You have a nice playground called linux, and you ask everyone who comes to play in it to follow your rules, except for parts around the edges where you let other people make their own rules. One of the playground bullies comes along and says you should make the shiniest most fun part of your playground where you ask everyone to follow your rules into an "anyone else can make the rules" area. This bully says you have to do it because he needs to make more friends, and all the people he wants to be friends with play in the shiny part of your playground. You tell the bully that no, he has to make friends by being nice, not by making other people follow his rules, and he calls you a meanie doodoo head and says it's your fault he doesn't have any friends.

Spreadsheets -- well, Excel really -- are inescapable in business.

I know personally of complex multimillion dollar deals in the oil and gas business involving buying and selling entire refineries and gas pipelines where the numbers were all worked out on a spreadsheet.

The insurance industry lives on the spreadsheets put together by the actuaries.

The only consistent reason I've seen for Excel users will give up their rows and columns and have bespoke software created is when the dataset gets cumbersomely large. A secondary reason is when the kinds of calculations needed can't be cobbled together with Excel's function and macro tools. Even then, it's not unheard of for users to demand summary/aggregate reports and analytics that they then copy the numbers from into their spreadsheet to do their scenarios.

Just keep in mind the next time you hear about big money moving around in some deal -- somewhere someone probably had a pivot table for that.

Cookies are just one way to track. They aren't even the most convenient way anymore, in the technical sense, because of browser single-origin policies.

Does he not also realize how easy it is for users to block sites that don't honor Do Not Track?

Excellent solution. We can also start a filter list for AdBlock (or insert your favorite browser extension) and start dumping domains that refuse to honor DNT into the bitbucket.

> that loss of revenue means that marginally some sites will close, some will stop offering advanced features, and fewer such new features will be offered?

Guess what? That's called "capitalism". Can't make money or compete in the market? Out you go. Don't try to use the government or the legal system to force people to allow your marginal and failing revenue model to continue to be profitable.

You do realize you can create an maintain your own filter list that blocks what you want, right?

We should start another category and block list for AdBlock: domains that refuse to honor DNT.

So they want to play that game? Drop this line in your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.itif.org

Maybe we can start a blackhole list for domains that don't honor DNT the way it was designed? Maybe in the form of an addition list for AdBlock?

As a developer, the last thing I want to deal with in ops issues. Here, I give you the install script, does it fail? Fine, let's fix it. Do I want to be on call at all hours because your monkeys can't run 'make install' properly? Fuck no. Half-assed attempts by ops staff and craptastic server clusterfucks that result are not my problem, and trying to install my software on a mis-provisioned system with a single-core 128MB instance when the system requirements clearly state a 4-core system with 4GB should result in immediate termination.

Congratulations, you've illustrated perfectly one of the major problems with the DMCA. Written by corporations for corporations, the law implicitly equates a rights owner with a person or institution that has substantial resources to pursue and litigate violations. Nowhere in the law is there relief for the individual creator or small business whose works are appropriated by another party that has money and lawyers.

In the days before the personal computer revolution, all software* was by subscription. Companies and universities bought hardware form the IBMs, Honeywells, DECs, and Amdahls of the world, but then paid a subscription fee for support in the form of maintenance and upgrades.

Then the microcomputer came along, and there was no software for it at first, so people wrote what they needed. Some of it was good enough that people were willing to buy it, at retail, just like milk or bread. Some software vendors would support purchased software with upgrades, either free for a time or for small fees, but it wasn't subscription-based.

Microsoft was one of the biggest forces in the world of boxed retail software. Remember the Windows 95 midnight release?

A couple of decades or more later, and now Microsoft decides that the "pay forever" model of the giants it supplanted is the right path. While it is something of a regression to old ways, it's also an outgrowth of the absurd situation we've come to in copyright and licensing laws.

What other models are there now? Apple sells you the hardware (computer or phone) and you get the patches and minor updates for free, but they push you to upgrade your hardware relatively frequently -- iPhone 6 anyone? Ubuntu gives you the OS, but they have deals with corporate partners and will probably be pushing ads into the os soon. A number of vendors give you the software, upgrades, and source, but charge you for the kind of "call up somebody and get this fixed now" support that management likes.

The situation Microsoft is in may be unique, however, because they can no longer convince consumers -- or most corporations -- to get on the upgrade treadmill, thus they've lost their steady income stream. MS can't get their customers to cough up more money on a regular basis for the next version. Who can blame the customers when the difference between Office 2010 and Office 2013 is, well, what exactly is different, other than Metro? Why should anyone upgrade?

This inability to keep pumping their customers for additional money to upgrade is the main driving force behind the subscription model. With a copyright regime which increasingly says the user only "rents" the software, and declining revenue from the Office cash cow, Microsoft really has only once way out: charging you a monthly fee for the privilege of editing your letters and calculating your spreadsheets.

*footnote: except software you (the company, the university) wrote yourself.

Just for the record: mercury and lead don't give you cancer. Yes, heavy metals are toxic, but their biological effects are different from cancer.

A method "obvious to a person that is well-versed in an art" is not supposed to be patentable either. Except Apple added "on a mobile phone", and THEN, well, it changed everything!

The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there.