I'd hardly call Retina Display merely a cosmetic difference.
I'm not defending the use of old CPU, but the display is a far bigger deal for me.
Well, it's not as if a Retina display is at the forefront of technology these days, either. In the Mac notebook price range, most other manufacturers ship higher resolution displays. Many people just think that "Retina" = "best display on the market", when every standard 3200x1800 notebook display actually beats it in resolution (15" retina=2880x1800, 13" retina=2560x1600).
Would not worry that much about Chinese sellers, instead Amazon really needs to sort out their Marketplace and remove all the scammers which pop up recently. It seems to be the New Thing for scammers to put up notebooks/DSLR and other higher price items at prices which go from "very good price" to "omg what a deal", and when someone is dumb enough to fall for such an offer, the scammer tries to handle payment outside Amazon (only to then disappear with the money and the buyer has no Amazon payment protection). If you do not agree to pay outside of Amazon, the item you want to buy suddenly is not available anymore, of course. Sometimes these scammers even use hacked seller accounts. These scam offers ruin any search for items at a normal price because of course only these fake super low prices are shown in the search results. Look e.g. here, this camera normally goes for 3500+ Euro new, see all the "used-very good" results at less than half the price (totally unrealistic prices for this high end DSLR) and the "write to us xxxx@yyyy.de": https://www.amazon.de/gp/offer...
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Any system designed to detect and respond to vehicles or objects in your path MUST BE ABLE TO DETECT ALL SOLID OBJECTS DIRECTLY IN THE PATH OF ANY PART OF THE CAR, period! To do otherwise is irresponsible, dangerous, and just plain stupid! There have been multiple "accidents" like this already, luckily none had been fatal until this one, but there will be more to come unless Tesla (or, more likely the NTSB, since Tesla is all about denying and covering up flaws and blaming the victims at this point) puts an end to it.
If you're too fricking cheap to put another sensor on the roof, or too focused on "design" to allow it because you think it won't be pretty enough, you are WRONG!
That's why other manufacturers put more sensors on their cars and STILL do not make the same bold claims as Tesla. They know that otherwise stupid people will make stupid decisions. Comparisons of the sensors in the Tesla model S and the Mercedes S class of the same year: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-87qz...
If you have to be available via phone for your job (e.g. on-call duty) or if you are expecting an important phone call, don't go to a concert or movie or any other place where you would not be able to access your phone without annoying others. Simple as that. Once every five to six weeks, I have a week of on-call duty for our IT department, and it is not that hard to plan ahead and NOT go to a concert or to the cinema or to a fine restaurant where people would consider it rude to answer the phone during that week.
Complain rightfully that Microsoft is being aggressive, belligerent, and ought to stop, or even be sanctioned... but there's no reason to imagine nonsense about the X button, which is doing exactly what its always done: dismiss the window. Whether or not it cancels the action... some times it does, other times it doesn't...it depends. You can't assume it's cancelled and there are countless examples where dismissing a notification window doesn't cancel...
What's more, the notification windows says right in the middle "CLICK HERE TO CHANGE SCHEDULE OR CANCEL THE UPGRADE": http://core0.staticworld.net/i... So why do people who do not want the upgrade actually read the text and click there? Are they just mindlessly X-ing everything away?
From what I see, it schedules the upgrade, and you have to opt out by going into some other settings to cancel.
It's not that the "X" activates the upgrade - at that point, it's too late.
Still, it's very shady not to give users an obvious choice on the popup, let alone not making it an "opt in" choice.
All of my machines are running Windows 10... shrugs... at this point, all the bitching is basically all about the point of the matter. Win 10 runs fine on the machines I've installed it on (several laptops, 9 or 10 desktops, some 10+ years old). Unless you have some particularly specific niche software or hardware (that can't run in Win7, therefore, not in Win10, since the drivers are mostly the same), people really shouldn't have too many complaints.
I'd be more concerned if Microsoft was pushing people to Win8 and the crappy fail that was the Metro Start Screen. Win10 dialed it back and makes more sense in the case of a desktop/mobile hybrid OS. Still, the exec who is pushing this sort of tactic needs to be fired ASAP.
True, apparently most users think this is the "we will NOW upgrade your PC" dialogue box and just close it to cancel the upgrade. But instead, this is the " We have SCHEDULED your upgrade, and here you can change some options about the schedule or start the upgrade right now" box. And closing the dialogue does nothing about the schedule.
People just seem to click away everything which is put in front of them. If they would actually READ the text, they would see that in the middle of the dialogue, it says "click HERE to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade": http://core0.staticworld.net/i...
But apparently reading text is too hard these days.
Disclaimer: I do not say Microsoft are right in the way they try to distribute this upgrade. But some accusations (like that they changed this dialogue to start the upgrade even though people "X it away") are just stupid. It's just a consequence of them making it a "recommended" update plus the update settings the user himself chose.
Tesla sold a car self-driving/self-parking car function that couldn't detect a vehicle in front of it in broad daylight to the public world of boneheads. I'd say Tesla lacked some critical reasoning skills too.
I am definitely not a Tesla fanboy (in fact, they annoy me), but in this case it was not really the fault of the car itself. The trailer was invisible to the cars sensors, because - that much is clearly visible on the photos - there was nothing in front of the car in the field of view of the parking sensors. In fact, the car was able to drive several feet UNDER the trailer without crashing into anything. To avoid something like this, the car would need additional sensors at eye level of the driver.
Another thought - with the car in summon mode, do the parking sensors even stop the car if they detect anything? After all, it is a driver activated mode during which the driver can command the car to go forward/backward while pressing buttons on the key. I do not own a Tesla, so maybe someone else can comment if it actually would be possible to command the car to hit e.g. a wall which the sensors could pick up.
Here in Germany, the main issue why people do not buy electric cars is not that they are slightly more expensive than standard cars (talking about stuff like the e-Golf, not Tesla), it is that the infrastructure is not there and so electric cars are not practical. People look at electric cars and ask "where am I supposed to charge that?". Many people park their car on the streets, so they simply cannot charge it over night, or they have a garage with no suitable power outlet, so that the incentives would have to be enough to buy the expensive electric car AND pay for all the work to put a suitable outlet into the garage. 4000 Euros in incentives won't magically make a power outlet appear on the street where you park your car over night. So all these incentives will do is make rich people (who can afford it anyway) save 4000 Euros when they buy a Tesla or i8 as a 2nd or 3rd car.
Clearly all of the manufacturers used similar tricks, that's why they didn't point the finger at VW earlier. I'm sure they all knew about it since VW had such good emissions and fuel economy that the other manufacturers must have done tests and tear downs of their own to figure out how VW did it. But no one wanted to rock the boat and invite more scrutiny from regulators.
True. Ever wondered why after the whole VW scandal became known - even though it would be such an excellent thing to capitalize on - none of the other car manufacturers did any large advertising campaigns in which they said "buy our cars, we do not cheat"? This is why. Keep a low profile and nobody will take a closer look at your own cars.
My 6 year old macbook pro is arguably better than anything new. It has a 17" display. Apparently hipsters have some sort of size phobia,
It's the new rule. Smartphones have to receive bigger and bigger screens - until we end up with 7-10" monster phones. While at the same time notebooks receive smaller and smaller screens - until we end up with 7-10" mini notebooks which need a stylus to use the keyboard.
Anecdote: I got a new ultrabook at work, it has a 14" screen with a resolution of 3200x1800. You literally cannot read any text in Windows 7 system dialogues etc. unless you MASSIVELY increase the OS scaling - which many applications do not respect. So I just run the thing at 1920x1080. which is still too small, but at least I do not need a magnifying glass to read anything. I'd gladly take a 17" notebook to work without straining my eyes or having to massively decrease the resolution, but for some reason all we can get are these "easy to carry from meeting to meeting" ultrabooks.
It is nice to see Apple finally accept the fact that a lot of people do NOT want phones to grow larger and larger with every new generation. For me, the old iPhone 4/4s was the perfect size for someone who wants a smartPHONE and does not care about watching videos or playing games on his device.
I had a Macbook Pro 15" two years ago (retina with Nvidia dedicated GPU). When I played GPU/CPU intensive games on it, the battery drained and eventually the notebook turned off EVEN WITH THE POWER SUPPLY PLUGGED IN, because the power supply was undersized and could not deliver enough power - so the battery had to be used, too. When I visited the Apple forums to look into this problem, I found that I was not the only one with this problem - it was apparently well-known, but Apple did not care. That was when I decided to switch to non-Apple notebooks from then on. Apparently having a small, nice-to-look-at power supply was more important for them than having a power supply which actually can handle the notebook being used for more than only browsing and facebooking.
Apple still ships the same 85W power supply for all 15" models of the Macbook Pro. As a random example of another manufacturer, Dell ships the XPS15 with a 130W power supply.
Windows 8.1 is a "service pack" for Windows 8. Microsoft only supports the "service pack-less" version of an OS for one year after the service pack has been made available. So, if you want support for your Windows 8 machine, you need to update to Windows 8.1. It is the same for Windows 7, by the way. Support for Windows 7 *without service pack 1* has already ended in 2013.
Number 11 on the top list of returned refurbished products is a "remote-controlled rechargeable Panzer III". Well, I guess once you have flattened your neighbour's home, there is not much use left for having your own Panzer. Wonder how often that one has already been sold and returned again.
Sadly, most of the people who use "power features" of an application are not the ones who click "next-next-next-finish" when installing, i.e. they are also the ones who opt out of phone-home data collection.
Not at all, those of us who were alive at the time who watched the rover on televison would recognize the frame instantly, just as we would recognize the ascent and descent stages of prototype Lunar Module either together or seperately. You must be young.
Except that it does not look anything like the actual lunar rovers which were sent to the moon, because this was only a prototype for testing various components...
This feature shuts off WiFi when the WiFi connection you're trying to use, has crappy throughput, and uses Cellular instead. Just like Every Person In The World with a smartphone would do, when the WiFi they're trying to use is crap. Maybe add a popup saying "Hey, your WiFi throughput is crap, we switched you over to Cell, data charges may apply, click here to say OK, click this other box to say "Yeah I get it, never show me this again", " would have been nice, but come on, a freaking class action lawsuit? Only people who benefit from that, are the lawyers.
Problem is that the default behaviour changed and people used up their cellular data when they absolutely did not want to do so - when they were at home, in range of their home WiFi and used data intensive apps (like watching movies, installing updates etc.) BECAUSE they were sure only WiFi would be used as long as they are in range of their WiFi access point. But WiFi assist means that the phone can switch to cellular data even while you are still in range of your own WiFi, which was never the case before and which was not sufficiently explained by Apple when the iOS update was made available.
Exactly, this. It allows you to blacklist updates. You then create an update DVD which you use on the clients, or you start the updater from a network share.
Or set up a WSUS server and do not approve the updates responsible for the W10 upgrade (of course not practical for a single private computer, but maybe an option for a school - although I'd hope you'd already have something like that running there...).
Someone else created a script which disables all the currently known telemetry/W10 updates for the Windows online update service. Problem is that these updates sometimes get replaced by a newer update, so you'd have to add updates as they appear (by which time they might already have been automatically installed...).
I know, I am crazy, I actually READ the article. And this info is in there:
Now they have been launched the positive news is KB3075249 and KB3080149 have been classed as ‘Optional’ in Windows Update. This means they won’t install without Windows 7 and Windows 8 users giving them express permission to do so (a key difference to Windows 10).
On the flip side KB3068708 is classified as ‘Recommended’ which means Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs with Windows Update set to automatic will install it by default. That said for the update to appear in the first place you will need to be a participant in Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, an opt-in program which already has you agreeing to send user data to the company.
Same problem here, same problem for my parents. I owned a HP colour inkjet printer years ago, cartridges always dried up and I ended up using over half the ink via "cleaning mode" just to make the damn thing work again when I wanted to print a page again after a few weeks. Even worse for my parents, they bought an inkjet printer, I helped set it up, it worked, a couple days later it already had missing lines in the printouts due to clogged-up print heads. Of course my father was pissed, "every time I just want to print out one or two pages, I have to clean the damn printer for five minutes before it works again!"
So I bought a €100 black and white laser printer for my parents, they are happy with it and the 3000 pages toner cartridge will last them forever. I myself had already switched to laser printers years earlier, I bought a colour one last year (previous model to this: http://accessories.us.dell.com... ). Cost me €250, the toner lasts a long time, print quality is very good even for pictures (of course not suitable if you REALLY want to print out glossy photographs on high quality photo paper) and a third party set of toner (all colours) costs about €30.
At night? The only option real option here is to ignore them.
If the Royals are doing things that piss people off and thus live in fear of them, then perhaps they should stop doing those things.
I think it is not so much about "doing things that piss people off", but instead more about not wanting to find photographs/videos on the internet of themselves undressing before taking a shower/going to bed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd hardly call Retina Display merely a cosmetic difference.
I'm not defending the use of old CPU, but the display is a far bigger deal for me.
Well, it's not as if a Retina display is at the forefront of technology these days, either. In the Mac notebook price range, most other manufacturers ship higher resolution displays. Many people just think that "Retina" = "best display on the market", when every standard 3200x1800 notebook display actually beats it in resolution (15" retina=2880x1800, 13" retina=2560x1600).
... if there were any PC manufacturers out there which offered pre-built gaming PC systems you did not have to put together yourself.
Just in case Amazon actually manages to remove some of the fake offers, here is what it looks like right now: http://i.imgur.com/sG86jsG.png
Would not worry that much about Chinese sellers, instead Amazon really needs to sort out their Marketplace and remove all the scammers which pop up recently. It seems to be the New Thing for scammers to put up notebooks/DSLR and other higher price items at prices which go from "very good price" to "omg what a deal", and when someone is dumb enough to fall for such an offer, the scammer tries to handle payment outside Amazon (only to then disappear with the money and the buyer has no Amazon payment protection). If you do not agree to pay outside of Amazon, the item you want to buy suddenly is not available anymore, of course. Sometimes these scammers even use hacked seller accounts. These scam offers ruin any search for items at a normal price because of course only these fake super low prices are shown in the search results. Look e.g. here, this camera normally goes for 3500+ Euro new, see all the "used-very good" results at less than half the price (totally unrealistic prices for this high end DSLR) and the "write to us xxxx@yyyy.de": https://www.amazon.de/gp/offer...
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Any system designed to detect and respond to vehicles or objects in your path MUST BE ABLE TO DETECT ALL SOLID OBJECTS DIRECTLY IN THE PATH OF ANY PART OF THE CAR, period! To do otherwise is irresponsible, dangerous, and just plain stupid! There have been multiple "accidents" like this already, luckily none had been fatal until this one, but there will be more to come unless Tesla (or, more likely the NTSB, since Tesla is all about denying and covering up flaws and blaming the victims at this point) puts an end to it.
If you're too fricking cheap to put another sensor on the roof, or too focused on "design" to allow it because you think it won't be pretty enough, you are WRONG!
That's why other manufacturers put more sensors on their cars and STILL do not make the same bold claims as Tesla. They know that otherwise stupid people will make stupid decisions. Comparisons of the sensors in the Tesla model S and the Mercedes S class of the same year: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-87qz...
If you have to be available via phone for your job (e.g. on-call duty) or if you are expecting an important phone call, don't go to a concert or movie or any other place where you would not be able to access your phone without annoying others. Simple as that. Once every five to six weeks, I have a week of on-call duty for our IT department, and it is not that hard to plan ahead and NOT go to a concert or to the cinema or to a fine restaurant where people would consider it rude to answer the phone during that week.
Complain rightfully that Microsoft is being aggressive, belligerent, and ought to stop, or even be sanctioned... but there's no reason to imagine nonsense about the X button, which is doing exactly what its always done: dismiss the window. Whether or not it cancels the action... some times it does, other times it doesn't...it depends. You can't assume it's cancelled and there are countless examples where dismissing a notification window doesn't cancel...
What's more, the notification windows says right in the middle "CLICK HERE TO CHANGE SCHEDULE OR CANCEL THE UPGRADE": http://core0.staticworld.net/i...
So why do people who do not want the upgrade actually read the text and click there? Are they just mindlessly X-ing everything away?
From what I see, it schedules the upgrade, and you have to opt out by going into some other settings to cancel.
It's not that the "X" activates the upgrade - at that point, it's too late.
Still, it's very shady not to give users an obvious choice on the popup, let alone not making it an "opt in" choice.
All of my machines are running Windows 10... shrugs... at this point, all the bitching is basically all about the point of the matter. Win 10 runs fine on the machines I've installed it on (several laptops, 9 or 10 desktops, some 10+ years old). Unless you have some particularly specific niche software or hardware (that can't run in Win7, therefore, not in Win10, since the drivers are mostly the same), people really shouldn't have too many complaints.
I'd be more concerned if Microsoft was pushing people to Win8 and the crappy fail that was the Metro Start Screen. Win10 dialed it back and makes more sense in the case of a desktop/mobile hybrid OS. Still, the exec who is pushing this sort of tactic needs to be fired ASAP.
True, apparently most users think this is the "we will NOW upgrade your PC" dialogue box and just close it to cancel the upgrade. But instead, this is the " We have SCHEDULED your upgrade, and here you can change some options about the schedule or start the upgrade right now" box. And closing the dialogue does nothing about the schedule.
People just seem to click away everything which is put in front of them. If they would actually READ the text, they would see that in the middle of the dialogue, it says "click HERE to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade": http://core0.staticworld.net/i...
But apparently reading text is too hard these days.
Disclaimer: I do not say Microsoft are right in the way they try to distribute this upgrade. But some accusations (like that they changed this dialogue to start the upgrade even though people "X it away") are just stupid. It's just a consequence of them making it a "recommended" update plus the update settings the user himself chose.
I don't dispute the guy was a bonehead.
Tesla sold a car self-driving/self-parking car function that couldn't detect a vehicle in front of it in broad daylight to the public world of boneheads. I'd say Tesla lacked some critical reasoning skills too.
I am definitely not a Tesla fanboy (in fact, they annoy me), but in this case it was not really the fault of the car itself. The trailer was invisible to the cars sensors, because - that much is clearly visible on the photos - there was nothing in front of the car in the field of view of the parking sensors. In fact, the car was able to drive several feet UNDER the trailer without crashing into anything. To avoid something like this, the car would need additional sensors at eye level of the driver.
Another thought - with the car in summon mode, do the parking sensors even stop the car if they detect anything? After all, it is a driver activated mode during which the driver can command the car to go forward/backward while pressing buttons on the key. I do not own a Tesla, so maybe someone else can comment if it actually would be possible to command the car to hit e.g. a wall which the sensors could pick up.
Here in Germany, the main issue why people do not buy electric cars is not that they are slightly more expensive than standard cars (talking about stuff like the e-Golf, not Tesla), it is that the infrastructure is not there and so electric cars are not practical. People look at electric cars and ask "where am I supposed to charge that?". Many people park their car on the streets, so they simply cannot charge it over night, or they have a garage with no suitable power outlet, so that the incentives would have to be enough to buy the expensive electric car AND pay for all the work to put a suitable outlet into the garage. 4000 Euros in incentives won't magically make a power outlet appear on the street where you park your car over night. So all these incentives will do is make rich people (who can afford it anyway) save 4000 Euros when they buy a Tesla or i8 as a 2nd or 3rd car.
Clearly all of the manufacturers used similar tricks, that's why they didn't point the finger at VW earlier. I'm sure they all knew about it since VW had such good emissions and fuel economy that the other manufacturers must have done tests and tear downs of their own to figure out how VW did it. But no one wanted to rock the boat and invite more scrutiny from regulators.
True. Ever wondered why after the whole VW scandal became known - even though it would be such an excellent thing to capitalize on - none of the other car manufacturers did any large advertising campaigns in which they said "buy our cars, we do not cheat"? This is why. Keep a low profile and nobody will take a closer look at your own cars.
My 6 year old macbook pro is arguably better than anything new. It has a 17" display. Apparently hipsters have some sort of size phobia,
It's the new rule. Smartphones have to receive bigger and bigger screens - until we end up with 7-10" monster phones. While at the same time notebooks receive smaller and smaller screens - until we end up with 7-10" mini notebooks which need a stylus to use the keyboard.
Anecdote: I got a new ultrabook at work, it has a 14" screen with a resolution of 3200x1800. You literally cannot read any text in Windows 7 system dialogues etc. unless you MASSIVELY increase the OS scaling - which many applications do not respect. So I just run the thing at 1920x1080. which is still too small, but at least I do not need a magnifying glass to read anything. I'd gladly take a 17" notebook to work without straining my eyes or having to massively decrease the resolution, but for some reason all we can get are these "easy to carry from meeting to meeting" ultrabooks.
It is nice to see Apple finally accept the fact that a lot of people do NOT want phones to grow larger and larger with every new generation. For me, the old iPhone 4/4s was the perfect size for someone who wants a smartPHONE and does not care about watching videos or playing games on his device.
I had a Macbook Pro 15" two years ago (retina with Nvidia dedicated GPU). When I played GPU/CPU intensive games on it, the battery drained and eventually the notebook turned off EVEN WITH THE POWER SUPPLY PLUGGED IN, because the power supply was undersized and could not deliver enough power - so the battery had to be used, too. When I visited the Apple forums to look into this problem, I found that I was not the only one with this problem - it was apparently well-known, but Apple did not care. That was when I decided to switch to non-Apple notebooks from then on. Apparently having a small, nice-to-look-at power supply was more important for them than having a power supply which actually can handle the notebook being used for more than only browsing and facebooking.
Apple still ships the same 85W power supply for all 15" models of the Macbook Pro. As a random example of another manufacturer, Dell ships the XPS15 with a 130W power supply.
Windows 8.1 is a "service pack" for Windows 8. Microsoft only supports the "service pack-less" version of an OS for one year after the service pack has been made available. So, if you want support for your Windows 8 machine, you need to update to Windows 8.1. It is the same for Windows 7, by the way. Support for Windows 7 *without service pack 1* has already ended in 2013.
Number 11 on the top list of returned refurbished products is a "remote-controlled rechargeable Panzer III". Well, I guess once you have flattened your neighbour's home, there is not much use left for having your own Panzer. Wonder how often that one has already been sold and returned again.
Sadly, most of the people who use "power features" of an application are not the ones who click "next-next-next-finish" when installing, i.e. they are also the ones who opt out of phone-home data collection.
Not at all, those of us who were alive at the time who watched the rover on televison would recognize the frame instantly, just as we would recognize the ascent and descent stages of prototype Lunar Module either together or seperately. You must be young.
Except that it does not look anything like the actual lunar rovers which were sent to the moon, because this was only a prototype for testing various components...
This feature shuts off WiFi when the WiFi connection you're trying to use, has crappy throughput, and uses Cellular instead. Just like Every Person In The World with a smartphone would do, when the WiFi they're trying to use is crap. Maybe add a popup saying "Hey, your WiFi throughput is crap, we switched you over to Cell, data charges may apply, click here to say OK, click this other box to say "Yeah I get it, never show me this again", " would have been nice, but come on, a freaking class action lawsuit? Only people who benefit from that, are the lawyers.
Problem is that the default behaviour changed and people used up their cellular data when they absolutely did not want to do so - when they were at home, in range of their home WiFi and used data intensive apps (like watching movies, installing updates etc.) BECAUSE they were sure only WiFi would be used as long as they are in range of their WiFi access point. But WiFi assist means that the phone can switch to cellular data even while you are still in range of your own WiFi, which was never the case before and which was not sufficiently explained by Apple when the iOS update was made available.
Most of them have already been available for a couple years on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/fr...
Exactly, this. It allows you to blacklist updates. You then create an update DVD which you use on the clients, or you start the updater from a network share.
Or set up a WSUS server and do not approve the updates responsible for the W10 upgrade (of course not practical for a single private computer, but maybe an option for a school - although I'd hope you'd already have something like that running there...).
Someone else created a script which disables all the currently known telemetry/W10 updates for the Windows online update service. Problem is that these updates sometimes get replaced by a newer update, so you'd have to add updates as they appear (by which time they might already have been automatically installed...).
http://forums.mydigitallife.in...
So some way of updating AFTER the patch day is better, I think.
There will be standard game controllers for the Apple TV. I suppose those would do OK, once games support them. http://www.apple.com/tv/games-...
Still, I think Apple is aiming more for the "casual" gaming crowd.
I know, I am crazy, I actually READ the article. And this info is in there:
Now they have been launched the positive news is KB3075249 and KB3080149 have been classed as ‘Optional’ in Windows Update. This means they won’t install without Windows 7 and Windows 8 users giving them express permission to do so (a key difference to Windows 10).
On the flip side KB3068708 is classified as ‘Recommended’ which means Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs with Windows Update set to automatic will install it by default. That said for the update to appear in the first place you will need to be a participant in Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, an opt-in program which already has you agreeing to send user data to the company.
Same problem here, same problem for my parents. I owned a HP colour inkjet printer years ago, cartridges always dried up and I ended up using over half the ink via "cleaning mode" just to make the damn thing work again when I wanted to print a page again after a few weeks. Even worse for my parents, they bought an inkjet printer, I helped set it up, it worked, a couple days later it already had missing lines in the printouts due to clogged-up print heads. Of course my father was pissed, "every time I just want to print out one or two pages, I have to clean the damn printer for five minutes before it works again!"
So I bought a €100 black and white laser printer for my parents, they are happy with it and the 3000 pages toner cartridge will last them forever. I myself had already switched to laser printers years earlier, I bought a colour one last year (previous model to this: http://accessories.us.dell.com... ). Cost me €250, the toner lasts a long time, print quality is very good even for pictures (of course not suitable if you REALLY want to print out glossy photographs on high quality photo paper) and a third party set of toner (all colours) costs about €30.
shooting practice
At night? The only option real option here is to ignore them.
If the Royals are doing things that piss people off and thus live in fear of them, then perhaps they should stop doing those things.
I think it is not so much about "doing things that piss people off", but instead more about not wanting to find photographs/videos on the internet of themselves undressing before taking a shower/going to bed.