In fact, if they asked, I'd wear a wire and narrate my daily activities for them minute-by-minute. I'd relish the prospect of some poor sap having to figure out how to summarize it for his superiors without sounding like a smart alec and also being boring at the same time.

iPhones are activated by Apple. They know exactly how many are activated as soon as it happens. They even know how many owners the average iPhone has over its lifetime and how many iPhones the average owner has over time. HTC and Samsung have nothing like that.

Actually in most cases the buyer takes possession of the item first.

You haven't taken any sort of legal possession of the stuff in your shopping cart.

People still want films that haven't been made yet. So, in a world where you can't get people to pay for something after it's been made, pay will occur, mostly, before, rather than after production - which is how it used to be with music and theater.

So customer-retention is unimportant to you. Because you know, those who've been on Facebook for a while tend to turn it off completely.

Facebook is like Myspace, a proprietary and intrusive fad.