To assume that the size of a sheriff force in an east coast county that has a city with its own municipal police will be larger than that municipal police force seems to be a bad assumption to me.
Oh come on. We've had a strong open-source movement now for 20 years or so (it really seemed to get in high gear in the late 90s, along with the rise of the internet), and has it really gone very far? Sure, most people have a Linux kernel running on their smartphone, which they have no clue about, but for anything consumer-facing, it's all proprietary and it's gotten worse, thanks to walled garden "app stores" and the rise of Apple. I just don't see any evidence that consumers care about FOSS or are moving to it in any way. They've even moved away from Firefox towards Chrome.
You can say the same thing about Hillary. According to recent polls, they're pretty close, and neither one of them is liked at all by the general public. There is a chance that Trump will win, and if that happens, it's the fault of the Democratic voters and the DNC for picking Hillary. They did the same stupid thing back in 1999 when they picked wooden Al Gore and his shitty neo-con running mate Joe Lieberman, and his shitty wife who tried to ban curse words in music.
I wonder if any alien life managed to evolve and create civilizations, long before it happened on Earth. We'll probably never know, since due to the planet's crust occasionally liquefying, any evidence of a long-extinct civilization would be gone by now.
You don't need to go to Mars to work on space travel technology or figuring out how to survive in space. The Moon is only 3 days away and still has plenty of interesting stuff to investigate. Have you watched "The Martian" yet? If you're going to spend any significant time on another world, you need to have some kind of habitat there. Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong, and you might need to evacuate. As that movie made painfully clear (despite its silly premise of a storm), evacuating a team of astronauts from Mars would take months, close to a year, if not longer, because it's so far away. Most likely, they'll just be dead. That's a gigantic risk to take when we have zero experience setting up permanent habitats on other worlds.. However, with the Moon, it's not that bad: if we have a big problem and need to evacuate the astronauts before sending a new team, it's no problem: the Moon is only 3 days away. Just load them into a small tin can and send them back to Earth with a small rocket. An astronaut having a medical problem on the Moon, for instance, has a pretty good chance of getting back to Earth to get medical treatment in time; an astronaut on Mars with a medical problem is toast.
Once we've figured out how to build and live in habitats on the Moon, then we can try doing that on Mars.
The Internet, by itself, is not detrimental to privacy, it's everyone trusting these giant for-profit corporations like Microsoft and Facebook and Google. If we all used phones and PCs running various Linux flavors or similar, and didn't use anything from Microsoft or Facebook at all, we wouldn't have so many problems like this.
It'd be better if they (and anyone else interested in privacy while texting) switched to Trillian. It's free, open-source, and not tied to some giant corporation that makes money by advertising and data collection.
I'd like to see these companies get sued by their customers for making unreliable machines; using Windows was their own choice, and should fall on them.
Good point. It'd be interesting though if the federal government refused, because the President sided with the city over the state. After all, riots are a rather different matter than a city refusing to enforce state laws, and then using their cops to harass and falsely arrest outsiders attempting to cut their internet service.
The county sheriff is one guy with a pistol. No, he has no power over an entire municipal police department. Even in Maricopa County (which is giant), Sheriff Joe and his deputies are a tiny number of people compared to the combined forces of Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Scottsdale, etc. And no, they don't really supercede the city cops to my knowledge, there's some kind of legal system there where the county police have jurisdiction over parts not claimed by any cities, or over cities which outsource their policing to the county (Guadalupe did that for a while because their own cops were too problematic so they disbanded them), but no, they can't just come in and start doing speed patrols and such in the cities. In the eastern states like NC (where this story takes place), counties are tiny and county sheriffs, where city cops exist, don't do much besides serve warrants.
I'm not making anything up. No, the anti-trust trial wasn't about that specific issue at all, but it's irrelevant. The anti-trust trial proved that the government is completely unwilling to rein in Microsoft's behavior, which they have a 30+ year history of (remember "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus won't run"?). So if you want to sit around and whine about how bad MS is, go ahead, but it isn't productive and it's annoying. The only rational solution, if you don't like the way they're treating you, is to vote with your feet.
As for "trolling", that's not what I'm doing; I'm giving Microsoft users a reality check. You have exactly two choices: 1) continue to use their products, and we'll see if things change for the better and MS has a change of heart and suddenly decides it wants to be nice (I think that's rather naive and stupid, considering their past behavior and also the behavior of every corporation that grows that large and powerful--Apple isn't any better these days, IBM was just as bad at their peak, etc.), or 2) you can find a better vendor.
Windows 7 came out long after their anti-trust trial where their abusive business practices were brought to light. They've been behaving badly for decades. Everyone has had more than enough time to figure this out and stop doing business with them.
Why isn't it appropriate? What are you or anyone else going to do about it? Maybe take them to court, and they'll get a tiny slap on the wrist like what happened with their infamous anti-trust case. Did you completely forget about that? As soon as Bush took office, the government just dropped it and there was no actual punishment.
If you're dumb enough to keep doing business with a company that behaves this way, that has behaved this way for decades (that case was back in 1999!), and apparently even the US Government doesn't feel like reining in, then you deserve whatever happens to you.
My lack of empathy comes from the fact that Microsoft has a history spanning 3-4 decades of being a predatory monopolist, so anyone doing business with them has had more than enough warning. No, they can't "just simply port to Linux or Mac" in a short time, but they should have made the correct decision before, which was to avoid using Windows if at all possible. Now they're stuck and they're sufferent the consequences for it, and I'm glad.
They didn't purchase licenses for Windows 10, they purchased licenses for Windows XP, 7, or 8. Nobody ever expected Microsoft to force an OS change, because they never have in the past. When Windows Vista rolled out, it was an offered upgrade for XP users, but they never strong-armed them into it. Same for when Windows 7 came out. They offered an upgrade to windows 7 from Vista, but it was voluntary, and was never forced upon the end-user.
This upgrade wasn't forced on anyone either. They allowed it to be done, and didn't opt out. Oh, the opt-out mechanism didn't work right? Or the rollback mechanism didn't work right? That must be user error... or maybe a small bug, sorry! If that's not a good enough explanation for you, too bad, good luck getting a court judgment. Suing a behemoth like MS isn't a simple or inexpensive task (unless you take it to small-claims court as at least one person has done, but if you're a big business trying to claim serious losses, that's not the right venue).
There's a difference here. With desegregation, the States weren't following *Federal* law, so of course federal troops had to be sent in.
In this hypothetical scenario, there's a city that is refusing to follow *State* law, not federal. So why would the federal government bother sending troops in to enforce a state law?
Yes, I'm sure the state would want to avoid this, but I don't think the federal government is obligated to step in here. However, now that I think about it, the states all do have National Guard units, which they'd probably call up.
Still, I do think it'd be funny to see a city openly rebel against its state over internet access, and then request federal assistance and maybe even attempt to secede and join a neighboring state. West Virginia did it, after all.
They didn't decline to use Windows in the first place. Windows Update is an integral part of the OS, and the only way to get security updates, so of course they can also use it to sneak in stuff you don't want. MS never made any promises not to do so, or to give you the freedom to pick and choose what you want; it's possible to selectively apply updates if you go to a lot of extra trouble (though now they're bundling them to make this harder), but that's not the default option. Again, if you don't like the way Microsoft treats you as a customer, stop buying their products. Or continue spending all your time and effort trying to work around and deal with all the issues they cause.
Because they have a military port there, you idiot. Try reading before you post. Military ports aren't useful when a country is embroiled in a civil war.
If the city police are united, the state troopers are the only ones who can do anything. County sheriffs have no power at all. And most states don't have that many state policepeople.
So again, I ask: who's going to jail the arresting officer?
This isn't just about the US, it's about *any* country: who's going to declare *war* on a country for not taking in refugees? How is that even productive? Because some country won't take in a few hundred thousand refugees, you're going to invade, wreck the economy, create a humanitarian disaster, and create a few million more refugees? That doesn't even make sense. You can't *force* a country to take in refugees.
First off, Windows is marketed as a business tool, and MS has spent millions in advertising to convince the business world that Windows is reliable and well supported.
Yes, and they lied. GM and Chrysler have been trying to tell me their cars are reliable for decades, and they lied too. Caveat emptor.
Mission critical safety applications, where there is risk of great bodily harm or death
You've never heard of factory machines killing people or hacking their limbs off? It's not quite as risky as aviation stuff, but there's still a high degree of risk with factory machinery.
This would be prohibitively expensive for most industrial automation applications
There's lots of RTOSes out there that don't cost significantly more than Windows. And if you really need graphics, QNX has been doing that for ages; they even use them in Fords now for the infotainment. Windows is the absolute worst choice here. You can even run Linux; it's free and works far better for realtime tasks that Windows. You don't have to engineer those machines to the degree that you do mission-critical avionics, but that doesn't mean you have to use the absolute biggest POS OS available either.
Microsoft marketed and sold Windows as a business OS, and they marketed it with the expectation of continuous reliability and security updates until the stated end of support/end of life. They then deceptively used the Windows update pathway to force a new, incompatible OS with spyware, paid ads and forced updates on their paying customers. If that results in business losses, I am pretty sure that even a jury of non-technical people can follow the logical liability train back to MS and award damages.
Good luck with that. MS has lots of money for lawyers. The US government couldn't even do anything to them in the infamous antitrust trial. This should serve as a lesson to anyone that builds Windows into their products, or even uses it. I've been telling people for almost 2 decades that MS was a bad company to do business with, so I don't have one iota of sympathy for anyone who's getting burned by their business practices now.
You're confusing Trump with Hillary. Hillary is the establishment candidate who's exactly like Bush, and who wants to continue military interventionism in that way.
Trump will likely just go along with Russia. What power vacuum are you talking about? When ISIS is wiped out in Syria, Assad will take over that territory and be closer to total victory. In case you forgot, before Syria's civil war, Assad was in power and there was no power vacuum, and they had peace. Sure, it sucked if you were opposed to the government, but he kept a lid on the place. It's the US that creates these power vacuums by creating democratic governments that simply don't work in those cultures.
This sounds like BS to me. Most modern cars have engines that are so quiet that at higher speeds, you'll only hear the wind noise and tire noise if you're outside the vehicle. The tire noise is the biggest factor these days, not the engine, unless you have some big diesel engine or you've modified the exhaust.
It's only at low speeds (like in residential areas, 30mph and below) where you'll really notice the missing engine note on an EV.
I fail to see the problem. Your business got extra work and revenue thanks to the idiot treasurer selecting this vendor that has a long track record of shoddy products and poor customer service.
And yet somehow Microsoft did not get the message, or simply didn't care to check with all OEM databases for compatibility.
Why should they bother? If someone gets burned by their shoddy work, like your treasurer, what are they going to do about it? Are they going to switch to another vendor? Didn't think so. Microsoft is doing the right thing by not wasting employee time checking things like this, or doing other basic QA, and just pushing Windows 10 out everywhere and letting customers deal with the ensuing problems themselves; this increases their profits, which is good for the company and its shareholders.
Perhaps it's the manufacturers and the owners fault for using/requesting Windows in the first place
Exactly.
but Microsoft should definitely be liable for this.
No, it shouldn't. If you're dumb enough to design an obviously-defective software product into your mega-$$$ industrial machine, then *you* should be liable. The makers of these machines should be liable for this, not MS. They've been building windows into these machines for a couple decades now, stupidly, and they need to suffer the consequences. Windows was never the right tool for the job.
If some avionics company stupidly decided to use Windows for the avionics on a passenger jet, and the jet crashed because of a Windows 10 update, would you blame MS or the avionics company? I'd blame the avionics company. Windows was never designed for any kind of safety-critical application, or any kind of application at all where reliability is required.
To my amusement in front of me) and I've seen a CNC machine just stop working requiring a complete software overhaul because of the Windows 10 upgrade
My home-built CNC machine doesn't have this problem; it runs on Debian.
Businesses that lost revenue due to shady Windows 10 upgrade practices should most definitely be compensated for said lost revenue.
No, they shouldn't. If they don't like Microsoft's business practices, then they should stop using Microsoft products. Otherwise, they should shut up and stop complaining.
Or ya know.. Microsoft could just stop aggressive malware tactics that forced Windows 10 onto their customers.
Why should they? They can run their company however they want. If you don't like it, don't buy from them any more.
What are you going to do if they don't stop their aggressive malware tactics anyway? File a complaint?
Slashdot Mirror
To assume that the size of a sheriff force in an east coast county that has a city with its own municipal police will be larger than that municipal police force seems to be a bad assumption to me.
Oh come on. We've had a strong open-source movement now for 20 years or so (it really seemed to get in high gear in the late 90s, along with the rise of the internet), and has it really gone very far? Sure, most people have a Linux kernel running on their smartphone, which they have no clue about, but for anything consumer-facing, it's all proprietary and it's gotten worse, thanks to walled garden "app stores" and the rise of Apple. I just don't see any evidence that consumers care about FOSS or are moving to it in any way. They've even moved away from Firefox towards Chrome.
You can say the same thing about Hillary. According to recent polls, they're pretty close, and neither one of them is liked at all by the general public. There is a chance that Trump will win, and if that happens, it's the fault of the Democratic voters and the DNC for picking Hillary. They did the same stupid thing back in 1999 when they picked wooden Al Gore and his shitty neo-con running mate Joe Lieberman, and his shitty wife who tried to ban curse words in music.
I wonder if any alien life managed to evolve and create civilizations, long before it happened on Earth. We'll probably never know, since due to the planet's crust occasionally liquefying, any evidence of a long-extinct civilization would be gone by now.
You don't need to go to Mars to work on space travel technology or figuring out how to survive in space. The Moon is only 3 days away and still has plenty of interesting stuff to investigate. Have you watched "The Martian" yet? If you're going to spend any significant time on another world, you need to have some kind of habitat there. Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong, and you might need to evacuate. As that movie made painfully clear (despite its silly premise of a storm), evacuating a team of astronauts from Mars would take months, close to a year, if not longer, because it's so far away. Most likely, they'll just be dead. That's a gigantic risk to take when we have zero experience setting up permanent habitats on other worlds.. However, with the Moon, it's not that bad: if we have a big problem and need to evacuate the astronauts before sending a new team, it's no problem: the Moon is only 3 days away. Just load them into a small tin can and send them back to Earth with a small rocket. An astronaut having a medical problem on the Moon, for instance, has a pretty good chance of getting back to Earth to get medical treatment in time; an astronaut on Mars with a medical problem is toast.
Once we've figured out how to build and live in habitats on the Moon, then we can try doing that on Mars.
The Internet, by itself, is not detrimental to privacy, it's everyone trusting these giant for-profit corporations like Microsoft and Facebook and Google. If we all used phones and PCs running various Linux flavors or similar, and didn't use anything from Microsoft or Facebook at all, we wouldn't have so many problems like this.
It'd be better if they (and anyone else interested in privacy while texting) switched to Trillian. It's free, open-source, and not tied to some giant corporation that makes money by advertising and data collection.
I'd like to see these companies get sued by their customers for making unreliable machines; using Windows was their own choice, and should fall on them.
Good point. It'd be interesting though if the federal government refused, because the President sided with the city over the state. After all, riots are a rather different matter than a city refusing to enforce state laws, and then using their cops to harass and falsely arrest outsiders attempting to cut their internet service.
The county sheriff is one guy with a pistol. No, he has no power over an entire municipal police department. Even in Maricopa County (which is giant), Sheriff Joe and his deputies are a tiny number of people compared to the combined forces of Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Scottsdale, etc. And no, they don't really supercede the city cops to my knowledge, there's some kind of legal system there where the county police have jurisdiction over parts not claimed by any cities, or over cities which outsource their policing to the county (Guadalupe did that for a while because their own cops were too problematic so they disbanded them), but no, they can't just come in and start doing speed patrols and such in the cities. In the eastern states like NC (where this story takes place), counties are tiny and county sheriffs, where city cops exist, don't do much besides serve warrants.
I'm not making anything up. No, the anti-trust trial wasn't about that specific issue at all, but it's irrelevant. The anti-trust trial proved that the government is completely unwilling to rein in Microsoft's behavior, which they have a 30+ year history of (remember "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus won't run"?). So if you want to sit around and whine about how bad MS is, go ahead, but it isn't productive and it's annoying. The only rational solution, if you don't like the way they're treating you, is to vote with your feet.
As for "trolling", that's not what I'm doing; I'm giving Microsoft users a reality check. You have exactly two choices: 1) continue to use their products, and we'll see if things change for the better and MS has a change of heart and suddenly decides it wants to be nice (I think that's rather naive and stupid, considering their past behavior and also the behavior of every corporation that grows that large and powerful--Apple isn't any better these days, IBM was just as bad at their peak, etc.), or 2) you can find a better vendor.
Windows 7 came out long after their anti-trust trial where their abusive business practices were brought to light. They've been behaving badly for decades. Everyone has had more than enough time to figure this out and stop doing business with them.
Why isn't it appropriate? What are you or anyone else going to do about it? Maybe take them to court, and they'll get a tiny slap on the wrist like what happened with their infamous anti-trust case. Did you completely forget about that? As soon as Bush took office, the government just dropped it and there was no actual punishment.
If you're dumb enough to keep doing business with a company that behaves this way, that has behaved this way for decades (that case was back in 1999!), and apparently even the US Government doesn't feel like reining in, then you deserve whatever happens to you.
My lack of empathy comes from the fact that Microsoft has a history spanning 3-4 decades of being a predatory monopolist, so anyone doing business with them has had more than enough warning. No, they can't "just simply port to Linux or Mac" in a short time, but they should have made the correct decision before, which was to avoid using Windows if at all possible. Now they're stuck and they're sufferent the consequences for it, and I'm glad.
They didn't purchase licenses for Windows 10, they purchased licenses for Windows XP, 7, or 8. Nobody ever expected Microsoft to force an OS change, because they never have in the past. When Windows Vista rolled out, it was an offered upgrade for XP users, but they never strong-armed them into it. Same for when Windows 7 came out. They offered an upgrade to windows 7 from Vista, but it was voluntary, and was never forced upon the end-user.
This upgrade wasn't forced on anyone either. They allowed it to be done, and didn't opt out. Oh, the opt-out mechanism didn't work right? Or the rollback mechanism didn't work right? That must be user error... or maybe a small bug, sorry! If that's not a good enough explanation for you, too bad, good luck getting a court judgment. Suing a behemoth like MS isn't a simple or inexpensive task (unless you take it to small-claims court as at least one person has done, but if you're a big business trying to claim serious losses, that's not the right venue).
There's a difference here. With desegregation, the States weren't following *Federal* law, so of course federal troops had to be sent in.
In this hypothetical scenario, there's a city that is refusing to follow *State* law, not federal. So why would the federal government bother sending troops in to enforce a state law?
Yes, I'm sure the state would want to avoid this, but I don't think the federal government is obligated to step in here. However, now that I think about it, the states all do have National Guard units, which they'd probably call up.
Still, I do think it'd be funny to see a city openly rebel against its state over internet access, and then request federal assistance and maybe even attempt to secede and join a neighboring state. West Virginia did it, after all.
They didn't decline to use Windows in the first place. Windows Update is an integral part of the OS, and the only way to get security updates, so of course they can also use it to sneak in stuff you don't want. MS never made any promises not to do so, or to give you the freedom to pick and choose what you want; it's possible to selectively apply updates if you go to a lot of extra trouble (though now they're bundling them to make this harder), but that's not the default option. Again, if you don't like the way Microsoft treats you as a customer, stop buying their products. Or continue spending all your time and effort trying to work around and deal with all the issues they cause.
Because they have a military port there, you idiot. Try reading before you post. Military ports aren't useful when a country is embroiled in a civil war.
If the city police are united, the state troopers are the only ones who can do anything. County sheriffs have no power at all. And most states don't have that many state policepeople.
So again, I ask: who's going to jail the arresting officer?
This isn't just about the US, it's about *any* country: who's going to declare *war* on a country for not taking in refugees? How is that even productive? Because some country won't take in a few hundred thousand refugees, you're going to invade, wreck the economy, create a humanitarian disaster, and create a few million more refugees? That doesn't even make sense. You can't *force* a country to take in refugees.
No, you are completely wrong here.
First off, Windows is marketed as a business tool, and MS has spent millions in advertising to convince the business world that Windows is reliable and well supported.
Yes, and they lied. GM and Chrysler have been trying to tell me their cars are reliable for decades, and they lied too. Caveat emptor.
Mission critical safety applications, where there is risk of great bodily harm or death
You've never heard of factory machines killing people or hacking their limbs off? It's not quite as risky as aviation stuff, but there's still a high degree of risk with factory machinery.
This would be prohibitively expensive for most industrial automation applications
There's lots of RTOSes out there that don't cost significantly more than Windows. And if you really need graphics, QNX has been doing that for ages; they even use them in Fords now for the infotainment. Windows is the absolute worst choice here. You can even run Linux; it's free and works far better for realtime tasks that Windows. You don't have to engineer those machines to the degree that you do mission-critical avionics, but that doesn't mean you have to use the absolute biggest POS OS available either.
Microsoft marketed and sold Windows as a business OS, and they marketed it with the expectation of continuous reliability and security updates until the stated end of support/end of life. They then deceptively used the Windows update pathway to force a new, incompatible OS with spyware, paid ads and forced updates on their paying customers. If that results in business losses, I am pretty sure that even a jury of non-technical people can follow the logical liability train back to MS and award damages.
Good luck with that. MS has lots of money for lawyers. The US government couldn't even do anything to them in the infamous antitrust trial. This should serve as a lesson to anyone that builds Windows into their products, or even uses it. I've been telling people for almost 2 decades that MS was a bad company to do business with, so I don't have one iota of sympathy for anyone who's getting burned by their business practices now.
You're confusing Trump with Hillary. Hillary is the establishment candidate who's exactly like Bush, and who wants to continue military interventionism in that way.
Trump will likely just go along with Russia. What power vacuum are you talking about? When ISIS is wiped out in Syria, Assad will take over that territory and be closer to total victory. In case you forgot, before Syria's civil war, Assad was in power and there was no power vacuum, and they had peace. Sure, it sucked if you were opposed to the government, but he kept a lid on the place. It's the US that creates these power vacuums by creating democratic governments that simply don't work in those cultures.
This sounds like BS to me. Most modern cars have engines that are so quiet that at higher speeds, you'll only hear the wind noise and tire noise if you're outside the vehicle. The tire noise is the biggest factor these days, not the engine, unless you have some big diesel engine or you've modified the exhaust.
It's only at low speeds (like in residential areas, 30mph and below) where you'll really notice the missing engine note on an EV.
I fail to see the problem. Your business got extra work and revenue thanks to the idiot treasurer selecting this vendor that has a long track record of shoddy products and poor customer service.
And yet somehow Microsoft did not get the message, or simply didn't care to check with all OEM databases for compatibility.
Why should they bother? If someone gets burned by their shoddy work, like your treasurer, what are they going to do about it? Are they going to switch to another vendor? Didn't think so. Microsoft is doing the right thing by not wasting employee time checking things like this, or doing other basic QA, and just pushing Windows 10 out everywhere and letting customers deal with the ensuing problems themselves; this increases their profits, which is good for the company and its shareholders.
Perhaps it's the manufacturers and the owners fault for using/requesting Windows in the first place
Exactly.
but Microsoft should definitely be liable for this.
No, it shouldn't. If you're dumb enough to design an obviously-defective software product into your mega-$$$ industrial machine, then *you* should be liable. The makers of these machines should be liable for this, not MS. They've been building windows into these machines for a couple decades now, stupidly, and they need to suffer the consequences. Windows was never the right tool for the job.
If some avionics company stupidly decided to use Windows for the avionics on a passenger jet, and the jet crashed because of a Windows 10 update, would you blame MS or the avionics company? I'd blame the avionics company. Windows was never designed for any kind of safety-critical application, or any kind of application at all where reliability is required.
To my amusement in front of me) and I've seen a CNC machine just stop working requiring a complete software overhaul because of the Windows 10 upgrade
My home-built CNC machine doesn't have this problem; it runs on Debian.
Businesses that lost revenue due to shady Windows 10 upgrade practices should most definitely be compensated for said lost revenue.
No, they shouldn't. If they don't like Microsoft's business practices, then they should stop using Microsoft products. Otherwise, they should shut up and stop complaining.
Or ya know.. Microsoft could just stop aggressive malware tactics that forced Windows 10 onto their customers.
Why should they? They can run their company however they want. If you don't like it, don't buy from them any more.
What are you going to do if they don't stop their aggressive malware tactics anyway? File a complaint?