Anecdotal, and just one case, but hope someone finds it helpful.

The conflict of interest argument will always carry some weight re: the Vine program, but Amazon seems to be handling it quite well. Anyone who doesn't like the program is given enough information to just ignore those reviewers.

Having manual status turned off by default, but available to enable in settings, shouldn't lose you a single customer.

Strange design choice, even stranger justification.

• Ownership of the two is not mutually exclusive.

• Usage habits of the two vary wildly, probably mostly favoring cars, not only because keeping an unused car is far more expensive and complicated than keeping an unused bicycle is, and because people don't tend to buy cars the first week of January to work off those holiday pounds.

I'm not sure why this article matters much.

According to the guy who implemented FFmpeg's ALAC encoder, there are power benefits to ALAC over FLAC. ALAC was developed when iPods were struggling to get 8 hours of playback, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that Apple's engineers wanted to be able to match the codec to the hardware as efficiently as possible.

On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives.

No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best.

Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/

There were no measures to technologically limit one's ability to perform multiple installations from a purchased OS X install disc. You could buy two different Tiger installers and they'd checksum the same, and there were no serial numbers to be entered. It was an honor thing.

There are certainly areas where some level of multitasking can be trained. For some, it's still merely fast switching, and for the gifted few, there's the capacity to become so familiar, competent, and therefore at ease with complex tasks that they become second nature, and that frees up bandwidth for other things.

The problem gets to be that that sort of thing is very challenging, and most people just aren't capable of doing it well, if at all. The level of self-deception surrounding the issue is stratospheric. (We're talking about maybe ~5% of the population.) And, for the most part, it only makes sense to practice in high-workload environments where there may not be the ability to add people to divide the workload (think: some aviation).

Also, uploading would make it an instant non-starter for me, due to data sensitivity issues.

Obviously (the excellent) William James predates this by some time, but within the context of the modern era, this sort of thing has been discussed long before the Hallowells and Ferrisses of the world made their careers by repackaging old notions.

I hope they're more careful with their software design and monetization plan than they were with that announcement. And at some point they should probably address that it's still an advertisement–for their services.

Not saying anything shady is happening, just that they've made big changes and aren't communicating properly about them.

When there's money and success at stake, it's difficult to be too cynical about what tactics are probably being employed.

It's worth remembering that sites like comScore, Quantcast, Alexa and Hitwise derive a solid chunk of their business by enabling Google sales reps to better convince clients to spend more money. It's not far off from an academic whose career depends on grants by parties who are heavily invested in seeing a particular outcome.

I'll do better.