While I'm certainly no hard core conservative, your examples are.. not even misleading they're just flat out wrong.
Feudalism? As in when local warlords continually fight over chunks of land and the peasants are little better than slaves? Pretty sure there's not much freedom in a market that's basically "give me all your stuff or I'll kill you and your family and maybe your entire village."
Corporatism isn't even a real thing. Its a derogatory term for our current system since it sometimes (well OK, often) seems like corporate lobbyists have more power over government than voters.
And fascism? Which again amounts to the central authority controlling basically everything through threat of force, and there's very little freedom involved, market or otherwise.
If you're going to go on a political rant, please at least try to use words that mean what you think they mean.
Its the "cheaper" bit that's the problem. Labor of course has always been cheaper in (certain) foreign countries, but that's compensated for by import tariffs. If those import tariffs are removed (or even significantly decreased) by trade deals, then suddenly manufacturers are free to relocate as they see fit with little or no detriment.
That's Trump's big argument for renegotiating NAFTA. He figures that if he shuts down much of NAFTA and can re-impose high tariffs on things like automobile imports then manufacturing would return to the US.
And he's right in a sense, but fails to see the bigger picture. Sure, a bunch of GM employees get screwed but at the same time the cost for a car goes down for everybody. Or in other words, do you want to pay an extra $5k for a car manufactured in Michigan over an identical one manufactured in Mexico? "Made in the US" might be worth a bit -- an extra $1 on your $4 bag of peas or even $10 on that $100 sweater.. but when we start getting into the big ticket items where even a small percentage increase can be a couple thousand dollars, the question becomes a little harder to answer for a lot of people.
Member of Parliament. Approximately at the same level of government as an American member of Congress (though due to the forms of government being different, their powers and responsibilities don't exactly equate.)
I'm pretty sure nobody said that sharing information can't be done. The problem is that companies want to make money and are quite happy to slow progress (scientifically, culturally, or basically any other metric) in order to retain their profits (and often just their right to profits even if they aren't actually making any, such as sitting on ancient copyrights for no reason than "because its ours!")
a) Fits all currently available data, within a margin of error (and the margin of error needs to be specified.)
b) Is falsifiable. That is, it must always accept the possibility that some new data will come in tomorrow that breaks the theory. That is why religion can never be science -- "God did it" is always an acceptable answer no matter what happens and therefore the "theory" is not falsifiable. That doesn't imply that there is no God or anything that extreme -- just that God's existence (or non-) is something that can't be simply talked about scientifically at all.
c) Makes inferences/predictions about future events. This somewhat relates to (b) in that a prediction that doesn't come true immediately breaks the theory. That said, the predictions can sometimes have very long time frames. The Higgs boson for example was predicted in the 60s and only shown to be true (with high confidence) a few years ago -- a good 50 year gap give or take. Climate change theories are looking like similar or even longer predictive time scales (but much worse for the world if the predictions end up being true!)
That's really all there is to it. The citation idea mostly goes towards fulfilling (a) -- "all available data" is often a huge huge quantity of stuff to work with, so its often easier to work with an existing theory that already deals with most of the data and then tweak it a bit to encompass a bit of extra data and make new predictions rather than starting from scratch every single time.
That's just not true. We value human lives very little. What we value is the lives of our friends and families.
If your brother gets shot in Iraq, its a tragedy to you personally. If an Iraqi's brother gets shot, its a statistic to you. And the Iraqi thinks the exact same thing except in reverse.
This is a good part of why Americans are so resistant to a decent healthcare system.. Joe is happy to spout off things like "well I'm not sick and nobody I know is sick so why should I be paying for Jane from 6 miles down the road?" But of course if Joe gets sick himself a year later, suddenly he's bitching about the cost of doctors and medicine. Because now it actually matters to him personally. His life is worth paying for but Jane's isn't. And Jane thinks the same way about Joe.
Basically it all comes down to that "Monkeysphere" concept we hear about, combined with "greed solves everything" capitalism and some American-dream style eternal (if unfulfilled) optimism about a person's own potential.
And at 245W. That's the part that really boggles me. Its difficult to find a graphics card that requires less than 300W, and gaming-quality cards seem to bottom out around 400-450W. Some of the top end cards are looking at 750W. The 1070 you bring up is 500W.
(Recommended system PSU according to http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm.)
So they've either gone to great lengths to reduce power consumption, or your average gaming PC is running with some serious inefficiencies (though some of that might be necessary in order to retain features like replaceability.)
Backwards compatibility is for looking backwards. Its not about new games that can (and almost certainly would be) be cross-compiled, its about old games and not having to keep two consoles taking up space and standby power if it can be done by one and so on.
If they're purely adding instructions then that's almost certainly not a problem. But if they're removing or changing existing instructions, then all old games would have at least a chance of failing (how big a chance depends on which instructions and frequency of use and such things of course.)
Similarly if they're just speeding the CPU up or adding extra threads, probably fine (I hope there's no modern games out there that use busy-loop timing! That kind of went out of fashion in the mid-90s!) But slowing it down (even if you up-power the GPU for example) or removing threads could cause compatibility issues and so on.
I don't get why this is creepy. They already have your data (you're posting it on their site after all!) Its no secret that analyzing data is something that these "information" companies can and pretty much always do.
I could see being creeped out in 2010 when this kind of shit was new but by this point it should be considered the default position. You should almost be more creeped out if they're NOT doing this kind of shit since it kind of suggests they're probably doing something even more nefarious (not that they couldn't do both of course..)
Now pissed off that they're going to start injecting ads into your conversations? That's something I can get behind. Or at least I could if I actually used FB.
Figure what out exactly? Is there some paragon of UX design that you can point to and say "why isn't MS doing that?" I don't think I've ever seen a user interface for any moderately complex piece of software that didn't piss me off in one way or another at some point.
Also, "someone else" is already doing it -- Apple. I'm not sure I'd claim their designs are much better (and coming from a Windows background, I can tell you that I have trouble finding much of anything on Apple's backassward system and their malleable menus and other shit that I personally find confusing as hell.)
The only thing Apple has going for them (if you can call it a benefit) is their insistence that their way isn't just the right way but the only way, so you have a much smaller pool of apps that try to be clever and ignore the OS' paradigms in favor of their own.
And just to throw a bone to conspiracy nuts.. a "perfect" OS (especially in user-visible areas) is counterproductive to future upgrade sales. Which may no longer matter if Win10/OSX actually ends up being the final forms like they claim but certainly might have been a consideration in past.
Not sure about your other claims but the ozone depletion and acid rain issues were only stopped because the world got together and collectively said "holy shit we need to do something about this!"
Of course those two issues have something that climate change predictions do not: Immediacy. The then-relatively-new Doppler satellites made the ozone hole fairly obvious to the layman, and everyone could see the effects of acid rain on their crops and buildings.
Climate change is another beast all together. We've got lots of data to show that its happening -- temperature histories, sea level histories, CO2 level histories and so on. But there's no one event or image that you can definitively point to and say "see, told ya so!" And unfortunately data, no matter how carefully collected or what it says, is easy to brush off by people who don't really want to admit there's a problem.
As for predictions of the end of oil.. yeah those are pretty much never going to be accurate until we've explored every square mile of the planet to confirm that there's no more undiscovered reserves, and determined unequivocally that no amount of technology improvement will be able to (economically) extract the last dredges out of the known reserves. I mean such a time will come, absolutely. Its a finite resource. But whether it will be a time that anyone manages to (accurately) predict? Far less certain (and if we actually start putting serious effort into slowing or even reversing climate change, we may end up abandoning oil before we use it all.) Similar arguments of course apply to coal and natural gas and uranium and pretty much every other non-renewable resource.
China and India are working on cleaning up their shit. Sure they've got a long way to go still, but its the US that's currently the ones saying "fuck it lets cook the planet." By the time Trump finishes his second term, it'll be China telling us to get with the program.
More people = more pollution = more climate change.
The theory is sound. The solution is not really one most of us would like to stomach though since it amounts to "kill off a couple billion people," either directly or by leaving them to starve or die of disease.
Reducing the per capita CO2 is much more palatable, so we may as well look that direction as long as its still a possibility. If we can reduce our energy demands (without reducing quality of life) and switch our energy production to cleaner sources, the goal is to reduce that Minnesotan's carbon footprint to something much closer to the Somalian's rather than just killing off the Somalian to remove his (relatively smaller) footprint from the equation.
So instead of standing up and trying to lead the way, your plan is to just say fuck it lets race to the bottom and see who loses first? That sounds great!
Also, China is already working on environmental regulations. They're well aware of what the past few decades have done to their country but now that their growth is plateauing, they're also looking at ways to clean up the mess they've made. The Chinese aren't any happier about breathing thick smog and drinking heavy metal laden water than we are. They (well, "they") have just accepted it as a cost that will have to be paid in the future and realize that the future is starting to bear down on them.
They're definitely not anywhere close to Western regulations at this point of course, but the wheels are turning at least. In particular, of the three biggest polluters signed onto the Paris Agreement (China, India, US,) only one is threatening to pull out at this point, and its not China or India.
we can't stop the DPRK from developing nuclear weapons and missile technology
Sure we can. It just hasn't been worth the risk of pissing off China. Now that China is backing off of their support of North Korea, doing something about them is already coming into our sights. Especially with ISIS looking less than healthy in recent weeks and the US potentially needing a new reason to keep up their military spending.
which has a far bigger impact on the environment than global warming
Not even close. Nukes have a bigger impact on the local environment around ground zero for a few decades, but on a global scale they're a piss in the ocean. It would take hundreds if not thousands of nukes to have significant long-term effects on the entire earth's climate.
man made islands in the South China Sea, which again has far bigger impact on the climate (loss of ocean habitat, destruction of ecosystems, etc..)
Again, these are local effects. Even if they were building islands right in the middle of a major ocean current's path, it would take again hundreds or thousands of them to add up to a big enough effect to matter outside of the local area.
I don't have a solution to the CO2 problem -- at least not one the world would accept (possibly not even myself if it kills my quality of life too much!) But I can guarantee you that throwing around straw men.. especially ones that aren't even remotely accurate.. won't solve anything.
No, it takes a moron to think that all the climate change doom and gloom is bullshit -- a moron or someone with a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
And, as I'm sure you've ignored before: The problem isn't about the absolute temperature we're likely to reach. The problem is about the rate that the temperature is changing. In particular, its changing faster than many forms of life (especially plant life that isn't very mobile) can adapt.
Will all life on earth go extinct? Probably not. Will humans go extinct? Possibly but we're pretty clever so we might make it once the droughts and famines have killed off enough of us that we're able to reach a new equilibrium with the climate. Will millions of other species go extinct? Almost certainly.
Also, no science is absolutely not done by rigorous verifiable proof. You're thinking of math. Science is done by matching data to hypothesis to form a theory. Theories are tested as best we can but there's always the possibility that a new piece of data could come in tomorrow that breaks your theory.
But you know what? You adjust your theory to compensate. Its a very rare day when a highly accepted theory is shown to be entirely wrong and has to be completely scrapped. Even most of the ones we have entirely replaced can usually be rewritten as limits in the new theories (Newton's gravity=>General Relativity.. Classic=>quantum mechanics.. both of those=>string theory, providing we ever find evidence to support it.)
So if they don't revert the fairly small changes in the Win10 over Win7 UI, you're going to go to something entirely different? That seems kind of counter-productive.
The data collection issue is a solid reason, though I'm not sure I'd bet the horse on Apple being enormously better, especially over the long-term and whatever "features" they decide to you have to use because Apple always knows best right?
And what price point would they have to put that at to cover the value of the data they're no longer collecting on you? $500? $1000? More?
That said, no this kind of telemetry doesn't help much when someone calls into Microsoft support asking why their coffee holder no longer retracts or why their ATI drivers don't work with their new nVidia card or stupid shit like that.
In terms of troubleshooting, its helpful in aggregate to know things like "58% of users spend more-than-desired time on the installation folder selection dialog.. perhaps we should try to redesign it to flow smoother." Or "30% of new Acrobat installs fail the first attempt but succeed on the second," which may not be something MS can do anything about themselves but if they can get enough diagnostic information, they probably have a much more direct line for reporting bugs to Adobe than you or I do just posting requests on their help forums.
Telemetry is amazingly useful. Unfortunately its just as useful for nefarious purposes as it is for beneficial ones, and the nefarious purposes tend to be more profitable (and are so far entirely legal, though we'll see what the EU says about that in a few months I guess!)
Don't know that I agree with that sentiment given how aggressively they were pushing the updates over 7/8 there. Over a year of having to disable GWX on any machines that we didn't want to be magically upgraded.
I mean from a personal perspective I liked getting the free upgrade but it wasn't really great for my job where we're still wanting to stick with 7 for a while due to some old software that's potentially incompatible with 10 (I'm fairly sure it'd be fine but 7 works for us for now and no push to spend a bunch of time testing 10 since we're planning to retire that software anyway at some point in the next couple years.)
Its more likely a question of MS underestimating the amount of blowback they would receive given that we're regularly passing as much if not more information to ISPs, Google, Facebook, etc -- the latter even entirely voluntarily.
But we've all still got a collective hate-on for anything MS due to their past transgressions, even though they're pretty much just doing what everyone else does at this point (and aren't even close to the worst for it in many cases.) We're just not willing to let go of that history though.
From what I've seen, yes you are. They're making it fairly trivial to reduce the data collection (from Full to Basic) but I don't see anything about disabling it all together.
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While I'm certainly no hard core conservative, your examples are.. not even misleading they're just flat out wrong.
Feudalism? As in when local warlords continually fight over chunks of land and the peasants are little better than slaves? Pretty sure there's not much freedom in a market that's basically "give me all your stuff or I'll kill you and your family and maybe your entire village."
Corporatism isn't even a real thing. Its a derogatory term for our current system since it sometimes (well OK, often) seems like corporate lobbyists have more power over government than voters.
And fascism? Which again amounts to the central authority controlling basically everything through threat of force, and there's very little freedom involved, market or otherwise.
If you're going to go on a political rant, please at least try to use words that mean what you think they mean.
Its the "cheaper" bit that's the problem. Labor of course has always been cheaper in (certain) foreign countries, but that's compensated for by import tariffs. If those import tariffs are removed (or even significantly decreased) by trade deals, then suddenly manufacturers are free to relocate as they see fit with little or no detriment.
That's Trump's big argument for renegotiating NAFTA. He figures that if he shuts down much of NAFTA and can re-impose high tariffs on things like automobile imports then manufacturing would return to the US.
And he's right in a sense, but fails to see the bigger picture. Sure, a bunch of GM employees get screwed but at the same time the cost for a car goes down for everybody. Or in other words, do you want to pay an extra $5k for a car manufactured in Michigan over an identical one manufactured in Mexico? "Made in the US" might be worth a bit -- an extra $1 on your $4 bag of peas or even $10 on that $100 sweater.. but when we start getting into the big ticket items where even a small percentage increase can be a couple thousand dollars, the question becomes a little harder to answer for a lot of people.
Member of Parliament. Approximately at the same level of government as an American member of Congress (though due to the forms of government being different, their powers and responsibilities don't exactly equate.)
I'm pretty sure nobody said that sharing information can't be done. The problem is that companies want to make money and are quite happy to slow progress (scientifically, culturally, or basically any other metric) in order to retain their profits (and often just their right to profits even if they aren't actually making any, such as sitting on ancient copyrights for no reason than "because its ours!")
"Real" science:
a) Fits all currently available data, within a margin of error (and the margin of error needs to be specified.)
b) Is falsifiable. That is, it must always accept the possibility that some new data will come in tomorrow that breaks the theory. That is why religion can never be science -- "God did it" is always an acceptable answer no matter what happens and therefore the "theory" is not falsifiable. That doesn't imply that there is no God or anything that extreme -- just that God's existence (or non-) is something that can't be simply talked about scientifically at all.
c) Makes inferences/predictions about future events. This somewhat relates to (b) in that a prediction that doesn't come true immediately breaks the theory. That said, the predictions can sometimes have very long time frames. The Higgs boson for example was predicted in the 60s and only shown to be true (with high confidence) a few years ago -- a good 50 year gap give or take. Climate change theories are looking like similar or even longer predictive time scales (but much worse for the world if the predictions end up being true!)
That's really all there is to it. The citation idea mostly goes towards fulfilling (a) -- "all available data" is often a huge huge quantity of stuff to work with, so its often easier to work with an existing theory that already deals with most of the data and then tweak it a bit to encompass a bit of extra data and make new predictions rather than starting from scratch every single time.
That's just not true. We value human lives very little. What we value is the lives of our friends and families.
If your brother gets shot in Iraq, its a tragedy to you personally. If an Iraqi's brother gets shot, its a statistic to you. And the Iraqi thinks the exact same thing except in reverse.
This is a good part of why Americans are so resistant to a decent healthcare system.. Joe is happy to spout off things like "well I'm not sick and nobody I know is sick so why should I be paying for Jane from 6 miles down the road?" But of course if Joe gets sick himself a year later, suddenly he's bitching about the cost of doctors and medicine. Because now it actually matters to him personally. His life is worth paying for but Jane's isn't. And Jane thinks the same way about Joe.
Basically it all comes down to that "Monkeysphere" concept we hear about, combined with "greed solves everything" capitalism and some American-dream style eternal (if unfulfilled) optimism about a person's own potential.
And at 245W. That's the part that really boggles me. Its difficult to find a graphics card that requires less than 300W, and gaming-quality cards seem to bottom out around 400-450W. Some of the top end cards are looking at 750W. The 1070 you bring up is 500W.
(Recommended system PSU according to http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm.)
So they've either gone to great lengths to reduce power consumption, or your average gaming PC is running with some serious inefficiencies (though some of that might be necessary in order to retain features like replaceability.)
Backwards compatibility is for looking backwards. Its not about new games that can (and almost certainly would be) be cross-compiled, its about old games and not having to keep two consoles taking up space and standby power if it can be done by one and so on.
If they're purely adding instructions then that's almost certainly not a problem. But if they're removing or changing existing instructions, then all old games would have at least a chance of failing (how big a chance depends on which instructions and frequency of use and such things of course.)
Similarly if they're just speeding the CPU up or adding extra threads, probably fine (I hope there's no modern games out there that use busy-loop timing! That kind of went out of fashion in the mid-90s!) But slowing it down (even if you up-power the GPU for example) or removing threads could cause compatibility issues and so on.
I don't get why this is creepy. They already have your data (you're posting it on their site after all!) Its no secret that analyzing data is something that these "information" companies can and pretty much always do.
I could see being creeped out in 2010 when this kind of shit was new but by this point it should be considered the default position. You should almost be more creeped out if they're NOT doing this kind of shit since it kind of suggests they're probably doing something even more nefarious (not that they couldn't do both of course..)
Now pissed off that they're going to start injecting ads into your conversations? That's something I can get behind. Or at least I could if I actually used FB.
Figure what out exactly? Is there some paragon of UX design that you can point to and say "why isn't MS doing that?" I don't think I've ever seen a user interface for any moderately complex piece of software that didn't piss me off in one way or another at some point.
Also, "someone else" is already doing it -- Apple. I'm not sure I'd claim their designs are much better (and coming from a Windows background, I can tell you that I have trouble finding much of anything on Apple's backassward system and their malleable menus and other shit that I personally find confusing as hell.)
The only thing Apple has going for them (if you can call it a benefit) is their insistence that their way isn't just the right way but the only way, so you have a much smaller pool of apps that try to be clever and ignore the OS' paradigms in favor of their own.
And just to throw a bone to conspiracy nuts.. a "perfect" OS (especially in user-visible areas) is counterproductive to future upgrade sales. Which may no longer matter if Win10/OSX actually ends up being the final forms like they claim but certainly might have been a consideration in past.
Innovation! Look at all the new ways companies are figuring out to screw customers over! The possibilities are endless! MAGAMAGAMAGA!
Not sure about your other claims but the ozone depletion and acid rain issues were only stopped because the world got together and collectively said "holy shit we need to do something about this!"
Of course those two issues have something that climate change predictions do not: Immediacy. The then-relatively-new Doppler satellites made the ozone hole fairly obvious to the layman, and everyone could see the effects of acid rain on their crops and buildings.
Climate change is another beast all together. We've got lots of data to show that its happening -- temperature histories, sea level histories, CO2 level histories and so on. But there's no one event or image that you can definitively point to and say "see, told ya so!" And unfortunately data, no matter how carefully collected or what it says, is easy to brush off by people who don't really want to admit there's a problem.
As for predictions of the end of oil.. yeah those are pretty much never going to be accurate until we've explored every square mile of the planet to confirm that there's no more undiscovered reserves, and determined unequivocally that no amount of technology improvement will be able to (economically) extract the last dredges out of the known reserves. I mean such a time will come, absolutely. Its a finite resource. But whether it will be a time that anyone manages to (accurately) predict? Far less certain (and if we actually start putting serious effort into slowing or even reversing climate change, we may end up abandoning oil before we use it all.) Similar arguments of course apply to coal and natural gas and uranium and pretty much every other non-renewable resource.
China and India are working on cleaning up their shit. Sure they've got a long way to go still, but its the US that's currently the ones saying "fuck it lets cook the planet." By the time Trump finishes his second term, it'll be China telling us to get with the program.
No. Unless of course you're willing to cherry pick data to suit your needs rather than encompassing the entire picture.
And if we removed the politicians, who would take up the torch? Giant multinationals who answer to nothing but the bottom line?
Yes politicians fuck everything up. But so does everybody else. At least politicians can be voted out when their term expires.
More people = more pollution = more climate change.
The theory is sound. The solution is not really one most of us would like to stomach though since it amounts to "kill off a couple billion people," either directly or by leaving them to starve or die of disease.
Reducing the per capita CO2 is much more palatable, so we may as well look that direction as long as its still a possibility. If we can reduce our energy demands (without reducing quality of life) and switch our energy production to cleaner sources, the goal is to reduce that Minnesotan's carbon footprint to something much closer to the Somalian's rather than just killing off the Somalian to remove his (relatively smaller) footprint from the equation.
So instead of standing up and trying to lead the way, your plan is to just say fuck it lets race to the bottom and see who loses first? That sounds great!
Also, China is already working on environmental regulations. They're well aware of what the past few decades have done to their country but now that their growth is plateauing, they're also looking at ways to clean up the mess they've made. The Chinese aren't any happier about breathing thick smog and drinking heavy metal laden water than we are. They (well, "they") have just accepted it as a cost that will have to be paid in the future and realize that the future is starting to bear down on them.
They're definitely not anywhere close to Western regulations at this point of course, but the wheels are turning at least. In particular, of the three biggest polluters signed onto the Paris Agreement (China, India, US,) only one is threatening to pull out at this point, and its not China or India.
Heck, I'll even give you a link for once! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-takes-the-climate-spotlight-as-u-s-heads-for-exit/.
we can't stop the DPRK from developing nuclear weapons and missile technology
Sure we can. It just hasn't been worth the risk of pissing off China. Now that China is backing off of their support of North Korea, doing something about them is already coming into our sights. Especially with ISIS looking less than healthy in recent weeks and the US potentially needing a new reason to keep up their military spending.
which has a far bigger impact on the environment than global warming
Not even close. Nukes have a bigger impact on the local environment around ground zero for a few decades, but on a global scale they're a piss in the ocean. It would take hundreds if not thousands of nukes to have significant long-term effects on the entire earth's climate.
man made islands in the South China Sea, which again has far bigger impact on the climate (loss of ocean habitat, destruction of ecosystems, etc..)
Again, these are local effects. Even if they were building islands right in the middle of a major ocean current's path, it would take again hundreds or thousands of them to add up to a big enough effect to matter outside of the local area.
I don't have a solution to the CO2 problem -- at least not one the world would accept (possibly not even myself if it kills my quality of life too much!) But I can guarantee you that throwing around straw men.. especially ones that aren't even remotely accurate.. won't solve anything.
No, it takes a moron to think that all the climate change doom and gloom is bullshit -- a moron or someone with a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
And, as I'm sure you've ignored before: The problem isn't about the absolute temperature we're likely to reach. The problem is about the rate that the temperature is changing. In particular, its changing faster than many forms of life (especially plant life that isn't very mobile) can adapt.
Will all life on earth go extinct? Probably not. Will humans go extinct? Possibly but we're pretty clever so we might make it once the droughts and famines have killed off enough of us that we're able to reach a new equilibrium with the climate. Will millions of other species go extinct? Almost certainly.
Also, no science is absolutely not done by rigorous verifiable proof. You're thinking of math. Science is done by matching data to hypothesis to form a theory. Theories are tested as best we can but there's always the possibility that a new piece of data could come in tomorrow that breaks your theory.
But you know what? You adjust your theory to compensate. Its a very rare day when a highly accepted theory is shown to be entirely wrong and has to be completely scrapped. Even most of the ones we have entirely replaced can usually be rewritten as limits in the new theories (Newton's gravity=>General Relativity.. Classic=>quantum mechanics.. both of those=>string theory, providing we ever find evidence to support it.)
So if they don't revert the fairly small changes in the Win10 over Win7 UI, you're going to go to something entirely different? That seems kind of counter-productive.
The data collection issue is a solid reason, though I'm not sure I'd bet the horse on Apple being enormously better, especially over the long-term and whatever "features" they decide to you have to use because Apple always knows best right?
That's relatively irrelevant. Just because its ugly doesn't mean you can't read it if you spend enough time.
The bigger question is verifying that the source they released is the same as the source they compiled.
And what price point would they have to put that at to cover the value of the data they're no longer collecting on you? $500? $1000? More?
That said, no this kind of telemetry doesn't help much when someone calls into Microsoft support asking why their coffee holder no longer retracts or why their ATI drivers don't work with their new nVidia card or stupid shit like that.
In terms of troubleshooting, its helpful in aggregate to know things like "58% of users spend more-than-desired time on the installation folder selection dialog.. perhaps we should try to redesign it to flow smoother." Or "30% of new Acrobat installs fail the first attempt but succeed on the second," which may not be something MS can do anything about themselves but if they can get enough diagnostic information, they probably have a much more direct line for reporting bugs to Adobe than you or I do just posting requests on their help forums.
Telemetry is amazingly useful. Unfortunately its just as useful for nefarious purposes as it is for beneficial ones, and the nefarious purposes tend to be more profitable (and are so far entirely legal, though we'll see what the EU says about that in a few months I guess!)
Don't know that I agree with that sentiment given how aggressively they were pushing the updates over 7/8 there. Over a year of having to disable GWX on any machines that we didn't want to be magically upgraded.
I mean from a personal perspective I liked getting the free upgrade but it wasn't really great for my job where we're still wanting to stick with 7 for a while due to some old software that's potentially incompatible with 10 (I'm fairly sure it'd be fine but 7 works for us for now and no push to spend a bunch of time testing 10 since we're planning to retire that software anyway at some point in the next couple years.)
Its more likely a question of MS underestimating the amount of blowback they would receive given that we're regularly passing as much if not more information to ISPs, Google, Facebook, etc -- the latter even entirely voluntarily.
But we've all still got a collective hate-on for anything MS due to their past transgressions, even though they're pretty much just doing what everyone else does at this point (and aren't even close to the worst for it in many cases.) We're just not willing to let go of that history though.
From what I've seen, yes you are. They're making it fairly trivial to reduce the data collection (from Full to Basic) but I don't see anything about disabling it all together.