"Normal wear"

I believe I've previously commented on issues with the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.  You can go look for the prior post if you want to; I'm not going to.  Instead, I'll briefly summarize the issues:

• The MS Natural 4000 is frequently not recognized at boot time as a keyboard, even by motherboards that are aware of USB keyboards.  This causes "no keyboard connected" warnings, and can cause problems getting into the BIOS setup if you have to.
• The keyboard will sometimes spontaneously begin auto-repeating a key you didn't even press.  (n and t are common.)  It can be quite difficult to get it to stop.  Needless to say, the wrong key autorepeating at the wrong moment could be catastrophic.
• There's the whole silly F-lock business.  By itself, this would just be silly wasted functionality, but when the keyboard forgets its F-lock state, it defaults to the alternate key meanings.
• And then there's the key cap life issue.  A Natural 4000's key cap legends — which appear to be just printed decals, and exceptionally thin ones at that — begin to wear away within a few months of normal use, and by six months many of them will be completely blank.

My first Natural Keyboard 4000 was replaced under warranty by Microsoft at five months' age.  (It carries a three year warranty.)  Within four months of replacement, the replacement had the same problem.  I'm guessing Microsoft replaced a LOT of Natural Keyboard 4000s with worn-blank key caps, and decided it was costing them too much money.

You see, they've now solved the problem with a brilliantly simple strategy.  What's more, this solution automatically extends to all existing keyboards already sold!  Astounding!

The solution?

They have simply defined the Natural Keyboard 4000's absurdly short key cap life to be "normal wear".  Thus it is no longer covered under the warranty.

I suppose this is to be expected from Microsoft.  It's not like they don't already have a history of making their shoddy products become their customer's problem.  But this is more blatant than usual; they have basically just declared an endemic problem with one of their products to be not a problem, in order to avoid having to honor their warranty on the product.

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft, before warranting this keyboard for three years, you should have done some actual wear testing on it to see whether or not it would actually stand up to three years of use.  Or one.  Or even six months.  But now that you've put it out on the market with a three-year warranty, the least you could do is suck it up and honor your warranty.  Or, god forbid, have your hardware OEM actually fix the problem.

But it's easier to just let your name become still more tarnished, isn't it?

In related themes

jordan179 outs Amnesty International for supporting jihad.  All you have to do is claim, however unsupportably, that it's "in self defense", and Amnesty International will have no problem with it whatsoever, and will actually suspend any of its own personnel who have a problem with Amnesty International endorsing jihad.  And as pointed out in that thread, Islam has been making war on other peoples "for its own defense" since at least about the eighth century AD.

And, in another case where it's all about definitions, Strategic Forecasting points out that Mexico's having lost control of its northern states to drug cartels isn't necessarily a problem, for Mexico, if you look at it the right way.  Looked at from the perspective that drug smuggling into the US is America's problem, drug smuggling across the Mexican border brings Mexico forty billion dollars of hard (well ... OK, harder) foreign currency a year.  About thirty two billion dollars of this is profit, which would require about a third of a trillion dollars in conventional business to produce.  In other words, the drug trade pumps as much new money into the Mexican economy as does roughly a third of Mexico's GDP.  As has been pointed out before, it is not in Mexico's economic interest to stem the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico into the US, any more than it's in Mexico's interest to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

Of course, to be fair, this knife — like many others — cuts both ways.  There are things the US could do fix the problem from the US side; principally, taking the profit out of smuggling through drug legalization.  But the US cannot bring itself to do that, and can't figure out how to reduce the demand for drugs while keeping them illegal.  So, short of massive military action against Mexico, here we stand.