Actually, I have to disagree vigorously with this one. Windows is much more of a pain in the ass than Linux to use, for many reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is updates. On Linux Mint, they're ridiculously easy: just click on the little shield icon when it's red, then click "install updates" on that window. Minimize and go back to your work. I believe it's also possible to make it fully automatic though I haven't tried that. On Windows, updates will force themselves on you at terribly inconvenient times, and prevent you from using your computer, and will force a reboot, so you lose all your open windows.
With Trump, it's anyone's guess, because he's so unpredictable.
With Hillary, a war with Russia was a sure thing. Hillary was dead-set on establishing a no-fly zone over Syria. That would have inevitably led to war with Russia.
With one candidate offering a 100% chance of war, and the other candidate offering a less-than-100% chance of war with Russia, the latter is obviously the better choice.
It wouldn't have to have been this way if the stupid Democrats and the media didn't torpedo Bernie in the primary. They have only themselves to blame.
What are you talking about? Right now, it appears that close to half the nation at least sympathizes with the alt-right: they just elected the President. I don't think it's completely unreasonable to assume that the Americans on Facebook roughly represent America's population overall, in fact I think the alt-right is probably over-represented on FB because younger people (under 30, and esp. under 20) use the platform a lot less than older people.
Also, in my own personal experience with some, um, family members, alt-right groups are very strong and numerous on Facebook from what I've seen. Personally, I think Facebook will be shooting itself in the foot if they kick out all the alt-right groups. They have a platform that caters mostly to old people (Gen-X and up), and a huge portion of that population is right-wing, and has now moved into alt-right territory (AFAICT, the traditional right-wing is now mostly gone, and conservative people have shifted their views to align with alt-right sources like infowars). So while I can understand why Zuck isn't real happy with his customer base, but those are the people keeping Facebook alive and bringing in advertising dollars.
How about artificial sweeteners (stevia isn't artificial to my knowledge, it comes from some plant in South America I think)? Saccharin, aspartame, sucralose?
I think I might have that gene too; cilantro seems to taste a little soapy, and I really have stevia. I like broccoli though, but only steamed like in Chinese food.
Ok, that makes sense, but I'm not proposing that MS push these shenanigans any time too soon. What if they wait until everyone's finally moved to Win10 Enterprise, perhaps in 3-5 years, and *then* they start tightening the screws on their corporate customers, mis-feature by mis-feature? Remember the old tale about the frog in boiling water.
I don't see how that would prevent what Germany does. If a State wanted to withhold tithes from people's paychecks in that State, the 1A doesn't prevent it, as long as the government doesn't favor any one religion. As long as any religion could apply for this service, it should be legal. The problem is that it'd probably be an administrative nightmare. As I understand it, over in Germany, most Christians still fall into a handful of denominations, which are all probably organized at the national level (i.e., the Catholics have organizations at the diocesan levels, and probably one country-wide level above those, which reports to the Vatican; the Lutherans have one organization, the Anglicans too, etc.). Over here in the US, things aren't that simple. While the Catholics are of course well-organized, the other mainstream Protestant denomations are less so: there's mainstream groups for the Epsicopals, Lutherans, etc., but all these also have renegade divisions where some chuches at some point rebelled against the heirarchy and split off into their own sect. The Lutherans, for instance, have the Wisconin and Missouri Synods which are ultra-conservative, unlike the regular sect. The Presbyterians have PC-USA which most churches are part of, but a bunch are either independent or part of some other ultra-conservative group (lately in response to the Presbyterians' acceptance of homosexuals and of homosexual preachers even). There's a zillion different Baptist groups out there dating from the 1800s. And these days half the Protestants are Evangelicals, and frequently part of some Prosperity Gospel megachurch, which is totally independent. All in all, there's probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of "organizations" around the nation, just for Christianity, though most of these are independent churches both large and small (some of them in peoples' basements even). So keeping track of all these entities and giving them access to the government-tithe-withholding system would end up costing an absolute fortune. In Germany, they probably don't have this problem because 1) I'm pretty sure they don't have remotely as many independent churches and 2) they don't have our 1A, so they can probably safely ignore smaller religious organizations and just do this for large, established ones.
Honestly, I'm not sure why Germany still does this at all. Much of their population isn't religious any more, and if people want to give money to a church, they can do it themselves without the government's help. It's probably some silly holdover from previous generations when churches were a stronger part of civic life, but for an advanced and secular western nation, it's really an embarrassment IMO.
That is not the same thing as consuming child sex abuse material, which is based on harm to other people.
No, it's not.
Cartoons and stick figures do not cause harm to actual children, yet these are just as illegal as full-fledged photographic CP in many jurisdictions. That's the problem with these stupid laws. Someone who likes to look at kiddie anime has issues, I'll agree, but they don't need to be locked up, as they haven't harmed any children or anyone at all. If you take that route, then we need to start locking people up for all kinds of moral "crimes" such as adultery, fornication, looking at (adult) porn, criticizing the Dear Leader, etc. under the theory that they're somehow harming society.
And alcoholics and drug addicts, it can be argued, are hurting their families and society too, probably more than someone looking at some pics at home. Drug/alcohol addiction causes a real loss of productivity at work, impaired driving-related accidents, etc.
Just like alcohol and drugs, it's basically impossible to eliminate the demand for CP; there's simply something miswired in the heads of people who like that. The answer is therapy, not criminal prohibition of everything that resembles it and locking them up. (Note that I'm *not* arguing for legalization of actual CP that involves real humans.)
And to extend this to the future: we can already create nearly photo-realistic movies entirely digitally, with no humans at all. There was a Final Fantasy movie over 10 years ago that was pretty impressive for the time, and it's only gotten better since then. Now amateurs are making very impressive short videos on their home computers. Before too long, it won't be hard to make movie scenes that look entirely real, depicting humans who don't actually exist, and someone's going to use that technology to make CP. Should that be illegal, when it can be *proven* that no humans were involved in the production? Something to think about. Because if that's illegal, under the theory that people interested in this stuff will inevitably want the "real thing" at some point, then basically you've invented a "thought crime" and created a witch hunt.
Sea salt vs. table salt isn't just a difference in crystal size (sea salt can be milled down to a finer size easily). Sea salt has a different chemical makeup than table salt: that's why it tastes so different. Table salt is almost pure sodium chloride, plus some anti-caking agents and iodine, and has all the impurities refined out. Sea salt has much higher concentrations of trace minerals, namely calcium, magnesium, potassium, and iron. These things are still small in concentration in sea salt (hence the term "trace amounts"), but it's enough to make the salt taste noticeably different.
First, the higher-priced chocolate bars really aren't that hard to find. You really should be able to find the higher-priced US-made chocolate bars at any Walmart or Target, even in "the heartland". Target carries Lindt, for instance. It's not going to be in the checkout aisle, though.
Another good place to get chocolate (both US and especially European) is "Cost Plus World Market". These stores are pretty common in suburban areas, and have a lot of specialty foreign foods plus some fancy American-made stuff that's hard to find in supermarkets.
Finally, Whole Foods' alternate name is "Whole Paycheck".
And how is white chocolate "criminal fraud"? If you get really high-quality white chocolate, it's fantastic.
Most politicians are guilty of being big liars. Trump just made it more comical and used their tricks against them. It should be no surprise that politicians are good at lying: almost all of them are lawyers. The entire law profession is nothing but professional lying.
Finally, "applying the same technique to marketing"? WTF do think marketing is??? Marketing is just a euphemism for lying! It's always been that way!
How old are you anyway? You're acting like Trump invented lying!
It's probably like Germany. There (as I understand it), the government takes tithes out of your paycheck to give to the church. To do this, you have to declare a church affiliation. So if you're dumb enough to declare to the government that you're a Lutheran or whatever, they'll take 10% of your pay and give it to that denomination. If you say that you're unaffiliated/non-religious, you keep all your money (minus the other taxes of course).
It wouldn't work in the US because there's a strong aversion here to mixing the government with religion that way. (The religious want their churches to have power over the government, and religious people in power in the government, not the other way around which is how it appears with the government having control over church finances by forcibly taking tithes.)
No. What you're missing is that different people taste these things differently.
As an example, what do you think of cilantro? Do you like it, or does it taste like soap to you? There's a genetic difference in people who think it tastes like soap, and those people are a significant minority of the population, not just a few mutants. It's very likely the same thing is going on with these artificial sweeteners.
What's insane about that? Fructose is a poison. Of course, sucrose has fructose in it (after it's broken down by sucrase enzyme in your body), but that's better than pure fructose. Fructose is like alcohol: it has to be processed by your liver. It's OK in fruits because the total amount of it isn't that much (whole fruits are mostly fiber), but in large, concentrated amounts it's not good for you. And of course, sucrose isn't "healthy" either, but it's better than pure fructose.
AFAICT, different people react to different sweeteners differently. Some people think saccharin tastes just fine, for instance, while others think it tastes like shit. Stevia seems to be especially controversial; to me it tastes really nasty.
It's not just sweeteners: some people like the taste of cilantro, but other people think it tastes like soap. This is actually controlled by a gene, which has been identified IIRC.
I'm like you: I think all the artificial sweeteners taste terrible. However, I also think HFCS tastes terrible. Corn syrup (and its close relative HFCS) isn't just pure glucose and fructose; it still retains molecules from its corn source which affects its flavor. There's a reason that Coca-Cola made south of the border with real sugar has a certain popularity here: it really does taste different than the HFCS version. There's even a conspiracy theory that the whole "New Coke" thing in the 80s was a plot to switch the public from sugar to HFCS, since the "old Coke" was made with sugar, and then the "Coke Classic" was made with HFCS: by the time Coke Classic finally came out, everyone had forgotten what the old Coke tasted like and was just happy to have something similar-tasting back.
I'm not underestimating how damaging those things are, I'm maybe overestimating how willing these organizations are to put up with these shenanigans so they don't have to switch away from Windows. As you say, a lot of stuff is in "the cloud" or has a web-based interface these days, but a lot still doesn't, plus MS Office seems to be irreplaceable to just about every business and it only runs on Windows. Plus in so many companies, their IT departments seem to have been all-MS (even for applications that don't really need it) for ages, to the point where it seems like those IT departments are branches of an MS cult. I just have a very hard time seeing any significant number of companies actually switching away from Windows if MS steadily made the Enterprise version more and more business-unfriendly by taking away the flexibility and features you speak of.
They wouldn't need to build their own apps necessarily, just put a lot of pressure on their ISV vendors to make versions of those apps which run on the OS of their choice. ISVs made Windows versions of their apps ages ago when their customers pressured them to because they wanted to move to Windows from whatever they were using before (usually UNIX); this is no different. So the question really is: what advantage does a different OS give them that would be worth the expensive and effort of getting ISVs to make new versions, and of getting your IT department to switch? Well, we can go back in time and ask the very same question of companies in the 1990s, when they all switched to Windows. If they did it then, why is it so hard to imagine them doing it again? Am I the only one here who remembers a time before Windows?
Perhaps, but I think that it would take a pretty incredible amount of "silly things" to tip the balance enough to make organizations actually leave Windows. Companies aren't 100% rational; they're still run by humans, who have their own biases and prejudices, and organizational inertia is extremely strong.
It's a piece of shit: no removable battery or SDcard slot. Even worse, it isn't waterproof. That's a necessary feature on a modern phone; even Apple finally caved on this point.
No, not really. That's a good list and all, but "Hitler II" just doesn't have a good ring to it, the way "Lyin' Ted" or "Crooked Hillary" do, and more importantly, "Hitler II" doesn't actually have Trump's name in it! It's not obvious that it's referring to Trump because of this; someone could think you're talking about Erdogan or Putin. I'm looking for a catchy nickname that actually has either "Trump" or "Donald" in it, just like his nicknames for his opponents. Something with alliteration would be best (though "Crooked Hillary" lacked that). Maybe "Tyrannical Trump"? Though to be fair, it remains to be seen as he hasn't proven himself one way or the other, it's all just been rhetoric and bluster to this point.
BTW, the press really does lie. WaPo proved that when they sabotaged Bernie's campaign. Trump was exactly right about that. It's not just the leftist (really corporatist) outlets like WaPo either; the alt-right news outlets are at least as bad. They're all liars. Also, Hillary didn't give a shit about anyone else but herself too, so Trump isn't unique on that point.
History for MS wouldn't suggest that they'd add ads and spyware to their OS, but they've done exactly that. History for MS would suggest a bunch of things based on how they acted with Gates and Ballmer in charge. Those guys are gone now, and Nadella is in charge now, and they're doing things that 10 years ago people wouldn't have dreamed. MS is fundamentally an amoral corporation, and it's going to do whatever it wants to maximize profit. So far, they've decided to do that by adding spyware and advertising to consumer desktops and forcing people to upgrade to Win10 against their will. There's nothing stopping them from going well beyond this.
As for living in fear, it's just plain good sense to retain as much control over your own destiny as feasible, instead of happily handing it over to some amoral entity that only cares about extracting as much profit from you as they can. You can only feasibly go so far with this, but at least with application software, it's generally not that hard to switch from one to another if you have a big problem, as long as there's some competition in that market, and an application only has so much power over you. An OS is entirely different. And with OSes, we already have better alternatives that respect your privacy.
No, I'm not kidding. How exactly do you propose these F500 businesses get all their Windows-only applications (internal and external) running on MacOSX or Linux? If companies were actually serious about putting this kind of effort into a different OS, many more would have switched by now. They're not. These customers are utterly locked in; the only real competition Microsoft has is with their own older software versions.
So even when Linux succeeds, it may eventually tarnish and such stuff as we're seeing MS succumb to would translate over.
How so? Have you forgotten that Linux is open-source, and anyone can build it or modify it as they wish? That was what was so laughable about the "Amazon Lens" on Ubuntu: it was trivial to remove with an 'apt-get remove' command. Even if they had tried to bake it in somehow, it's not that hard to make your own distro, or use a derivative like Mint. The idea that Linux would somehow pull ratty shenanigans like this is ridiculous: there's a bunch of different distros, so if one turns ratty, it's easy to just switch over to another.
This process of leveraging power away from consumers and into the 'service provider' is a natural consequence in the business world.
If you're a large enough corporation, it should be pretty simple to take an existing Linux distro, modify/customize it some, and roll your own distro, thus becoming your own "service provider" instead of leaving yourself at the mercy of a vendor that does not have your best interest at heart. If a handful of volunteers at distros like Linux Mint can do it, any company with more than a few dozen employees can do it if they really want. Businesses only outsource critical functions like this because they're short-sighted which is why I don't expect to see many companies do anything like this any time soon.
Telemetry can be turned off on enterprise. and the only ads are a one-line text entry in the start menu that you can again turn off in the start menu settings.
For now. There's no telling what MS will decide to do in the future. It's their OS and they can update it however they want. That could mean requiring telemetry/ads on Enterprise editions, increasing the ads and preventing them from being disabled (including on Enterprise versions), etc.
Also, those aren't the only ads. They have live tiles with ads.
Competent admins do the above things
For now. Competent admins are limited by what MS allows. Competent admins do not have access to the Windows 10 source code with the ability to build their own; they're at MS's mercy.
and that is why corporations aren't really phased by Windows 10.
And that's why they're all sticking with Win7?
For those that are plowing ahead, just wait until MS changes the terms and conditions and requires spyware and ads on corporate desktops. You don't think they could do that? What's to stop them? Threats of switching to Linux? Customers aren't going to do that. Personally I really hope MS tightens the screws on these companies and forces ads into Win10 Enterprise soon.
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end-user ease of use easily on a par with Windows
Actually, I have to disagree vigorously with this one. Windows is much more of a pain in the ass than Linux to use, for many reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is updates. On Linux Mint, they're ridiculously easy: just click on the little shield icon when it's red, then click "install updates" on that window. Minimize and go back to your work. I believe it's also possible to make it fully automatic though I haven't tried that. On Windows, updates will force themselves on you at terribly inconvenient times, and prevent you from using your computer, and will force a reboot, so you lose all your open windows.
With Trump, it's anyone's guess, because he's so unpredictable.
With Hillary, a war with Russia was a sure thing. Hillary was dead-set on establishing a no-fly zone over Syria. That would have inevitably led to war with Russia.
With one candidate offering a 100% chance of war, and the other candidate offering a less-than-100% chance of war with Russia, the latter is obviously the better choice.
It wouldn't have to have been this way if the stupid Democrats and the media didn't torpedo Bernie in the primary. They have only themselves to blame.
He doesn't find assault humorous. He's using what's called "black humor"; you might want to look it up.
He probably does find it humorous, In a dark way, how many want to cover up those assaults because it makes certain ethnic groups look bad.
What are you talking about? Right now, it appears that close to half the nation at least sympathizes with the alt-right: they just elected the President. I don't think it's completely unreasonable to assume that the Americans on Facebook roughly represent America's population overall, in fact I think the alt-right is probably over-represented on FB because younger people (under 30, and esp. under 20) use the platform a lot less than older people.
Also, in my own personal experience with some, um, family members, alt-right groups are very strong and numerous on Facebook from what I've seen. Personally, I think Facebook will be shooting itself in the foot if they kick out all the alt-right groups. They have a platform that caters mostly to old people (Gen-X and up), and a huge portion of that population is right-wing, and has now moved into alt-right territory (AFAICT, the traditional right-wing is now mostly gone, and conservative people have shifted their views to align with alt-right sources like infowars). So while I can understand why Zuck isn't real happy with his customer base, but those are the people keeping Facebook alive and bringing in advertising dollars.
How about artificial sweeteners (stevia isn't artificial to my knowledge, it comes from some plant in South America I think)? Saccharin, aspartame, sucralose?
I think I might have that gene too; cilantro seems to taste a little soapy, and I really have stevia. I like broccoli though, but only steamed like in Chinese food.
Ok, that makes sense, but I'm not proposing that MS push these shenanigans any time too soon. What if they wait until everyone's finally moved to Win10 Enterprise, perhaps in 3-5 years, and *then* they start tightening the screws on their corporate customers, mis-feature by mis-feature? Remember the old tale about the frog in boiling water.
I don't see how that would prevent what Germany does. If a State wanted to withhold tithes from people's paychecks in that State, the 1A doesn't prevent it, as long as the government doesn't favor any one religion. As long as any religion could apply for this service, it should be legal. The problem is that it'd probably be an administrative nightmare. As I understand it, over in Germany, most Christians still fall into a handful of denominations, which are all probably organized at the national level (i.e., the Catholics have organizations at the diocesan levels, and probably one country-wide level above those, which reports to the Vatican; the Lutherans have one organization, the Anglicans too, etc.). Over here in the US, things aren't that simple. While the Catholics are of course well-organized, the other mainstream Protestant denomations are less so: there's mainstream groups for the Epsicopals, Lutherans, etc., but all these also have renegade divisions where some chuches at some point rebelled against the heirarchy and split off into their own sect. The Lutherans, for instance, have the Wisconin and Missouri Synods which are ultra-conservative, unlike the regular sect. The Presbyterians have PC-USA which most churches are part of, but a bunch are either independent or part of some other ultra-conservative group (lately in response to the Presbyterians' acceptance of homosexuals and of homosexual preachers even). There's a zillion different Baptist groups out there dating from the 1800s. And these days half the Protestants are Evangelicals, and frequently part of some Prosperity Gospel megachurch, which is totally independent. All in all, there's probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of "organizations" around the nation, just for Christianity, though most of these are independent churches both large and small (some of them in peoples' basements even). So keeping track of all these entities and giving them access to the government-tithe-withholding system would end up costing an absolute fortune. In Germany, they probably don't have this problem because 1) I'm pretty sure they don't have remotely as many independent churches and 2) they don't have our 1A, so they can probably safely ignore smaller religious organizations and just do this for large, established ones.
Honestly, I'm not sure why Germany still does this at all. Much of their population isn't religious any more, and if people want to give money to a church, they can do it themselves without the government's help. It's probably some silly holdover from previous generations when churches were a stronger part of civic life, but for an advanced and secular western nation, it's really an embarrassment IMO.
That is not the same thing as consuming child sex abuse material, which is based on harm to other people.
No, it's not.
Cartoons and stick figures do not cause harm to actual children, yet these are just as illegal as full-fledged photographic CP in many jurisdictions. That's the problem with these stupid laws. Someone who likes to look at kiddie anime has issues, I'll agree, but they don't need to be locked up, as they haven't harmed any children or anyone at all. If you take that route, then we need to start locking people up for all kinds of moral "crimes" such as adultery, fornication, looking at (adult) porn, criticizing the Dear Leader, etc. under the theory that they're somehow harming society.
And alcoholics and drug addicts, it can be argued, are hurting their families and society too, probably more than someone looking at some pics at home. Drug/alcohol addiction causes a real loss of productivity at work, impaired driving-related accidents, etc.
Just like alcohol and drugs, it's basically impossible to eliminate the demand for CP; there's simply something miswired in the heads of people who like that. The answer is therapy, not criminal prohibition of everything that resembles it and locking them up. (Note that I'm *not* arguing for legalization of actual CP that involves real humans.)
And to extend this to the future: we can already create nearly photo-realistic movies entirely digitally, with no humans at all. There was a Final Fantasy movie over 10 years ago that was pretty impressive for the time, and it's only gotten better since then. Now amateurs are making very impressive short videos on their home computers. Before too long, it won't be hard to make movie scenes that look entirely real, depicting humans who don't actually exist, and someone's going to use that technology to make CP. Should that be illegal, when it can be *proven* that no humans were involved in the production? Something to think about. Because if that's illegal, under the theory that people interested in this stuff will inevitably want the "real thing" at some point, then basically you've invented a "thought crime" and created a witch hunt.
Sea salt vs. table salt isn't just a difference in crystal size (sea salt can be milled down to a finer size easily). Sea salt has a different chemical makeup than table salt: that's why it tastes so different. Table salt is almost pure sodium chloride, plus some anti-caking agents and iodine, and has all the impurities refined out. Sea salt has much higher concentrations of trace minerals, namely calcium, magnesium, potassium, and iron. These things are still small in concentration in sea salt (hence the term "trace amounts"), but it's enough to make the salt taste noticeably different.
There's some inaccuracies in your post.
First, the higher-priced chocolate bars really aren't that hard to find. You really should be able to find the higher-priced US-made chocolate bars at any Walmart or Target, even in "the heartland". Target carries Lindt, for instance. It's not going to be in the checkout aisle, though.
Another good place to get chocolate (both US and especially European) is "Cost Plus World Market". These stores are pretty common in suburban areas, and have a lot of specialty foreign foods plus some fancy American-made stuff that's hard to find in supermarkets.
Finally, Whole Foods' alternate name is "Whole Paycheck".
And how is white chocolate "criminal fraud"? If you get really high-quality white chocolate, it's fantastic.
"Post-factual world"? WTF are you smoking?
Most politicians are guilty of being big liars. Trump just made it more comical and used their tricks against them. It should be no surprise that politicians are good at lying: almost all of them are lawyers. The entire law profession is nothing but professional lying.
Finally, "applying the same technique to marketing"? WTF do think marketing is??? Marketing is just a euphemism for lying! It's always been that way!
How old are you anyway? You're acting like Trump invented lying!
It's probably like Germany. There (as I understand it), the government takes tithes out of your paycheck to give to the church. To do this, you have to declare a church affiliation. So if you're dumb enough to declare to the government that you're a Lutheran or whatever, they'll take 10% of your pay and give it to that denomination. If you say that you're unaffiliated/non-religious, you keep all your money (minus the other taxes of course).
It wouldn't work in the US because there's a strong aversion here to mixing the government with religion that way. (The religious want their churches to have power over the government, and religious people in power in the government, not the other way around which is how it appears with the government having control over church finances by forcibly taking tithes.)
No. What you're missing is that different people taste these things differently.
As an example, what do you think of cilantro? Do you like it, or does it taste like soap to you? There's a genetic difference in people who think it tastes like soap, and those people are a significant minority of the population, not just a few mutants. It's very likely the same thing is going on with these artificial sweeteners.
What's insane about that? Fructose is a poison. Of course, sucrose has fructose in it (after it's broken down by sucrase enzyme in your body), but that's better than pure fructose. Fructose is like alcohol: it has to be processed by your liver. It's OK in fruits because the total amount of it isn't that much (whole fruits are mostly fiber), but in large, concentrated amounts it's not good for you. And of course, sucrose isn't "healthy" either, but it's better than pure fructose.
AFAICT, different people react to different sweeteners differently. Some people think saccharin tastes just fine, for instance, while others think it tastes like shit. Stevia seems to be especially controversial; to me it tastes really nasty.
It's not just sweeteners: some people like the taste of cilantro, but other people think it tastes like soap. This is actually controlled by a gene, which has been identified IIRC.
I'm like you: I think all the artificial sweeteners taste terrible. However, I also think HFCS tastes terrible. Corn syrup (and its close relative HFCS) isn't just pure glucose and fructose; it still retains molecules from its corn source which affects its flavor. There's a reason that Coca-Cola made south of the border with real sugar has a certain popularity here: it really does taste different than the HFCS version. There's even a conspiracy theory that the whole "New Coke" thing in the 80s was a plot to switch the public from sugar to HFCS, since the "old Coke" was made with sugar, and then the "Coke Classic" was made with HFCS: by the time Coke Classic finally came out, everyone had forgotten what the old Coke tasted like and was just happy to have something similar-tasting back.
I'm not underestimating how damaging those things are, I'm maybe overestimating how willing these organizations are to put up with these shenanigans so they don't have to switch away from Windows. As you say, a lot of stuff is in "the cloud" or has a web-based interface these days, but a lot still doesn't, plus MS Office seems to be irreplaceable to just about every business and it only runs on Windows. Plus in so many companies, their IT departments seem to have been all-MS (even for applications that don't really need it) for ages, to the point where it seems like those IT departments are branches of an MS cult. I just have a very hard time seeing any significant number of companies actually switching away from Windows if MS steadily made the Enterprise version more and more business-unfriendly by taking away the flexibility and features you speak of.
They wouldn't need to build their own apps necessarily, just put a lot of pressure on their ISV vendors to make versions of those apps which run on the OS of their choice. ISVs made Windows versions of their apps ages ago when their customers pressured them to because they wanted to move to Windows from whatever they were using before (usually UNIX); this is no different. So the question really is: what advantage does a different OS give them that would be worth the expensive and effort of getting ISVs to make new versions, and of getting your IT department to switch? Well, we can go back in time and ask the very same question of companies in the 1990s, when they all switched to Windows. If they did it then, why is it so hard to imagine them doing it again? Am I the only one here who remembers a time before Windows?
Perhaps, but I think that it would take a pretty incredible amount of "silly things" to tip the balance enough to make organizations actually leave Windows. Companies aren't 100% rational; they're still run by humans, who have their own biases and prejudices, and organizational inertia is extremely strong.
It's a piece of shit: no removable battery or SDcard slot. Even worse, it isn't waterproof. That's a necessary feature on a modern phone; even Apple finally caved on this point.
Any better suggestions, shithead?
No, not really. That's a good list and all, but "Hitler II" just doesn't have a good ring to it, the way "Lyin' Ted" or "Crooked Hillary" do, and more importantly, "Hitler II" doesn't actually have Trump's name in it! It's not obvious that it's referring to Trump because of this; someone could think you're talking about Erdogan or Putin. I'm looking for a catchy nickname that actually has either "Trump" or "Donald" in it, just like his nicknames for his opponents. Something with alliteration would be best (though "Crooked Hillary" lacked that). Maybe "Tyrannical Trump"? Though to be fair, it remains to be seen as he hasn't proven himself one way or the other, it's all just been rhetoric and bluster to this point.
BTW, the press really does lie. WaPo proved that when they sabotaged Bernie's campaign. Trump was exactly right about that. It's not just the leftist (really corporatist) outlets like WaPo either; the alt-right news outlets are at least as bad. They're all liars. Also, Hillary didn't give a shit about anyone else but herself too, so Trump isn't unique on that point.
History for MS wouldn't suggest that they'd add ads and spyware to their OS, but they've done exactly that. History for MS would suggest a bunch of things based on how they acted with Gates and Ballmer in charge. Those guys are gone now, and Nadella is in charge now, and they're doing things that 10 years ago people wouldn't have dreamed. MS is fundamentally an amoral corporation, and it's going to do whatever it wants to maximize profit. So far, they've decided to do that by adding spyware and advertising to consumer desktops and forcing people to upgrade to Win10 against their will. There's nothing stopping them from going well beyond this.
As for living in fear, it's just plain good sense to retain as much control over your own destiny as feasible, instead of happily handing it over to some amoral entity that only cares about extracting as much profit from you as they can. You can only feasibly go so far with this, but at least with application software, it's generally not that hard to switch from one to another if you have a big problem, as long as there's some competition in that market, and an application only has so much power over you. An OS is entirely different. And with OSes, we already have better alternatives that respect your privacy.
Move next door to Arizona. California has always had strict gun laws.
No, I'm not kidding. How exactly do you propose these F500 businesses get all their Windows-only applications (internal and external) running on MacOSX or Linux? If companies were actually serious about putting this kind of effort into a different OS, many more would have switched by now. They're not. These customers are utterly locked in; the only real competition Microsoft has is with their own older software versions.
So even when Linux succeeds, it may eventually tarnish and such stuff as we're seeing MS succumb to would translate over.
How so? Have you forgotten that Linux is open-source, and anyone can build it or modify it as they wish? That was what was so laughable about the "Amazon Lens" on Ubuntu: it was trivial to remove with an 'apt-get remove' command. Even if they had tried to bake it in somehow, it's not that hard to make your own distro, or use a derivative like Mint. The idea that Linux would somehow pull ratty shenanigans like this is ridiculous: there's a bunch of different distros, so if one turns ratty, it's easy to just switch over to another.
This process of leveraging power away from consumers and into the 'service provider' is a natural consequence in the business world.
If you're a large enough corporation, it should be pretty simple to take an existing Linux distro, modify/customize it some, and roll your own distro, thus becoming your own "service provider" instead of leaving yourself at the mercy of a vendor that does not have your best interest at heart. If a handful of volunteers at distros like Linux Mint can do it, any company with more than a few dozen employees can do it if they really want. Businesses only outsource critical functions like this because they're short-sighted which is why I don't expect to see many companies do anything like this any time soon.
Telemetry can be turned off on enterprise.
and the only ads are a one-line text entry in the start menu that you can again turn off in the start menu settings.
For now. There's no telling what MS will decide to do in the future. It's their OS and they can update it however they want. That could mean requiring telemetry/ads on Enterprise editions, increasing the ads and preventing them from being disabled (including on Enterprise versions), etc.
Also, those aren't the only ads. They have live tiles with ads.
Competent admins do the above things
For now. Competent admins are limited by what MS allows. Competent admins do not have access to the Windows 10 source code with the ability to build their own; they're at MS's mercy.
and that is why corporations aren't really phased by Windows 10.
And that's why they're all sticking with Win7?
For those that are plowing ahead, just wait until MS changes the terms and conditions and requires spyware and ads on corporate desktops. You don't think they could do that? What's to stop them? Threats of switching to Linux? Customers aren't going to do that. Personally I really hope MS tightens the screws on these companies and forces ads into Win10 Enterprise soon.