I have had similar experiences with other manufacturers as well. I bought myself a decent (as in approx US$500) scanner, after having spent about an hour working out whether or not it works with Linux. Since I only use Linux on my work computers, this is quite important to me. And the scanner I was investigating was claimed to work under Linux, so I bought it.

Once I got the thing running, I was grossly disappointed by the scanner software: it looks and behaves as if it had been designed and written by a bunch of students who are desperate to turn in their final assignment before graduating! Such a simple thing as marking on a prescan what areas I am interested in takes a solid minute!
I got so fed up with the crappy software from Epson that I finally got myself a computer with W10 on it, so I could use the miles better software provided for that platform. The sad thing is that the difference doesn't really have to be astronomical, if the people doing the job know what they are up to.

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Prescan: this is (in my view) a fundamental function of every scanner designed for scanning things on paper. You click a button on the screen, the scanner does a quick low-quality scan of the entire area it can scan and you get presented with the result. On this, you can then mark out the area(s) you want scanned, instead of having to scan the entire area in high quality. Since this may vary with every document you scan, it has to be something done easily and in little time.

Not only that, but if done properly, you could leave traces of somebody else's DNA on the weapons used to commit murder. If the person can't prove they were somewhere else, very far away from the scene of the murder, they are likely to get sentenced for it.

It could still be justice, but the fines for the corporation (including subsidiaries and parent companies) would have to be enormously much larger than they seem to be today. For each dollar in fines for an individual, the fine for a corporation would have to be thousands. And the the company or it's parent can't (or won't!) pay, then seize all material and immaterial possessions the guilty party has, and sell it at auction to raise funds for the fines.

And as for the parent company, this would include all parent companies, no matter how far up the ladder you have to go.

As I remember the episode where Mythbusters tested this, their main criticism was that the reflected sun beams need to be focused on the boat the Greeks want to set on fire for a completely impractical amount of time. While it could still be done, under ideal conditions, once the war is on this weapon is useless: no enemy boat is going to stay still enough for the long time (several minutes) needed to even start making the ship timbers start smouldering.

And that is more or less why I think we are unlikely to see laser weapons any time soon: they have to be focused on their target (and on the same spot!) for so long that it becomes highly impractical. If it were up to me, I would try developing a faster gatling gun, with bullets that can accelerate even after leaving the barrel of the gun.

Although I agree with you, I can easily see a few points that any hardware manufacturer would like with using Windows instead of Linux:
- one single, easily identifiable, company to deal with when it comes to issues related to the OS
- one single, easily identifiable, company to deal with when it comes to documentation about the OS
- the risk that someone suddenly drags you to court for something you might or might not have done is, in the eyes of the corporate lawyers, lower. This assessment may or may not be correct, but if the lawyers say "Avoid FOSS" that is what the developers will be told to do
- no need to worry, correctly or not, about possibly having to reveal your source code
- your developers only know Windows

There may well be other things that make the POS manufacturer choose Windows over anything else.

I had some problems with the combination of an earlier laptop and Linux, but there was a solution to it. But that was over ten years ago, and today I find that all my hardware works without a problem with Linux. The only disappointment I have come across is my flatbed scanner: it works with Linux, but the scanner software from Epson looks like it is the result of having a bunch of IT students writing it, in under one term... But that is hardly something I can attribute to Linux itself, it's a problem with Epson.

FB has a problem when it comes to "doing business" with people in the EU: they have a large amount of servers in the EU. Thus they might want to follow the laws of the country/-ies these servers are located in. If they got rid of these servers, FB would have a lot more room to manoeuvre. But that would obviously give them other kinds of problems.

Source: https://www-ncc-se.translate.g...
And FYI: the city in the liked article is Luleå, in the north of Sweden

More or less my thought exactly: anybody selling things via apps on iPhone could use the same words against Apple themselves, just alter the company names and you are good to go...

I can see one reason, but I don't know if it applies: there is a good reason to move system-wide settings to something only the system administrator can change, and leave the user-specific settings somewhere so the user can change them. This is the way things work on my Linux system: as a regular user, I can change things that affect only me, but nothing that affects the entire system and all other users. In the case of my own laptop, there are no other users, but the division of power still works very well.

Personally, I couldn't wait till it asks me "It looks like you are trying to install Linux on your computer. Would you like some help with that?"

What little I remember of the original Clippy was that I turned it off as fast as I could. And since 2002 or so, I have used Linux as the only OS on my "productivity" computers. Any time I sit down with a friends computer with Windows, I feel my productivity declines by orders of magnitude.

I have found a third reason to pirate things: there is no legal way to pa for what you want.


A few years ago I discovered a for me new artist, that had already been dead for 5-20 years. I wanted this artist's music, and was prepared to pay for it. But no matter where I looked, it could not find it. Except of course on the bay of pirates. So of course I "pirated" the music, and I don't feel bad about it at all.

And it would take the Israeli government about 20 seconds to come up with a solution: give everybody working there new passports with fake names. At least the people who are visible outwards, like CEO and so on.

Unfortunately not, although it would be a logical conclusion. I can't remember the exact limits set in law, but if you buy a CD you are allowed to make copies of it for your family and close friends. In all this would be, generally, less than ten people. But the people you make copies for are not allowed to make copies for their family/friends.

Further, there is some limit that I can't remember about what kind of source you are allowed to copy. I may be wrong, but I think that you are not allowed to copy streaming media (eg Spotify and Youtube). In any case, the source you make copies of has to be legally purchased, not a copy somebody else has made.

I haven't RTFAd, but get the impression that Sweden (where I live) already has a similar system: a small part of the price you pay for any medium on which you can store music (see foot note) goes to some sot of private organisation that distributes this money to various people. But the public, who pay the money, has no way of finding out how this money is distributed, or what guidelines (if there are any!) are used to determine what artist/composer gets how much money.

Back in the day when music was distributed on tape or vinyl, it made a bit of sense: you would buy an album, and record it for your friends. This was legal (at least in Sweden, and only for family and close friends), and technically impossible to stop. There was not really any big desire to make second generation copies, because of the inevitable loss of quality involved with each new generation of copies. In these days, I didn't mind that some of my money anded up in the pockets of artists/composers, since I was copying the result of their work.

But today things have changed a lot: many people just stream their music, from eg Youtube or Spotify. In the case of Spotify, they pay for it, and some of this money is payed to the record companies (who hold the right to the recorded music). Thus, people who only stream the music they listen to, would end up paying twice for the music: once by subscribing to Spotify and once by buying something with this fee on it. I don't think that anybody should get payed twice for the same piece of work.

And not only that, but there is another aspect to it. Essentially everything we create today is created in a digital format. I happen to be an amateur photographer, and have some 35K pictures stored on my hard drives, that I have bought over the years. And for every hard drive I buy, Swedish artists/composers get some of my money. Why should others (other than those involved in manufacturing, transporting and selling the HD) profit from me desire to not loose any pictures? And the same can be asked about anybody who made backup copies of their own writing: when they buy a USB memory to make copies of it, some of the price they pay goes to Swedish artists/composers, who have nothing to do with the writing!





Footnote:
media that come with this "music fee" include, but is not limited to:
- recordable CDs
- recordable DVDs
- USB memory
- hard drives
- memory cards for cameras
- mobile phones
- blank cassette tape

As I understand things, if you are a US citizen, the federal government expects you to pay some tax on your income. And dropping your US citizenship to avoid this taxation is apparently a reason to declare your not-a-US-citizen-anymore-status to be voided, thereby making you a US citizen again, and therefore liable for taxes.


Reservation: I am not a US citizen and do not live in the USA. The above is what I have understood from talking to people who are US citizens.