Come on people, what a petty thing to argue over!
Its hardly a drug habbit is it! its not destroying the economy...
we all kno the ICs talked about are produced in masive numbers for a few pence!
And as has been said already they wont offer such large samples unless they can within their profit margin!
Any way its promotional for the company, they know that by giving free samples out engineers will be use to their format of IC and are more likely to use it for big orders. They wouldnt offer free samples unless there was a lot of marketing saying it helps sales!