Jobs - what's he done for us lately? - Re: Today, in the bus to work...

I don't believe it will come to pass. But I don't believe it won't either. I _fear_ it will. I find that scenario scarily plausible. Not in the near future, as you point out. Probably not in my lifetime. But, in a century or two of devolution into dystopia, I have no trouble imagining a world rather like the Corporate State crossed with 1984, in which the construction or possession of an unapproved computing device is cause for re-education, or in extreme cases destruction. I see acceptance of things like the iPad and the paradigms it brings as the thin edge of the wedge that would make such a future possible. I've seen it happen in related fields - look at how hard it is to find a fully-documented computer these days, because everyone made individually short-term reasonable decisions to not care until only the lunatic fringe (eg, us) still cares, and as a result they're hell to find, and I expect will soon (probably within my lifetime) be not just difficult and expensive but impossible. A good illustration of my point, in a slightly different form: you have become so accustomed to undocumented hardware that you are actually citing a computer built around hardware whose documentation requires an NDA as a paragon of openness! That is a staggering attitude shift, and the goalpost-moving it implies forms a part of the creep I sketched above. Removing freedoms is most effectively done a tiny step at a time, individually too small to be noticed - like boiling a frog. Nobody seems to have noticed how much the tiny creeping steps have added up to already, and I see no reason to think they will stop before the frog is fully cooked. I really really hope I'm being excessively conspiracy-theorist here. But I'm having trouble convincing myself I am. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B