impact.
Even if it is not a precedent in the legally binding sense, lawyers love to cite other courts' decisions and judges usually take them into consideration.
I live in a country where precedents are never legally binding, even if a higher court made them. Nevertheless, most courts follow other courts' decisions unless they find a good reason to deviate (usually because the case is similar, but not identical) and very few courts deviate from the opinion of higher courts (mostly because they know on appeal they'd be overturned anyways).
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
And what stops them or the state patrol from doing it again?
It's called a precedent.
Next time this goes to court, the judge will look at them funny and essentially say "you know this has been decided. Why, pray tell, are you wasting my time?"
Having been in a position where I made the rules, I also learnt an important lesson that most people don't ever learn explicitly, but still treasure:
Rules give you certainty. In your examples, I as a driver never know when someone else (a cop) will consider my driving inadequate and cite more for it. With a fixed speed limit, I can glance at the speedometer and know for certain whether I'm good or not.
There have been a great number of interesting studies that show that clear and well-known rules, no matter how nonsensical and arbitrary they are, have a calming psychological effect while uncontrollable external judgement causes constant stress. So if you want to create a society of permanently stressed-out people, then by all means continue pushing for your proposal.
PS: In my country (Germany), an equivalent of your rule already exists in addition to the usual rules, or rather as its preface. 1 of our traffic laws book says that drivers shall at all times drive cautiously and considerate. You don't easily get a ticket for violating that, but this is what gets you in trouble when you try to argue the sign said "80" in strong winds, heavy rainfall and 10m visibility.
This does, of course, suffer from a self-selection bias. People who use a cross-platform compiler have already decided that they want to play in both fields. All this does is find out their reason why. Which is interesting, make no mistake. To round out the picture, however, you'd have to at least get the number of developers who target one platform exclusively or use other cross-platform tools.
With my own dabbling in iPhone development and a friend who does that plus android semi-professionally, my own take is that the iPhone "peak" is getting ever smaller, to get into the top apps that make money like a printing press is getting ever more difficult. However, people usually underestimate the long tail, which feeds quite a lot of developers. It's not as exciting, but it works well especially for small-time and indy developers.
The same goes for android as a whole. I don't see nearly the same exposure for any android apps as is common for top iPhone apps. Less peak, more long tail. There is a marked difference in willingness to pay, however. At this time, as far as I can gather from people I know, android development isn't very profitable. But the growth rate is good, so that may change.
A radar does not print "alien object detected" on the screen anywhere except the movies. It shows a radar echo. That is pretty good evidence that something is out there. At the same time, it is no evidence whatsoever that said something is of alien origin.
Eye witnesses... well, the unreliability of eye witnesses is an open secret. The human power of perception is pretty pathetic, and memory even worse. There are tons of experiments out there where you can reliably and repeatably make people remember things that weren't there, see things that aren't there, or miss blatantly obvious things.
If I see a guy who I know died come back to life, and other witnesses see it then that would be outside verification.
And what is more likely? That the diagnosis of death was wrong, or that one of the thousand gods mankind has invented has reversed the order of chemical and physical processes just for the fun of it?
Not all of the accounts in religion and in UFO's fit neatly into your phychology theory.
Probably not. But it is a lot more likely that a different psychological theory fits them than that gods are real or aliens are visiting us. Once more: Where did all the curious aliens from the 60s go? Left earth because we made their favourite drugs illegal in the 70s?
What the UFOs are and where they came from, who knows
More importantly, where did they go? The current patterns do make it look like a cultural phenomenon.
but there is something to these reports
Totally. The question is: What?
The aliens on Earth theory has an incredible amount of holes and empty spaces once you accept it and look to the details. All its magic is in the base assumption. It's the modern day religion - God or UFOs sounds like an incredible thing to have, but every time someone starts to write down the details, it's a piece of crap literature full of continuity errors and outright nonsense.
I personally think these people are completely honest. Just the same way certain religious people are completely honest when talking about how Jesus talks to them. They really believe what they say. That just doesn't make it true.
But for both cases, psychology, not conspiracy theory, gives the most likely explanations as to why they truly believe what has no outside verification.
Steve Jobs still clings to haptic studies done in the 80s that showed that Apple users are less confused when prevented with fewer ways to control things, while he's ignored a couple of decades' worth of feedback that Apple would sell more computers if they gave the user more control.
Feedback is noisy, and uncontrolled. It does not usually do a good job at accurately representing a majority opinion. On the contrary, random feedback tends to exaggerate the extreme opinions, as those who are simply happy with how things are do not provide feedback until prompted.
I've given a bundle of speeches and held trainings, one of the things you either learn by yourself over time or they tell you when you train for things like that is that feedback given afterwards while interesting and useful is never representative. You need to actually have people fill out a questionaire or something to get the majority opinion.
So, unless you cite some actual studies done on that subject, I doubt your assertion that Apple would sell more. Heck, I switched to Mac at a time where I could not understand how people can work on windos without the 3rd mouse button. The mouse I currently have on this Mac has 7 buttons and two wheels. The fact that Apple packaged a multi-touch mouse with 1,5 buttons doesn't bother me.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a vital difference: These things are different for each person.
Sure, if you are attacking a specific individual, finding out his address, finding his house on Google maps and finding the front door is easy.
But what you can't do is sweep through an entire University with a list of common passwords and look where you get lucky. You need to actually do some research on the particular person, and that drives costs up considerably. Mass-hacking would be over.
People are dumb.
True, but individuals are smart.
Yes, you would have to exclude famous landmarks. But the training is a lot simpler. Compare:
With this scheme:
"Pick a place that has meaning to you, personally, and that you can easily remember. Don't pick famous landmarks or other places that lots and lots of people would think about, but rather something personal."
With passwords:
"Pick a difficult-to-guess combination of letters, numbers and special characters. Don't write it down anywhere, you have to remember it. But it can't be any actual word, or a permutation of a word. It should at best resemble randomly jumbled letters and numbers. And not too short. Yes, we are serious when we said you have to learn it by heart it."
Now I'm a security geek, and I don't understand much of the things going on in the brains of security-averse average Joes. But I would be surprised if he'd not nod his head for the first explanation and shake it for the second.
I'm an American, I might choose Westminster Abbey as my password, but I'm not going to select a random flat in London.
Really? How about if you were told - like with passwords today - not to pick famous places. You might pick a random flat in London. One that isn't random for you. Maybe the one where you laid that gorgeous black girl on your first business trip there?
And besides, even if you do pick famous places, you may have to be a bit more specific than that. You might pick Westminster Abbey, but not the whole building, but, for example the roof of the tower. That's a lot more difficult to guess.
This rivals one of the worst-ever schemes security schemes I've seen. A credit union I used to use would let you select a "secret question" from a drop-down list.
And there's the massive difference and everyone who ever did any work in security could've told them that. They arbitrarily reduced the keyspace dramatically.
Taking the whole world is still a huge keyspace, if you are specific enough (i.e. no taking of entire countries or cities or famous landmarks). Whatever place you pick will have meaning to you, but to everyone else it could well be totally random. And that's what the strength is. A list of sports teams, even if it weren't as pre-determined as your example, has meaning to everyone, not just the person that picked it.
Simple questions are too easy to be asked. To have an expectation of personal privacy, you'd have to be a person, right? I mean come on, you can lawyer-talk all you like, but that doesn't change simple, straightforward facts. Yes, I know that it is the job of lawyers to complicate and twist around simple facts until they don't look so simple anymore, but that's just a trick of the trade.
So no, corporations do not have personal privacy because they aren't persons.
Oh, also, in this case, they aren't private. They're a publicly traded company. Oops.
Agreed, and I've used QoS to that end myself.
However, that is the case of "ISP doing its best to deliver all traffic as best as possible" that I was referring to. Priorisation according to non-technical criteria, on the other hand, means leaving that optimum that you worked so hard on getting to.
Write people an extremely hefty fine if they are involved in an accident while texting
Sure, that'll work. It only ignores one of the most well-known facts about human attitude towards low-probability, high-risk events - in less prosaic terms known as the "it only ever happens to other people" effect. Everyone thinks that he can handle it. Just like everyone on the road thinks the other people should go back to driving school.
One of the problems of things that distract is that distraction is not an effect noticeable by the distracted unless it is very strong. Most people strongly overestimate their ability to drive safely while just slightly intoxicated, for example. Driving simulators can do a lot to confront them safely with reality. Most people are shocked when they get out of the simulator because they thought they were still almost sober - when in fact their reaction times are already slowed down enough to make a life-or-death difference to someone else.
I'm very sure that all those who text while driving honestly believe that they can handle it. I would take bets they wouldn't even realize the problem after the accident. They'd probably tell themselves that it would've happened even if they had been paying attention.
It's not half as dumb as the summary makes it sound.
For security, what matters is the keyspace and the likelyhood of guessing correctly. The keyspace easily competes with alphanumeric passwords. It is dramatically reduced by the assumption that people will pick places with meaning to them, which means places they've been to. Nevertheless, it should measure up to passwords in security.
Different from passwords, though, the human mind is pretty well equipped to recall specific places. Arbitrary alphanumeric combinations, on the other hand, are amongst the most difficult things to remember and recall.
All the ISPs know they'll get whacked by their customers if they are doing something to significantly reduce user experience.
Bwuahahahahaha
As if customers would notice. And yes, I work at an ISP, I know what the fuck I'm talking about.
The key word is "significant". Of course you never do that. You add your degredation of service gradually, so their experience never really changes from one day to the next, and human beings are pretty much incapable of noticing a gentle slope. The only guys who have a chance of catching what you're doing are those who do measurements (a hand full of geeks plus some journalists) and those who return after a very long holiday or absence. Have a bullshit explanation ("additional quality ensurance on the lines does unfortunately introduce a negliegable amount of latency") ready for them.
The primary reason free market theory is not applicable to the real world is that it makes assumptions about both sides that are not true if they are humans. Free market theory is the Newton of economics - a pretty good approximation, but once you go outside of everyday experience, and get to huge corporations or split-second stock markets, it simply fails.
uh, right. IANANES (I Am Not A Native English Speaker)
Which is why traffic courts allow for tolerances and take the possibility of measurement errors into consideration.
Next.
Yes, and you just about summed up what's been wrong with Germany for centuries: instead of taking personal responsibility and dealing with uncertainty, Germans want to have things spelled out for them as rules they can follow blindly and without having to think for themselves.
It's funny how only the A Cowards bring that argument.
Knowing what the rules are and blindly following them are not the same things and one does not necessarily follow the other. If you see them in such close proximity, that says a lot more about you than about 21st century Germany.
The Autobahn works because it was built with no speed limit in mind, so it is usually straight and curves are long, sometimes very long. In fact, we used to have something called "Richtgeschwindigkeit", roughly "recommended speed" set at 130 km/h (80 mph). It works because people expect you to be driving at speeds like that and above, and drive accordingly. Nobody who is sane would change into the leftmost lane at low speeds without making very certain that the road behind is empty.
I'm not a fan of speed limits, I enjoy driving at 240 km/h (150 mph) which is the top speed of most of the cars I rent. So I personally believe that lower speeds don't make driving safer. But you have to have the environment - the road must be built for it, the car must be built for it, and the driver must be used to the speed (things like keeping enough distance at speeds like that, etc.)
Well, if your speedometer is broken, you also can't tell if you are speeding or not. But the difference is that this is your problem and your responsibility to fix.
For alcohol, there are breathalyzers available. Some clubs even have them installed in my city, so you can check. Or you can simply play it safe and not drink and drive. The fact that you don't know your alcohol concentration is entirely your problem and how you deal with it as well.
Nice attempt at provocation, but missing the argument by a wide margin.
Having rules formulated clearly and unambigiously so you know for certain whether you are breaking them or not gives you assurance.
Blindly following every rule no matter what it is is not only not the same thing, it is probably not even in the same chapter in the book of life. On the contrary, a lot of people in this world knowingly and intentionally break rules to make a point - see the jewish blockade runners of today. If they hadn't known the rules, or if the rules had been so soft that nobody were able to say what exactly it was that they were doing, the whole action would have lost a lot of its impact.
Even if it is not a precedent in the legally binding sense, lawyers love to cite other courts' decisions and judges usually take them into consideration.
I live in a country where precedents are never legally binding, even if a higher court made them. Nevertheless, most courts follow other courts' decisions unless they find a good reason to deviate (usually because the case is similar, but not identical) and very few courts deviate from the opinion of higher courts (mostly because they know on appeal they'd be overturned anyways).
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
And what stops them or the state patrol from doing it again?
It's called a precedent.
Next time this goes to court, the judge will look at them funny and essentially say "you know this has been decided. Why, pray tell, are you wasting my time?"
Having been in a position where I made the rules, I also learnt an important lesson that most people don't ever learn explicitly, but still treasure:
Rules give you certainty. In your examples, I as a driver never know when someone else (a cop) will consider my driving inadequate and cite more for it. With a fixed speed limit, I can glance at the speedometer and know for certain whether I'm good or not.
There have been a great number of interesting studies that show that clear and well-known rules, no matter how nonsensical and arbitrary they are, have a calming psychological effect while uncontrollable external judgement causes constant stress. So if you want to create a society of permanently stressed-out people, then by all means continue pushing for your proposal.
PS:
In my country (Germany), an equivalent of your rule already exists in addition to the usual rules, or rather as its preface. 1 of our traffic laws book says that drivers shall at all times drive cautiously and considerate. You don't easily get a ticket for violating that, but this is what gets you in trouble when you try to argue the sign said "80" in strong winds, heavy rainfall and 10m visibility.
This does, of course, suffer from a self-selection bias. People who use a cross-platform compiler have already decided that they want to play in both fields. All this does is find out their reason why. Which is interesting, make no mistake. To round out the picture, however, you'd have to at least get the number of developers who target one platform exclusively or use other cross-platform tools.
With my own dabbling in iPhone development and a friend who does that plus android semi-professionally, my own take is that the iPhone "peak" is getting ever smaller, to get into the top apps that make money like a printing press is getting ever more difficult. However, people usually underestimate the long tail, which feeds quite a lot of developers. It's not as exciting, but it works well especially for small-time and indy developers.
The same goes for android as a whole. I don't see nearly the same exposure for any android apps as is common for top iPhone apps. Less peak, more long tail. There is a marked difference in willingness to pay, however. At this time, as far as I can gather from people I know, android development isn't very profitable. But the growth rate is good, so that may change.
A radar does not print "alien object detected" on the screen anywhere except the movies. It shows a radar echo. That is pretty good evidence that something is out there. At the same time, it is no evidence whatsoever that said something is of alien origin.
Eye witnesses... well, the unreliability of eye witnesses is an open secret. The human power of perception is pretty pathetic, and memory even worse. There are tons of experiments out there where you can reliably and repeatably make people remember things that weren't there, see things that aren't there, or miss blatantly obvious things.
If I see a guy who I know died come back to life, and other witnesses see it then that would be outside verification.
And what is more likely? That the diagnosis of death was wrong, or that one of the thousand gods mankind has invented has reversed the order of chemical and physical processes just for the fun of it?
Not all of the accounts in religion and in UFO's fit neatly into your phychology theory.
Probably not. But it is a lot more likely that a different psychological theory fits them than that gods are real or aliens are visiting us. Once more: Where did all the curious aliens from the 60s go? Left earth because we made their favourite drugs illegal in the 70s?
So, where are the mirrors? Who has copies of the video?
Haven't we always thought that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it? Well, where is the backup route?
Hm, maybe all this centralized infrastructure in a few big providers does have some drawbacks after all...
What the UFOs are and where they came from, who knows
More importantly, where did they go? The current patterns do make it look like a cultural phenomenon.
but there is something to these reports
Totally. The question is: What?
The aliens on Earth theory has an incredible amount of holes and empty spaces once you accept it and look to the details. All its magic is in the base assumption. It's the modern day religion - God or UFOs sounds like an incredible thing to have, but every time someone starts to write down the details, it's a piece of crap literature full of continuity errors and outright nonsense.
I personally think these people are completely honest. Just the same way certain religious people are completely honest when talking about how Jesus talks to them. They really believe what they say. That just doesn't make it true.
But for both cases, psychology, not conspiracy theory, gives the most likely explanations as to why they truly believe what has no outside verification.
The question I would have is --- why is the article presenting skewed numbers, and including PC and Netbook users?
Follow the money? Who is going to be a big loser if Flash is demoted from its de-facto standard?
Steve Jobs still clings to haptic studies done in the 80s that showed that Apple users are less confused when prevented with fewer ways to control things, while he's ignored a couple of decades' worth of feedback that Apple would sell more computers if they gave the user more control.
Feedback is noisy, and uncontrolled. It does not usually do a good job at accurately representing a majority opinion. On the contrary, random feedback tends to exaggerate the extreme opinions, as those who are simply happy with how things are do not provide feedback until prompted.
I've given a bundle of speeches and held trainings, one of the things you either learn by yourself over time or they tell you when you train for things like that is that feedback given afterwards while interesting and useful is never representative. You need to actually have people fill out a questionaire or something to get the majority opinion.
So, unless you cite some actual studies done on that subject, I doubt your assertion that Apple would sell more. Heck, I switched to Mac at a time where I could not understand how people can work on windos without the 3rd mouse button. The mouse I currently have on this Mac has 7 buttons and two wheels. The fact that Apple packaged a multi-touch mouse with 1,5 buttons doesn't bother me.
also conspiciously absent: a simple link to the map, which is slightly hidden among other links at the end of the article.