The other thing that annoys me about US/Euro car differences is that Europe always seems to get more features at a comparable price, and newer/better technology more quickly than the US will deploy it.
After having two people I was living with get hit by hit-and-run drivers while on bicycles, I decided not to take up biking. There are too many assholes with cars.
Many cyclists believe that police regard us as a nuisance and are glad to have us taken off the road, and that's why they don't bother charging the driver. True or not, it sometimes feels that way.
If you lived in a location with bike cops, things might be different...
SUVs are about two things: driving off-road and style.
Most SUVs are not very good off-road vehicles, with high centers of mass. SUVs are about one thing -- fleeing the reality of aging.
When the reasonable car for a family to buy was a station wagon, everyone bought it.
But most people just can't deal with the thought of "being old, like their parents", so the kids of those people bought minivans to be different.
Now, their kids can't deal with the thought of "being old, like their parents", so they buy SUVs to be different.
Adults are just as bad at resisting marketing as children are. They aren't any better than children at realizing when they're being influenced, either.
And the great thing about a car choice (from the standpoint of an auto company) is that it's a big investment, and can't be backed out of. So every person who commits to a car winds up defensive as to why it's a good choice, or else is faced with admitting that they made a stupid decision. "This Porsche? Best purchase I ever made." Uh, huh. Same stupid mentality that drives squabbling over which console is better on game forum websites.
It doesn't work with iPod because Apple refuses to lince Fairplay and refuses to support WMA.
Ah.
So, let me get this straight.
It's *Apple's* fault that Microsoft's product sucks because, after Apple took over the market (in what I'd consider a pretty reasonable and not-underhanded manner), they refused to pay money to Microsoft to allow them the privilege of letting Microsoft control a standard interchange format?
Sounds like you're looking for emusic... There's a monthly fee for a set number of downloads (number depends on which plan you choose) that are yours permanently. It's DRM-free MP3 format, as you requested....
*My* living room media box is a Linux machine with a 104-key keyboard attached. And I'll bet it's a hell of a lot more capable than *either* of the above companies' offerings.
convicted felons can't own a firearm or vote. Does that go against the constitution?
The fact that felons can't vote is really bad. The entire point of voting is to have a safety valve where people can express their gripes without running out and shooting people. I would say that people who are in jail for a felony are prime candidates for people who aren't really happy with the way things are working and *would* like a say.
Otherwise, if I'm the State and I want to shush you, all I have to do is create a new felony law that you disagree with and when you violate it, silence you.
The felon sufferage thing is actually a little more complicated than just "can't vote". It doesn't apply in some states. In general, the states where it applies most strongly are Republican states; something like 80% of felons vote Democratic, probably (speculation here) a good chunk of which is because of drug law. Only two states (Maine and Vermont, both solidly Democrat) allow felons to vote from prison with the rest of the citizens. Some states allow a felon to vote once he has served out his prison sentence, others once he has also completed probation. Some disenfranchise a felon only if he has committed multiple felonies. A number of states require a felon to go through a process to re-obtain sufferage. A few states (again, all red states) permanently strip a felon of the right to vote (including, significantly, Florida, the "big swing state").
Also, half the battle of a lawsuit is collecting the money...you cannot collect what the person doesn't have, and I am pretty sure the gov't is not allowed to force a person to give so much that he cannot live (i.e. become homeless).
Specifically in Florida, your house cannot be seized (hence, you can shelter assets in your house...or mansion).
Actually, I'd agree that a dime is probably a better metric of the damage caused (as long as that damage was only deleting spam, and not the ISP being RBLed and many people's communications being disrupted, not someone falling for a scam, and so forth).
However, as you've pointed out, a dime instead of a dollar still won't change the issue. Any spammer who sends a sizeable spam is going to have to declare bankrupcy, end of story.
My current spam irritation comes from the "companies you have done any business with can contact you" Do Not Call List exemption. When you combine this with the fact that a couple years ago, well-meaning laws went through stating that financial organizations can't just sell your information, you get the expected result: mergers. Lots and lots of mergers in the financial sector, for a couple years now. So now you have a few vast financial giants (like Bank of America) who can transmit your financial information to any *other* part of their company (including, say, their credit card/insurance/etc wings) and can call you and email you advertisements constantly on behalf of anything they own. It sucks.
Okay, yes, Unisys is a big company, but unless there is one person posting over and over, they've got the worst goddamn employee morale that I have *ever* seen.
I see something like twenty posts from Unisys and ex-Unisys employees here that are overwhelmingly negative about the company. I see only *one* that's remotely positive, and that's from a guy who says that he's so detached from Unisys that he barely knows who he's working for -- and *that's* what he considers good.
See, here's the thing. Had Unisys made people aware that GIF compression was patented early on, nobody would have used the thing. They had to let people form an incorrect impression to make money.
That might even be the American Way, but if so, that mere fact isn't enough to make me endorse it.
Don't worry, there are lots of really rich and powerful people who benefit from the FUD generated by this lawsuit so SCO will not ever run out of money.
I'll bite. I can think of Microsoft and conceivably Sun -- these folks compete with Linux and can benefit from any bad PR generated. Who else, though, possibly profits from a string of unwinnable lawsuits filed against Linux?
I certainly would love to know if this ten million dollars started, one way or another, at Microsoft. I can't think of any other people with lots of money (with the possible exception of Sun) who would remotely benefit from continuous legal challenges to Linux.
At first I thought that ESR was a conspiracy nut. Then you realize that, no, Microsoft actually *is* as nasty as he claims.
Why? SCO isn't aiming for public approval. McBride knows that he is "the most hated man in the industry". At this point, he's going to gamble long with the remnants of his hand, and that's hoping that he'll hit something, anything, where a judge might smack Novell.
The justice system doesn't require that a plaintiff be liked (and we don't have much of a mechanism to keep people from filing unfounded lawsuits).
The US's frustration with France really stems from the fact that the US absolutely saved France's posterior in both World War I and World War II.
If you ignore Britain's rather more substantial contribution to that effort.
And if you want to look to long-past wars, you might consider the American Revolution, where France rather handily pulled America's bacon out of the fire.
File formats are the new security frontier. No matter how much you audit servers and fling firewall rules about, there is a vast mass of software on your computer that writes and reads data to and from files. Do these programs treat data as if it is as untrusted and potentially malicious as they do (well, should) if they are accepting data from the network? Of course not -- hell, most of the software authors out there probably don't have a clue what kind of security issues there are to be concerned about.
There is no easy fix (NX is about as close as you're going to get). "Move to XML" takes care of a tiny bit of easy code, the low-level parsing code. How does all the data interrelate? Does your program have defined behavior for *all* possible input files? It's almost certainly exposing a *huge* chunk of its internals in its files, usually far more than is exposed to the network by a typical program. How robust is all that? Are there buffer overflows anywhere in your code? Two pieces of redundant data that might disagree? Can corrupt data structures be produced? Basically, is there *any* way that a corrupt data file can crash your program? If so, there's a pretty solid risk that you represent a vulnerability to the computer that your program is running on.
MP3s file-reading code has had exploitable bugs. JPEGs have had exploitable bugs. Do you want to bet that the file I/O code of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office package really is completely robust, and that a single malicious file opened on one computer on your network can't infect all the others reachable from that computer?
Except this isolated incident for Microsoft is played out constantly in the open source world. An engineer sees an irritating problem, he fixes it. You can fix Microsoft's screw-ups (there is a whole host of flaky $15 shareware programs exist based on this premise), but it's never going to be the clean, seamless fix that you'll see in the open source world. It'll be "that independent hack that might patch things over" versus "the real, Microsoft-blessed thing".
I'm not sure I'd have even been able to use pig insulin, let alone human from recombinant source insulin, without the patent regime.
I'm not sure either, but I'm also not sure that you wouldn't have had even better systems. Patents are definitely not a necessary component of medical advances -- they may well help, though.
"Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?"
-- Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine
My particular beef is with software patents. I don't know enough about the chemistry, biomedical, mechanical, and business plan industries to know whether patents there are worthwhile. I work at a corporate lab that does computer science research, and yet I haven't read one software patent that I consider indispensible or even that directly helpful to the advancement of computer science. I have seen people making poor engineering decisions because once they have produced a patent, even if they discover a better approach to solving a problem, the people funding them expect them to conform to the patent. The image of expensive-to-develop, revolutionary ideas is simply not the reality of most worthwhile work. Worse, almost every engineer that I've worked with has at some point been constrained because of patent concerns. The only direct beneficiary is the legal department.
The idea of the patent is that without it, everything will simply become secret information (or, alternately, that there will be no advances in the field). This system might have been reasonable for, say, a new plow design. It is immediately obvious how a new plow works. The reverse engineering and production of duplicate plows can be done almost immediately. It is not feasible for an individual to produce a nation's worth of plows -- capital to produce these plows is required, so there is concern that the ideas of individuals will not be implemented without providing incentive for corporations to expend money on research. A new plow may have a lifespan of fifty years. However, this is not at all the case in computer science. A single person can easily come up with a new idea in computer science, produce an implementation, and replicate this implementation around the world. He *inherently* has protection -- it takes time to figure out what he has done and reimplement a competing product, if his idea truly is amazing, and if his idea is obvious and trivial, then it has a correspondingly weaker degree of protection. His production costs are low, he can recoup expenses in a short time -- software products generally have a lifespan that is far shorter than any patents protecting them. The time before someone can reverse-engineer and reimplement his work is significant in his case, unlike the situation with the plow.
There are other issues. One of the challenges associated with software is the degree to which a software vendor can create lock-in. Patents can be phenomenally helpful in this -- for example, TrueType is now the de facto standard font format in use, but hinting information in TrueType fonts cannot be used by the FreeType renderer implementation. Apple holds a patent that may or may not prevent FreeType from interpreting the hinting instructions. All the existing incumbent players simply cross-license their patents (completely contrary to the intent of how patents were intended to function). If you want to enter the font renderer world and be competitive, you now have to sell people on a new, incompatible format.
This cross-licensing is a severe problem. NVidia and Intel cross-license. Apple and Microsoft cross-license. ATI and Nvidia cross-license. Why? Because (a) they've long since realized that it is simply impossible for an engineer to legally function in the patent minefield of a competitive industry without simply overriding patents and (b) this simply allows them to prevent any new challengers from entering their arena. Every advance, no matter how minor, has a few patents attached to it, and the patents are used to en
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [CC]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure.
Wikipedia is not *perfect*, this is true...but that doesn't mean that it isn't the best thing currently out there. Britannica lacks any entry for Panera whatsoever.
You know, it's probably just concidence, but CD manufacturers that tried to "DRMize" discs by corrupting the error-correction data also neatly slashed the lifetime of their discs. Consumer thinks that he's buying a normal CD -- hell, he doesn't know anything about error-correction lookup tables or anything -- takes it home, can't back the CD up without violating the DMCA, yet he discovers that any scratches really screw over the CD.
I like the idea of providing a choice to device manufacturers -- you can have DMCA protection against the bypassing of copy blocking schemes to prevent backups if you want, but then you *must* provide, on request, a replacement product for damaged product (since the consumer is unable to create a backup copy himself). It'd be a win-win situation for consumers -- manufacturers have incentive to not just block copying on everything, and alternately have incentive to make products more reliable.
Just don't be an idiot who moves the console while it's on.
I think that this is apologism for something unacceptable. Hard drive based devices, okay -- they have a fragile read head that has to be incredibly close to the magnetic surface. Optical devices have big heavy read heads that stay well away from the disc, and especially on a console designed to operate in both horizontal and vertical mode, the thing should not barf with a little bit of movement. You'll notice that the problem isn't the laser's optics impacting the disc, but housing. The llama folks worked around the problem themselves pretty easily -- the problem is not fundamental, but a design flaw. I don't think that only an "idiot" would move a 360 while it's on.
Now, I don't expect Microsoft to replace 'em -- with the thin (well, probably negative, actually) margins of the console world, it's let the buyer beware. It's not just Microsoft, either -- all of the other console vendors have always had Rev 1 of their console be a lemon one way or another -- the stuff gets patched over time, and reliability improves. I expect that Rev 2 360s will have padding, though, as detailed in the article.
This *is* a really good argument for backups, though -- the fact that you can't create a legal backup of your game really sucks. I could see an amendment to the DMCA saying that if your product's mechanism uses a legally-unbypassable-under-the-DMCA-mechanism that prevents creation of a backup of your product, that you *must* provide a replacement product in exchange for a damaged copy of your product, on demand. This would be particularly relevant for DRM involving the deliberate corruption of CD error correction data -- in adding such DRM, CD publishers drastically shorten the life of their media (which kind of screws the customer, who probably is not aware of the technical details of various DRM schemes, and expects his new CD to age as well as normal CDs).
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The other thing that annoys me about US/Euro car differences is that Europe always seems to get more features at a comparable price, and newer/better technology more quickly than the US will deploy it.
Automatic transmission?
At 35 mph collision of any type (front, side flat, back and side pillar) there is no damage to the occupants. At all.
How about *top*? Betcha didn't think of that. What if the H2 *fell* on the car?
After having two people I was living with get hit by hit-and-run drivers while on bicycles, I decided not to take up biking. There are too many assholes with cars.
Many cyclists believe that police regard us as a nuisance and are glad to have us taken off the road, and that's why they don't bother charging the driver. True or not, it sometimes feels that way.
If you lived in a location with bike cops, things might be different...
SUVs are about two things: driving off-road and style.
Most SUVs are not very good off-road vehicles, with high centers of mass. SUVs are about one thing -- fleeing the reality of aging.
When the reasonable car for a family to buy was a station wagon, everyone bought it.
But most people just can't deal with the thought of "being old, like their parents", so the kids of those people bought minivans to be different.
Now, their kids can't deal with the thought of "being old, like their parents", so they buy SUVs to be different.
Adults are just as bad at resisting marketing as children are. They aren't any better than children at realizing when they're being influenced, either.
And the great thing about a car choice (from the standpoint of an auto company) is that it's a big investment, and can't be backed out of. So every person who commits to a car winds up defensive as to why it's a good choice, or else is faced with admitting that they made a stupid decision. "This Porsche? Best purchase I ever made." Uh, huh. Same stupid mentality that drives squabbling over which console is better on game forum websites.
Oh, wait a minute. PlayFair is Apple's system, and PlaysForSure is Microsoft's.
Gah, haven't really been following this.
It doesn't work with iPod because Apple refuses to lince Fairplay and refuses to support WMA.
Ah.
So, let me get this straight.
It's *Apple's* fault that Microsoft's product sucks because, after Apple took over the market (in what I'd consider a pretty reasonable and not-underhanded manner), they refused to pay money to Microsoft to allow them the privilege of letting Microsoft control a standard interchange format?
Sounds like you're looking for emusic... There's a monthly fee for a set number of downloads (number depends on which plan you choose) that are yours permanently. It's DRM-free MP3 format, as you requested....
Are you familiar with MagnaTune?
*My* living room media box is a Linux machine with a 104-key keyboard attached. And I'll bet it's a hell of a lot more capable than *either* of the above companies' offerings.
convicted felons can't own a firearm or vote. Does that go against the constitution?
The fact that felons can't vote is really bad. The entire point of voting is to have a safety valve where people can express their gripes without running out and shooting people. I would say that people who are in jail for a felony are prime candidates for people who aren't really happy with the way things are working and *would* like a say.
Otherwise, if I'm the State and I want to shush you, all I have to do is create a new felony law that you disagree with and when you violate it, silence you.
The felon sufferage thing is actually a little more complicated than just "can't vote". It doesn't apply in some states. In general, the states where it applies most strongly are Republican states; something like 80% of felons vote Democratic, probably (speculation here) a good chunk of which is because of drug law. Only two states (Maine and Vermont, both solidly Democrat) allow felons to vote from prison with the rest of the citizens. Some states allow a felon to vote once he has served out his prison sentence, others once he has also completed probation. Some disenfranchise a felon only if he has committed multiple felonies. A number of states require a felon to go through a process to re-obtain sufferage. A few states (again, all red states) permanently strip a felon of the right to vote (including, significantly, Florida, the "big swing state").
Here's a breakdown.
Also, half the battle of a lawsuit is collecting the money...you cannot collect what the person doesn't have, and I am pretty sure the gov't is not allowed to force a person to give so much that he cannot live (i.e. become homeless).
Specifically in Florida, your house cannot be seized (hence, you can shelter assets in your house...or mansion).
Actually, I'd agree that a dime is probably a better metric of the damage caused (as long as that damage was only deleting spam, and not the ISP being RBLed and many people's communications being disrupted, not someone falling for a scam, and so forth).
However, as you've pointed out, a dime instead of a dollar still won't change the issue. Any spammer who sends a sizeable spam is going to have to declare bankrupcy, end of story.
My current spam irritation comes from the "companies you have done any business with can contact you" Do Not Call List exemption. When you combine this with the fact that a couple years ago, well-meaning laws went through stating that financial organizations can't just sell your information, you get the expected result: mergers. Lots and lots of mergers in the financial sector, for a couple years now. So now you have a few vast financial giants (like Bank of America) who can transmit your financial information to any *other* part of their company (including, say, their credit card/insurance/etc wings) and can call you and email you advertisements constantly on behalf of anything they own. It sucks.
Okay, yes, Unisys is a big company, but unless there is one person posting over and over, they've got the worst goddamn employee morale that I have *ever* seen.
I see something like twenty posts from Unisys and ex-Unisys employees here that are overwhelmingly negative about the company. I see only *one* that's remotely positive, and that's from a guy who says that he's so detached from Unisys that he barely knows who he's working for -- and *that's* what he considers good.
See, here's the thing. Had Unisys made people aware that GIF compression was patented early on, nobody would have used the thing. They had to let people form an incorrect impression to make money.
That might even be the American Way, but if so, that mere fact isn't enough to make me endorse it.
Don't worry, there are lots of really rich and powerful people who benefit from the FUD generated by this lawsuit so SCO will not ever run out of money.
I'll bite. I can think of Microsoft and conceivably Sun -- these folks compete with Linux and can benefit from any bad PR generated. Who else, though, possibly profits from a string of unwinnable lawsuits filed against Linux?
I certainly would love to know if this ten million dollars started, one way or another, at Microsoft. I can't think of any other people with lots of money (with the possible exception of Sun) who would remotely benefit from continuous legal challenges to Linux.
At first I thought that ESR was a conspiracy nut. Then you realize that, no, Microsoft actually *is* as nasty as he claims.
You sure have to give them credit for sheer nads.
Why? SCO isn't aiming for public approval. McBride knows that he is "the most hated man in the industry". At this point, he's going to gamble long with the remnants of his hand, and that's hoping that he'll hit something, anything, where a judge might smack Novell.
The justice system doesn't require that a plaintiff be liked (and we don't have much of a mechanism to keep people from filing unfounded lawsuits).
Two panes on a high-resolution TV monitor, and start buying Wacom stock...
The two screens were almost certainly because it's less expensive to produce two flawless small screens than one flawless large screen.
The US's frustration with France really stems from the fact that the US absolutely saved France's posterior in both World War I and World War II.
If you ignore Britain's rather more substantial contribution to that effort.
And if you want to look to long-past wars, you might consider the American Revolution, where France rather handily pulled America's bacon out of the fire.
File formats are the new security frontier. No matter how much you audit servers and fling firewall rules about, there is a vast mass of software on your computer that writes and reads data to and from files. Do these programs treat data as if it is as untrusted and potentially malicious as they do (well, should) if they are accepting data from the network? Of course not -- hell, most of the software authors out there probably don't have a clue what kind of security issues there are to be concerned about.
There is no easy fix (NX is about as close as you're going to get). "Move to XML" takes care of a tiny bit of easy code, the low-level parsing code. How does all the data interrelate? Does your program have defined behavior for *all* possible input files? It's almost certainly exposing a *huge* chunk of its internals in its files, usually far more than is exposed to the network by a typical program. How robust is all that? Are there buffer overflows anywhere in your code? Two pieces of redundant data that might disagree? Can corrupt data structures be produced? Basically, is there *any* way that a corrupt data file can crash your program? If so, there's a pretty solid risk that you represent a vulnerability to the computer that your program is running on.
MP3s file-reading code has had exploitable bugs. JPEGs have had exploitable bugs. Do you want to bet that the file I/O code of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office package really is completely robust, and that a single malicious file opened on one computer on your network can't infect all the others reachable from that computer?
Except this isolated incident for Microsoft is played out constantly in the open source world. An engineer sees an irritating problem, he fixes it. You can fix Microsoft's screw-ups (there is a whole host of flaky $15 shareware programs exist based on this premise), but it's never going to be the clean, seamless fix that you'll see in the open source world. It'll be "that independent hack that might patch things over" versus "the real, Microsoft-blessed thing".
I'm not sure I'd have even been able to use pig insulin, let alone human from recombinant source insulin, without the patent regime.
I'm not sure either, but I'm also not sure that you wouldn't have had even better systems. Patents are definitely not a necessary component of medical advances -- they may well help, though.
"Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?"
-- Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine
My particular beef is with software patents. I don't know enough about the chemistry, biomedical, mechanical, and business plan industries to know whether patents there are worthwhile. I work at a corporate lab that does computer science research, and yet I haven't read one software patent that I consider indispensible or even that directly helpful to the advancement of computer science. I have seen people making poor engineering decisions because once they have produced a patent, even if they discover a better approach to solving a problem, the people funding them expect them to conform to the patent. The image of expensive-to-develop, revolutionary ideas is simply not the reality of most worthwhile work. Worse, almost every engineer that I've worked with has at some point been constrained because of patent concerns. The only direct beneficiary is the legal department.
The idea of the patent is that without it, everything will simply become secret information (or, alternately, that there will be no advances in the field). This system might have been reasonable for, say, a new plow design. It is immediately obvious how a new plow works. The reverse engineering and production of duplicate plows can be done almost immediately. It is not feasible for an individual to produce a nation's worth of plows -- capital to produce these plows is required, so there is concern that the ideas of individuals will not be implemented without providing incentive for corporations to expend money on research. A new plow may have a lifespan of fifty years. However, this is not at all the case in computer science. A single person can easily come up with a new idea in computer science, produce an implementation, and replicate this implementation around the world. He *inherently* has protection -- it takes time to figure out what he has done and reimplement a competing product, if his idea truly is amazing, and if his idea is obvious and trivial, then it has a correspondingly weaker degree of protection. His production costs are low, he can recoup expenses in a short time -- software products generally have a lifespan that is far shorter than any patents protecting them. The time before someone can reverse-engineer and reimplement his work is significant in his case, unlike the situation with the plow.
There are other issues. One of the challenges associated with software is the degree to which a software vendor can create lock-in. Patents can be phenomenally helpful in this -- for example, TrueType is now the de facto standard font format in use, but hinting information in TrueType fonts cannot be used by the FreeType renderer implementation. Apple holds a patent that may or may not prevent FreeType from interpreting the hinting instructions. All the existing incumbent players simply cross-license their patents (completely contrary to the intent of how patents were intended to function). If you want to enter the font renderer world and be competitive, you now have to sell people on a new, incompatible format.
This cross-licensing is a severe problem. NVidia and Intel cross-license. Apple and Microsoft cross-license. ATI and Nvidia cross-license. Why? Because (a) they've long since realized that it is simply impossible for an engineer to legally function in the patent minefield of a competitive industry without simply overriding patents and (b) this simply allows them to prevent any new challengers from entering their arena. Every advance, no matter how minor, has a few patents attached to it, and the patents are used to en
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [CC]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure.
Wikipedia is not *perfect*, this is true...but that doesn't mean that it isn't the best thing currently out there. Britannica lacks any entry for Panera whatsoever.
You know, it's probably just concidence, but CD manufacturers that tried to "DRMize" discs by corrupting the error-correction data also neatly slashed the lifetime of their discs. Consumer thinks that he's buying a normal CD -- hell, he doesn't know anything about error-correction lookup tables or anything -- takes it home, can't back the CD up without violating the DMCA, yet he discovers that any scratches really screw over the CD.
I like the idea of providing a choice to device manufacturers -- you can have DMCA protection against the bypassing of copy blocking schemes to prevent backups if you want, but then you *must* provide, on request, a replacement product for damaged product (since the consumer is unable to create a backup copy himself). It'd be a win-win situation for consumers -- manufacturers have incentive to not just block copying on everything, and alternately have incentive to make products more reliable.
Just don't be an idiot who moves the console while it's on.
I think that this is apologism for something unacceptable. Hard drive based devices, okay -- they have a fragile read head that has to be incredibly close to the magnetic surface. Optical devices have big heavy read heads that stay well away from the disc, and especially on a console designed to operate in both horizontal and vertical mode, the thing should not barf with a little bit of movement. You'll notice that the problem isn't the laser's optics impacting the disc, but housing. The llama folks worked around the problem themselves pretty easily -- the problem is not fundamental, but a design flaw. I don't think that only an "idiot" would move a 360 while it's on.
Now, I don't expect Microsoft to replace 'em -- with the thin (well, probably negative, actually) margins of the console world, it's let the buyer beware. It's not just Microsoft, either -- all of the other console vendors have always had Rev 1 of their console be a lemon one way or another -- the stuff gets patched over time, and reliability improves. I expect that Rev 2 360s will have padding, though, as detailed in the article.
This *is* a really good argument for backups, though -- the fact that you can't create a legal backup of your game really sucks. I could see an amendment to the DMCA saying that if your product's mechanism uses a legally-unbypassable-under-the-DMCA-mechanism that prevents creation of a backup of your product, that you *must* provide a replacement product in exchange for a damaged copy of your product, on demand. This would be particularly relevant for DRM involving the deliberate corruption of CD error correction data -- in adding such DRM, CD publishers drastically shorten the life of their media (which kind of screws the customer, who probably is not aware of the technical details of various DRM schemes, and expects his new CD to age as well as normal CDs).