Intel and M$ have made an agreement to limit hardware specs. They did the same thing last year, using XP pricing to force OEMs to obey. This year they are using Vista 7. It is doubtful they will control the market with that kind of bait.
Think this video of Bill O'Rielly's Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen states the case very well. Over the last decade pragmatists have made various deals with the non free software world. None of them are prospering now. Companies like Novell are going the same way the non free Unix companies went, hung separately instead of hanging together in freedom. Those who have stayed closer to freedom have done better. It seems, in retrospect, that the purists were more practical after all.
Ex husband stole the computer and online photo backup saved the day. This is a niche case but a good example of where an automated backup to offsite was worth while.
small and small growing data set, less than 5 GB
owner did not care about privacy of data, would have been happy to publish it all
owner had a real physical threat to all equipment
Does this exception make me trust non free software? Hell no. DIY with your friends. Windows users might as well get the service because their systems have zero privacy and reliability to begin with. Note that online backups will faithfully backup malware corrupted files.
Oh yes, the biggest data backup problem is Windows. In ten years of free software use, I've never suffered data loss due to malware or fs corruption. I make backups to optical disk and offline disks anyway. This protects against private malice and fire, which are my only remaining concerns.
If you look in to it you'll find that it is rather rare to see someone who is homeless 100% by circumstance....
How would you "look into" this kind of thing? Would you trade your clothes for rags and go live on the street to observe? If you did, would you keep things to yourself or write a book so that others did not have to? That would be cool, but you know it's easier to read the last book and the overflowing literature written since about life on the street. When you do, you will drop your judgment like the turd it is. Here's a reasonable opinion by someone who did all of the above:
I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
What you do from here is up to you, but recognize yourself in those less fortunate. RMS genreally buys people on the street food if they ask him for money. You have to walk them into the place and buy it because only a fool would trust food they did not see made like that. The world is full of people who ignorantly cast blame and would harm them for sport. Such are the extremes of behavior people with means chose.
You assume he is not familiar with both. This is almost impossible thanks to idiots like you who insist on Word. The same kind of things can be said for Windows in general, an OS favored by ignorant fools.
I've never seen a law firm use any other application for documents. From divorce, real estate, maritime, and criminal, they're pretty consistent.
It has been said that the only person who ever reads a technical document from cover to cover is the author. Even in those circumstances, some effort to style and layout are justified and the result may be called a publication.
Court records are a special subspecies of technical document useful only for a short time by those involved and never, ever read again. A large portion of the output is "discovery" where hundreds of pounds of pure dreck is dredged through for anything of value. It is text of the most utilitarian kind and no effort is justified in it's creation and little thought has been given to it's storage. M$ succeeded in taking over the market because no one cared, they will soon be displaced by Open Office - so long as government stays away from M$XML. The professionalism in legal records is no in the writing, it's in getting it done as cheaply and quickly possible, with "good enough" judgement. All that legal records require is a spell checker and the ability to cut and paste text. Please do not call this a publication.
Officer: How old are you?
Lister: I don't know.
Officer: When is your birthday?
Lister: What?
Officer: exasperated - What day do you celebrate your birth?
Lister: Everyday.
Officer gives up.
It's always good to eradicate mosquitoes where people live. Pumping more CO2 into the air might not be the best way to do it. Draining swamps has been damaging in unintended ways too. Sterile male techniques show promise. Never forget that less than a hundred years ago, mosquitoes used to kill tens of thousands of people at a time in cities like New Orleans.
Trying to make GNU/Linux "as good as Windows" is a bad idea, it's better to make company policy as good as free software instead. Because free software lacks most of the problems non free software does, it does not need as much "lockdown". Software management, without non free licenses is also much easier - you can set up your own repository with custom meta packages and have all of your machines do their updates as a cron job. If you look for Windows style tools and try to force free software to act like Windows, you will get something that sucks almost as much as Windows.
ATT has bent over backward for wiretaps, helped make the US 27th in broadband penetration and worked with other US carriers to force crap like Windows Mobil that makes iPhone look good but calling them "penis" is below the belt. You should be ashamed of yourself.
And how, pray tell, are you going to influence distribution?
They could let people share Canadian TV and forbid Canadian ISPs from interfering with P2P. Promoting is as easy as letting people share because people go for the path of least resistance. Ubiquity == Revenue.
We now return you to your regular broadcast, propping up dead business models with words like "IP" and "piracy." Do not adjust your TV, or else.
When getting antibiotics, the vast majority of people get either the full course or nothing at all - there's no in-between.
You seem so sure of this, why? Are you friends with people in Brazil and India? Don't you think it a little strange that people don't finish taking medicine their doctor gave them? A more reasonable explanation for half taken medicine is half full wallets and other things you have no experience of. People can't afford to complete the course or have some awful thing happen that gets in the way. The developing world is where you more often see anti-biotic resistant bacteria emerging, not the first world where animal overuse is happening. Face it, IP laws are what's wrong with the picture.
Animal use is bad but human suffering is worse and the main villain is "Intellectual Property" Law. An unstated argument here is that people distributing medicine and those who don't take their full course are somehow at fault. These arguments shift blame from people who profit from misery and blame the victims and those who would help.
Does it really make moral sense that farm animals are over treated and people end up with half treatments? Do you think that people really want to have less than proper medicine? The system is really screwed up and one of the main barriers are IP treaties that threaten countries that would make their own life saving drugs. Sure, you can point to WIPO exceptions for just this sort of problem, but reality is what you describe - livestock get better medicine than most people.
Don't judge the victims, they don't know any better. It's amazing what a billion dollars a month in advertising will do to people. "Get the facts" and other smear attacks on competition do their damage. OEM and Vendor lock help to reinforce this. With every vendor robotically chanting, "We recommend Microsoft Windows" and never providing a fair price for any other OS, people believe what they have heard from everywhere else. With the FUD, many people are afraid a LiveCD will ruin their computer and think free software advocates are wreckless subversives, terrorists of the desktop even. This is how M$ has survived the last 10 years, despite the absolute panic free software caused in their upper ranks.
It's all over now. No amount of lying can cover for Vista. Enough of the wrong words have gone into the right ears. M$ is out of money. OEMs have been burnt and see Windows7 as more of the same. Retailers are so dead, M$ is thinking about starting their own stores - oh please do! The revolt is on and M$ does not stand a chance.
Their success has trivialized their products. Even their high end software which is rather nice (if you are able to look at them threw un Fanboy/Zealot eyes) has the stigma of being sub-par home software. As well associating any and all PC problems that one has with Microsoft even if it isn't their fault. Really gives them a PR problem. Now I am not sure a retail store will fix it. Showing off the software is a much more difficult problem.
The PR problem comes from more than a decade of vicious anti-competitive behavior and you can say that the M$ store is more of the same. Circuit City and CompUSA both failed due to Vista channel stuffing. Zune is a byword for DRM betrayal, both for customers and OEMs left high and dry by M$'s shifting non standards. Xbox "support" includes sabotaging and screwing game partners. M$ has screwed all of their friends and have to make a little place of their own. They will soon be bankrupt.
The "retirement" was a lie. Bill Gates is still the largest M$ shareholder and the richest man in the US. If you think he no longer controls M$, you are sadly deceived.
M$ "innovation" is an even bigger lie. "R+D" on M$ balance sheets almost always includes marketing and advertising as part of "research" and a large portion of their product development goes into technical sabotage. This is why their R+D budget looks so bloated - they are dumping money hand over fist in an effort to insure positive press and media control. If they really were spending their monopoly rents on product development, they would have products 10x cooler than anything Apple could throw together.
The problem has never been "bundling" it's been technical and business sabotage. "Bundling" is like a gift, the naive user asks themselves, "How can having a free program be bad?" "Bundling" that forbids vendors from including other programs is where M$ falls foul of the market and law. Technical sabotage, such as erasing user preferences and book marks, is another issue. These are the kinds of things that M$ continues to do and making vendors carry the cost of installing additional programs won't fix the problem. Massive fines for M$ and vendors who submitted to the practices might do better.
I can't believe that people working at Firefox could have missed these issues and suspect PCPro of selectively quoting people to deliver a M$ friendly message. Netscape is the poster boy of anti-trust in the US and people at Mozilla are intimately familiar with the issue. The message delivered undercuts the weaker remedy that might have been implemented as a compromise. That Mozilla would be accused of anti-trust practices like M$ is pure FUD, the practices and size of the two companies could not be more different. The editors at PCPro have some strange filters for what they consider newsworthy.
moderators_are_w*nke, "the dev teams may not have finished all the performance tweaking in the beta, so yes, you get some numbers but unless you want to run the beta in production they are meaningless when it comes to production."
Another GP, "RTFA it was tested agains Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04. In both x32 and x64 flavors. Ubuntu 9.04 we used the daily build from January 22nd.
Me, "Windows 7 is not a beta. It's Vista, the result of six year of development and two years of failed production."
Linux Torvalds, "Beta is a state of mind."
Me, "I stand corrected but your state of mind won't make Vista faster than Ubuntu. That's called a delusion or wishful thinking."
With that, the multibillion dollar Vista ad campaign vanished in a puff of smoke.
M$ Executives have been deathly afraid of market shareerrosion for quite some time now and have been on a "Jihad" to prevent it. The fight is brutal and involves bribes, threats, sabotage and espionage. Look at the recent Walmart case as an example - they went after every piece of the chain to make sure GNU/Linux was more expensive than Windows on the same hardware and finally driven off at the source. They do all of this because they know they can't and won't win a free choice or a fair fight. They know their development model is broken and their products are not competitive so badly that they need a slush fund called "EDGI" to essentially dump where they run into a real choice situation. It can't last forever, even with $1 billion per month in advertising, fake studdies and astroturf. GNU/Linux is real and anyone can try it at zero cost.
Going free might cure some of their problems, but it's probably too little too late. Windows has consistently failed to deliver what customers want, but free software does that by definition. Windows might be made usable if they let customers add features they like and strip out DRM. But how many developers are left to do this? M$ has been driving what they describe as "pawns" and "one night stands" off. It will take years of honest releases for people to believe M$ has turned over a new leaf and for a community to form again. Until then, Windows will suck like Vista does. M$'s monopoly revenue stream is not something that can be maintained under any circumstances. Without M$'s constant threat of technical sabotage, customers will turn to free applications even if they do keep using Windows. Worse for M$, hardware vendors will turn to GNU/Linux and the rest of the world will follow. M$ might be able to survive as a GNU/Linux company, but it will be a much smaller place than it is now and they will have to give up their dreams of media dominance based on unAmerican censorship and restrictions. The alternative to free survival though, is complete collapse.
An easier question to ask is, "Given the scale of this system and recent US history, what are the chances this new system won't be abused?" While more is always better, I was unaware of a computing power problem at Sandia in the first place. The scale of the system is reason for more suspicion, not less.
Why would you expect modest spending plans from a government that tapped the entire internet and specifically targeted journalist communications? Tremendous amounts of money have already been wasted making sure Uncle Sam and his corporate buddies have access to all of your communications and spending.
How powerful is the beast? People say it's got more power than all of the top 500 supercomputers combined. That it will be able to do weather forecasting down to the square kilometer on the side. That it can perform 3 million computations per second for every person on the plannet. With that kind of computing power you will not only be able to identify your political opposition, you will be able predict what side of the bed they wake up on and when they will brush their teeth. Petty details, such as who to fire to win the next election will be trivial.
Is it supposed to be surprising that they didn't rewrite their entire codebase for every new OS release?!? Obviously Windows 7 is going to be built on top of the Vista codebase, that's how almost every software release works.
There you have it, folks, every release of Windows was nothing more than a rebranding. This is why exploits invariably cover ever version. Vista did add some cool new digital restrictions but those have been in the works since 2001 or so.
I thought this kind of talk was over the top, then I read the article.
The specifications enable support for strong access control and, once set at the management level, the encryption cannot be turned off by end-users.... it can't be brought back up and read without first giving a cryptographically-strong password. If you don't have that, it's a brick. You can't even sell it on eBay."
No reset so that you can repartion the thing? Users are supposed to trust the hardware won't betray them? No way. It's like they are trying to clog landfills with these things.
The whole article reeks of "trusted path" and other defective by design tech beyond the obvious "oops, I forgot the password" inevitability. To be trusted by sane users, the controller boards must come with easy to change free software doing the dirty work. If not, all sorts of malicious features can be hidden that negate all benefits of hardware encryption. These things could turn themselves if "premium" content is ever placed on the drive and then accessed with a "non trusted" OS, for example. Your data is never secure when you use non free software, it is always at the mercy of the software's owner. This kind of "firmware" is something that should be rejected.
Giving someone money is nice but it does not give them rights. H1B workers still have to leave the US one week after being fired. M$ has tried to play that fact up to their advantage, "Oh noes, we can't send our poor friends home to starve," but the ability to do just that is half the reason M$ has them here in the first place. Their loss of freedom is a direct assault on your own. M$ has used H1B workers to lower the expectations and pay of all their employees.
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Intel and M$ have made an agreement to limit hardware specs. They did the same thing last year, using XP pricing to force OEMs to obey. This year they are using Vista 7. It is doubtful they will control the market with that kind of bait.
Think this video of Bill O'Rielly's Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen states the case very well. Over the last decade pragmatists have made various deals with the non free software world. None of them are prospering now. Companies like Novell are going the same way the non free Unix companies went, hung separately instead of hanging together in freedom. Those who have stayed closer to freedom have done better. It seems, in retrospect, that the purists were more practical after all.
Ex husband stole the computer and online photo backup saved the day. This is a niche case but a good example of where an automated backup to offsite was worth while.
Does this exception make me trust non free software? Hell no. DIY with your friends. Windows users might as well get the service because their systems have zero privacy and reliability to begin with. Note that online backups will faithfully backup malware corrupted files.
Oh yes, the biggest data backup problem is Windows. In ten years of free software use, I've never suffered data loss due to malware or fs corruption. I make backups to optical disk and offline disks anyway. This protects against private malice and fire, which are my only remaining concerns.
If you look in to it you'll find that it is rather rare to see someone who is homeless 100% by circumstance....
How would you "look into" this kind of thing? Would you trade your clothes for rags and go live on the street to observe? If you did, would you keep things to yourself or write a book so that others did not have to? That would be cool, but you know it's easier to read the last book and the overflowing literature written since about life on the street. When you do, you will drop your judgment like the turd it is. Here's a reasonable opinion by someone who did all of the above:
What you do from here is up to you, but recognize yourself in those less fortunate. RMS genreally buys people on the street food if they ask him for money. You have to walk them into the place and buy it because only a fool would trust food they did not see made like that. The world is full of people who ignorantly cast blame and would harm them for sport. Such are the extremes of behavior people with means chose.
You assume he is not familiar with both. This is almost impossible thanks to idiots like you who insist on Word. The same kind of things can be said for Windows in general, an OS favored by ignorant fools.
It has been said that the only person who ever reads a technical document from cover to cover is the author. Even in those circumstances, some effort to style and layout are justified and the result may be called a publication.
Court records are a special subspecies of technical document useful only for a short time by those involved and never, ever read again. A large portion of the output is "discovery" where hundreds of pounds of pure dreck is dredged through for anything of value. It is text of the most utilitarian kind and no effort is justified in it's creation and little thought has been given to it's storage. M$ succeeded in taking over the market because no one cared, they will soon be displaced by Open Office - so long as government stays away from M$XML. The professionalism in legal records is no in the writing, it's in getting it done as cheaply and quickly possible, with "good enough" judgement. All that legal records require is a spell checker and the ability to cut and paste text. Please do not call this a publication.
From Red Dwarf, from memory.
Officer: How old are you?
Lister: I don't know.
Officer: When is your birthday?
Lister: What?
Officer: exasperated - What day do you celebrate your birth?
Lister: Everyday.
Officer gives up.
It's always good to eradicate mosquitoes where people live. Pumping more CO2 into the air might not be the best way to do it. Draining swamps has been damaging in unintended ways too. Sterile male techniques show promise. Never forget that less than a hundred years ago, mosquitoes used to kill tens of thousands of people at a time in cities like New Orleans.
Trying to make GNU/Linux "as good as Windows" is a bad idea, it's better to make company policy as good as free software instead. Because free software lacks most of the problems non free software does, it does not need as much "lockdown". Software management, without non free licenses is also much easier - you can set up your own repository with custom meta packages and have all of your machines do their updates as a cron job. If you look for Windows style tools and try to force free software to act like Windows, you will get something that sucks almost as much as Windows.
ATT has bent over backward for wiretaps, helped make the US 27th in broadband penetration and worked with other US carriers to force crap like Windows Mobil that makes iPhone look good but calling them "penis" is below the belt. You should be ashamed of yourself.
And how, pray tell, are you going to influence distribution?
They could let people share Canadian TV and forbid Canadian ISPs from interfering with P2P. Promoting is as easy as letting people share because people go for the path of least resistance. Ubiquity == Revenue.
We now return you to your regular broadcast, propping up dead business models with words like "IP" and "piracy." Do not adjust your TV, or else.
When getting antibiotics, the vast majority of people get either the full course or nothing at all - there's no in-between.
You seem so sure of this, why? Are you friends with people in Brazil and India? Don't you think it a little strange that people don't finish taking medicine their doctor gave them? A more reasonable explanation for half taken medicine is half full wallets and other things you have no experience of. People can't afford to complete the course or have some awful thing happen that gets in the way. The developing world is where you more often see anti-biotic resistant bacteria emerging, not the first world where animal overuse is happening. Face it, IP laws are what's wrong with the picture.
Animal use is bad but human suffering is worse and the main villain is "Intellectual Property" Law. An unstated argument here is that people distributing medicine and those who don't take their full course are somehow at fault. These arguments shift blame from people who profit from misery and blame the victims and those who would help.
Does it really make moral sense that farm animals are over treated and people end up with half treatments? Do you think that people really want to have less than proper medicine? The system is really screwed up and one of the main barriers are IP treaties that threaten countries that would make their own life saving drugs. Sure, you can point to WIPO exceptions for just this sort of problem, but reality is what you describe - livestock get better medicine than most people.
Don't judge the victims, they don't know any better. It's amazing what a billion dollars a month in advertising will do to people. "Get the facts" and other smear attacks on competition do their damage. OEM and Vendor lock help to reinforce this. With every vendor robotically chanting, "We recommend Microsoft Windows" and never providing a fair price for any other OS, people believe what they have heard from everywhere else. With the FUD, many people are afraid a LiveCD will ruin their computer and think free software advocates are wreckless subversives, terrorists of the desktop even. This is how M$ has survived the last 10 years, despite the absolute panic free software caused in their upper ranks.
It's all over now. No amount of lying can cover for Vista. Enough of the wrong words have gone into the right ears. M$ is out of money. OEMs have been burnt and see Windows7 as more of the same. Retailers are so dead, M$ is thinking about starting their own stores - oh please do! The revolt is on and M$ does not stand a chance.
Imagine me laughing like this, "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" It makes me feel good too. No need for a laugh box when you have a sense of humor.
Fanboy barf:
Showing off software is only difficult if people who use your software universally agree that it sucks.
The PR problem comes from more than a decade of vicious anti-competitive behavior and you can say that the M$ store is more of the same. Circuit City and CompUSA both failed due to Vista channel stuffing. Zune is a byword for DRM betrayal, both for customers and OEMs left high and dry by M$'s shifting non standards. Xbox "support" includes sabotaging and screwing game partners. M$ has screwed all of their friends and have to make a little place of their own. They will soon be bankrupt.
The "retirement" was a lie. Bill Gates is still the largest M$ shareholder and the richest man in the US. If you think he no longer controls M$, you are sadly deceived.
M$ "innovation" is an even bigger lie. "R+D" on M$ balance sheets almost always includes marketing and advertising as part of "research" and a large portion of their product development goes into technical sabotage. This is why their R+D budget looks so bloated - they are dumping money hand over fist in an effort to insure positive press and media control. If they really were spending their monopoly rents on product development, they would have products 10x cooler than anything Apple could throw together.
This is one of many they have pulled lately.
The problem has never been "bundling" it's been technical and business sabotage. "Bundling" is like a gift, the naive user asks themselves, "How can having a free program be bad?" "Bundling" that forbids vendors from including other programs is where M$ falls foul of the market and law. Technical sabotage, such as erasing user preferences and book marks, is another issue. These are the kinds of things that M$ continues to do and making vendors carry the cost of installing additional programs won't fix the problem. Massive fines for M$ and vendors who submitted to the practices might do better.
I can't believe that people working at Firefox could have missed these issues and suspect PCPro of selectively quoting people to deliver a M$ friendly message. Netscape is the poster boy of anti-trust in the US and people at Mozilla are intimately familiar with the issue. The message delivered undercuts the weaker remedy that might have been implemented as a compromise. That Mozilla would be accused of anti-trust practices like M$ is pure FUD, the practices and size of the two companies could not be more different. The editors at PCPro have some strange filters for what they consider newsworthy.
GP, "Queue douchebag saying its only a beta."
moderators_are_w*nke, "the dev teams may not have finished all the performance tweaking in the beta, so yes, you get some numbers but unless you want to run the beta in production they are meaningless when it comes to production."
Another GP, "RTFA it was tested agains Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04. In both x32 and x64 flavors. Ubuntu 9.04 we used the daily build from January 22nd.
Me, "Windows 7 is not a beta. It's Vista, the result of six year of development and two years of failed production."
Linux Torvalds, "Beta is a state of mind."
Me, "I stand corrected but your state of mind won't make Vista faster than Ubuntu. That's called a delusion or wishful thinking."
With that, the multibillion dollar Vista ad campaign vanished in a puff of smoke.
M$ Executives have been deathly afraid of market share errosion for quite some time now and have been on a "Jihad" to prevent it. The fight is brutal and involves bribes, threats, sabotage and espionage. Look at the recent Walmart case as an example - they went after every piece of the chain to make sure GNU/Linux was more expensive than Windows on the same hardware and finally driven off at the source. They do all of this because they know they can't and won't win a free choice or a fair fight. They know their development model is broken and their products are not competitive so badly that they need a slush fund called "EDGI" to essentially dump where they run into a real choice situation. It can't last forever, even with $1 billion per month in advertising, fake studdies and astroturf. GNU/Linux is real and anyone can try it at zero cost.
Going free might cure some of their problems, but it's probably too little too late. Windows has consistently failed to deliver what customers want, but free software does that by definition. Windows might be made usable if they let customers add features they like and strip out DRM. But how many developers are left to do this? M$ has been driving what they describe as "pawns" and "one night stands" off. It will take years of honest releases for people to believe M$ has turned over a new leaf and for a community to form again. Until then, Windows will suck like Vista does. M$'s monopoly revenue stream is not something that can be maintained under any circumstances. Without M$'s constant threat of technical sabotage, customers will turn to free applications even if they do keep using Windows. Worse for M$, hardware vendors will turn to GNU/Linux and the rest of the world will follow. M$ might be able to survive as a GNU/Linux company, but it will be a much smaller place than it is now and they will have to give up their dreams of media dominance based on unAmerican censorship and restrictions. The alternative to free survival though, is complete collapse.
An easier question to ask is, "Given the scale of this system and recent US history, what are the chances this new system won't be abused?" While more is always better, I was unaware of a computing power problem at Sandia in the first place. The scale of the system is reason for more suspicion, not less.
Why would you expect modest spending plans from a government that tapped the entire internet and specifically targeted journalist communications? Tremendous amounts of money have already been wasted making sure Uncle Sam and his corporate buddies have access to all of your communications and spending.
How powerful is the beast? People say it's got more power than all of the top 500 supercomputers combined. That it will be able to do weather forecasting down to the square kilometer on the side. That it can perform 3 million computations per second for every person on the plannet. With that kind of computing power you will not only be able to identify your political opposition, you will be able predict what side of the bed they wake up on and when they will brush their teeth. Petty details, such as who to fire to win the next election will be trivial.
Is it supposed to be surprising that they didn't rewrite their entire codebase for every new OS release?!? Obviously Windows 7 is going to be built on top of the Vista codebase, that's how almost every software release works.
There you have it, folks, every release of Windows was nothing more than a rebranding. This is why exploits invariably cover ever version. Vista did add some cool new digital restrictions but those have been in the works since 2001 or so.
I thought this kind of talk was over the top, then I read the article.
No reset so that you can repartion the thing? Users are supposed to trust the hardware won't betray them? No way. It's like they are trying to clog landfills with these things.
The whole article reeks of "trusted path" and other defective by design tech beyond the obvious "oops, I forgot the password" inevitability. To be trusted by sane users, the controller boards must come with easy to change free software doing the dirty work. If not, all sorts of malicious features can be hidden that negate all benefits of hardware encryption. These things could turn themselves if "premium" content is ever placed on the drive and then accessed with a "non trusted" OS, for example. Your data is never secure when you use non free software, it is always at the mercy of the software's owner. This kind of "firmware" is something that should be rejected.
Giving someone money is nice but it does not give them rights. H1B workers still have to leave the US one week after being fired. M$ has tried to play that fact up to their advantage, "Oh noes, we can't send our poor friends home to starve," but the ability to do just that is half the reason M$ has them here in the first place. Their loss of freedom is a direct assault on your own. M$ has used H1B workers to lower the expectations and pay of all their employees.