Why would he do that? Ummmm... So fewer innocent people go to prison and we're owned by slightly less evil corporations?
The 'lesser of two evils' is still less evil, dammit. And nobody's asking Nader to thank anybody. Just to admit that his 3rd party tactics aren't working, and in fact, are counterproductive. That's not to say he's wrong about the 2 party system - it's just saying he's doing a lousy job of fixing it - and losing stature in the process.
Nice observation in hindsight. You're right that in California, you're probably safe 'voting your conscience', but don't assume the swing states will be the typical ones this time.
I personally think Nader's sales pitch "The two major parties are Coke and Pepsi", while grounded in some truth, was a gross simplification that helped bring us 8 years of war, climate change denial, worsening income inequality and Citizens United - which only made the 3rd party scenario less likely to succeed in the future. If he had any integrity, he'd admit that - instead of insisting that Al Gore losing deep red Tennessee as a Democrat somehow leaves Nader blameless. There's no shame in acknowledging his spoiler role while maintaining his critique of the system. In fact, admitting his mistakes might actually help formulate a more effective strategy. But he's too full of himself to put changing the system in a constructive way above his own ego.
And if Adams is serious that 'being equally slimed with sex scandals' - even if actually equally - is the reason he can't vote for Clinton or Trump, well then he's basically an embarrassed Trump supporter - who's overlooking a lot worse than what Trump said on a bus in 2005.
A President Johnson administration might bring with it some operational risks, and policy risks, but at least he won't slime you by association and turn you into some sort of cheerleader for sex abuse in the way you would if you voted for the Clintons or Trump.
Cute, but since a President Johnson administration is a statistically effective impossibility, this statement is all but meaningless. We're going to get Clinton or Trump, and if Scott Adams doesn't want to get his widdle feet dirty, well isn't he virtuous. He's also abdicating his responsibility to make a meaningful choice between the two truly available choices.
But the polls had him neck and neck because the press treated him as a serious candidate for way too long. They still don't really do a serious critique of his policay stances - largely because he's so short on specifics.
And in the case of Clinton, they pile on to every new nothing new to report here 'revelation' about her emails. And that stupid AP story about the Clinton Foundation. It all perpetuates the myth that there's no real difference between the parties and a crapshoot is as good as a reasoned choice. Sure, the parties are both beholden to special interests - and our corrupt campaign finance system is largely responsible for that. But which party has been for campaign finance reform consistently for decades - and which one seated 5 Supreme Court justices that thought 'money is speech' and 'corporations are people' should carry more weight than 'one person, one vote'?
That '50% of people who met with Clinton' statistic is little more than a case of journalistic malpractice. It turns out to be 50% of a small subset of people she met with who happened to not be government representatives who would routinely come in contact with Clinton in the course of her duties as SOS. So what is a small set of 'questionable' meetings is represented as though it were 'half of everything Clinton did at State was connected with the foundation's donors'. And then fools like you quote it as 'maybe fake, but why would it be surprising'. Unimpeachable evidence, that...
And while I'm on the subject of that small set of meetings, none have turned up any quid-pro-quo. And you can bet that if it were there, it would have been reported on exhaustively - based on the fact that the 50% number itself, having been discredited, is still being reported on. The fact that all we ever here is this bogus '50% of meetings' figure all but guarantees that this is a non story. That doesn't stop Trump, Pence or any others of his surrogates from repeating it. Nor does it stop 'mainstream' journalists from distilling it down to 'there have been serious questions asked about the Clinton Foundation'.
It's all self-feeding bullshit. Kind of like Cheney feeding a bogus WMD story to Judith Miller at the NY Times and then quoting the resulting article to prove his point about WMD.
Because voting for a third party won't have the metaphorical effect of stopping the train.
Clinton or Trump is going to be elected, whether or not you think the system by which that happens is corrupt. And calls to 'blow up the tracks' are about as likely to change that corrupt system as your vote is to get Johnson or Stein elected. That's why Bernie Sanders chose not to attempt to run as a 3rd party candidate - he's made the calculation that he can get more of his program enacted by helping elect Clinton than by 'making a statement about the corrupt system'. He's already made that statement in the primary season, and sabotaging the general election won't make that statement any stronger - it'll just make him ignorable as a a saboteur.
I would suggest that your feeling that your protest vote will stop the train - or even move the needle in that direction - is where the narcissism/nihilism lines start to get crossed...
Well, at least I've coaxed you into revealing your utterly nihilistic thought process. My job for today is done - vote for whomever you please, and I hope anybody reading this gets that your advice may be counter-productive - by design.
Judging from your signature, the only constitutional protection you're worried about is your right to shoot birds - which, by the way, nobody is advocating for taking away, no matter how much you whine that they are.
Well, the constitution covers a few other areas that Slashdotters might just care about. Like the preference of one-person-one-vote democracy over an interpretation of freedom of speech that considers The American Enterprise Institute as a charitable organization. And of course, while the SC doesn't design intellectual property law, it does get to be the referee of last resort in related disputes. So it's not out of the question to imagine the likes of Antonin Scalia weighing in on the patentability of API's, etc...
A train is out of control on a track. You have access to a switch that could send it to one track with 2 people on it, or another with 5. Those are the choices my friend. You don't get to say, "I'd fix the brakes", or call Superman. Your vote for Johnson will have the affect of rolling dice to decide which track the train takes - which, I suppose if you really think there's no difference between Clinton or Trump on any issue you care about, is rational. But of course the thought that there's no difference is irrational in and of itself.
At best, your point is that we need a different system for electing Presidents - and possibly a large turnout for Johnson might inch that into being. I'd say there are better ways - like electing Johnson (or Sanders, or Stein, or Nader)-like candidates to Congress or State legislatures from districts where they stand a chance of winning. And then changing the election system through a process that can actually do it. Because Presidencies have long-term repercussions, so they're best not used to 'send a message' when there are other, better ways.
Boy. In any other context, you'd probably be railing about 'defining rape down to the point of meaninglessness'. But if it's a Clinton...
The primary 'victims' of Hillary's supposed 'blaming the victim' were Gennifer Flowers, who conducted a consensual sexual relationship and then sold her story to the tabloids. And Monica Lewinsky, who basically flirted with a married man, fell in love, and they cried on the shoulder of Linda Tripp, who betrayed her royally. That Hillary chose to defend her husband rather than stand in feminist solidarity with these 'victims', is pretty understandable - in the light of the forces trying to undermine Bill, and yes, in the light of both of their ambitions.
Perhaps in another place or time, sexual infidelity would be a disqualifier. A pretty hypocritical one, but nontheless... But Trump? Really?
Because 'The Cloud' has become as much a marketing buzzword as the real thing that it is, you will find companies embracing Azure to run their traditional Windows desktop apps 'in the cloud' using some combination of Azure and Citrix.
Those companies bought in to the Windows desktop paradigm and built database-centric client/server applications that in hindsight should have never been built that way - but that's what they have to sell, and if it will sell better if it's hosted 'in the cloud', then that's what they'll do. I've seen this approach taken first hand. It sucks, but if you can't do a rewrite, it's the best alternative to self-hosting a big database app and managing deployment to the desktop.
In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers. I don't know how the cost of Citrix figures in to this kind of deployment, though.
Well, Apple doesn't license their software to OEM's, but you can bet there'll never be a Siri competitor integrated into any Apple hardware.
Microsoft sells Windows through OEM's, and I don't think they allow them to disable Cortana or provide a competitor out of the box. It took much legal wrangling to get them to make it easy-ish to replace Internet Explorer. And I think Google desktop search has become a thing of the past...
Does Amazon license their smart speaker software? I doubt it. And in any case, since it's based off of Android, that's a pretty good argument for Google being as open as possible while maintaining some kind of business model to support development.
So Google's providing smart speaker software with Google Assistant baked in, and requiring hardware makers to sell it as is. Since Amazon's already making competing devices - with Google's OS, and Microsoft is surely looking in to doing the same, I'm not sure this is too much of a violation. I suppose it would be nice if the platform allowed end users to swap out various components, but limiting OEM's seems reasonable at this stage of the game. It's not like Google doesn't have to compete on digital assistants - with Cortana on just about every desktop PC sold in the world - or anything...
I think the rebranding has nothing to do with the 'product being crappy'. It's an attempt to unify what are now thought of as a bunch of separate products - and get potential customers thinking about the whole package. Yes, as an attempt to compete with Microsoft's similar suite.
Except that the stuff wasn't classified at the time, which kind of blows apart your theory of copy/pasting stuff from classified documents, since there weren't any. Yes, there was one instance of something kind of like that where there was a partial marking inside the document, and perhaps copy/paste could account for that. But out of tens of thousands, that doesn't rise to any systematic anything.
I agree, she probably intended to circumvent the FOIA laws - for stuff that wasn't official business, in that it came from outside the department. Stuff from inside the department was archived, so no dice. Whether that's illegal or not is a wholly separate issue from whether the handling of classified information was worthy of "Lock her up!" chants. And you can bet the crowds chanting "Lock her up" were basing it on the classified stuff. And those crowds could give a shit about the actual classified information supposedly involved. They just want to think of the Clintons as criminals, and try to get others to share their vies - for political reasons.
I won't go into the "Bush administration did worse - and did it systematically throughout their ranks" arguement. But they did.
You make it sound like the intent in setting up a personal server was to enable Clinton to pass classified information to where it wasn't supposed to be. That is utter bullshit. The intent was to control where her emails (personal and otherwise) went - and maybe that's a significant issue. But what this is not about is the dissemination of classified information. The few classified items that (yes) slipped through - by being unlabeled or incompletely labeled - are only incriminating to someone looking for a technical excuse to prosecute. The information involved wasn't particularly sensitive, and probably would've been sent on the unclassified State Deparment system, had she been using it. Actual seriously secret info was sent on another, unwieldier system.
So, maybe there's a case to be made that using the personal email server broke some rule or other, but the FBI got involved to find out whether vital security secrets were revealed, and determined that basically they weren't - certainly not enough to prosecute. And the bottom line is that the whole criminality thing is a red herring for the whole political thing, which is a witch hunt to bring down a presidential candidate over an embassy attack, which was a horrible thing - but largely (mostly) not directly attributable to that candidate.
Or perhaps there have been so many actual conspiracy kooks reading such garbage into everything the Clintons have ever done that if (and that's a big if) there were something to one or two of the conspiracies, it could be easily discredited by all the crap spewed by all the conspiracy theorists.
Have you ever heard of "the boy who cried wolf"? Have you ever heard Trump or Guiliani or Rubio or Cruz cherry pick every bad thing that's happened in the U.S. since 1992 and blame it on Hillary Clinton? You don't buy credibility with that kind of nonsense, though apparently you can garner significant amounts of votes.
Gee, I thought the moderator complained about Trump not addressing his questions.
Trump was attempting to follow his campaign's strategy of responding to any uncomfortable question by filibustering with a spew of soundbites. "The people don't want to hear about that, they want to hear about....". Kellyane Conway does it really well, with a big smile on her face. Other Trump surrogates are not as good, and apparently, Trump himself is the worst of the bunch. He would start a filibuster, but lapse into utter incoherence. Not that Kellyane's scripted stuff is any less incoherent, but it sounds coherent, and that's apparently enough to get the job done.
I don't suppose it would be much of a problem - as long as they don't change it a little, patent it, and establish a new 'standard' where noone else can play. Would Bitcoin be prior art enough to prevent that?
More like Windows 10 will Soon Run Edge in a Virtual Machine partly to keep you safe and mostly to have an advantage to hype over Chrome and Firefox, which already keep you pretty safe, but y'know, you can never have too much security.
Why there's no provision to allow other apps to run this way is hard to fathom in any other context.
So, Microsoft has patented a way to get information to fuel Bing searches through other means than, y'know, people actually using Bing search. Brilliant. All it takes is a monopoly on the OS that process your every keystroke. Beyond the fact that there's nothing novel about capturing data as data (duh), and this shouldn't be patentable, it is downright creepy - and just a little bit desperate.
Now, I'm sure some of you Google haters out there will try to make the point that Google does much the same, and I guess they do - when you voluntarily use their products for free with full knowledge that you are 'paying' by enhancing Google's revenue-generating search engine. But the bottom line - Google is 'opt in', and Windows is more and more 'you have no options'.
That's exactly what Microsoft wants. They don't care if there are expensive, special-purpose boxes built to run Linux - as long as it's difficult to avoid Windows - or even try something else. But the beauty of Linux is that it is built to run on as many boxes out there that it can be made to run on. You don't need a special-purpose vendor to use it. And if you needed that 5 or 10 years ago, Linux would've never caught on. So, sorry, I don't need my vendor to say "you want linux, sure". If someone else needs the security of a pre-install, fine. But I'll install my own - and I'd hope to find enough support for that position that most vendors would gladly allow it.
Or... we could just boycott OEM's that sell devices like this. Nobody needs to buy a Lenovo PC, so we have choices - whether we actually run Linux or not. If we (as a community, or whatever it is we are...) think PC's should be able to have alternative OS's installed on them, then we should only support vendors that don't make that unnecessarily hard. Yes, there are the System 76's of the world, but for many of us, a cheap, naked PC - or one with a cheap, bundled Windows installation - that allows us to wipe/install and or dual-boot is the best option. And it's up to us (as a big, influential-ish market segment) to make sure that such PC's remain available.
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Why would he do that? Ummmm... So fewer innocent people go to prison and we're owned by slightly less evil corporations?
The 'lesser of two evils' is still less evil, dammit. And nobody's asking Nader to thank anybody. Just to admit that his 3rd party tactics aren't working, and in fact, are counterproductive. That's not to say he's wrong about the 2 party system - it's just saying he's doing a lousy job of fixing it - and losing stature in the process.
Nice observation in hindsight. You're right that in California, you're probably safe 'voting your conscience', but don't assume the swing states will be the typical ones this time.
I personally think Nader's sales pitch "The two major parties are Coke and Pepsi", while grounded in some truth, was a gross simplification that helped bring us 8 years of war, climate change denial, worsening income inequality and Citizens United - which only made the 3rd party scenario less likely to succeed in the future. If he had any integrity, he'd admit that - instead of insisting that Al Gore losing deep red Tennessee as a Democrat somehow leaves Nader blameless. There's no shame in acknowledging his spoiler role while maintaining his critique of the system. In fact, admitting his mistakes might actually help formulate a more effective strategy. But he's too full of himself to put changing the system in a constructive way above his own ego.
And if Adams is serious that 'being equally slimed with sex scandals' - even if actually equally - is the reason he can't vote for Clinton or Trump, well then he's basically an embarrassed Trump supporter - who's overlooking a lot worse than what Trump said on a bus in 2005.
Bingo.
A President Johnson administration might bring with it some operational risks, and policy risks, but at least he won't slime you by association and turn you into some sort of cheerleader for sex abuse in the way you would if you voted for the Clintons or Trump.
Cute, but since a President Johnson administration is a statistically effective impossibility, this statement is all but meaningless. We're going to get Clinton or Trump, and if Scott Adams doesn't want to get his widdle feet dirty, well isn't he virtuous. He's also abdicating his responsibility to make a meaningful choice between the two truly available choices.
But the polls had him neck and neck because the press treated him as a serious candidate for way too long. They still don't really do a serious critique of his policay stances - largely because he's so short on specifics.
And in the case of Clinton, they pile on to every new nothing new to report here 'revelation' about her emails. And that stupid AP story about the Clinton Foundation. It all perpetuates the myth that there's no real difference between the parties and a crapshoot is as good as a reasoned choice. Sure, the parties are both beholden to special interests - and our corrupt campaign finance system is largely responsible for that. But which party has been for campaign finance reform consistently for decades - and which one seated 5 Supreme Court justices that thought 'money is speech' and 'corporations are people' should carry more weight than 'one person, one vote'?
Plus, copyright is still subject to 'fair use' exceptions. So no loss on the API front.
That '50% of people who met with Clinton' statistic is little more than a case of journalistic malpractice. It turns out to be 50% of a small subset of people she met with who happened to not be government representatives who would routinely come in contact with Clinton in the course of her duties as SOS. So what is a small set of 'questionable' meetings is represented as though it were 'half of everything Clinton did at State was connected with the foundation's donors'. And then fools like you quote it as 'maybe fake, but why would it be surprising'. Unimpeachable evidence, that...
And while I'm on the subject of that small set of meetings, none have turned up any quid-pro-quo. And you can bet that if it were there, it would have been reported on exhaustively - based on the fact that the 50% number itself, having been discredited, is still being reported on. The fact that all we ever here is this bogus '50% of meetings' figure all but guarantees that this is a non story. That doesn't stop Trump, Pence or any others of his surrogates from repeating it. Nor does it stop 'mainstream' journalists from distilling it down to 'there have been serious questions asked about the Clinton Foundation'.
It's all self-feeding bullshit. Kind of like Cheney feeding a bogus WMD story to Judith Miller at the NY Times and then quoting the resulting article to prove his point about WMD.
Because voting for a third party won't have the metaphorical effect of stopping the train.
Clinton or Trump is going to be elected, whether or not you think the system by which that happens is corrupt. And calls to 'blow up the tracks' are about as likely to change that corrupt system as your vote is to get Johnson or Stein elected. That's why Bernie Sanders chose not to attempt to run as a 3rd party candidate - he's made the calculation that he can get more of his program enacted by helping elect Clinton than by 'making a statement about the corrupt system'. He's already made that statement in the primary season, and sabotaging the general election won't make that statement any stronger - it'll just make him ignorable as a a saboteur.
I would suggest that your feeling that your protest vote will stop the train - or even move the needle in that direction - is where the narcissism/nihilism lines start to get crossed...
I picked them because they're the ones where Hillary's supposedly on the record for slut-shaming them. And that was the topic I was responding to.
They're also the only two where the accusations were borne out by, y'know, evidence.
Well, at least I've coaxed you into revealing your utterly nihilistic thought process. My job for today is done - vote for whomever you please, and I hope anybody reading this gets that your advice may be counter-productive - by design.
Judging from your signature, the only constitutional protection you're worried about is your right to shoot birds - which, by the way, nobody is advocating for taking away, no matter how much you whine that they are.
Well, the constitution covers a few other areas that Slashdotters might just care about. Like the preference of one-person-one-vote democracy over an interpretation of freedom of speech that considers The American Enterprise Institute as a charitable organization. And of course, while the SC doesn't design intellectual property law, it does get to be the referee of last resort in related disputes. So it's not out of the question to imagine the likes of Antonin Scalia weighing in on the patentability of API's, etc...
What a load of crap.
A train is out of control on a track. You have access to a switch that could send it to one track with 2 people on it, or another with 5. Those are the choices my friend. You don't get to say, "I'd fix the brakes", or call Superman. Your vote for Johnson will have the affect of rolling dice to decide which track the train takes - which, I suppose if you really think there's no difference between Clinton or Trump on any issue you care about, is rational. But of course the thought that there's no difference is irrational in and of itself.
At best, your point is that we need a different system for electing Presidents - and possibly a large turnout for Johnson might inch that into being. I'd say there are better ways - like electing Johnson (or Sanders, or Stein, or Nader)-like candidates to Congress or State legislatures from districts where they stand a chance of winning. And then changing the election system through a process that can actually do it. Because Presidencies have long-term repercussions, so they're best not used to 'send a message' when there are other, better ways.
Boy. In any other context, you'd probably be railing about 'defining rape down to the point of meaninglessness'. But if it's a Clinton...
The primary 'victims' of Hillary's supposed 'blaming the victim' were Gennifer Flowers, who conducted a consensual sexual relationship and then sold her story to the tabloids. And Monica Lewinsky, who basically flirted with a married man, fell in love, and they cried on the shoulder of Linda Tripp, who betrayed her royally. That Hillary chose to defend her husband rather than stand in feminist solidarity with these 'victims', is pretty understandable - in the light of the forces trying to undermine Bill, and yes, in the light of both of their ambitions.
Perhaps in another place or time, sexual infidelity would be a disqualifier. A pretty hypocritical one, but nontheless... But Trump? Really?
Because 'The Cloud' has become as much a marketing buzzword as the real thing that it is, you will find companies embracing Azure to run their traditional Windows desktop apps 'in the cloud' using some combination of Azure and Citrix.
Those companies bought in to the Windows desktop paradigm and built database-centric client/server applications that in hindsight should have never been built that way - but that's what they have to sell, and if it will sell better if it's hosted 'in the cloud', then that's what they'll do. I've seen this approach taken first hand. It sucks, but if you can't do a rewrite, it's the best alternative to self-hosting a big database app and managing deployment to the desktop.
In any case, this is a Microsoft-only market, since Amazon or Google can't do this cost-effectively if they have to pay for Windows on all their servers. I don't know how the cost of Citrix figures in to this kind of deployment, though.
Well, Apple doesn't license their software to OEM's, but you can bet there'll never be a Siri competitor integrated into any Apple hardware.
Microsoft sells Windows through OEM's, and I don't think they allow them to disable Cortana or provide a competitor out of the box. It took much legal wrangling to get them to make it easy-ish to replace Internet Explorer. And I think Google desktop search has become a thing of the past...
Does Amazon license their smart speaker software? I doubt it. And in any case, since it's based off of Android, that's a pretty good argument for Google being as open as possible while maintaining some kind of business model to support development.
So Google's providing smart speaker software with Google Assistant baked in, and requiring hardware makers to sell it as is. Since Amazon's already making competing devices - with Google's OS, and Microsoft is surely looking in to doing the same, I'm not sure this is too much of a violation. I suppose it would be nice if the platform allowed end users to swap out various components, but limiting OEM's seems reasonable at this stage of the game. It's not like Google doesn't have to compete on digital assistants - with Cortana on just about every desktop PC sold in the world - or anything...
I think the rebranding has nothing to do with the 'product being crappy'. It's an attempt to unify what are now thought of as a bunch of separate products - and get potential customers thinking about the whole package. Yes, as an attempt to compete with Microsoft's similar suite.
Except that the stuff wasn't classified at the time, which kind of blows apart your theory of copy/pasting stuff from classified documents, since there weren't any. Yes, there was one instance of something kind of like that where there was a partial marking inside the document, and perhaps copy/paste could account for that. But out of tens of thousands, that doesn't rise to any systematic anything.
I agree, she probably intended to circumvent the FOIA laws - for stuff that wasn't official business, in that it came from outside the department. Stuff from inside the department was archived, so no dice. Whether that's illegal or not is a wholly separate issue from whether the handling of classified information was worthy of "Lock her up!" chants. And you can bet the crowds chanting "Lock her up" were basing it on the classified stuff. And those crowds could give a shit about the actual classified information supposedly involved. They just want to think of the Clintons as criminals, and try to get others to share their vies - for political reasons.
I won't go into the "Bush administration did worse - and did it systematically throughout their ranks" arguement. But they did.
You make it sound like the intent in setting up a personal server was to enable Clinton to pass classified information to where it wasn't supposed to be. That is utter bullshit. The intent was to control where her emails (personal and otherwise) went - and maybe that's a significant issue. But what this is not about is the dissemination of classified information. The few classified items that (yes) slipped through - by being unlabeled or incompletely labeled - are only incriminating to someone looking for a technical excuse to prosecute. The information involved wasn't particularly sensitive, and probably would've been sent on the unclassified State Deparment system, had she been using it. Actual seriously secret info was sent on another, unwieldier system.
So, maybe there's a case to be made that using the personal email server broke some rule or other, but the FBI got involved to find out whether vital security secrets were revealed, and determined that basically they weren't - certainly not enough to prosecute. And the bottom line is that the whole criminality thing is a red herring for the whole political thing, which is a witch hunt to bring down a presidential candidate over an embassy attack, which was a horrible thing - but largely (mostly) not directly attributable to that candidate.
Or perhaps there have been so many actual conspiracy kooks reading such garbage into everything the Clintons have ever done that if (and that's a big if) there were something to one or two of the conspiracies, it could be easily discredited by all the crap spewed by all the conspiracy theorists.
Have you ever heard of "the boy who cried wolf"? Have you ever heard Trump or Guiliani or Rubio or Cruz cherry pick every bad thing that's happened in the U.S. since 1992 and blame it on Hillary Clinton? You don't buy credibility with that kind of nonsense, though apparently you can garner significant amounts of votes.
Gee, I thought the moderator complained about Trump not addressing his questions.
Trump was attempting to follow his campaign's strategy of responding to any uncomfortable question by filibustering with a spew of soundbites. "The people don't want to hear about that, they want to hear about....". Kellyane Conway does it really well, with a big smile on her face. Other Trump surrogates are not as good, and apparently, Trump himself is the worst of the bunch. He would start a filibuster, but lapse into utter incoherence. Not that Kellyane's scripted stuff is any less incoherent, but it sounds coherent, and that's apparently enough to get the job done.
I don't suppose it would be much of a problem - as long as they don't change it a little, patent it, and establish a new 'standard' where noone else can play. Would Bitcoin be prior art enough to prevent that?
More like Windows 10 will Soon Run Edge in a Virtual Machine partly to keep you safe and mostly to have an advantage to hype over Chrome and Firefox, which already keep you pretty safe, but y'know, you can never have too much security.
Why there's no provision to allow other apps to run this way is hard to fathom in any other context.
So, Microsoft has patented a way to get information to fuel Bing searches through other means than, y'know, people actually using Bing search. Brilliant. All it takes is a monopoly on the OS that process your every keystroke. Beyond the fact that there's nothing novel about capturing data as data (duh), and this shouldn't be patentable, it is downright creepy - and just a little bit desperate.
Now, I'm sure some of you Google haters out there will try to make the point that Google does much the same, and I guess they do - when you voluntarily use their products for free with full knowledge that you are 'paying' by enhancing Google's revenue-generating search engine. But the bottom line - Google is 'opt in', and Windows is more and more 'you have no options'.
"This system has a Signature Edition of Windows 10 Home installed. It is locked per our agreement with Microsoft."
That doesn't sound like Lenovo's fault to me - except of course the part where they made the agreement in the first place...
That's exactly what Microsoft wants. They don't care if there are expensive, special-purpose boxes built to run Linux - as long as it's difficult to avoid Windows - or even try something else. But the beauty of Linux is that it is built to run on as many boxes out there that it can be made to run on. You don't need a special-purpose vendor to use it. And if you needed that 5 or 10 years ago, Linux would've never caught on. So, sorry, I don't need my vendor to say "you want linux, sure". If someone else needs the security of a pre-install, fine. But I'll install my own - and I'd hope to find enough support for that position that most vendors would gladly allow it.
Or... we could just boycott OEM's that sell devices like this. Nobody needs to buy a Lenovo PC, so we have choices - whether we actually run Linux or not. If we (as a community, or whatever it is we are...) think PC's should be able to have alternative OS's installed on them, then we should only support vendors that don't make that unnecessarily hard. Yes, there are the System 76's of the world, but for many of us, a cheap, naked PC - or one with a cheap, bundled Windows installation - that allows us to wipe/install and or dual-boot is the best option. And it's up to us (as a big, influential-ish market segment) to make sure that such PC's remain available.