The bugs exist for a reason. If it's not broken now why buy the new version?

They might buy them to ensure they have enough plastic for more purchases.

This is a terrifically respectful response to a troll and I have to admit I always love it when I see this kind of thing on Slashdot. Definitely friending you because of this.

We do have all our eggs in one basket and meaningless acts like climbing a mountain won't save the human race from global warming, meteors, and the greed of our fellow human beings. Scuba diving and sailing and leisure activities in our global water supply are part in parcel of aquatic pollution as we litter huge continents of filth into the center of oceans under the premise of "unseen is okay".

The idiots, I mean the real idiots, are the people who encourage others to get the most of out life and really enjoy it to the fullest without any responsibility for helping our species to thrive. Because soon, and in contrast between the lifespan of Earth, we will not be able to sustain life on Earth. If you wanted to consider the timeline, we are actually within the last five minutes of Earth's life... like if Earth was your grandfather and he was lying down in his deathbed with cancer and he was really struggling to breathe... the way human beings are treating Earth right now is just as if we took a knife and drove it through his heart as he begged us to stop.

After you.

A scrap of funding for such a vital tool for human survival. Is it that our technology could never allow us to escape the confines of Earth, or is it that the government would rather lock horns with rivals on a pebble in a sea of pebbles? KUNG KUNG KUNG...

Oligarchies are a funny animal. If you are 99% of the people you do anything like NSA does and you die alone in a prison cell or you're shot point blank. 1% of NSA affiliated members can do any of it and it's "national security".

I am always ready to ascribe malicious intent to Microsoft, but this just smells like incompetence.

Flagrant incompetence is malicious. Systemic feigned incompetence a lesser form of evil. (When they release one good OS, then one bad one, then a good one... etc)

Maybe I wasn't being clear enough. If everyone is very happy with what their OS can do, they have no reason to buy another one (limiting MSFT's bottom line). Microsoft wants us to always be buying another OS from them. They won't simply perfect the OS and say "Done!", but it's even worse than that.

By increasing the hardware requirements they force us to buy new computers, which in turn means we will need to constantly be shelling out money to them every 2yrs, or every time a computer dies.

They break the OS each time intentionally so we will buy the NEXT one... if it's just as good as the one we have.

We're the dumb ones though. We buy the Vistas, the Win8s, the MEs... we BUY that crap. We're to blame!!

I like how Windows follows a SIN curve of customer satisfaction, almost flawlessly. My prediction is that Win 9 will be the next XP, loved by all only to be replaced by Win10 which everyone will hate... and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.

This kind of business policy is pretty corrupt and if it's not illegal it really should be.

Each release guarantees problems between users in terms of learning curve. Techsupport bottlenecks each time and they take the brunt of the flak from idealized Microsoft decision making.

Nonsense. Facts exist regardless of perspective. Facts surrounding Clancy's writing are easily misunderstood without context. Had he been an unpublished college student he would have been investigated for espionage or planning some horrible future crime. Context is not available through logfile analysis. Context happens outside of logs or monitoring.

History doesn't disappear simply because you die. Consider that too, for a moment.

Lots of people lie. On Linkedin. You'll end up getting a bunch of people who want others to THINK they had NSA experience... when in fact they are 12yr old boys.

There are so many reasons that colleges and universities should step way back from network monitoring but the best one I can think of to sell it to your school, is one of limiting liability. If the school is monitoring all network traffic and tying it to students, then they are totally responsible for any safety incidents that occur from a preventative standpoint. Legally speaking a victim of any crime could then sue the school if they failed to prevent anything. As it stands now a school is responsible for anything that happens on their grounds but they can't really be sued directly for something like Columbine, that I am aware of. If the network monitoring goes live and there are manifestos posted through the school internet that go unnoticed, then the school is going to be hit with massive lawsuits down the road... plus the expense of having to monitor that information.

Because from my perspective, paying an ISP to run traffic back and forth is CHEAP. Monitoring a network is VERY EXPENSIVE.

What's the payoff for schools? You might think it's some sinister reason, but I can assure you this is some very angry person in the IT dept or somewhere in the school who merely enjoys feeling powerful so they are pushing this kind of authoritarian agenda just to flex their muscles. There is not one shred of financial reasoning to take on all that insurance risk... and God forbid the insurance people find a loophole if shit goes down on the campus or even off campus.

Then you have your would-be novelists. Imagine what Tom Clancy's internet history looks like.

tl:dr; schools that follow any student's browsing habits become responsible for whatever that student does or APPEARS to do

No you see you're missing the point. This point I'm trying to introduce to you is that the people discussing a fact have nothing to do with the fact. Their belief is irrelevant and yet so often we have logical fallacy introduced to discussions because a person injects themselves into the discussion and presents their opinion without substantiating the premise. You could present an ontologically pure idea to someone and they might reject it because YOU presented it... which is biased perception, in effect.

Laziness is in the way of progress.

Rather than attack an argument at its premise or at its foundations, the attack is at the presenter or at the fringe issues or to present irrelevant ideas to try and disarm the premise. Believing and those who practice that bad habit are fools... gathering as many others as they can to bring them along for a dozen fool's errands.

Your response certainly sounds insightful but in reality, when something is a fact, there is no need to state that you believe it or why you believe it. Injecting yourself into the conversation is trading on the value of fact, which ought to be illegal. Facts are something that everyone is inherently owed as debt to the pains of life.

Science eliminates the need for believing -- holding an unsubstantiated opinion.