So patent it, or reveal the source code under a very much not open-source license. Just because the source is visible doesn't make it OSS, even if it could allow for someone to (illegally) copy part or all of that code for use elsewhere. Look at vBulletin for example - you can't really closed-source a PHP app from a technical sense, but every file has a license warning at the top stating it's not open source software. True, there's always obfuscation techniques if you want to get into that, but my point here is that a visible source code doesn't make something open source, and certainly not free.
The state collects fines from DUI convicts, and I'm sure they can manipulate the stats on arrests in such a way that there are other gains (politicians showing better results on DUI crackdowns getting re-elected, as a possible example).
If the company producing the devices knowingly rounds things up internally, the police would tend to see higher conviction rates using those devices over others even if they aren't actually aware of the fact. Follow the money trail.
Of course, the code could be fine and they're just concerned about the IP. Or it could be unknowingly flawed, or as has already been mentioned it may have been rushed out the door to get the bid on the contract. There are any number of scenarios that could apply here, but what really needs to be determined is whether the code is producing results that are fair and accurate.
So why can't we get this judge working on one of the cases against voting machines?
There may be a bit of financial incentive for the states to screw over people getting arrested for possible DUI, but there's a whole hell of a lot more to be gained by falsifying election results and thus the devices should be trusted that much less.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but shouldn't there be some sort of requirement for a certain level of technological knowledge by the judge when working on a base that hinges on that technology?
It doesn't matter if the music/games/films are cheap or without DRM as you just can't beat free for a lot of people.
For some people, sure. But it's certainly possible to beat free, especially within the right demographic.
The problem is that these companies seem to think they can beat free to death, which is NOT possible. Piracy will never die. They've attempted to take away value from not paying* (and fail consistently) rather than add value to paying. If they think they're going to sell information to an "information wants to be free" crowd, they've got another thing coming. That's not their target market, nor should they think it is. Selling good, genuine entertainment that provides good value is going to get some sales from that crowd, but taking it to the next level by providing extras in legit accounts (NOT requiring a legit account to play at all, as that's just a different take on DRM) could really enhance that.
We live in a time where many, many people feel that they're entitled to get something for nothing - especially with regard to digital goods (there's plenty of political stuff as well that I won't get into). You can try to fight it (and lose), or you can acknowledge that and use the knowledge to your own advantage.
Yeah, if you're going to make a PC game targeted at 14-year-olds with broadband, good luck selling any software. Aiming a few years older to a market that actually has some disposable income would be a very wise move. Actually giving people a _reason_ to pay (send them a free shirt or whatever, some sort of tangible value-add that can't come in bit form) will help so much more. Attempting to use technical means to stop people from playing if a pirated copy is detected isn't going to convince them to cough up. There just aren't means of detection that are 100% safe for paying customers. Look at WGA for example. It accurately tagged a downloaded copy of Vista I'd thrown in a VM for poking around a bit, and the result is that I've now got a VM that can do nothing but browse the internet for no more than an hour a day or buy a legit copy of Vista. I've heard way too many horror stories about WGA to even momentarily consider risking that happening on something I'd pay for. Now that's a somewhat extreme example as far as DRM goes, but simply knowing it's in there has caused me to avoid the product entirely (FWIW, I mostly have no problem with Vista, and I'm a Mac guy).
* Companies have gone so far to intentionally sabotage the game if it detected a pirated copy, going well beyond the usual DRM. Obviously, this completely backfired when it would sometimes wrongly tag legitimate copies causing crashing among paying customers. More significantly, when it hit the scene a few days before release as always happens, it started getting tons of bad press for appearing buggy as hell, even though the "bugs" were intentional crashes caused by the pirated copy bit getting flipped.
If it's not accessible directly on the product before purchasing, the terms are worthless. Best Buy was careful to cover the "This product requires internet activation" (or whatever) warning on the front that fits exactly within the width of one of their price tags.
I can't agree to terms if I'm not presented with them upfront. The terms aren't visible within the product itself until you've opened it, voiding your return policy. You're not even linking to a page on the developer's website, for Christ's sake. Shrink wrap EULAs are bullshit, plain and simple.
But of the eleventy billion IE users who still haven't switch to !IE, why would they switch to Chrome? I think the vast majority of them can be split into two groups: their bank/intranet/some stupid thing/fucking activex/etc doesn't work right elsewhere, and "the blue e takes me to the internet!". The first group can't switch and the second just doesn't care - why/how would Chrome change that?
Why the hell would the Mac version only work on 32-bit? With the exception of I think just the first Mac Mini (and maybe the first Macbooks), their entire Intel line has been x86-64. Seems like a silly move.
True, but it also stops you from playing the games you already own.
Yes, Wine, I know. I want to play the game, not play the installation process. Like a lot of things in the Linux world, the technology is there but with a little more polish it would start to see some real adoption.
At the end of the day, an OS is just a tool that enables you to use other tools and toys. You can hate the OS vendor all yo want, but at the end of the day it's still you that's going to be losing out by switching even if the principle of and reasoning behind the switch make you feel great.
FWIW, this is more a criticism of game developers than Linux. If they'd write their games using OGL instead of D3d, this issue would be largely avoided. Most non-3d apps have comparable equivalents across the three major platforms, though there are plenty of instances of the original being far and away better than the imitators.
In theory, yes, that's what they're for. However from the customer's perspective, that's a (very much not insignificant) added cost. Remember, Geek Squad will charge you something like $120 for an OS install (that number comes from my ass, but I doubt it's too far off the mark), and lord have mercy if you ever have hardware problems and are out of the manufacturer's warranty.
With Apple OTOH, you pay $(150|200|250 depending on system) once and get unlimited parts and labor for three years, and people that are actually good at what they do. Yes, Apple's closed ecosystem makes their job 10x easier (and reduces problems by another order of magnitude to start), but Apple's Genius Bar is seen as a helpful resource rather than an added cost by customers. I'll note that it's more than paid for itself on my MBP, well beyond the point where they've lost money on that one copy of Applecare (but made it back and then some by keeping me as a customer). As far as I'm concerned, both of us won - and THAT is what Microsoft needs (but will fail) to address with their "Gurus". I don't think the insurance company business model would really work at commodity shops like Best Buy or Circuit City, if for no reason other than short-sighted shareholders (and yes, there are a LOT of other reasons).
Applecare exists for the sole purpose of keeping customers happy and getting word of mouth advertisements. It's profits are probably next to nothing, if it turns at profit at all between employee time and replacement hardware costs. Geek Squad et al were designed from day one to be profit centers, and potential customers know this. BB/CC would, of course, hate the 'competition' from a MS Guru if that person existed as a support center, because those companies tend to be too short-sighted. I hate to sound like I'm evangelzing for Apple, but you'd be foolish to deny that Steve Jobs' approach of "manage the top line and the bottom line will follow" (look at the interview on appleinsider following the iPod announcement a few days ago) is working really damn well, especially in an environment where customers tend to get the shaft.
No kidding. I'm pretty sure some/. post yesterday pegged it at something like 2.5PB/yr*, or almost 7TB/day. Your sneakernet would be more like a forkliftnet. An interesting sight to say the least, but logistically retarded.
*I'm running on about 2 hours of sleep, so I could be way off the mark there.
Yes. The problem is that in order to avoid potential ambiguity in laws, they need to be written in unreadable legalese. That certainly requires a lot of care (those age-old debates about having used a semicolon instead of a comma, etc).
So, say there's a simple law on the books: "Sending spam is illegal." Then you have to define spam, legally. It's easy enough to do, but damn near impossible to do without also including legitimate communications under the umbrella term. Maybe "a business sending out messages to mailing lists where those on the list haven't opted-in first". But then the spammers stop working under some sort of protective LLC, and it has to be expanded to cover individuals. But then you can't send out CCs legally anymore either.
Unfortunately, there's nothing (AFAIK) in the email protocols about how to deal with unsolicited messages at a mailbox level. Whitelisting is the closest we really have, and that blocks way too much legitimate communication. The problem is that a legal solution won't help since spammers don't care about breaking the law; but what we have as a technical solution is really the best way to do things (generating lists against billions of messages, a la gmail) despite still not being great.
Do we really have to get into this whole cache=copying=recording debate, though? It's a reasonably simple thing to have any cache clearing functions do so securely, and unlike with magnetic platters there's no need to worry about paranoid 35-pass overwrites with the flash memory in the iPhone and every other handheld on the planet.
I'd say that "recording" is REALLY pushing the limit of what one could call caching, especially as they're not sent anywhere. I'm much more a felon in Illinois for putting Google Analytics on my blog while neglecting to put a giant banner across the top of the page than my iPhone would be for temporarily caching a screenshot of something.
Sure, if you overwrite your firmware (jailbreak), enable SSH access to the phone, and then NOT change your root password. Quite frankly, you deserve it at that point.
Sounds like yet another sensationalist (and completely inaccurate) headline pointing to a non-story. Unless some pervert is hits the home button while trying to take a (crappy, borderline-useless unless it's being done in full daylight) picture of himself raping a kid, AND law enforcement not only knows to look for this cached file, I don't really see this being an issue. I suppose it could possibly be used as supplemental evidence when a case is being built up, but the actual AIM chat logs, sent emails, phone call history (all of which are far more accessible) and such would be far more potentially incriminating.
Yeah, but at least Linux distros have some decent material in their myriad forums. I don't use Linux either for much the same reason, but at least their support sites don't tend to be unhelpful error messages followed by a popup for Silverlight (which doesn't do a damn thing to enhance the site if you install it, by the way, other than stopping the damn ad from showing again).
My thought exactly. Either Microsoft is more ass-backwards than I had previously thought, or they simply don't understand how to compete on the same plane. Apple has plenty of people walking the sales floor answering questions and doing actual sales work, but so does Best Buy. Aside from generally needing less support in the first place, part of that Apple Store Experience is seeing that help desk and seeing that there's a physical presence where you can get any problems solved (or at least assessed, when it comes to hardware repair and such).
The last thing that would make me buy Vista is more people pitching the damn thing to me. I don't hate it, but knowing that I could bring the machine in to have someone actually look at it and not have to fail at diagnosing it over the phone from India would be a HUGE selling point for most people. Not the geeks of Slashdot for the most part, but at least for the majority of those who have attempted to use phone support.
Customer service-oriented companies are destined to succeed when their competitors are only sales-oriented. Apple creates a positive experience* by trying to start you off well and ensure that you're taken care of if problems are encountered. This is rarely if ever the case with Microsoft and the hardware companies that bundle its software. They treat customer support as a cost of doing business rather than a value-add for customers, and it always shows. That may work once, but it sure as hell doesn't generate repeat customers, let alone all of the free word-of-mouth advertising that Apple gets these days.
*I've had plenty of issues with my MBP, but they've all been hardware-related except for one odd corrupted plist file that took them all of five minutes to fix, unlike all of the software problems on my Windows-based systems. They actually worked to fix the problems. Except for when I had a CD burner die in a Dell back in 2002 or so, I've never witnessed this with MS-based vendors as a consumer.
An interesting standpoint the issue, and certainly "devil's advocate" by Slashdot standards.
The problem with the RIAA's approach to business, at least in my eyes, is that their business model is built around having a monopoly on a product. By being the sole distributor of a product, they can charge whatever they want. Now of course with music as an elastic good (as compared to, say, gasoline, home heating oil, water, food, etc) there's still a hint of free market in place.
Legal or not, though, piracy has become a competitor in a once-monopolized market. This obviously induces a panic at the RIAA's end, as it's hard to compete with free (not impossible by any means, but traditional business models WILL fail). When there had previously been only one option to get music or the only choice was that of cassette or CD, there are now a plethora of formats, bitrates, levels of compatibility, and any number of other things that come with digital content. More significantly, there's no longer necessarily a difference between what you want and what you can get.
I'll back you up on saying that Shawn Fanning as almost certainly just a cheap bastard who wanted free music. Most college-age people are. But I'd also argue that he inadvertently reintroduced music to the free market. While Napster was nothing more than illegal file-sharing, it was the first step towards creating a not-completely-monopolized market. Sites like AllOfMP3 attempted to jump in and legitimize cheap music. Not the best example since I don't think anyone knows whether royalties actually went to the artists, but for the sake of argument assume they did. Certainly iTunes, Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, and the like are totally legal. More interesting are the indie music sites like Amie St that use sales rates and such to dynamically adjust pricing which is pretty much the definition of the free market at work.
Most people want to see content creators rewarded for good work. They just don't want to deal with stupid shit in order to see it happen. If the decision is between a $14 CD and grabbing it from TPB for free, I'm going to have to REALLY like the artist to justify that price as I don't think music is worth that much. But charge five bucks and they've got my money. Charge a buck an album and I'll buy music at random rather than download at random. Lower margins, higher volume - it probably works out nearly the same for album sales, but with a far greater market saturation, which artists WANT since they make all the real money on concerts and merchandise, etc.
Some people will never pay, and for the most part they're not worth your time (unless you're a multi-billion dollar cartel of lawyers who can buy laws as needed...). But when you provide good value, there's hardly any need for legal backing.
Just as a data point, I have bought all of the music that I listen to on a regular basis (I grab a CD from Amazon once it's available at ten bucks since I like to have a hard copy around), but 100% of it was pirated first. Most of the other stuff in my music library has a play count of 2 or lower. But had it been sufficiently cheap, I'd have bought it. At ten bucks for an album or a buck a song, I think about it. At AllOfMP3-level prices, it's an automatic buy, if for no other reason than the download from a legit service is always faster than hitting the torrents.
So long story short, we've told them exactly what we want and what we're willing to pay. The fact that they won't use that information accordingly and stick with their old pricing and sue people who act otherwise is why we claim they've got an outdated business model. Are they in the legal right doing it that way? For the most part, but that doesn't stop them from being a bunch of outdated douche bags that won't listen to their would-be customers.
I visit digg too, but like Slashdot go there primiarily for the discussion. Unfortunately, while Digg has somewhat more interesting submissions (outside of tech anyways), most of the users are babbling incoherent idiots with the debate skills of a third grader. Between that and a completely broken login system (I honestly can't understand how they were so successfully able to fuck up implementing cookies, given how easy it is to do correctly), I've stopped commenting entirely and unsubscribed from the main frontpage feed and just keep an eye out for interesting stories that crop up in a couple subsections (all of which are dupes from or duped on other sites).
Outside of the hiking thing, you pretty much just described half of Slashdot (and of that half, I'm sure at least a couple others have ventured outdoors a couple of times). Maybe not as carbon-copy clones of yourself, but enough that the data could be used usefully.
You can pretty easily configure the browser to wipe out all of your history upon closing. 99% of the internet would find this to be a tremendous pain in the ass, which is why it's not the default behavior.
Put it this way - sending a postcard or heading out naked is easier, but you go out of your way to add that additional layer of privacy. There's no reason to expect a piece of software to behave differently.
It's effectively virtual machine snapshots+rollback for the browser. Enabling porn mode makes the snapshot, and disabling it or closing the window (or however it's triggered) executes the rollback.
Which, truth be told, would be a much less detectable and more foolproof way to have a porn mode, if you're that concerned about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Warning: oxymoron detected.
So patent it, or reveal the source code under a very much not open-source license. Just because the source is visible doesn't make it OSS, even if it could allow for someone to (illegally) copy part or all of that code for use elsewhere. Look at vBulletin for example - you can't really closed-source a PHP app from a technical sense, but every file has a license warning at the top stating it's not open source software. True, there's always obfuscation techniques if you want to get into that, but my point here is that a visible source code doesn't make something open source, and certainly not free.
The state collects fines from DUI convicts, and I'm sure they can manipulate the stats on arrests in such a way that there are other gains (politicians showing better results on DUI crackdowns getting re-elected, as a possible example).
If the company producing the devices knowingly rounds things up internally, the police would tend to see higher conviction rates using those devices over others even if they aren't actually aware of the fact. Follow the money trail.
Of course, the code could be fine and they're just concerned about the IP. Or it could be unknowingly flawed, or as has already been mentioned it may have been rushed out the door to get the bid on the contract. There are any number of scenarios that could apply here, but what really needs to be determined is whether the code is producing results that are fair and accurate.
So why can't we get this judge working on one of the cases against voting machines?
There may be a bit of financial incentive for the states to screw over people getting arrested for possible DUI, but there's a whole hell of a lot more to be gained by falsifying election results and thus the devices should be trusted that much less.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but shouldn't there be some sort of requirement for a certain level of technological knowledge by the judge when working on a base that hinges on that technology?
How does that work? "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private".
We're getting pretty off-topic at this point, but
I'm curious.
For some people, sure. But it's certainly possible to beat free, especially within the right demographic.
The problem is that these companies seem to think they can beat free to death, which is NOT possible. Piracy will never die. They've attempted to take away value from not paying* (and fail consistently) rather than add value to paying. If they think they're going to sell information to an "information wants to be free" crowd, they've got another thing coming. That's not their target market, nor should they think it is. Selling good, genuine entertainment that provides good value is going to get some sales from that crowd, but taking it to the next level by providing extras in legit accounts (NOT requiring a legit account to play at all, as that's just a different take on DRM) could really enhance that.
We live in a time where many, many people feel that they're entitled to get something for nothing - especially with regard to digital goods (there's plenty of political stuff as well that I won't get into). You can try to fight it (and lose), or you can acknowledge that and use the knowledge to your own advantage.
Yeah, if you're going to make a PC game targeted at 14-year-olds with broadband, good luck selling any software. Aiming a few years older to a market that actually has some disposable income would be a very wise move. Actually giving people a _reason_ to pay (send them a free shirt or whatever, some sort of tangible value-add that can't come in bit form) will help so much more. Attempting to use technical means to stop people from playing if a pirated copy is detected isn't going to convince them to cough up. There just aren't means of detection that are 100% safe for paying customers. Look at WGA for example. It accurately tagged a downloaded copy of Vista I'd thrown in a VM for poking around a bit, and the result is that I've now got a VM that can do nothing but browse the internet for no more than an hour a day or buy a legit copy of Vista. I've heard way too many horror stories about WGA to even momentarily consider risking that happening on something I'd pay for. Now that's a somewhat extreme example as far as DRM goes, but simply knowing it's in there has caused me to avoid the product entirely (FWIW, I mostly have no problem with Vista, and I'm a Mac guy).
* Companies have gone so far to intentionally sabotage the game if it detected a pirated copy, going well beyond the usual DRM. Obviously, this completely backfired when it would sometimes wrongly tag legitimate copies causing crashing among paying customers. More significantly, when it hit the scene a few days before release as always happens, it started getting tons of bad press for appearing buggy as hell, even though the "bugs" were intentional crashes caused by the pirated copy bit getting flipped.
If it's not accessible directly on the product before purchasing, the terms are worthless. Best Buy was careful to cover the "This product requires internet activation" (or whatever) warning on the front that fits exactly within the width of one of their price tags.
I can't agree to terms if I'm not presented with them upfront. The terms aren't visible within the product itself until you've opened it, voiding your return policy. You're not even linking to a page on the developer's website, for Christ's sake. Shrink wrap EULAs are bullshit, plain and simple.
And give the developers of that site an excuse to keep producing bad code?
I think not.
But of the eleventy billion IE users who still haven't switch to !IE, why would they switch to Chrome? I think the vast majority of them can be split into two groups: their bank/intranet/some stupid thing/fucking activex/etc doesn't work right elsewhere, and "the blue e takes me to the internet!". The first group can't switch and the second just doesn't care - why/how would Chrome change that?
Why the hell would the Mac version only work on 32-bit? With the exception of I think just the first Mac Mini (and maybe the first Macbooks), their entire Intel line has been x86-64. Seems like a silly move.
True, but it also stops you from playing the games you already own.
Yes, Wine, I know. I want to play the game, not play the installation process. Like a lot of things in the Linux world, the technology is there but with a little more polish it would start to see some real adoption.
At the end of the day, an OS is just a tool that enables you to use other tools and toys. You can hate the OS vendor all yo want, but at the end of the day it's still you that's going to be losing out by switching even if the principle of and reasoning behind the switch make you feel great.
FWIW, this is more a criticism of game developers than Linux. If they'd write their games using OGL instead of D3d, this issue would be largely avoided. Most non-3d apps have comparable equivalents across the three major platforms, though there are plenty of instances of the original being far and away better than the imitators.
In theory, yes, that's what they're for. However from the customer's perspective, that's a (very much not insignificant) added cost. Remember, Geek Squad will charge you something like $120 for an OS install (that number comes from my ass, but I doubt it's too far off the mark), and lord have mercy if you ever have hardware problems and are out of the manufacturer's warranty.
With Apple OTOH, you pay $(150|200|250 depending on system) once and get unlimited parts and labor for three years, and people that are actually good at what they do. Yes, Apple's closed ecosystem makes their job 10x easier (and reduces problems by another order of magnitude to start), but Apple's Genius Bar is seen as a helpful resource rather than an added cost by customers. I'll note that it's more than paid for itself on my MBP, well beyond the point where they've lost money on that one copy of Applecare (but made it back and then some by keeping me as a customer). As far as I'm concerned, both of us won - and THAT is what Microsoft needs (but will fail) to address with their "Gurus". I don't think the insurance company business model would really work at commodity shops like Best Buy or Circuit City, if for no reason other than short-sighted shareholders (and yes, there are a LOT of other reasons).
Applecare exists for the sole purpose of keeping customers happy and getting word of mouth advertisements. It's profits are probably next to nothing, if it turns at profit at all between employee time and replacement hardware costs. Geek Squad et al were designed from day one to be profit centers, and potential customers know this. BB/CC would, of course, hate the 'competition' from a MS Guru if that person existed as a support center, because those companies tend to be too short-sighted. I hate to sound like I'm evangelzing for Apple, but you'd be foolish to deny that Steve Jobs' approach of "manage the top line and the bottom line will follow" (look at the interview on appleinsider following the iPod announcement a few days ago) is working really damn well, especially in an environment where customers tend to get the shaft.
No kidding. I'm pretty sure some /. post yesterday pegged it at something like 2.5PB/yr*, or almost 7TB/day. Your sneakernet would be more like a forkliftnet. An interesting sight to say the least, but logistically retarded.
*I'm running on about 2 hours of sleep, so I could be way off the mark there.
Yes. The problem is that in order to avoid potential ambiguity in laws, they need to be written in unreadable legalese. That certainly requires a lot of care (those age-old debates about having used a semicolon instead of a comma, etc).
So, say there's a simple law on the books: "Sending spam is illegal." Then you have to define spam, legally. It's easy enough to do, but damn near impossible to do without also including legitimate communications under the umbrella term. Maybe "a business sending out messages to mailing lists where those on the list haven't opted-in first". But then the spammers stop working under some sort of protective LLC, and it has to be expanded to cover individuals. But then you can't send out CCs legally anymore either.
Unfortunately, there's nothing (AFAIK) in the email protocols about how to deal with unsolicited messages at a mailbox level. Whitelisting is the closest we really have, and that blocks way too much legitimate communication. The problem is that a legal solution won't help since spammers don't care about breaking the law; but what we have as a technical solution is really the best way to do things (generating lists against billions of messages, a la gmail) despite still not being great.
Do we really have to get into this whole cache=copying=recording debate, though? It's a reasonably simple thing to have any cache clearing functions do so securely, and unlike with magnetic platters there's no need to worry about paranoid 35-pass overwrites with the flash memory in the iPhone and every other handheld on the planet.
I'd say that "recording" is REALLY pushing the limit of what one could call caching, especially as they're not sent anywhere. I'm much more a felon in Illinois for putting Google Analytics on my blog while neglecting to put a giant banner across the top of the page than my iPhone would be for temporarily caching a screenshot of something.
Sure, if you overwrite your firmware (jailbreak), enable SSH access to the phone, and then NOT change your root password. Quite frankly, you deserve it at that point.
Sounds like yet another sensationalist (and completely inaccurate) headline pointing to a non-story. Unless some pervert is hits the home button while trying to take a (crappy, borderline-useless unless it's being done in full daylight) picture of himself raping a kid, AND law enforcement not only knows to look for this cached file, I don't really see this being an issue. I suppose it could possibly be used as supplemental evidence when a case is being built up, but the actual AIM chat logs, sent emails, phone call history (all of which are far more accessible) and such would be far more potentially incriminating.
Sorry, but I dibsed WW on behalf of my fellow Mac users.
Yeah, but at least Linux distros have some decent material in their myriad forums. I don't use Linux either for much the same reason, but at least their support sites don't tend to be unhelpful error messages followed by a popup for Silverlight (which doesn't do a damn thing to enhance the site if you install it, by the way, other than stopping the damn ad from showing again).
My thought exactly. Either Microsoft is more ass-backwards than I had previously thought, or they simply don't understand how to compete on the same plane. Apple has plenty of people walking the sales floor answering questions and doing actual sales work, but so does Best Buy. Aside from generally needing less support in the first place, part of that Apple Store Experience is seeing that help desk and seeing that there's a physical presence where you can get any problems solved (or at least assessed, when it comes to hardware repair and such).
The last thing that would make me buy Vista is more people pitching the damn thing to me. I don't hate it, but knowing that I could bring the machine in to have someone actually look at it and not have to fail at diagnosing it over the phone from India would be a HUGE selling point for most people. Not the geeks of Slashdot for the most part, but at least for the majority of those who have attempted to use phone support.
Customer service-oriented companies are destined to succeed when their competitors are only sales-oriented. Apple creates a positive experience* by trying to start you off well and ensure that you're taken care of if problems are encountered. This is rarely if ever the case with Microsoft and the hardware companies that bundle its software. They treat customer support as a cost of doing business rather than a value-add for customers, and it always shows. That may work once, but it sure as hell doesn't generate repeat customers, let alone all of the free word-of-mouth advertising that Apple gets these days.
*I've had plenty of issues with my MBP, but they've all been hardware-related except for one odd corrupted plist file that took them all of five minutes to fix, unlike all of the software problems on my Windows-based systems. They actually worked to fix the problems. Except for when I had a CD burner die in a Dell back in 2002 or so, I've never witnessed this with MS-based vendors as a consumer.
An interesting standpoint the issue, and certainly "devil's advocate" by Slashdot standards.
The problem with the RIAA's approach to business, at least in my eyes, is that their business model is built around having a monopoly on a product. By being the sole distributor of a product, they can charge whatever they want. Now of course with music as an elastic good (as compared to, say, gasoline, home heating oil, water, food, etc) there's still a hint of free market in place.
Legal or not, though, piracy has become a competitor in a once-monopolized market. This obviously induces a panic at the RIAA's end, as it's hard to compete with free (not impossible by any means, but traditional business models WILL fail). When there had previously been only one option to get music or the only choice was that of cassette or CD, there are now a plethora of formats, bitrates, levels of compatibility, and any number of other things that come with digital content. More significantly, there's no longer necessarily a difference between what you want and what you can get.
I'll back you up on saying that Shawn Fanning as almost certainly just a cheap bastard who wanted free music. Most college-age people are. But I'd also argue that he inadvertently reintroduced music to the free market. While Napster was nothing more than illegal file-sharing, it was the first step towards creating a not-completely-monopolized market. Sites like AllOfMP3 attempted to jump in and legitimize cheap music. Not the best example since I don't think anyone knows whether royalties actually went to the artists, but for the sake of argument assume they did. Certainly iTunes, Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, and the like are totally legal. More interesting are the indie music sites like Amie St that use sales rates and such to dynamically adjust pricing which is pretty much the definition of the free market at work.
Most people want to see content creators rewarded for good work. They just don't want to deal with stupid shit in order to see it happen. If the decision is between a $14 CD and grabbing it from TPB for free, I'm going to have to REALLY like the artist to justify that price as I don't think music is worth that much. But charge five bucks and they've got my money. Charge a buck an album and I'll buy music at random rather than download at random. Lower margins, higher volume - it probably works out nearly the same for album sales, but with a far greater market saturation, which artists WANT since they make all the real money on concerts and merchandise, etc.
Some people will never pay, and for the most part they're not worth your time (unless you're a multi-billion dollar cartel of lawyers who can buy laws as needed...). But when you provide good value, there's hardly any need for legal backing.
Just as a data point, I have bought all of the music that I listen to on a regular basis (I grab a CD from Amazon once it's available at ten bucks since I like to have a hard copy around), but 100% of it was pirated first. Most of the other stuff in my music library has a play count of 2 or lower. But had it been sufficiently cheap, I'd have bought it. At ten bucks for an album or a buck a song, I think about it. At AllOfMP3-level prices, it's an automatic buy, if for no other reason than the download from a legit service is always faster than hitting the torrents.
So long story short, we've told them exactly what we want and what we're willing to pay. The fact that they won't use that information accordingly and stick with their old pricing and sue people who act otherwise is why we claim they've got an outdated business model. Are they in the legal right doing it that way? For the most part, but that doesn't stop them from being a bunch of outdated douche bags that won't listen to their would-be customers.
I visit digg too, but like Slashdot go there primiarily for the discussion. Unfortunately, while Digg has somewhat more interesting submissions (outside of tech anyways), most of the users are babbling incoherent idiots with the debate skills of a third grader. Between that and a completely broken login system (I honestly can't understand how they were so successfully able to fuck up implementing cookies, given how easy it is to do correctly), I've stopped commenting entirely and unsubscribed from the main frontpage feed and just keep an eye out for interesting stories that crop up in a couple subsections (all of which are dupes from or duped on other sites).
Outside of the hiking thing, you pretty much just described half of Slashdot (and of that half, I'm sure at least a couple others have ventured outdoors a couple of times). Maybe not as carbon-copy clones of yourself, but enough that the data could be used usefully.
You can pretty easily configure the browser to wipe out all of your history upon closing. 99% of the internet would find this to be a tremendous pain in the ass, which is why it's not the default behavior.
Put it this way - sending a postcard or heading out naked is easier, but you go out of your way to add that additional layer of privacy. There's no reason to expect a piece of software to behave differently.
It's effectively virtual machine snapshots+rollback for the browser. Enabling porn mode makes the snapshot, and disabling it or closing the window (or however it's triggered) executes the rollback.
Which, truth be told, would be a much less detectable and more foolproof way to have a porn mode, if you're that concerned about it.
Maybe not, but we've been able to discreetly view porn for longer than the Windows and Linux crowds, which is really all that matters here.