MS has been introducing this change on us like proverbial 'boiling frog'. It's coming and I think even you are starting to see the light or you would have used more assertive in your statements.
I hear you. I honestly do. Market trends make it seem obvious. But the repeated "there you, told you" posts every time news is posted that ISN'T about our existing licenses going subscription is getting really, really old.
Microsoft leasing hardware and offering software that already is subscription-related (mostly) isn't evidence. It's just not.
The real question is what they will do with existing installations. Will there be a year or two grace period after which point your license expires and will require a subscription renewal? Or will they allow existing licenses to continue in perpetuity?
And therein lies the answer. Microsoft just pushed as hard as they could for everyone on Home and Pro to upgrade to Win10. Thing is, those licenses were perpetual, and the replacement license for Win10 isn't subscription. If they pull a bait & switch and degrade our perpetual licenses into a subscription product, there will be lawsuits. Successful ones.
Same thing goes for anyone who bought a new PC in the last year with Win10 installed on it. Perpetual.
They can't even play the game of "oh, you don't qualify for anniversary edition unless you 'subscribe'", because without a version change, these are just updates and support fixes, regardless of introducing new features.
I'm not saying MS won't ever add subscription OS licenses. But to date there remains no actual sign of that happening. The sky is not falling.
Not to worry, citizen! Your OS and Tablet will be automatically upgraded by Microsoft to a subscription model, for your convenience!
No. Just no. Stop perpetuating this. While Microsoft has made many missteps with Win10, this isn't one of them. Yet.
Enterprise was never free to upgrade. It was always a product available only through volume licensing, usually with Software Assurance, which is a yearly fee.
Home and Pro have no sign of moving to a subscription plan at this point. That might change some day, but there's no sign of it yet.
Like last week's "revelation" that the latest Win10 build includes some SUBSCRIPTIONTHING.EXE and folks like you coming out of the woodwork to say "I told you so", despite Microsoft very, very clearly explaining that the file had nothing to do with Pro/Home installs and was purely for Enterprise, the FUD is getting annoying. I'm no fanboy, but to date, your suggesting has no basis in fact.
I liked it better when I had to move a jumper before I could flash the BIOS in a machine. That was really quite secure against post-shipment BIOS modification.
A good thought but it doesn't work so well when you've got hundreds or thousands of remotely supported systems scattered over the city/country/continent/planet.
Of course, I also can't think of the last time I flashed the BIOS in any of my systems, which makes me wonder why the hell we ever got away from ROMs in the first place...
You know this article is about shitty code, right? Well, I can tell you that the BIOS being shipped these days is shitty in more ways than this. If you have enough machines out there, you will sooner or later encounter something strange that involves a bug in firmware. From a mouse/printer/USB-vibrator to the latest DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort monitor, sooner or later you'll plug something in and it won't work as advertised. Or something that used to work stops working because... reasons. Basically, if you accept that there are firmware updates for motherboards, you should accept that there are reasons for them existing, even if you haven't needed them.
And don't get me started on the shitty code in server firmwares.
Most commercial systems (Dell, Lenovo, HP) they're bugfixes. Most consumer systems (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) they're updating support for processor microcode or memory module compatibility or whatever.
Someone found a filename they don't like. Microsoft explained - clearly - what it is for and what it isn't for. It's used for that version of Windows 10 that we have always known costs money and is part of a subscription: Enterprise.
All the posters ranting about how they've had enough and are switching to Linux, and all those smug people saying "I told you so" evidently didn't even read the summary.
This is a non-issue. The filename might as well have been NothingHasChangedInAnyWay.EXE
It IS informative and is NOT a joke; because it adroitly sidesteps the weak sarcasm in the original "request" by actually outlining the top-level steps necessary to switch from being a Windows-based office to a Mac-based one.
Come on. If it was informative, it wouldn't be missing:
2.5 Read your your e-mails wherein your Purchase Requisitions were denied.
Warranty: discovering your warranty has expired after the fact is a problem because you can't reinstate coverage quickly. Being reminded that the expiry is coming up encourages you to renew before that happens. Yes, that costs you money, but that's to your benefit.
Backup: Windows Backup is a sad sack of crap.
Battery: I'm responsible for, directly use, and own several Lenovo Thinkpad class laptops. No, they don't have anything resembling a timed false-positive battery degradation alert. This is fabricated or your experience is unusual.
Hardware tests: I did voluntarily say that hardware tests generally won't reveal anything until your system has already stopped working. As for hard drive tests... guess what... the Lenovo scheduled tests are SMART short and long tests, not exhaustive drive stress-tests.
allows users to check their system's virus and firewall status, update their Lenovo software, perform backups, check battery health, get registration and warranty information and run hardware tests.
So, completely pointless bullshit that has no legitimate reason to exist.
Not exactly. While the antivirus status is redundant, the rest isn't. Being notified that your warranty is about to expire is a good thing. Being notified that you haven't done a backup recently is a good thing. Being informed that the battery in your laptop is degraded is a good thing. Having something run scheduled tests of basic peripherals is better than not doing so, even though typically you'll know when there's a problem because your system stops working.
While IT-fluent people are probably doing this sort of thing on their own, the vast majority of machines are either lightly managed or not managed at all.
It's easy to mock yet another software package that is flawed. But the idea that the software is unjustified and without use is false, in most users' cases.
How much is the gold worth if the global supply is doubled and it looks like there will be more to come? Plus I'm pretty sure the odds of finding an asteroid that high in gold content is astronomically high (pun intended).
How much is the gold worth if you don't have enough and want more?
Really, asteroid mining is a question of energy availability versus materials availability. If energy becomes sufficiently available and can be stored in a useful manner, using it to obtain materials we want makes the idea viable. Of course, that's not next week, or the week after.
With that lack of clearance it's literally going to be hitting the streets.
I came here to point that out. There's almost zero clearance, and none of the four tires can change direction; this car design can only go forwards and backwards in a straight line.
I agree with the idea that this is some sort of rich-person joke.
Only if you never had any evidence that it was ever their intention to give away the game in the first place.
I'm a pretty honest kind of guy; if a cashier gives me too much change back, I tell them. That said, purchases are contracts. A seller states that they are willing to provide a product with a description, for an amount. If I agree to that contract, it should be binding. It doesn't matter if the agreed upon price is $0 or some number with a bunch of zeroes after it. To attempt to renegotiate after a contract is agreed to, upon the basis of a mistake is reasonable. A house-seller who had a typo that caused a massively low asking price would be reasonable to ask to be let out of the contract. But to unilaterally renege? Not cool.
The moment Microsoft's servers accepted the transaction at $0, they accepted the contract that THEY offered the buyers. Any site wordings indicating they reserve the right to change their minds afterwards is... immoral to me, even if it's legally binding.
In a decent world, the buyer of the incorrectly-priced house releases the seller, because to not do so deprives the seller of a major asset. In the world of digital duplication, there is no actual loss to Microsoft if they honour their mistake. There is only loss of potential income.
All I'm saying is that IMHO, the contract is valid and Microsoft should honour it. And perhaps ask people to return the incorrectly-priced purchase. That's decency.
Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst and now partner at venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has delivered her annual report that offers critical stats and trends about how technology is evolving. TechCrunch has highlighted the takeaways from the report:
1) The global Internet adoption rate was flat year-over-year at 9%, reaching 3 billion users or 42% of the world's population.
It doesn't matter how good your burgers are, competing against McDonald's and Burger King is a massively uphill battle.
You'd have to create a cola that cures cancer to unseat Pepsi and Coke these days, and Windows Phone is basically just the third cola nobody cares enough about to buy. Blackberry has the same problem; if you talk to most people about "why should I buy a Windows Phone" (or Blackberry) instead of an iPhone or Android device, after you're done talking, Joe Average will respond "oh, so I should just go Apple/Samsung. Got it, thanks."
How do we know it's a link if it's the same color as the text? The whole point of hypertext is that links are called out visually.
No, no, this is good. This is the penultimate step in the interfaceless-UI that Google and their ilk are shooting for. Give it another couple years and it'll be black links on a black background, and you can simply shut your computer off.
If an investigation was a "consequence" in that sense then nothing would be allowed to be investigated. No, he won't "have a record" that is stupid.
Yes. He. Will. As you yourself acknowledge later in your post. So stow the name-calling and let's move on.
He'll have a file, but everybody has various files. The police keep a record of every time they pull you over, even if there is no citation, arrest, or even investigation. It isn't a meaningful metric.
Except that it is. If you think a police officer doesn't take your record - your word, please note - of pull-overs into account as they deal with you, please explain why they bother to keep it. You know darned well it's a metric used to evaluate how suspicious you are. I drive a "fast" car, but I don't speed, because I know it's an attention-getter. I've been pulled over twice in eight years. The first one, the officer visually decided I was speeding and estimated my speed 10 MPH (16 KPH) over the speed limit. I calmly explained the illusion involved (I was passing slow-moving trucks that had just started up from a red light) and suggested he review my pull-over record, which was empty because I don't speed. He wasn't happy, but accepted my explanation. The second time was unrelated, just an officer who saw my additional instrument cluster and wanted to confirm it wasn't an (illegal) radar-detector.
And when people talk about your "record" they're talking about the record of convictions.
A criminal record is exactly that. A record is simply a collection of noted events. When people ask for your criminal record, that is what they are asking for. It's almost as if I know the difference.
And sometimes people do also broaden that and ask about your arrest record, but nobody asks, "have you ever been suspected of a crime?"
Except US customs and border protection. As I noted. Arrest (without conviction) is accusation, or suspicion.
It would be a stupid question for a variety of reasons, but lets stick to the fact that you're lying, you just made that shit up.
Turns out that I'm not.
Take for instance the American DS-160 non-immigrant VISA application...
"Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?"
Gee, hey, it explicitly asks - among other things - if you've been arrested. Amusingly it goes on - as you can read - to explicitly indicate they want to know even if the event involves legal absolution. So yeah, there's your stupid question, being asked, as I said it was, by the government I said it was. There's shit indeed, but it wasn't made up by me.
Also, investigation is not prosecution or accusation.
True, but investigation is consequences. Rest assured that this person - if outed - will permanently have a record, and the existence of that record will eternally be taken as "worthy of investigation", rather than "vetted and innocent" (assuming that's the result of the investigation).
An interesting thing that illustrates this: at the US border, one of the questions we foreigners are occasionally asked is "have you ever been arrested?" Not "have you ever committed a crime" or "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" No, it's effectively "has a law-enforcement agency ever suspected you of a crime?" Because clearly, if you've been arrested - even if under the circumstances of mistaken identity - you are suspicious. Secondary questions may retract that suspicion, but it exists in the first place because you've been investigated.
I would like to know what sort of level of verbal threat counts as worthy of investigation to the Absolute Freedom Of Speech people.
I'm not a AFOS person per se, but I might be able to offer a reasonable response.
A direct threat, such as "I am going put shoot these police in the head"... might be deserving of investigation, if it isn't accompanied by context that conveys it's not serious.
This case is about a statement that boils down to "they'll probably get what's coming to them", where "what's coming to them" may or may not be proportional to the crime committed. Still, it's not a statement of intent. To imagine that say... in a conversation about a rapist, someone says "don't worry, someone will take care of him", and that's taken as intent rather than kharmic observation... that's worrying to me. Free speech should protect that. It should even protect "someone should take care of him." That should be above investigation. It's statement of opinion, not statement of intent to commit a crime.
Other people must give me what I want because I like it. No, really!! Waaaaah !!!! Waaaaah ! Information wants to be free !! Waaaaah!
There is no give involved. Information doesn't want to be free. It already is free.
It's simple. The existing copyright laws are unreasonable. End of story. That's not an excuse, it's an observation. I can, and do, pay for digital content, when it's made available to me in a reasonable format with reasonable usage rights. When the usage rights aren't reasonable, I observe that information is free, and don't pretend it isn't. Shrug. Technically that's a crime. Like jaywalking. Again, shrug. You can pass all the laws you like making it illegal to media-shift from DVD to media-center or CD to MP3 player, but those laws will never be reasonable, and those who can will bypass them. It's not about entitlement, like I said.
But... Anonymous Coward, so I don't imagine you're here for an actual discussion.
Why not instead support people who create content which is not region-locked? Why continue to consume content when they don't want your money?
This is a nonsense argument.
When I was young, I learned to like certain things, from shows like Star Trek to authors like Douglas Adams to music like Pink Floyd. I like what I like because of my experiences. Just because the properties I enjoy have been ensnared in modern distribution nightmares doesn't change what I like. If Star Trek were owned by a company that made access draconian, that wouldn't change my desire to consume it. If Douglas Adams (wasn't dead) wrote a book and his publisher made it massively difficult to purchase legitimately, that wouldn't extinguish my burning desire to read it. If Pink Floyd produced a bunch of awesome guitar-work but their label made me purchase a copy for every room I might listen to it in, that wouldn't diminish my want to hear it.
I understand fully that my wants and desires do not equate to entitlement. Problem is I'm still human and there's a really easy solution to the problem. Not liking what I like isn't it.
What's the difference between having no inventory and having inventory that's worth nothing?
Is this some sort of Zen koan? It should be, because it's enlightening. There's a revelation the inventory's value isn't directly related to the price tag you place on it.
The remainder of this post isn't directly replying to you, it's just topical. I don't call it "piracy". It call it "magic". Allow me to explain.
I have the ability to - through magic - do more or less whatever I want. I like food. I am willing to pay for food. So I go to the grocery store and I load up a cart and I buy some milk, some bread, some meat, some ice cream... whatever I feel like, then I pay for it. The next day, the grocery store stops carrying milk because the dairy farmers signed an exclusive distribution deal with STORENAME. If I want milk, I must make a separate trip to STORENAME. The next day, the same thing happens with bread, only it's only available at OTHERSTORE.
Sooner or later I'm going to use my magic to just wish food onto my plate. It's going to taste better than the products at the grocery store and it's going to arrive prepared the way I like it. Oh, and I won't be paying for it. Because... magic.
That's my lesson to media creators. Don't worry about "piracy". It's magic and you can't stop it. Worry about the ways YOU can make me want to not use my magic. Hint: making magic illegal won't work. Remember, I want to pay for my food. Not the least, because food-makers think of new kinds of food that I didn't, so I want to encourage food-making. Just don't make consuming food such a pain in the ass that I resort to magic. My magic food doesn't steal anything from anyone, but it sure deprives YOU of an opportunity to have some of my money.
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MS has been introducing this change on us like proverbial 'boiling frog'. It's coming and I think even you are starting to see the light or you would have used more assertive in your statements.
I hear you. I honestly do. Market trends make it seem obvious. But the repeated "there you, told you" posts every time news is posted that ISN'T about our existing licenses going subscription is getting really, really old.
Microsoft leasing hardware and offering software that already is subscription-related (mostly) isn't evidence. It's just not.
The real question is what they will do with existing installations. Will there be a year or two grace period after which point your license expires and will require a subscription renewal? Or will they allow existing licenses to continue in perpetuity?
And therein lies the answer. Microsoft just pushed as hard as they could for everyone on Home and Pro to upgrade to Win10. Thing is, those licenses were perpetual, and the replacement license for Win10 isn't subscription. If they pull a bait & switch and degrade our perpetual licenses into a subscription product, there will be lawsuits. Successful ones.
Same thing goes for anyone who bought a new PC in the last year with Win10 installed on it. Perpetual.
They can't even play the game of "oh, you don't qualify for anniversary edition unless you 'subscribe'", because without a version change, these are just updates and support fixes, regardless of introducing new features.
I'm not saying MS won't ever add subscription OS licenses. But to date there remains no actual sign of that happening. The sky is not falling.
Not to worry, citizen! Your OS and Tablet will be automatically upgraded by Microsoft to a subscription model, for your convenience!
No. Just no. Stop perpetuating this. While Microsoft has made many missteps with Win10, this isn't one of them. Yet.
Enterprise was never free to upgrade. It was always a product available only through volume licensing, usually with Software Assurance, which is a yearly fee.
Home and Pro have no sign of moving to a subscription plan at this point. That might change some day, but there's no sign of it yet.
Like last week's "revelation" that the latest Win10 build includes some SUBSCRIPTIONTHING.EXE and folks like you coming out of the woodwork to say "I told you so", despite Microsoft very, very clearly explaining that the file had nothing to do with Pro/Home installs and was purely for Enterprise, the FUD is getting annoying. I'm no fanboy, but to date, your suggesting has no basis in fact.
I liked it better when I had to move a jumper before I could flash the BIOS in a machine. That was really quite secure against post-shipment BIOS modification.
A good thought but it doesn't work so well when you've got hundreds or thousands of remotely supported systems scattered over the city/country/continent/planet.
Of course, I also can't think of the last time I flashed the BIOS in any of my systems, which makes me wonder why the hell we ever got away from ROMs in the first place...
You know this article is about shitty code, right? Well, I can tell you that the BIOS being shipped these days is shitty in more ways than this. If you have enough machines out there, you will sooner or later encounter something strange that involves a bug in firmware. From a mouse/printer/USB-vibrator to the latest DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort monitor, sooner or later you'll plug something in and it won't work as advertised. Or something that used to work stops working because... reasons. Basically, if you accept that there are firmware updates for motherboards, you should accept that there are reasons for them existing, even if you haven't needed them.
And don't get me started on the shitty code in server firmwares.
Most commercial systems (Dell, Lenovo, HP) they're bugfixes. Most consumer systems (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) they're updating support for processor microcode or memory module compatibility or whatever.
Someone found a filename they don't like. Microsoft explained - clearly - what it is for and what it isn't for. It's used for that version of Windows 10 that we have always known costs money and is part of a subscription: Enterprise.
All the posters ranting about how they've had enough and are switching to Linux, and all those smug people saying "I told you so" evidently didn't even read the summary.
This is a non-issue. The filename might as well have been NothingHasChangedInAnyWay.EXE
It IS informative and is NOT a joke; because it adroitly sidesteps the weak sarcasm in the original "request" by actually outlining the top-level steps necessary to switch from being a Windows-based office to a Mac-based one.
Come on. If it was informative, it wouldn't be missing:
2.5 Read your your e-mails wherein your Purchase Requisitions were denied.
2.6 Goto 5.
Warranty: discovering your warranty has expired after the fact is a problem because you can't reinstate coverage quickly. Being reminded that the expiry is coming up encourages you to renew before that happens. Yes, that costs you money, but that's to your benefit.
Backup: Windows Backup is a sad sack of crap.
Battery: I'm responsible for, directly use, and own several Lenovo Thinkpad class laptops. No, they don't have anything resembling a timed false-positive battery degradation alert. This is fabricated or your experience is unusual.
Hardware tests: I did voluntarily say that hardware tests generally won't reveal anything until your system has already stopped working. As for hard drive tests... guess what... the Lenovo scheduled tests are SMART short and long tests, not exhaustive drive stress-tests.
allows users to check their system's virus and firewall status, update their Lenovo software, perform backups, check battery health, get registration and warranty information and run hardware tests.
So, completely pointless bullshit that has no legitimate reason to exist.
Not exactly. While the antivirus status is redundant, the rest isn't. Being notified that your warranty is about to expire is a good thing. Being notified that you haven't done a backup recently is a good thing. Being informed that the battery in your laptop is degraded is a good thing. Having something run scheduled tests of basic peripherals is better than not doing so, even though typically you'll know when there's a problem because your system stops working.
While IT-fluent people are probably doing this sort of thing on their own, the vast majority of machines are either lightly managed or not managed at all.
It's easy to mock yet another software package that is flawed. But the idea that the software is unjustified and without use is false, in most users' cases.
How much is the gold worth if the global supply is doubled and it looks like there will be more to come? Plus I'm pretty sure the odds of finding an asteroid that high in gold content is astronomically high (pun intended).
How much is the gold worth if you don't have enough and want more?
Really, asteroid mining is a question of energy availability versus materials availability. If energy becomes sufficiently available and can be stored in a useful manner, using it to obtain materials we want makes the idea viable. Of course, that's not next week, or the week after.
With that lack of clearance it's literally going to be hitting the streets.
I came here to point that out. There's almost zero clearance, and none of the four tires can change direction; this car design can only go forwards and backwards in a straight line.
I agree with the idea that this is some sort of rich-person joke.
Only if you never had any evidence that it was ever their intention to give away the game in the first place.
I'm a pretty honest kind of guy; if a cashier gives me too much change back, I tell them. That said, purchases are contracts. A seller states that they are willing to provide a product with a description, for an amount. If I agree to that contract, it should be binding. It doesn't matter if the agreed upon price is $0 or some number with a bunch of zeroes after it. To attempt to renegotiate after a contract is agreed to, upon the basis of a mistake is reasonable. A house-seller who had a typo that caused a massively low asking price would be reasonable to ask to be let out of the contract. But to unilaterally renege? Not cool.
The moment Microsoft's servers accepted the transaction at $0, they accepted the contract that THEY offered the buyers. Any site wordings indicating they reserve the right to change their minds afterwards is... immoral to me, even if it's legally binding.
In a decent world, the buyer of the incorrectly-priced house releases the seller, because to not do so deprives the seller of a major asset. In the world of digital duplication, there is no actual loss to Microsoft if they honour their mistake. There is only loss of potential income.
All I'm saying is that IMHO, the contract is valid and Microsoft should honour it. And perhaps ask people to return the incorrectly-priced purchase. That's decency.
"A conclusion we came to was wrong because we jumped to it for no reason"
No reason whatsoever, except the entirety of observed data.
AP standards be damned.
Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst and now partner at venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has delivered her annual report that offers critical stats and trends about how technology is evolving. TechCrunch has highlighted the takeaways from the report:
1) The global Internet adoption rate was flat year-over-year at 9%, reaching 3 billion users or 42% of the world's population.
This is absolutely news for nerds.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that this story literally boils down to "someone used a computer to do what computers do."
It doesn't matter how good your burgers are, competing against McDonald's and Burger King is a massively uphill battle.
You'd have to create a cola that cures cancer to unseat Pepsi and Coke these days, and Windows Phone is basically just the third cola nobody cares enough about to buy. Blackberry has the same problem; if you talk to most people about "why should I buy a Windows Phone" (or Blackberry) instead of an iPhone or Android device, after you're done talking, Joe Average will respond "oh, so I should just go Apple/Samsung. Got it, thanks."
Foreign hackers are targeting everything, everywhere. Of course they're targeting political figures.
Domestic hackers are targeting everything, everywhere too. So are domestic intelligence agencies. So yeah.
How do we know it's a link if it's the same color as the text? The whole point of hypertext is that links are called out visually.
No, no, this is good. This is the penultimate step in the interfaceless-UI that Google and their ilk are shooting for. Give it another couple years and it'll be black links on a black background, and you can simply shut your computer off.
Or it's stupid.
Stopped reading at your. insistence. that. I. just. agree. with. you. sorry. I. do. not.
You don't need to agree. You're just factually incorrect and got called out on it.
If an investigation was a "consequence" in that sense then nothing would be allowed to be investigated. No, he won't "have a record" that is stupid.
Yes. He. Will. As you yourself acknowledge later in your post. So stow the name-calling and let's move on.
He'll have a file, but everybody has various files. The police keep a record of every time they pull you over, even if there is no citation, arrest, or even investigation. It isn't a meaningful metric.
Except that it is. If you think a police officer doesn't take your record - your word, please note - of pull-overs into account as they deal with you, please explain why they bother to keep it. You know darned well it's a metric used to evaluate how suspicious you are. I drive a "fast" car, but I don't speed, because I know it's an attention-getter. I've been pulled over twice in eight years. The first one, the officer visually decided I was speeding and estimated my speed 10 MPH (16 KPH) over the speed limit. I calmly explained the illusion involved (I was passing slow-moving trucks that had just started up from a red light) and suggested he review my pull-over record, which was empty because I don't speed. He wasn't happy, but accepted my explanation. The second time was unrelated, just an officer who saw my additional instrument cluster and wanted to confirm it wasn't an (illegal) radar-detector.
And when people talk about your "record" they're talking about the record of convictions.
A criminal record is exactly that. A record is simply a collection of noted events. When people ask for your criminal record, that is what they are asking for. It's almost as if I know the difference.
And sometimes people do also broaden that and ask about your arrest record, but nobody asks, "have you ever been suspected of a crime?"
Except US customs and border protection. As I noted. Arrest (without conviction) is accusation, or suspicion.
It would be a stupid question for a variety of reasons, but lets stick to the fact that you're lying, you just made that shit up.
Turns out that I'm not.
Take for instance the American DS-160 non-immigrant VISA application...
"Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?"
Gee, hey, it explicitly asks - among other things - if you've been arrested. Amusingly it goes on - as you can read - to explicitly indicate they want to know even if the event involves legal absolution. So yeah, there's your stupid question, being asked, as I said it was, by the government I said it was. There's shit indeed, but it wasn't made up by me.
Also, investigation is not prosecution or accusation.
True, but investigation is consequences. Rest assured that this person - if outed - will permanently have a record, and the existence of that record will eternally be taken as "worthy of investigation", rather than "vetted and innocent" (assuming that's the result of the investigation).
An interesting thing that illustrates this: at the US border, one of the questions we foreigners are occasionally asked is "have you ever been arrested?" Not "have you ever committed a crime" or "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" No, it's effectively "has a law-enforcement agency ever suspected you of a crime?" Because clearly, if you've been arrested - even if under the circumstances of mistaken identity - you are suspicious. Secondary questions may retract that suspicion, but it exists in the first place because you've been investigated.
I would like to know what sort of level of verbal threat counts as worthy of investigation to the Absolute Freedom Of Speech people.
I'm not a AFOS person per se, but I might be able to offer a reasonable response.
A direct threat, such as "I am going put shoot these police in the head"... might be deserving of investigation, if it isn't accompanied by context that conveys it's not serious.
This case is about a statement that boils down to "they'll probably get what's coming to them", where "what's coming to them" may or may not be proportional to the crime committed. Still, it's not a statement of intent. To imagine that say... in a conversation about a rapist, someone says "don't worry, someone will take care of him", and that's taken as intent rather than kharmic observation... that's worrying to me. Free speech should protect that. It should even protect "someone should take care of him." That should be above investigation. It's statement of opinion, not statement of intent to commit a crime.
Other people must give me what I want because I like it. No, really!! Waaaaah !!!! Waaaaah ! Information wants to be free !! Waaaaah!
There is no give involved. Information doesn't want to be free. It already is free. It's simple. The existing copyright laws are unreasonable. End of story. That's not an excuse, it's an observation. I can, and do, pay for digital content, when it's made available to me in a reasonable format with reasonable usage rights. When the usage rights aren't reasonable, I observe that information is free, and don't pretend it isn't. Shrug. Technically that's a crime. Like jaywalking. Again, shrug. You can pass all the laws you like making it illegal to media-shift from DVD to media-center or CD to MP3 player, but those laws will never be reasonable, and those who can will bypass them. It's not about entitlement, like I said.
But... Anonymous Coward, so I don't imagine you're here for an actual discussion.
Why not instead support people who create content which is not region-locked? Why continue to consume content when they don't want your money?
This is a nonsense argument.
When I was young, I learned to like certain things, from shows like Star Trek to authors like Douglas Adams to music like Pink Floyd. I like what I like because of my experiences. Just because the properties I enjoy have been ensnared in modern distribution nightmares doesn't change what I like. If Star Trek were owned by a company that made access draconian, that wouldn't change my desire to consume it. If Douglas Adams (wasn't dead) wrote a book and his publisher made it massively difficult to purchase legitimately, that wouldn't extinguish my burning desire to read it. If Pink Floyd produced a bunch of awesome guitar-work but their label made me purchase a copy for every room I might listen to it in, that wouldn't diminish my want to hear it.
I understand fully that my wants and desires do not equate to entitlement. Problem is I'm still human and there's a really easy solution to the problem. Not liking what I like isn't it.
What's the difference between having no inventory and having inventory that's worth nothing?
Is this some sort of Zen koan? It should be, because it's enlightening. There's a revelation the inventory's value isn't directly related to the price tag you place on it.
The remainder of this post isn't directly replying to you, it's just topical. I don't call it "piracy". It call it "magic". Allow me to explain.
I have the ability to - through magic - do more or less whatever I want. I like food. I am willing to pay for food. So I go to the grocery store and I load up a cart and I buy some milk, some bread, some meat, some ice cream... whatever I feel like, then I pay for it. The next day, the grocery store stops carrying milk because the dairy farmers signed an exclusive distribution deal with STORENAME. If I want milk, I must make a separate trip to STORENAME. The next day, the same thing happens with bread, only it's only available at OTHERSTORE.
Sooner or later I'm going to use my magic to just wish food onto my plate. It's going to taste better than the products at the grocery store and it's going to arrive prepared the way I like it. Oh, and I won't be paying for it. Because... magic.
That's my lesson to media creators. Don't worry about "piracy". It's magic and you can't stop it. Worry about the ways YOU can make me want to not use my magic. Hint: making magic illegal won't work. Remember, I want to pay for my food. Not the least, because food-makers think of new kinds of food that I didn't, so I want to encourage food-making. Just don't make consuming food such a pain in the ass that I resort to magic. My magic food doesn't steal anything from anyone, but it sure deprives YOU of an opportunity to have some of my money.
"still assessing whether a vulnerability... would go through a government review to determine if it should be disclosed"
They're debating over if they should debate over disclosing this. Yes, I get the reason why, but it still sounds moronic.