Why not have a GNU key which Windows will never trust as part of the firmware?

Actually, having grown up there in West by god Virginia, I can tell you that the Greenbank radio observatory area is very lovely and populated with very smart people doing very good work.

The Hillbillies that you are talking about are more from Bluefield.

The two big problems being with this lovely idea are:
* Companies might not want to compete with prior version of their products
* Rights to the product might not be in the free and clear (legal)

Otherwise I too would love the to have PCG.

The Corn Field in Second Life perhaps?

Sure- Automated process that stores the results in a database or is otherwise used in a system where the results are aggregated and retrievable for 4th party consumption with a method to tie back to a person.

That wasn't difficult at all. Just because I write something for consumption to the members of a particular web site (assuming that it's NOT out in the public like Slashdot's or any other comment system), I would not expect it to be slurped up and sold by 3rd parties. On a member's only web site, such as talked about in the story, the inclusion of my EULA statement would be a strong deterrent against these scrapers.

Two minutes of your time to insert the HTML?
A day for your lawyer to write up the text, who is either on a retainer or works directly for your company?
That was hard.

Add a line in your acceptable use / EULA section stating that you expect the user of the account to be human and that any attempt to scrape the data off of the server is fined at $100,000 per message, plus $10,000 to each message author.

Hell yes. Don't you?

Just report the blog as a violation of TOS.

Bullshit. Apple is "saying" that they're doing it for personal data reasons, but the real reason is that they want to OWN the relationship between the consumer (you) and them (the company).

No, the real reason is liability.
If you sell the machine and believe it to be secure and sell it as such with out the review & audit, and then it's proven to be insecure, fine, unknown bug.
If you audit the machine with white hat hackers, they tell you of issues, you sell the machine anyways, it's hacked, you're on a very big hook.

But... They wouldn't have done their best.
You'd never want your lawyer to short your appeals- that would be grounds for another appeal (they didn't do everything possible) and be a career suicide for your lawyer (who'd want to hire someone who didn't do everything possible for you; bar sanctions; plus a law suite when you sue for failing to do everything possible all come to my mind).

You want this case battle tested to the very, very, very bitter end. Each of these scars give armor and defense to Linux and GNU.
Anything less would not do.

Would it be possible to create an emulated disk layer which would handle the request?

Now just wait for a data center to be scheduled to close in some Congressman's home district and see how big of a block is put into place.