To me, something that really stands out is word choice. Jason says he used to be a member of their "Enthusiast Program". That sounds pretty good. The title of the program now? Evangelist. To me, that word is over the top. When someone is an evangelist of basically anything, but I'm mainly talking about a gadget, a PDA, an OS, etc, it generally means that they promote it to the exclusion of all others, will not permit anything "bad" (even if true!) to be said about it, and are generally not very fun to talk to. HP seems to want these sites to act more as employees than third-party enthusiasts, and unless they're going to pony up a salary, health plan, and retirement plan, it's a bit unreasonable.
As a moderator, deleting posts is not my favorite job (despite what some may think.
If you want to talk about that, though - start a new thread - don't use this one). Especially *informative* posts that are not in any way antagonistic, etc. It's one thing for a company to ask the staff to not post in exchange for the staff being able to see these devices. But to ask essentially that the USERS not be able to post? About info that's "out" anyway?
If they're worried about internal info getting out, they need to work on their internal practices, and stop the problem THERE rather than requiring that everyone else clean up their mess.
And what about information posted at the FCC? They seem to be saying that people aren't allowed to post "Hey - I saw this device at the FCC - is it the new ipaq?". I'm sorry, but that is most definitely public information. And if they don't like it, then they can lobby for FCC filings to not be made public. But until then, people are certainly allowed to look at those filings, and it would *NOT* be considered "industrial espionage" or anything like that. I mean... it's PUBLIC. It's as public as you can get. Not leaked, just PUBLIC.
I hope that very few sites agree to these terms. Maybe if HP gets an overwhelming number of rejections to this, they'll stop and wonder why. Maybe.