Similarly, I always feel a bit bad for Jon Rubinstein when I read articles like this. Tony Fadell didn't take over the iPod division until the 3rd Generation (the one with the funny buttons lined up above the scroll wheel).
These "gift" investigations and the game theory behind them are somewhat troubling.
Most medium to large sized technology companies that get big enough to attract parasites will gladly cooperate with an investigating authority (such as the FBI) and turn over user activity records without much of a stink in exchange for a future favor down the road rather than hold their ground and demand warrants, subpoenas and the rest of the 9 yards.
If you promise to aid the FBI into perpetuity, they will on occasion nail some malicious user that's giving you a hard time - like that 16 year old from Des Moines who is submitting stolen credit cards (that were found on twitter via @NeedADebitCard, naturally) to pay for your merchandise and giving you a headache in chargeback fees.
It's a cool superpower but it's probably not doing much to address the root of your problems.
Worse, it quickly turns the FBI into a sort of protection racket for the Fortune 5000.
Didn't we conclude yesterday that there was a fundamental flaw in the original author's assumptions in how tips get reported and preliminary evidence suggests Taxi drivers are now making less?
Now that a major tech publication has picked up the story it may legitimately be cited as fact in a Wikipedia article.
Now that a major tech publication has picked up the story it will probably also go as an unquestioned anecdote in a thousand VC pitches.
There is a fascinating documentary/long-form article in VICE about another Nike missile silo in Kansas that was backed by a VC and fronted as Y2K fallout shelter/precision spring manufacturing facility for NASA but was in fact producing kilos of MDMA and analogue chemicals.[1]
One of the guys behind the operation, Leonard Pickard, was formally convicted of producing 200,000 doses of LSD in an industrial facility in Mountain View.[2]
Interestingly, the facility in Kansas was turned into an even more luxurious living abode than the hypothetical ones presented here. Think Scarface.
>>So to my mind this was relatively innocent activity and I would have never thought...
Whether or not you are genuinely naïve about the terms connotations, I suspect there is a perception that you are trolling. This is in part because the original author of the package expressed the same kind of (artificial) shock when people expressed their concern over the name and responded in a very passive aggressive manner.
1) Because a government can implement a genocide, a region with no government won't be subject to genocide. (See historical territorial annexations.)
2) Because the Wiemar Republic's constitution was based on the U.S. constitution and fell victim to fascism, all nation's whose constitutions were based on the U.S. constitution may fall victim to fascism.
3) Winston Churchill's defines democracy [as]..eight times better than any other.
4) Because "democracy" is eight times better than any other government, and democracy is vulnerable to morph into fascism, any form of government may morph into fascism.
5) Similarly, because Nazi Germany was fascist and committed genocide, all fascist governments will commit genocide.
There may be arguments for anarchism, but this one isn't very solid.
The problem doesn't end there. Once these drugs' exclusive rights expire and "generic brand" prescriptions are allowed to compete, most insured patients will still prefer the "name brand" as they are only charged co-pay. Some insurance providers may place restrictions on which drugs are eligible for treatment but this is not the case with traditional U.S. sponsored Medicare/Medicaid (patients are free to choose between "name brand" and "generic brand"). Medicare/Medicaid patients may also be eligible for limited co-pay exemption. ("Why wouldn't I take the 'name brand'? I'm not paying for it./I'm paying the same price anyways.") This further drives up the price of "name brand" medication, simply because the "name brand" can get away with it. "Name brand" suppliers will also cut discounted deals with various insurance companies...no such luck for the uninsured though.
One particularly frustrating example I heard from my sister was about a mother on Medicaid who refused to switch her 19-month old infant from formula to solid food (infants usually make the transition around 7 months), complaining that the child had digestion problems when she tried. (Digestion problems are normal and temporary during the transition.) Formula is more calorie rich than seal milk and nearly as expensive as printer ink, however the patient had to pay for food but didn't have to pay for formula. As a result the infant became obese and developed diabetes - the treatment for which, is also covered by Medicaid.
Meanwhile uninsured/ineligible patients are forced to go for the "generic brand" pills due to a huge price disparity. This wouldn't be so bad as generic brands are generally just as effective, except that suppliers of generic brands can sometimes change who they source their pills from, subtly changing the dosages with them so users must constantly stay on alert to see if their pill changes color or shape as this could be an indication of a shift in supplier and depending on how sensitive the drug is, have mild to severe repercussions.
The Obama health-care reform was seeking to fix this issue by providing a third party government insurance plan which would promote a more transparent market in this arena amongst other things...
You'll probably be waiting longer than that. One of the reasons China opted for the hand drawn approach is it lets them control what is and (more importantly) isn't shown.
There are an infinite number of ways to communicate how not to do things. Enumerating them only serves to decrease the entropy rate.
What I suspect is most people enjoyed this article because VMware made a fool of themselves, but not, as you suggest, because it provides an enlightening anecdote that will inspire the reader to avoid a common pitfall and yield an effective checkout process.
As far as I can tell, some guy bought a copy of VMWare Fusion with a moderately poor customer experience, can't activate it within the first half hour, writes a blog post to complain and gets his buddies at Fog Creek to upvote.
Why on earth did you think other people would be interested in this?
Unless you already have the partnerships with the credit card processors and the capital to protect yourself from fraud (90% of the work) - I would release the design as open source and make it compatible with Square.
This will at least let hundreds of people build their own readers, and potentially educate most of them in magnetic stripe encoding.
Alternatively/Additionally the Square reader is miles away from ergonomic and by having another design out there you can make a small profit by selling more reliable readers.