How could they get people to use this in the first place?

My point is that there is a strong network effect. If nobody uses it, then you don't want to be first. (If you were then turning it off would be a high priority.) Conversely if everyone else had it, it would suck to be locked out. Right now we are in the first state.

My take is that they will put it into a release, but have a default where it is not turned on until a key date a couple of years afterwards. That way they get their technology widely distributed and then suddenly a significant marketshare shifts...

Cheers,
Ben

grandma asks why she can't read Jr's email. (I am assuming here the common policy where young adults buy a new computer and hands the old one off to a convenient relative.)

I really think that my proposal is how they would get the ball rolling. (And as the day approached, there would be a beat of publicity talking about how great it was all going to be, etc.)

Cheers,
Ben

[link|http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html|This one]. As The Register [link|http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25940.html|says], you should read it several times a week until further notice.

Ubiquitous DRM is closer than you think. :-(

Cheers,
Ben

Being cut off from mass culture doesn't bother me much. I have been cut off from mass culture for most of my life, and the exceptions to that have not sufficed to convince me to bother being a normal consumer.

However even so I am not immune from mass culture. My wife is less willing than I am to forgo all of it, and so I have to accept some influence. Ditto for co-workers and employers.

Also about your thieves comments. I don't know that it is so black and white. The Grateful Dead's experience has been widely quoted. They are not alone. When people feel good about contributing, they tend to contribute quite a bit more than most think they would. When you make people feel that you are out to screw them, they try to screw you first. People are continuously amazed at the generosity of strangers when said strangers have been properly motivated.

Personally I think that it would do a lot of people a lot of good to take a close look at the weird phenomena of alumni donations to good US universities. Universities? Yes! Universities!

Let me take Dartmouth College as a hardly unique example. Current tuition is about $25,000 per year. A 4 year degree is about $100K. All standard. Yhe funny thing is that they get more money each year from donations than they do from tuition! That averages out to what, an average of a couple thousand a year per alumn? In donations that people didn't have to pay?

You know, that is serious money. And they don't exactly get that by accident. They put a lot of energy into making alumni feel good about the alma mater, and they get serious money in return. The existence of free riders is OK because they get enough in total to cover them.

I am amazed that more people don't spend some energy examining that phenomena and asking whether people might be willing to do the same for other things...

A relevant quote from [link|http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/|chromatic] is, I like the idea that I've earned the right to use the free software I've been using. I know what he means. I think a lot of people do. I don't think it is a feeling which has been used very effectively. (And even where it has been used, the people using it need to understand in their gut that it is OK to do so. The entire Perl 6 effort would be in better financial shape right now if the key beneficiaries didn't have so much obvious guilt over how generous individuals have been. Damnit, if you ask for money and people want to give it, you thank them and tell everyone that the voluntary donations are an amazing show of generosity that is wonderful to see.)

Cheers,
Ben