Good point. I remember an article by an industry journalist test driving an early version of XP. He's on a plane, and changed some thing on the laptop, and XP started asking for a new license/auth code because the hardware profile changed
Absolutely. I’ve experienced this many times myself.
And more recently when I do a linux software upgrade and something changes with regard to virtual box, the windoze that’s running as a virtual machine on top of vbox thinks that the “hardware” has “changed” and calls home to Redmond.
So this idea seems contrary to all of that but it might be a bit like when the record companies made peace with analog copying to cassette tapes and such because the thought was that the experience was somehow degraded.