I agree with everything you've said thus far, however, I'm still curious as to how the Π would go about reconstruction w/out using their already gathered knowledge to get warrants/subpoenas.
They could hope the ∆ was using BT and had their IP logged for downloading copyrighted material. Then maybe request a warrant for their computer that way but that seems like a stretch.
USAA recently had the same issue; transactions not processing. They, like Costco, switched credit card issuers. So it may very well be a scaling issue like importing millions of customers into the DB.
There's something interesting to be said here. "They make {{ package }} unusable by hijacking it's name space", well who gave them that name space? I understand the whole first come first serve and all but if we played that way things could get messy real fast.
There was recently an article on HN about the "Web of Hashes" and this article got me thinking about it. Why not give each application an UUID and let that be it's name space? Give the user an option to still use- they're example- xedit while having another xedit installed along side?
I can see how this could also get messy. Just spit balling here.
The DaVinci is cool, but you get 10 uses out of each arm then you have to toss it... At a few grand a pop it's not cheap. I have two and am working on 'hacking' the usb interface, but they've epoxyed over the chips.
I wouldn't say there's no competition per se, but some areas are limited based on who has lines out there. For example, the area I live in at Augusta only offers Wow! as a cable provider; over priced reseller. But, I was fortunate enough to land a decent contract- more channels than Wow! and for 1/4 the price- with Dish. Satellite vs. Cable, but I'm willing to take that trade off for a better price point. Plus there's always NetFlix/Hulu.
That, or view/edit them with a hex editor.