If this becomes this crazy I see a lot of businesses setting up shop in Canada or Mexico and offering no tax purchases.
There's two big problems with this idea:
1) shipping internationally is more expensive, even for small items (unless it's coming from China somehow). Go to CanadaPost.com and check their prices: they're high. Same goes for shipping from the US to Canada. I think the pricing is based on the local shipping rates in the shipper's country, by international postal agreements, which is why China can ship junk to us so cheaply on dealextreme.com and the like. So maybe this might work for Mexico.
2) If too many places start doing this, Customs will do something about it. Maybe. Maybe not, though, now that I think about it: US Customs is a Federal agency, and it's only the state governments that are bitching and moaning about this issue.
Example 2: You live in one state, but purchase a car in another. Autos are taxed at 10% in your state, and at 5% in the state where you purchased it. The tax for the state of purchase IS collected, but you still owe 5% tax in your state.
This isn't true. Auto sales are a special area (and I've gone through this a few times in recent years). You're taxed based on your physical address, not where the dealer is. The dealer remits the tax to the correct place. Crossing state lines doesn't help.
Where this gets hairy is if you buy a car from a private seller, and there your state will demand proof that you paid the tax when you register, or will just have you pay the tax right there when you register (which is what generally happens). With an actual dealership, they handle that for you. I bought a car last year and was moving from one city to another place (which was just a county, no municipality really). The first place charged an extra 1% (!) sales tax on cars (and everything else). The dealership was located in a totally separate city that didn't have this 1% tax. They were obligated to collect it anyway, so to avoid it I had to bring in a lease proving that I now resided in the new county.
They don't do this for other purchases probably because it's too much trouble to enforce it, so they just tell you to voluntarily remit the difference in use taxes. For cars, it's so much money that they do enforce it.
Are you some kind of shill for a company that stands to make money from this? You've been crap-flooding this whole discussion with pro-taxation posts here.
Anyway, two wrongs don't make a right. Taxes in this country are far too complex, and we should be more like Europe. Europeans laugh at our ridiculously complex tax forms we fill out every April; theirs (for regular wage-earners) are simple 1-page affairs and don't require hiring a CPA or using special software. Their VAT taxes, though seemingly high, are also relatively simple.
If the government(s) can't keep taxes simple, then they don't deserve to collect them at all.
Sucks for the first one they sue because they'll be on the hook for several thousand in legal fees
That's the problem right there. Anyone with a small business would be better off just refusing any purchases from SD until NewEgg crushes this idiotic law.
Bullshit. The Internet is *not* funded by state or local sales taxes on merchandise. That's what we're talking about here, not taxation in general. Try to keep up.
The reason NH does so well is that we only have property tax(*). It's one and *only* one tax, so the costs of collecting our taxes are very low. And the taxation is on one big item instead of a zillion niggling little things. Compare with California, which has property tax, sales tax, and income tax. The costs of collection and compliance are much higher.
Yeah, but look at all the people California keeps employed collecting those taxes!!!
Yep, Congress could fix this issue very quickly by passing a law that does exactly this: internet or mail-order purchases are taxed based on the shipper's address, and states and localities can't interfere with such purchases or attempt to tax them further.
NewEgg?? Hahah! That should be fun. NewEgg loves lawsuits; they constantly attack patent trolls in court, I'm sure they'll have fun with this one too, esp. considering there's a SCOTUS decision in place.
He's not dead, he's immortal, that's part of the conspiracy. The powers that be in the rest of the world just want you to think that the Dear Leader being immortal is impossible, but in reality they invented immortality many years ago, just like they invented the Internet and computers.
KDE shot themselves in the foot when they released KDE 4 and broke so much stuff and it took them YEARS to recover from that mess, which lowered their adoption further.
Yes, but Gnome did the exact same thing with Gnome3, and the distros still feature it prominently.
And as I said elsewhere, when Gnome pulled their Gnome3 shenanigans, Linux users (not being quite like regular sheeple) actually did start looking for alternatives, and they forked it twice with MATE and Cinnamon, so a bunch of them switched to those, or to Xcfe, but not to KDE. So it's not that KDE lacks the first-mover advantage.
But as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, there are distros which offer KDE, but people don't pick them. They even got mad at Gnome with Gnome3, and what did they do? They forked it into two different Gnome2-esque DEs, MATE and Cinnamon, and those picked up all the people pissed about Gnome3. Some others went to Xcfe. KDE didn't pick up any. These are Linux users here; it's not like they're just blindly using whatever distros shovel at them. They really are making a choice, and it isn't the one that's highly configurable. Any time KDE comes up in a Linux discussion, the refrain is the same: "I don't want to deal with configuration" (ignoring somehow the fact that KDE is in fact set up with sane defaults out of the box).
So computers are not about letting people do what they want, but are about forcing you to do whatever the designer wants? I have to disagree.
You can disagree all you want, you're preaching to the choir here. I'm just pointing out what everyone else likes.
As far as Gnome goes, I don't know if it's the most popular or not (citation needed),
I don't think I need to dig up a citation to show that Gnome-based distros are far and away more popular than KDE-based ones. KDE is quite simply a second-class citizen in the Linux world.
but I've heard plenty of pushback against it and the "screw you, we know what's best for you" mindset of the developers.
Yeah, and what did they do? Instead of just adopting KDE, maybe coming up with some themes for it or something, they went and forked Gnome! So now we have a bunch of variants of Gnome, plus Unity of course (which isn't customizable either). Sure, MATE and Cinnamon are a little more customizable than Gnome3, but that's not saying much. Basically, they just went back to the way things were for Gnome2, which itself was the product of "usability testing" by the Gnome team and extremely minimalist compared to Gnome1, which was directly aimed at KDE1 in the late 90s. So the people who like Gnome2 and its offshoots like minimalism, they just didn't quite like the way it came out in Gnome3.
Popularity doesn't always equal quality.
I never said it did. But quality isn't very useful if no one uses it. I'm just bemoaning the fact that computer users really don't like configurability, as evidenced by their choices. You can even see it here when KDE comes up in a discussion; the mantra is always the same: "I don't want to deal with configuration, I want it set up for me out of the box." (despite the fact that KDE already comes with sane defaults out of the box).
Well one problem is that you can't always install your preferred software on a computer you're using. Maybe you have to use someone else's computer for a bit, or maybe your computer is a work computer and is locked-down by the IT department. Now you're stuck with a computer that's completely and utterly unusable because of Metro. On your own personally-owned computer at home, you can indeed install some software to make it better, but good luck getting your IT department to approve that.
No, it's not. If people wanted options and setting, KDE would easily be the leading desktop on Linux (a group who logically should be the most in-favor of options and settings). Instead, it's not; Gnome is, and it has the minimalist, no-configuration mindset you disagree with.
I am sick of the "modern" "simple" design of everything that is supposedly so superior... because it isn't. Removing all controls and choices, hiding everything, getting rid of settings, etc. No thanks.
The problem is that this is what people want. They don't want choices. If you do, you're either a liar, or a tiny, tiny minority.
Proof: Gnome vs. KDE on Linux. You'd think that Linux users, of all people (let's face it, Linux users are not mainstream), would think just like you: "I want choices! I want configurability! I want to be able to customize my desktop!". Well, KDE did just that, while Gnome has taken the opposite, minimalist approach, that options should be removed to "simplify" things. Which desktop is doing better? Well, it's not KDE. Even when Gnome went too far, its users decided instead they'd prefer to fork Gnome rather than just adopt KDE and set some configuration options (or just make a theme or something). And just look at the comments on forums like this, among actual Linux users, any time this topic comes up for debate: "I don't want to have to wade through dozens of menus setting configuration options just to use a desktop. I want everything to be set up for me out of the box."
So don't blame Google. They're giving people exactly what they want. People do NOT want configuration options. They don't want "sane defaults", they don't want there to be any choice at all. They want it to be set up in a way they can use from the outset, and they absolutely don't want there to be the possibility for it to be changed, or for other users to set their differently.
Now I'm sorry, but I can't explain this mindset at all since it's so alien to me, but I'm just describing my observations in countless places. And again, this isn't even mainstream Apple and Windows users here, this is Linux users, who you would think would be the most pro-user-choice. But no....
A better analogy is: a company sells a car, but it comes with a seat designed for a non-humanoid alien. So some apologists for this company on the internet tell you that you should accept this, and all you need to do is buy a bicycle seat and some clamps and jury-rig this onto the alien seat so you can use your car, and to just deal with it when the bicycle seat falls off randomly while you're driving. They also tell you that this is preferable to just grabbing a totally free car which works great and has an extremely comfortable seat designed for humans and only needs minor adjustments to fit your body like a glove.
I tried out Waze after listening to people like you, and I found it completely lacking.
One big thing that's missing is alternate routes: when I'm driving, Google Maps will show alternate routes and how much longer (or shorter) they'll take. It tells you to take a turn, but then shows a gray route in another direction (or straight) with a box saying "X minutes longer". This is pretty useful if routes are almost the same, but I prefer one direction or I'm not able to get to the correct lane in time or something. Waze never shows me this.
Waze also has too much useless info: notifications of cars pulled over or cops in the area (most of which are obsolete).
The only thing it seems to be any good for is letting people tell each other where speed traps are. But all the other things really aren't that great, and the UI is even worse than the one in Google Maps. At least GM is good at letting me set stars, find businesses, look at their hours of operation, phone number, reviews, etc. and then navigate to them. Waze seems like it's just meant for teenagers to drive to each others' houses.
We have six adult cats. I looked at that thing, and I just can't see it doing the job that has to be done.
A single unit might not be enough for 6 cats, that is a bit much. You could try it out though, and keep a standard box nearby if it's not enough or if any of the cats refuse to use it. It's definitely sufficient for 3. Remember, if cleans the litter after every cat, and has a rather large waste drawer, so it doesn't need tending nearly as much as a regular box. The newest version also (IIRC) has a sensor to warn you the drawer is full and won't continue trying to dump the waste in it, like the older versions (watch out for that, that's the fatal flaw of the old version--it makes a nasty mess when this happens).
What I was referring to, anyway, was the whole job. Clean, replace, take out, dispose of, sweep the area. Nothing that'll do that yet for any number of cats.
No, you still have to dispose of the filled bags and sweep yourself. If you have a Roomba in that room, that should take care of the sweeping part. But for now at least, that's the problem with every robot: it'll do all the drudgery for you, but you still have to do the robot maintenance, set-up, etc.
I'm in the US, which is the same country that this story about the meteorologist happened. It'd be interesting to see if MS gets slapped down in the EU over this stuff, but here in the US isn't not going to happen.
If that were actually true, there would be no consumer protection laws on the books, no cases where clauses in contracts of adhesion between a small business customer and a big business supplier have been struck down as unconscionable by a court, and so on.
It is true, but with a caveat: "... up to the limits of the law". The law doesn't forbid companies from generally being dicks to customers; companies do this all the time. They only pass laws (like consumer protection laws) when it gets too ridiculous, but I don't see that happening here. And the contract thing isn't going to help you here; you'd have to sue Microsoft. Show me one example of where someone has done that successfully. On the contrary, there have been court cases testing EULAs (and click-wrap licenses, etc.) and these licenses have been upheld.
I'm sorry, but there's simply no indication that the government is going to come to the rescue here, especially when the government is so under the thumb of corporations like this and in love with IP laws. So it's up to customers to deal with the problem themselves, and the only way they can do that is to stop doing business with blatantly abusive companies. If they're not going to do that, then they should just bend over and stop complaining.
1. Old versions suck ass compared to new versions from a customer's perspective. Nobody wants to watch weather forecasts that look like they came straight from the 90s.
But they want to watch pop-up messages trying to force the station into "upgrading" to Windows 10? Hmm...
3. The customers rarely (if ever) "band together". Shit needs to be more than FUBAR for customers to band together. 4. The customers will never "develop their own weather software collaboratively" - see point 3.
Then they can suffer the consequences. Fuck 'em.
5. Of course CBS, for instance, could, in theory, develop their own custom weather solution. They could also, in theory, develop their own hardware, broadcast format, audio format, video format, database types and God knows what else. Do they need to? Hell no.
Then they can suffer with looking like fools on-air when Windows Update messages pop up.
Personally, I don't care, I just want people to stop complaining about the way Microsoft treats them with things like this. If they're not willing to do what it takes to liberate themselves, then I want them to just suffer and shut the hell up about it and continue to bend over for it, and I'll sit back and laugh at them.
But the only parts of libertarian thought I consider valuable are the bits that say no one has any justification in interfering with the personal and consensual choices of others with regard to non-macroeconomic and non-contractual behaviors. The rest is, as far as I'm concerned, bunk.
It sounds like you're talking about social versus economic libertarianism. They're really two different animals. I'm a pretty big believer in social libertarianism myself, but there's a pretty good portion of the left ("liberals") who believe the same thing, they just don't call themselves "libertarians". (BTW, these aren't the same liberals who believe in "microaggressions", "safe spaces", that speech which offends someone should be banned, etc.) Social libertarianism is pretty simple: (non-economic) laws shouldn't be based on morality or religion, and only based on whether an action abridges someone's rights, so basically don't ban something unless it's affecting someone else. So (adult) sexuality for instance can't be regulated here, and you probably won't find any liberals (including the "safe spaces" ones) who would disagree with this notion. But you can also make a case that environmental regulation is justified because we all breathe the same air and are affected by pollution.
It's the economic part where the liberals and the libertarians diverge, since (economic) libertarians don't believe in almost any government regulation of industry or commerce.
I will not regret not having to clean the catbox, not having to mow the lawn, not having to shop, etc
"will not"??? Here's your litter box. It's a little pricey, but accept nothing less; all the other automated boxes suck. This one is fantastic. There's robotic lawn mowers out there too, but those are a lot more money than this admittedly expensive litter box; it's understandable if you're not ready to shell out $1500 for a Robomow, or for larger lawns a $4500 LawnBott. But they're here.
However, I can't see people ever giving up shopping. It's not that easy to "browse" on a computer screen, and you certainly can't touch and feel things or try clothes on remotely (we don't have holodecks yet, those aren't coming until the 24th Century; the 23rd Century ones suck and are visual-only). The whole way a lot of small shops survive in artsy districts is that people go there to just browse around and look at stuff, without any idea of what they're looking for, just to see what suits their whimsy. That's not going to go away, though more and more stuff is showing up online.
Slashdot Mirror
If this becomes this crazy I see a lot of businesses setting up shop in Canada or Mexico and offering no tax purchases.
There's two big problems with this idea:
1) shipping internationally is more expensive, even for small items (unless it's coming from China somehow). Go to CanadaPost.com and check their prices: they're high. Same goes for shipping from the US to Canada. I think the pricing is based on the local shipping rates in the shipper's country, by international postal agreements, which is why China can ship junk to us so cheaply on dealextreme.com and the like. So maybe this might work for Mexico.
2) If too many places start doing this, Customs will do something about it. Maybe. Maybe not, though, now that I think about it: US Customs is a Federal agency, and it's only the state governments that are bitching and moaning about this issue.
Hmm...
Example 2: You live in one state, but purchase a car in another. Autos are taxed at 10% in your state, and at 5% in the state where you purchased it. The tax for the state of purchase IS collected, but you still owe 5% tax in your state.
This isn't true. Auto sales are a special area (and I've gone through this a few times in recent years). You're taxed based on your physical address, not where the dealer is. The dealer remits the tax to the correct place. Crossing state lines doesn't help.
Where this gets hairy is if you buy a car from a private seller, and there your state will demand proof that you paid the tax when you register, or will just have you pay the tax right there when you register (which is what generally happens). With an actual dealership, they handle that for you. I bought a car last year and was moving from one city to another place (which was just a county, no municipality really). The first place charged an extra 1% (!) sales tax on cars (and everything else). The dealership was located in a totally separate city that didn't have this 1% tax. They were obligated to collect it anyway, so to avoid it I had to bring in a lease proving that I now resided in the new county.
They don't do this for other purchases probably because it's too much trouble to enforce it, so they just tell you to voluntarily remit the difference in use taxes. For cars, it's so much money that they do enforce it.
Are you some kind of shill for a company that stands to make money from this? You've been crap-flooding this whole discussion with pro-taxation posts here.
Anyway, two wrongs don't make a right. Taxes in this country are far too complex, and we should be more like Europe. Europeans laugh at our ridiculously complex tax forms we fill out every April; theirs (for regular wage-earners) are simple 1-page affairs and don't require hiring a CPA or using special software. Their VAT taxes, though seemingly high, are also relatively simple.
If the government(s) can't keep taxes simple, then they don't deserve to collect them at all.
Sucks for the first one they sue because they'll be on the hook for several thousand in legal fees
That's the problem right there. Anyone with a small business would be better off just refusing any purchases from SD until NewEgg crushes this idiotic law.
Bullshit. The Internet is *not* funded by state or local sales taxes on merchandise. That's what we're talking about here, not taxation in general. Try to keep up.
The reason NH does so well is that we only have property tax(*). It's one and *only* one tax, so the costs of collecting our taxes are very low. And the taxation is on one big item instead of a zillion niggling little things. Compare with California, which has property tax, sales tax, and income tax. The costs of collection and compliance are much higher.
Yeah, but look at all the people California keeps employed collecting those taxes!!!
Yep, Congress could fix this issue very quickly by passing a law that does exactly this: internet or mail-order purchases are taxed based on the shipper's address, and states and localities can't interfere with such purchases or attempt to tax them further.
NewEgg?? Hahah! That should be fun. NewEgg loves lawsuits; they constantly attack patent trolls in court, I'm sure they'll have fun with this one too, esp. considering there's a SCOTUS decision in place.
Are you saying that she's like FloridaWoman?
He's not dead, he's immortal, that's part of the conspiracy. The powers that be in the rest of the world just want you to think that the Dear Leader being immortal is impossible, but in reality they invented immortality many years ago, just like they invented the Internet and computers.
(/s)
KDE shot themselves in the foot when they released KDE 4 and broke so much stuff and it took them YEARS to recover from that mess, which lowered their adoption further.
Yes, but Gnome did the exact same thing with Gnome3, and the distros still feature it prominently.
And as I said elsewhere, when Gnome pulled their Gnome3 shenanigans, Linux users (not being quite like regular sheeple) actually did start looking for alternatives, and they forked it twice with MATE and Cinnamon, so a bunch of them switched to those, or to Xcfe, but not to KDE. So it's not that KDE lacks the first-mover advantage.
But as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, there are distros which offer KDE, but people don't pick them. They even got mad at Gnome with Gnome3, and what did they do? They forked it into two different Gnome2-esque DEs, MATE and Cinnamon, and those picked up all the people pissed about Gnome3. Some others went to Xcfe. KDE didn't pick up any. These are Linux users here; it's not like they're just blindly using whatever distros shovel at them. They really are making a choice, and it isn't the one that's highly configurable. Any time KDE comes up in a Linux discussion, the refrain is the same: "I don't want to deal with configuration" (ignoring somehow the fact that KDE is in fact set up with sane defaults out of the box).
So computers are not about letting people do what they want, but are about forcing you to do whatever the designer wants? I have to disagree.
You can disagree all you want, you're preaching to the choir here. I'm just pointing out what everyone else likes.
As far as Gnome goes, I don't know if it's the most popular or not (citation needed),
I don't think I need to dig up a citation to show that Gnome-based distros are far and away more popular than KDE-based ones. KDE is quite simply a second-class citizen in the Linux world.
but I've heard plenty of pushback against it and the "screw you, we know what's best for you" mindset of the developers.
Yeah, and what did they do? Instead of just adopting KDE, maybe coming up with some themes for it or something, they went and forked Gnome! So now we have a bunch of variants of Gnome, plus Unity of course (which isn't customizable either). Sure, MATE and Cinnamon are a little more customizable than Gnome3, but that's not saying much. Basically, they just went back to the way things were for Gnome2, which itself was the product of "usability testing" by the Gnome team and extremely minimalist compared to Gnome1, which was directly aimed at KDE1 in the late 90s. So the people who like Gnome2 and its offshoots like minimalism, they just didn't quite like the way it came out in Gnome3.
Popularity doesn't always equal quality.
I never said it did. But quality isn't very useful if no one uses it. I'm just bemoaning the fact that computer users really don't like configurability, as evidenced by their choices. You can even see it here when KDE comes up in a discussion; the mantra is always the same: "I don't want to deal with configuration, I want it set up for me out of the box." (despite the fact that KDE already comes with sane defaults out of the box).
Well one problem is that you can't always install your preferred software on a computer you're using. Maybe you have to use someone else's computer for a bit, or maybe your computer is a work computer and is locked-down by the IT department. Now you're stuck with a computer that's completely and utterly unusable because of Metro. On your own personally-owned computer at home, you can indeed install some software to make it better, but good luck getting your IT department to approve that.
No, it's not. If people wanted options and setting, KDE would easily be the leading desktop on Linux (a group who logically should be the most in-favor of options and settings). Instead, it's not; Gnome is, and it has the minimalist, no-configuration mindset you disagree with.
I am sick of the "modern" "simple" design of everything that is supposedly so superior... because it isn't. Removing all controls and choices, hiding everything, getting rid of settings, etc. No thanks.
The problem is that this is what people want. They don't want choices. If you do, you're either a liar, or a tiny, tiny minority.
Proof: Gnome vs. KDE on Linux. You'd think that Linux users, of all people (let's face it, Linux users are not mainstream), would think just like you: "I want choices! I want configurability! I want to be able to customize my desktop!". Well, KDE did just that, while Gnome has taken the opposite, minimalist approach, that options should be removed to "simplify" things. Which desktop is doing better? Well, it's not KDE. Even when Gnome went too far, its users decided instead they'd prefer to fork Gnome rather than just adopt KDE and set some configuration options (or just make a theme or something). And just look at the comments on forums like this, among actual Linux users, any time this topic comes up for debate: "I don't want to have to wade through dozens of menus setting configuration options just to use a desktop. I want everything to be set up for me out of the box."
So don't blame Google. They're giving people exactly what they want. People do NOT want configuration options. They don't want "sane defaults", they don't want there to be any choice at all. They want it to be set up in a way they can use from the outset, and they absolutely don't want there to be the possibility for it to be changed, or for other users to set their differently.
Now I'm sorry, but I can't explain this mindset at all since it's so alien to me, but I'm just describing my observations in countless places. And again, this isn't even mainstream Apple and Windows users here, this is Linux users, who you would think would be the most pro-user-choice. But no....
Terrible analogy.
A better analogy is: a company sells a car, but it comes with a seat designed for a non-humanoid alien. So some apologists for this company on the internet tell you that you should accept this, and all you need to do is buy a bicycle seat and some clamps and jury-rig this onto the alien seat so you can use your car, and to just deal with it when the bicycle seat falls off randomly while you're driving. They also tell you that this is preferable to just grabbing a totally free car which works great and has an extremely comfortable seat designed for humans and only needs minor adjustments to fit your body like a glove.
I do it all the time with OsmAnd on my phone. It even shows all the hiking trails, as long as someone's bothered to upload them to OpenStreetMaps.
I tried out Waze after listening to people like you, and I found it completely lacking.
One big thing that's missing is alternate routes: when I'm driving, Google Maps will show alternate routes and how much longer (or shorter) they'll take. It tells you to take a turn, but then shows a gray route in another direction (or straight) with a box saying "X minutes longer". This is pretty useful if routes are almost the same, but I prefer one direction or I'm not able to get to the correct lane in time or something. Waze never shows me this.
Waze also has too much useless info: notifications of cars pulled over or cops in the area (most of which are obsolete).
The only thing it seems to be any good for is letting people tell each other where speed traps are. But all the other things really aren't that great, and the UI is even worse than the one in Google Maps. At least GM is good at letting me set stars, find businesses, look at their hours of operation, phone number, reviews, etc. and then navigate to them. Waze seems like it's just meant for teenagers to drive to each others' houses.
We have six adult cats. I looked at that thing, and I just can't see it doing the job that has to be done.
A single unit might not be enough for 6 cats, that is a bit much. You could try it out though, and keep a standard box nearby if it's not enough or if any of the cats refuse to use it. It's definitely sufficient for 3. Remember, if cleans the litter after every cat, and has a rather large waste drawer, so it doesn't need tending nearly as much as a regular box. The newest version also (IIRC) has a sensor to warn you the drawer is full and won't continue trying to dump the waste in it, like the older versions (watch out for that, that's the fatal flaw of the old version--it makes a nasty mess when this happens).
What I was referring to, anyway, was the whole job. Clean, replace, take out, dispose of, sweep the area. Nothing that'll do that yet for any number of cats.
No, you still have to dispose of the filled bags and sweep yourself. If you have a Roomba in that room, that should take care of the sweeping part. But for now at least, that's the problem with every robot: it'll do all the drudgery for you, but you still have to do the robot maintenance, set-up, etc.
I'm in the US, which is the same country that this story about the meteorologist happened. It'd be interesting to see if MS gets slapped down in the EU over this stuff, but here in the US isn't not going to happen.
If that were actually true, there would be no consumer protection laws on the books, no cases where clauses in contracts of adhesion between a small business customer and a big business supplier have been struck down as unconscionable by a court, and so on.
It is true, but with a caveat: "... up to the limits of the law". The law doesn't forbid companies from generally being dicks to customers; companies do this all the time. They only pass laws (like consumer protection laws) when it gets too ridiculous, but I don't see that happening here. And the contract thing isn't going to help you here; you'd have to sue Microsoft. Show me one example of where someone has done that successfully. On the contrary, there have been court cases testing EULAs (and click-wrap licenses, etc.) and these licenses have been upheld.
I'm sorry, but there's simply no indication that the government is going to come to the rescue here, especially when the government is so under the thumb of corporations like this and in love with IP laws. So it's up to customers to deal with the problem themselves, and the only way they can do that is to stop doing business with blatantly abusive companies. If they're not going to do that, then they should just bend over and stop complaining.
Go ahead, sue Microsoft and see what happens. I'd really like to see someone try it.
EULAs have already been held up in court. So yeah, if the EULA has crappy terms like this, your choices are to suck it up or find another vendor.
1. Old versions suck ass compared to new versions from a customer's perspective. Nobody wants to watch weather forecasts that look like they came straight from the 90s.
But they want to watch pop-up messages trying to force the station into "upgrading" to Windows 10? Hmm...
3. The customers rarely (if ever) "band together". Shit needs to be more than FUBAR for customers to band together.
4. The customers will never "develop their own weather software collaboratively" - see point 3.
Then they can suffer the consequences. Fuck 'em.
5. Of course CBS, for instance, could, in theory, develop their own custom weather solution. They could also, in theory, develop their own hardware, broadcast format, audio format, video format, database types and God knows what else. Do they need to? Hell no.
Then they can suffer with looking like fools on-air when Windows Update messages pop up.
Personally, I don't care, I just want people to stop complaining about the way Microsoft treats them with things like this. If they're not willing to do what it takes to liberate themselves, then I want them to just suffer and shut the hell up about it and continue to bend over for it, and I'll sit back and laugh at them.
But the only parts of libertarian thought I consider valuable are the bits that say no one has any justification in interfering with the personal and consensual choices of others with regard to non-macroeconomic and non-contractual behaviors. The rest is, as far as I'm concerned, bunk.
It sounds like you're talking about social versus economic libertarianism. They're really two different animals. I'm a pretty big believer in social libertarianism myself, but there's a pretty good portion of the left ("liberals") who believe the same thing, they just don't call themselves "libertarians". (BTW, these aren't the same liberals who believe in "microaggressions", "safe spaces", that speech which offends someone should be banned, etc.) Social libertarianism is pretty simple: (non-economic) laws shouldn't be based on morality or religion, and only based on whether an action abridges someone's rights, so basically don't ban something unless it's affecting someone else. So (adult) sexuality for instance can't be regulated here, and you probably won't find any liberals (including the "safe spaces" ones) who would disagree with this notion. But you can also make a case that environmental regulation is justified because we all breathe the same air and are affected by pollution.
It's the economic part where the liberals and the libertarians diverge, since (economic) libertarians don't believe in almost any government regulation of industry or commerce.
I will not regret not having to clean the catbox, not having to mow the lawn, not having to shop, etc
"will not"???
Here's your litter box. It's a little pricey, but accept nothing less; all the other automated boxes suck. This one is fantastic.
There's robotic lawn mowers out there too, but those are a lot more money than this admittedly expensive litter box; it's understandable if you're not ready to shell out $1500 for a Robomow, or for larger lawns a $4500 LawnBott. But they're here.
However, I can't see people ever giving up shopping. It's not that easy to "browse" on a computer screen, and you certainly can't touch and feel things or try clothes on remotely (we don't have holodecks yet, those aren't coming until the 24th Century; the 23rd Century ones suck and are visual-only). The whole way a lot of small shops survive in artsy districts is that people go there to just browse around and look at stuff, without any idea of what they're looking for, just to see what suits their whimsy. That's not going to go away, though more and more stuff is showing up online.