The whole point is to make it annoying, so that the easily-scared father of a family will feel ill at ease when confronted with a big warning he is doing something illegal (--> deterrent, it makes you feel a criminal), or give up because he has to find a crack through a website full of pr0n, or call in a kiddie next door. I'm not saying it works very well, just that the rationale is that for the 1% that fall for it.

In other words: having to input a key, legit or fake, makes you acquire *conscience* of what you are doing, either legal or illegal. Clicking on the "next" button when confronted with the EULA doesn't, since you to it mechanically and never read through it anyway.

Oh, c'mon! XHTML main rule: you opened a tag, you close that tag. It can be so "elitist"!

I remember back in 1997 wondering why not all tags were being closed.
I started leaving them open just for sloppiness, or because others did that too.

It'd probably be more easier for people to understand in a well-structured way like HTML than leaving them looking why that freakin' div doesn't display correctly and then realising they have closed a "li" element outside a "div" element or other crap like that.

PS. given that, I totally agree with you that people should be encouraged to create web pages, and all that "only people who have a master degree in CS should touch the web" nonsense should go away.

C'mon, first rule of PR: everything they'll give you to sell will suck. Solution: lie about it. This guy doesn't even try. A good PR boy is one that can smile while he says "...and this service is soooo fantastic, 'cause it enables you to replenish your ice-cube stock while you're on holidays at the Arctic pole. Oh, and it also make a wonderful coffee with nothing more than water, electricity and some beans!" Never read Dilbert?