Thanks Sri! Ever since mouser was nice enough to reveal that I had been shamefully underestimating Tab Mix Plus, I have been poring over it, and learning something new every day.

And I figured that posting my new groaning smorgasbord of extensions would result in my learning something else about at least one of them!

If I hang out here long enough, the day may come when I might even have to give back my Totally Clueless card.   :)

There is a procedure for copying one Windows XP Pro user profile to another. There are articles about how to do it on the Microsoft site, and the internets are chock-a-block with echoes and paraphrases of those articles, and all of them are just as incomprehensible as the original one on the Microsoft site.

The goal of the Magical XP User Copy Machine is to allow us to copy the current user, that is fixed just like we like it, and then change our desktop icons and wallpaper, thus giving us a choice of outfits when we start Windows, just like when we open our closets and decide what we would like to wear that day.

What should be a simple and straightforward matter of a click or two to accomplish what is in my view, a most reasonable thing people would want to do, is a multi-step, confusing and complicated process, with lots of chances for a clueless person, or even a clueful one who is distracted or in a hurry, to mess things up.

The Intended End User is a person of my own formidable level of cluelessness or greater, and also Authentic Power-Usin' Nerds who are just very busy with important and ponderous tasks, but who are also human and might like a costume change now and then, without having to commit a complete valve and ring job to get it.

Another thing about the Intended End User - we may be clueless, but we are not so clueless that we do not realize that putting stuff like WindowBlinds on our machines is going to mean paying out a lot of system resources for what is a purely cosmetic function - even if it does not mess our computers up, which, if you google around, you will see that this is not a rare occurrence.

And we probably don't have a lot of icons on our desktop.

For instance, I have just a few broad category folder icons, and inside each one is a whole mess of subfolders and stuff. So if we get a copy of our current user, we are not going to have to spend all day just changing those icons and wallpaper.

But even if we do have a lot of icons, this program would still save a lot of time. Because  while we the Clueless Intended End Users may want the program to achieve a cosmetic goal, the business of copying users is not about cosmetics at all, but about stuff we do not begin to understand. All those settings and things.

So here is how the Magical XP User Copy Machine would work, in an ideal world.

You would simply click "copy current profile to" and make up a name for the new user, type that in the blank, and sit back.

Then a thing would pop up telling you that you were successfully logged into your new user, and from there you could change your wallpaper and your handful of icons. Now you have a whole new look, and next time you start windows, you can log in to whichever user you want, depending on what colors, etc, you are in the mood for, and all of those mysterious settings that we the Clueless Intended End Users don't understand, or probably even know about, have been magically and safely copied, including all our Firefox stuff, which we had finally gotten just like we wanted it. At least for today.

The program would also have a sync feature, so that if, while wearing our pink clothes, we install something or change some preference or setting somewhere or other, at the end of the day, when we do things like update and  run our antivirus and Malware Bytes, we can also click our Magical XP User Copy Machine, and click Sync with, and check off all the users we want whatever we did that day to sync with.

This would also give us the option of keeping one or more like they were yesterday, in case it turns out we don't like whatever I changed today, but being Clueless Intended End Users, we will of course, either have forgotten what that was or not be able to find it.

Is this something that someone here could whip up in a minute or two? Or is it all more complicated than I ever dreamed or imagined, like my last week's idea about context menus?

Or does it already exist but I just didn't find it, either because I did a sucky job of googling, or google did a sucky job of finding it for me even though I googled just fine?

I think you are right that most people who can - and I would add who actually USE a particular program - are more than willing to pay for it!

But let's take, for example, Adobe Photoshop. Of all the copies of that program that are downloaded daily, how many of the people who download it are A) able to purchase it, and B) really going to use it?

I have heard, and can't really refute, the argument that the small-scale bottom-feeding freelancer who downloads photoshop via "unofficial" channels, if s/he is hired one day to work for a company, is most likely to choose Photoshop as the image editing software for the company's advertising department, and thus cause Adobe to make a multi-license sale, but that is not going to be a very large percentage of all those people who are downloading it.

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that probably 90% of the people who download Photoshop not only are never in a position to cause their boss to buy even one copy, but after fooling with it enough to see that there is a pretty steep learning curve involved, simply leave it in their Program Files folder and forget about it. (And go download some other wildly popular program that they will probably never even learn to use!)

So Adobe's flagship product, like all its products, and like just about every other piece of "commerical" software, including the Windows operating system itself, is freely available to the general public at no cost, and there is not really anything that the software companies can do about that.

I know that there are all kinds of plans and schemes and task forces and digital millennium pronouncements, and that has been the case for some time, and I imagine will continue to be the case for some time, and no doubt all that provides the people who are involved with a very real psychological benefit.

But there is not really any way to change that downloadable reality.

You mentioned honesty, and a lot of the discussions I have seen on this subject, especially those where most of the participants are from the US or Europe, will sooner or later get into the subject of intellectual property, and ethics as related to that. For many people, to download Photoshop without paying for it constitutes theft - the theft of intellectual property. That is, for them, a core value, it is part of their cultural context, and the laws in the US reflect that cultural norm, that core value.

But you might discuss the subject with someone from a different culture, and their view could be completely different! To that person, honesty might not even enter into the picture. Their concept of honesty might be completely different from yours - and both views equally irrelevant to the ones and zeros that populate the download directories all over the globe!

Although some governments have tried, and continue to try, dividing the web up according to cultural tradition, value systems, and legal jurisdictions, or isolating particular populations from the larger body of internet citizenry, does not seem to be working out, and I do not intend that to be a diss against the very bright and talented people in any particular country who have done such hard work on those kinds of projects, nor those who are just as talented and work just as hard on "copy protection."

It is just that there are many, many people who use the internet, many, many people who click mice, and whatever programmatic strategy I might come up with to, for instance, prevent you from viewing web pages that reside on servers outside of say, Malaysia, somebody somewhere in the world is going to develop a workaround for that, and make that workaround available to you, even if your computer literacy stops at checking your email and a couple of favorite websites.

Similarly, whatver scheme I devise to prevent you from being able to run a copy of Photoshop that you download from a website not authorized by Adobe to offer the program for download, somebody somewhere is going to come up with a workaround for THAT, and so on.

The web, unlike laws, or beliefs, or cultures, is universal! And it is that universality that is presenting entire industries with the challenge of developing new ways of doing things on a very fundamental level, in order to adapt to these new realities.

Meanwhile, the open source Gimp project continues to steadily improve, and come closer to being a truly realistic replacement for Photoshop, and a larger percentage of people who download the GImp are actually going to use it, despite its learning curve, and the ones that can DO support it.

There is already a Gimp product, Gimpshop, that openly seeks to resemble Photoshop more closely, and I think that we can expect to see that march apace, and in a couple of years, Gimpshop will attain or surpass Open Office in its "open source alternativehood," precisely because as you say, most people are willing to support good software - Whether they would consider it dishonest to download Photoshop or not, those with the skills would definitely embrace the opportunity to be part of a project whose goal is to produce image editing software that is BETTER than Photoshop!

In other words, that very universality of the web that challenges all those traditional business models has the potential, in my opinion, to form itself into a new and, to use one of my pet peeve born-cliche memes, "reality-based" model.