So what really pissed you off about it? I mean I have kde3.5.10, kde4.2, and e17 installed.
I'm not pissed at all. I read the fine print and decided to wait.:-)
KDE could have made many adopters happy if they simply said "4.0 means API stable, but it is still not for doing 'real work.'"
That's pretty much what they did tell people (if some of these comments are to be believed). The observation that started this thread was that it didn't matter: the ".0" tells people that it's pretty much ready for real work regardless of any disclaimers you may have in your change list. Whether that's fair or not is uninteresting (unless you're trying to point the finger of blame). Communication is not about what's fair, it's about what's effective, and sometime something as trivial as a version number sends a big message. Trying to blame the general public is ineffective because it won't change anything.
Ignorance is still no defense. If that little sign says your car will be towed if you park there, but you don't see it; your car will still be towed. If you don't read the fine print in this world you will waste alot of time and money.
And you will also waste lots of time and money if you don't communicate effectively. KDE has a massive PR problem that might have been avoided with a different version number. Any developer who's been around the block a few times knows that you've got to aggressively and realistically manage perceptions about what your software will do (and how mature it is).
Another key lesson here is that people don't read details, especially when communicating with a broad audience. That's why--to return to the excruciatingly overused car analogy--municipalities and states have specific rules governing the font size, reflectivity, and placement of a tow-away sign.
DRM does not remove any control from you. None whatsoever.
Incorrect: without widespread DRM deployment, media companies would not have the market reality they need to release DRM'ed works. There's your loss of control.
In short, your email sucked if the behavior you wanted was a restart shutdown EVERY night. It should have read something like, "From this point forward we are changing the recommended daily restart procedure to a requirement." Good communication is more than just saying something. It is about saying the right thing to get the appropriate response. In your case, you didn't actually ask for what you wanted.
Amen! I would lead with:
"Restart every night to protect your computer."
Put your request/demand/question at the top of the email, then followup with details about what you want and why you want it. Make it terse, so people can read it fast (in Outlook AutoPreview, even). Bake an even terser version into the subject line ("Restart Every Night"). This lets you get your point across before the reader can hit the delete key.
Incidentally, most readers aren't interested in why you want something or the idiot's guide to doing it (if it's a known operation like "restart"). You need these details (for a big audience), but your message penetration will be lower if you lead off with them. Just tell people what you need of them. Other low priority information includes: how the decision was reached, what policy enforces it, and what vague alternatives might be hand-wavingly considered in the future. Never include grovelling and never lord it over your users: you are speaking professional to professional.
Pro tip: if there's an intrinsic motivation for your reader, mention it second (after your request but before the details). Saying "to protect your computer" speaks to the typical office worker's needs waaaaaaay faster than "Microsoft has issued a critical security patch that corrects a vulnerability problem with Internet Explorer." I can live for a few hours without IE, but I can't do anything if my workstation isn't running. On the other hand, if there's no motivation for the reader (or if it's trivial, or if it's hard to understand, or if it's a threat of punishment), you're better off burying these details in your verbiage.
Check the statistics on charitable giving to see what I mean.
I'm curious: are there statistics that compensate for population size and wealth? Are there stats that separate ideological and cultural giving from actually-helping-people giving?
I remember FOX reporting that Americans donated more money per capita than European nations, neglecting to mention that they donated less per capita relative to their wealth. A guy named Jesus warned about this type of stastical manipulation.
Nevertheless, it's silly to use charitable giving as a proxy for discussing the effectiveness of political philosophies and policies. Both left and right have generated lots of dumb ideas, and underneath it all are political power structures that don't really care about you.
Somewhere someone got fucking retarded and used the term DRM as their fighting words without actually doing any research. All DRM is, really, is permissions. It is CHMOD... It is a password... It is a limited user account. It is spatial security. Copy protection is one aspect of DRM. DRM != Copy Protection regardless of what the pundits tell you.
Are we talking about the technology of DRM, or are we talking about the social and market implications of people being able to arbitrarily control property after they have sold it to someone else? You can get wrapped up arguing that "DRM is just another security technology" and miss seeing the "DRM trend" that folks are actually worried about. Besides copy protection, DRM is being used to generate price discrimination (see DVD region-encoding), vendor lock-in (iPod music purchases), and fiat monopolies (iPhone apps).
Why does this raise any questions about creationism? To the best of my knowledge, there are essentially no creationists who argue that life was created by humans or any other intelligent organisms.
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian school. We were taught that evolution was false because: (1) cell theory means ALL cells came from other living cells ("God" was a valid exception, apparently, while abiogenesis wasn't); and (2) life is so unbelievably complex that humans have not even been able to recreate it in a lab--so it MUST require a God. A solid counterexample would limit these arguments and prove that godlike intelligence is not a prerequisite for life.
I think it would also help build better intuitions about how life and similarly complex phenomenon work. Consider the philosophy of vitalism, for example, which regards life as being magically different from non-life in some way that transcends pedestrian physics. Although science disregarded this long ago, the human intuition is still there, and non-scientific arguments can still play on it to support religious preconceptions. A "life-from-scratch" recipe would be useful in demonstrating the merits of emergent behavior over vitalism so that people realize... hey yeah, life is special, but it's special due to certain properties of internal organization, not some unfathomable magic.
Why does this matter? Most people don't know the academic terms, but everybody has intuitions about these things, and these intuitions influence their acceptance of scientific advances and new medical technology, which in turn influences the wellbeing of humanity.
when did having options become a bad thing for a developer? Having several alternative and more or less equally worthy options for implementation means that nobody owns the platform you're developing for.
Not to nitpick, but multiple options for the same need also dilutes developer expertise. It means having less google results for a particular technology when you run into a problem with it, as well as less support tools or API's that build on top of that technology. Horizontal diversification (multiple tools to address the same need) consumes resources that could be spent on vertical diversification (tools to address different needs that share the same underlying platform).
Free software often can circumvent the corporate BS associated with spending money.
And the BS involving legal/licensing (6 week minimum in my company). And the BS involving layers upon layers of business cases and needs analysis. If the commercial world could standardize some of this (the license agreement broilerplate, for instance), they could better compete against open source...
This guy stole bandwidth, and while it is an intangible thing, ultimately the total cost of his crap cost people FAR more than the value of the crap you could carry out of a pawn shop.
Stealing bandwidth isn't the issue... many spammers have paid for their bandwidth. The crime was committing a denial-of-service attack against a communications meaning, thus interfering with people's ability to communicate efficiently.
"First of all, I'm an agnostic leaning towards atheism." Do you ->have- a belief in gods? If no, you're an atheist. Agnostic is not atheist-lite, it's not a spectrum.
Your technical distinction between the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" do not reflect the general understanding of the population and includes a large number of epistimological assumptions. This is a problem because you've actively decided not to understand what the guy was saying and instead wasted breath trying to pigeonhole him into your specific terminology. For the rest of us, "agnostic leaning towards atheism" does indeed refer to some region of that nebulous spectrum (one might say "continuum" or "n-space") of ideas about what's going on with this world.
One cannot know that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 190 degrees.
Once a belief system concludes that knowledge is impossible, it ceases to be relevant. Besides, the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees.
The biggest problem I saw--aside from a rambling plot line that killed franchise characters at random--is that it lacked the Batman setting. For instance, the "General Hospital" was a mediocre low-rise in some office park, not a towering black monolith drenched in the glory and decadence of a thickly urban environment. Similarly, whoever conceived of Wayne Tower as your run-of-the-mill dainty standalone bank skyscraper did not see the last movie. And when do we come closest to the Gotham ambiance? When our hero visits Hong Kong.
Other location elements--such as the bat cave and Wayne manor--were also missing. Perhaps they had some misguided idea that Batman needed to be pulled into our exact time and place (like Spiderman) instead of the shadowy parallel universe he has traditionally inhabited, because they seemed content to inject a lot of cultural and political references as well (including the new emphasis on endorsing vigilantism).
If you want the standardization to go well, make sure the build tools are standardized. Once anyone can build the project (IDE or no), it won't matter what the "standard" IDE is.
You might want to take a look at modern IDE's: they're a lot more than just glorified text editors now, and even using two IDE's that congruently support the same build chain, you'll still encounter a host of incompatibilities on everything from file layout philosophy to designer support to plugins to licensing to packaging... all of which are unnecessary in a corporate environment where you can pick one good IDE and standardize on it.
If a defense of "I asked the router for entry and it granted me entry" is valid, then using social engineering to get someone's password and then entering the password would also be valid.
No, because you had to defraud someone to get the social engineering to work.
If I don't put a fence with a locked gate on my yard, am I granting permission for anyone to come hang out in my yard anytime they want?
Why does everyone want to complicate this? Open WAP==free for respectful public use; Close WAP==public use prohibited. Simple. Why make this a legal problem when a WAP owner can specify for themselves open or close? I want to be able to do either with my WAP, and I want mobile appliances to be able to communicate with whatever open WAP they can see without fear that some overzealous DA is going to jail a productive member of society on a technicality.
It'll be ready when it's ready.... Trying to alter this basic truth results in death marches, bad, bug-ridden software, disaffected developers, dissatisfied users, and "we'll fix that in the next release" bullsh*t.
If you're landscaping your yard, you can take as long as you want and spend as much money as you want. If someone else is landscaping your yard, you become much more interested in how long it will take and how much it will cost: giving them your credit card and letting them keep a running tab is not an option.
Similarly, if you're doing leisure or volunteering programming, you can tell the world "It'll be ready when it's ready." Much of Open Source falls under this umbrella. Most of the business world does not. The professional programmer enforces up-front and on-going trade-offs between features, quality, and schedule risk. When they can't or won't (sometimes due to politics), then you get the bad stuff you mention. One way or another though, schedules are a business necessity.
I suspect that, even for volunteer programming, schedules can be useful. Deadlines force you to think about where you want to be by the time the deadline rolls around. They give you a goal. They force you to cut unneeded features and focus on the core strengths/concepts of your product.
Likewise, the lack of a schedule--especially the "It'll be ready when it's ready." attitude--can be severely damaging. If you haven't hammered out a detailed plan of what you want to accomplish and you've left it all open-ended, you can get lost spending lots of time choosing a programming language or gold-plating a feature that nobody will use. Is this why there are so many defunct OSS projects on SourceForge? I bet it's part of the reason... most software their has no business driver to give them momentum.
My next project was a Z80 based single board computer on 160x100mm (Eurocard). It has a CTC, PIO, real time clock, paged memory, 512k of flash memory and 32k of RAM.
Sweet... imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
(*ducks*)
An image captcha is designed to require a mixture of perception and thought, but an audio one has to rely on pure perception, because it's temporary.
I think your explanation is missing something, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that audio captcha are simpler to process because (1) researches can't pump as much information thru the ears as they can thru the eyes [sensorary bandwidth is different] and (2) there's not a whole lot we can do to obfuscate a sound stream [as opposed to an image which can have lots of unused parts where we can throw whatever noise we want to].
Note that you could make audio captcha require thought. Someone else mentioned asking questions that require specific answers, but that might be difficult to automate: you would need a corpus with thousands of questions that require one-word answers. Perhaps the best way to do that would be to get your hands on a database of crossword puzzles and randomly generate questions like "3 letter word for pet, beginning with 'C'". Exclude words that don't appear in a modestly-sized dictionary, exclude certain obscure words that appear in crosswords way more than normal English (like "adit"--a mine entrance), and make it easy for people to get a new clue if they're having trouble guessing the current one.
At SiteTruth, we consider the low-end certs worthless.
But the self-signed cert you have for your own domain is laudable? Sheesh... it's even expired, not that you'd know since your "site verification site" doesn't even take the most basic precaution of defaulting to https.
Every time anyone raises a question like this, someone trots out robots.txt as if it is some sort of magic solution to all the potential problems. It is not.
Robots.txt defines the difference between good bots and bad bots. The fact that it's voluntary is not pertinent when you're talking about an ethical standard: all ethical standard are "voluntary". The fact that it's opt-out is not a significant problem when all you have to do is add two lines to a text file. TWO LINES!
Here are some random facts you may find pertinent to your evaluation of this issue:
The WWW was originally created on the assumption that bots would crawl it. This is reflected in the HTTP verb semantics as well as HTML itself (all those H1, H2, H3 stuff was so that automated indices could be built).
In Blake vs. Google, Blake sued Google for crawling his site. The courts found Blake to be a dumbass for not using robots.txt.
If Google were to purposefully ignore robots.txt, it would come back to haunt them socially and legally.
Finally, your post mentions no alternatives to robots.txt. What exactly are you advocating? Please make sure that you propose a workable solution with an advantage that outweighs its implementation cost (you'll probably need an order-of-magnitude gain to society to make this happen). Please provide a transition plan, especially if your solution is opt-in. Please describe the expected impact on the overall usability of the web and an estimate of how many sites would disappear from search engines as a result of your change.
"It's a symptom of the IT organization being unable to meet or even understand the needs of its customers," he says. "Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening."
I don't think that's true. Lots of people just want to screw around with things and get an ego boost out of flouting authority or trying to show-up the IT staff.
No, it's very true I work in a large (1000+ employees) IT organization. I've seen the rogue VB programs, the 80MB spreadsheets, the spaghetti networks of interlinked access databases. I'm sure there are some folks who "just want to screw around", but everyone I have met was trying to meet a business need that we were not fast enough and knowledgeable enough to accommodate.
The thing is, large IT organizations have trouble moving fast. We have to think about a lot of concerns (standardization, SOX-compliance, change management, licensing, overall cost) that are unrelated to the core business need. Not to mention actually/understanding/ the business need well enough to find a good solution for it.
It's somewhat unfair to judge Microsoft too harshly for wanting to game the system any way they could.
The problem is with the part "any way they could": the last time I checked, bribery, corruption, and asshattery were generally condemnable actions. That the activities were directed toward an organization that (in theory) stands for engineering rigor, cooperation, and objectivity makes them especially despicable. Are you seriously suggesting that this should not be a substantial blemish on Microsoft's reputation?
If "any way one can" is a valid means of deflecting criticism, than perhaps I should cut in front of you at the supermarket checkout, shovel all the cookies onto my plate at your house party, and flirt up your girlfriend when she looks down. No: the truth is, society only works because people act with respect and trust often enough to keep it working. When they don't, we punish them first with social condemnation. All the downstream consequences--loss of sales, ostracization, legal prosecution, antitrust actions--flow from that.
Educate yourself. If you dislike DRM, don't buy from the content creators which put DRM in their content. That has nothing to do with an Operating System.
Most users won't, that's the point: by incorporating DRM into a mainstream operating system, Microsoft is encouraging mass acceptance of a technology that moves control out of your hands and into those of governments and corporations. By installing Vista, an unknowing public is ceding yet another portion of their sovereignty to institutions... and human institutions have a spotty record of remaining humane once they have all the control.
So... you may disagree and have this pollyanna don't-buy-it-if-you-don't-support-it attitude, but some of worry about the future of humanity and can legitimately call Microsoft on these shenanigans.
Clearly the guy who invented holding down the Caps Lock key and typing "open firefox" to start firefox (real example from their home page) is a UI genius.
I think a better example would be Raskin's suggestion that users of a system be assigned unique passwords so they can login without having to type their username. It simplifies the login a little bit, but any usability gains are lost when the user cannot set their own password. Raskin seems to overvalue the flow of a user's experience, but I guess he's worth reading some since most programmers undervalue that flow.
I'm pretty sure building a new coal or natural gas isn't pocket change, either... With a 8-10X reduction in cost of production, I think you'll make up a few hundred million well before the lifespan of the powerplant expires.
No, nuclear is capital-intensive compared to fossil. Most studies I see show coal having a "slight" advantage overall, but there are a lot of factors that go into determining what's best for a specific region.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not pissed at all. I read the fine print and decided to wait. :-)
That's pretty much what they did tell people (if some of these comments are to be believed). The observation that started this thread was that it didn't matter: the ".0" tells people that it's pretty much ready for real work regardless of any disclaimers you may have in your change list. Whether that's fair or not is uninteresting (unless you're trying to point the finger of blame). Communication is not about what's fair, it's about what's effective, and sometime something as trivial as a version number sends a big message. Trying to blame the general public is ineffective because it won't change anything.
And you will also waste lots of time and money if you don't communicate effectively. KDE has a massive PR problem that might have been avoided with a different version number. Any developer who's been around the block a few times knows that you've got to aggressively and realistically manage perceptions about what your software will do (and how mature it is).
Another key lesson here is that people don't read details, especially when communicating with a broad audience. That's why--to return to the excruciatingly overused car analogy--municipalities and states have specific rules governing the font size, reflectivity, and placement of a tow-away sign.
Incorrect: without widespread DRM deployment, media companies would not have the market reality they need to release DRM'ed works. There's your loss of control.
Amen! I would lead with:
"Restart every night to protect your computer."
Put your request/demand/question at the top of the email, then followup with details about what you want and why you want it. Make it terse, so people can read it fast (in Outlook AutoPreview, even). Bake an even terser version into the subject line ("Restart Every Night"). This lets you get your point across before the reader can hit the delete key.
Incidentally, most readers aren't interested in why you want something or the idiot's guide to doing it (if it's a known operation like "restart"). You need these details (for a big audience), but your message penetration will be lower if you lead off with them. Just tell people what you need of them. Other low priority information includes: how the decision was reached, what policy enforces it, and what vague alternatives might be hand-wavingly considered in the future. Never include grovelling and never lord it over your users: you are speaking professional to professional.
Pro tip: if there's an intrinsic motivation for your reader, mention it second (after your request but before the details). Saying "to protect your computer" speaks to the typical office worker's needs waaaaaaay faster than "Microsoft has issued a critical security patch that corrects a vulnerability problem with Internet Explorer." I can live for a few hours without IE, but I can't do anything if my workstation isn't running. On the other hand, if there's no motivation for the reader (or if it's trivial, or if it's hard to understand, or if it's a threat of punishment), you're better off burying these details in your verbiage.
I'm curious: are there statistics that compensate for population size and wealth? Are there stats that separate ideological and cultural giving from actually-helping-people giving?
I remember FOX reporting that Americans donated more money per capita than European nations, neglecting to mention that they donated less per capita relative to their wealth. A guy named Jesus warned about this type of stastical manipulation.
Nevertheless, it's silly to use charitable giving as a proxy for discussing the effectiveness of political philosophies and policies. Both left and right have generated lots of dumb ideas, and underneath it all are political power structures that don't really care about you.
Are we talking about the technology of DRM, or are we talking about the social and market implications of people being able to arbitrarily control property after they have sold it to someone else? You can get wrapped up arguing that "DRM is just another security technology" and miss seeing the "DRM trend" that folks are actually worried about. Besides copy protection, DRM is being used to generate price discrimination (see DVD region-encoding), vendor lock-in (iPod music purchases), and fiat monopolies (iPhone apps).
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian school. We were taught that evolution was false because: (1) cell theory means ALL cells came from other living cells ("God" was a valid exception, apparently, while abiogenesis wasn't); and (2) life is so unbelievably complex that humans have not even been able to recreate it in a lab--so it MUST require a God. A solid counterexample would limit these arguments and prove that godlike intelligence is not a prerequisite for life.
I think it would also help build better intuitions about how life and similarly complex phenomenon work. Consider the philosophy of vitalism, for example, which regards life as being magically different from non-life in some way that transcends pedestrian physics. Although science disregarded this long ago, the human intuition is still there, and non-scientific arguments can still play on it to support religious preconceptions. A "life-from-scratch" recipe would be useful in demonstrating the merits of emergent behavior over vitalism so that people realize... hey yeah, life is special, but it's special due to certain properties of internal organization, not some unfathomable magic.
Why does this matter? Most people don't know the academic terms, but everybody has intuitions about these things, and these intuitions influence their acceptance of scientific advances and new medical technology, which in turn influences the wellbeing of humanity.
Not to nitpick, but multiple options for the same need also dilutes developer expertise. It means having less google results for a particular technology when you run into a problem with it, as well as less support tools or API's that build on top of that technology. Horizontal diversification (multiple tools to address the same need) consumes resources that could be spent on vertical diversification (tools to address different needs that share the same underlying platform).
And the BS involving legal/licensing (6 week minimum in my company). And the BS involving layers upon layers of business cases and needs analysis. If the commercial world could standardize some of this (the license agreement broilerplate, for instance), they could better compete against open source...
Stealing bandwidth isn't the issue... many spammers have paid for their bandwidth. The crime was committing a denial-of-service attack against a communications meaning, thus interfering with people's ability to communicate efficiently.
Your technical distinction between the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" do not reflect the general understanding of the population and includes a large number of epistimological assumptions. This is a problem because you've actively decided not to understand what the guy was saying and instead wasted breath trying to pigeonhole him into your specific terminology. For the rest of us, "agnostic leaning towards atheism" does indeed refer to some region of that nebulous spectrum (one might say "continuum" or "n-space") of ideas about what's going on with this world.
Once a belief system concludes that knowledge is impossible, it ceases to be relevant. Besides, the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees.
The biggest problem I saw--aside from a rambling plot line that killed franchise characters at random--is that it lacked the Batman setting. For instance, the "General Hospital" was a mediocre low-rise in some office park, not a towering black monolith drenched in the glory and decadence of a thickly urban environment. Similarly, whoever conceived of Wayne Tower as your run-of-the-mill dainty standalone bank skyscraper did not see the last movie. And when do we come closest to the Gotham ambiance? When our hero visits Hong Kong.
Other location elements--such as the bat cave and Wayne manor--were also missing. Perhaps they had some misguided idea that Batman needed to be pulled into our exact time and place (like Spiderman) instead of the shadowy parallel universe he has traditionally inhabited, because they seemed content to inject a lot of cultural and political references as well (including the new emphasis on endorsing vigilantism).
You might want to take a look at modern IDE's: they're a lot more than just glorified text editors now, and even using two IDE's that congruently support the same build chain, you'll still encounter a host of incompatibilities on everything from file layout philosophy to designer support to plugins to licensing to packaging... all of which are unnecessary in a corporate environment where you can pick one good IDE and standardize on it.
Similarly, if you're doing leisure or volunteering programming, you can tell the world "It'll be ready when it's ready." Much of Open Source falls under this umbrella. Most of the business world does not. The professional programmer enforces up-front and on-going trade-offs between features, quality, and schedule risk. When they can't or won't (sometimes due to politics), then you get the bad stuff you mention. One way or another though, schedules are a business necessity.
I suspect that, even for volunteer programming, schedules can be useful. Deadlines force you to think about where you want to be by the time the deadline rolls around. They give you a goal. They force you to cut unneeded features and focus on the core strengths/concepts of your product.
Likewise, the lack of a schedule--especially the "It'll be ready when it's ready." attitude--can be severely damaging. If you haven't hammered out a detailed plan of what you want to accomplish and you've left it all open-ended, you can get lost spending lots of time choosing a programming language or gold-plating a feature that nobody will use. Is this why there are so many defunct OSS projects on SourceForge? I bet it's part of the reason... most software their has no business driver to give them momentum.
(*ducks*)
Note that you could make audio captcha require thought. Someone else mentioned asking questions that require specific answers, but that might be difficult to automate: you would need a corpus with thousands of questions that require one-word answers. Perhaps the best way to do that would be to get your hands on a database of crossword puzzles and randomly generate questions like "3 letter word for pet, beginning with 'C'". Exclude words that don't appear in a modestly-sized dictionary, exclude certain obscure words that appear in crosswords way more than normal English (like "adit"--a mine entrance), and make it easy for people to get a new clue if they're having trouble guessing the current one.
Here are some random facts you may find pertinent to your evaluation of this issue:
- The WWW was originally created on the assumption that bots would crawl it. This is reflected in the HTTP verb semantics as well as HTML itself (all those H1, H2, H3 stuff was so that automated indices could be built).
- In Blake vs. Google, Blake sued Google for crawling his site. The courts found Blake to be a dumbass for not using robots.txt.
- If Google were to purposefully ignore robots.txt, it would come back to haunt them socially and legally.
Finally, your post mentions no alternatives to robots.txt. What exactly are you advocating? Please make sure that you propose a workable solution with an advantage that outweighs its implementation cost (you'll probably need an order-of-magnitude gain to society to make this happen). Please provide a transition plan, especially if your solution is opt-in. Please describe the expected impact on the overall usability of the web and an estimate of how many sites would disappear from search engines as a result of your change.The thing is, large IT organizations have trouble moving fast. We have to think about a lot of concerns (standardization, SOX-compliance, change management, licensing, overall cost) that are unrelated to the core business need. Not to mention actually
If "any way one can" is a valid means of deflecting criticism, than perhaps I should cut in front of you at the supermarket checkout, shovel all the cookies onto my plate at your house party, and flirt up your girlfriend when she looks down. No: the truth is, society only works because people act with respect and trust often enough to keep it working. When they don't, we punish them first with social condemnation. All the downstream consequences--loss of sales, ostracization, legal prosecution, antitrust actions--flow from that.
So... you may disagree and have this pollyanna don't-buy-it-if-you-don't-support-it attitude, but some of worry about the future of humanity and can legitimately call Microsoft on these shenanigans.
You may be interested in this summary of Fossil vs Nuclear cost studies, among others.