Unfortunately, the also attract attention when they are suddenly switching on and off around buildings that are occupied, and they do it whether it's a criminal triggering them or just someone walking home late or a neighbour's pet cat.

We've recently had a bunch of work done on the streetlights around us, leaving it completely dark right outside our own home. It looks like several people have almost immediately installed their own lighting at their own expense to compensate (which gives you some idea of how popular this move really is, I guess). We could try charging admission for the flashing light show we now get some nights, but honestly, we'd rather be able to sleep again.

Unfortunately, those headlights also tend to be aimed at the road ahead and maybe a little ground just to the side of it. They offer little visibility into junctions or corners. A few modern vehicles do have dedicated cornering lights, but even those provide nowhere near the visibility into where you'll be going next that street lighting does.

Since we're not citing studies we remember, I remember one from just a few years ago that suggested the most cost-effective single measure we could take to save lives on our roads in the UK might be to fully light every mile of motorway (and possibly all high-speed roads, but I can't remember now whether the data supported going that far).

But only if there is a chance of people passing by, which seems less likely if the surrounding area is also in complete darkness at the time.

This is indeed good news for amateur astronomers. Unfortunately, they are among the only people who will actually benefit or want to go out at night under these conditions.

My wife and sister, in contrast, are now uncomfortable about things like getting a late train home and then walking back from the station in pitch black conditions, to the point where if they can't make arrangements for more secure travel either end of a journey then they will sometimes not go out at all. And yes, before anyone asks, there have actually been relevant crimes recorded in the relevant areas, so their concerns do have have some justification. There is a reason that police and public safety advisors have long recommended walking home along well-lit streets instead of dark paths late at night.

While we're at it, several sources have already highlighted other data, up to and including coroners' reports directly attributing actual deaths in road traffic collisions to reduced lighting, that conflict with the claims here of no harm being done. Those claims are also in conflict with more general evidence about how to design homes and wider areas to minimise the ability for criminals to approach targets undetected and the reduced crime rates that result.

In short, this seems to be based on one selective result, published in a relatively obscure journal and from a relatively unknown source that has some unspecified link to UCL for credibility, that directly contradicts established policing policy, public safety policy, road safety policy, architectural principles, common sense, and hard evidence. But yay for astronomers though, I guess.

The whole thrust of ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar essay...

You're about 30 years late WRT your reference. When I said "back in the day"...

I first saw the term "software priesthood" in print in Byte magazine -- it was 1976, I think. It was already in play among those of us who had already been programming for a while, and even more so among certain sectors of management.

Back in the day, we called this concept the "Software Preisthood"

It wasn't complementary.

1) I am not threatened by "everyone" learning to program

2) don't buy a bunch of stupid apps, and,

3) Apparently, you're a programmer, so write your own apps. :)

Congrats for not understanding almost all of what you read. Stellar.

Videos are 5x slower than reading

Yep. And they're extremely difficult to deal with contextually, unless you take the time to generate a full transcript - ugh. So (a) waste your time watching, (b) waste your time writing up a transcript, (c) take the time to post... and (d) everyone has already moved on.

Most video "stories" are for droolers. If you can't write it up, it often isn't worth saying. Exceptions being movies of Pluto, that sort of science-y goodness. I don't think I've ever seen *anything* on the idiot box that was worth a full page of actual cogent explanation. And "interviews".... ffs, just write it down.

Well said. Yes. I'd mod you up, I have the points, but I've posted, so the broken slashcode won't let me. So kudos, anyway.

Make the slashdot UID the new UID for incoming ex-slashers. New users get numbers beyond the current max.

Perhaps the new owners will finally fix the massively broken and stupid moderation system that the previous and current owners have left bereft of badly needed attention:

o Moderators can't post with ID. Stupid. Utterly, completely, stupid. Pointless. Ridiculous.
o Moderators have zero accountability for what they've done -- only for what they might do later
o Absolutely no effective mechanism to remove bad moderation (and that really screws up threads here)
o AC's unjustly penalized, many of the site's best posts never rise above the noise level
o Trolls go un-handled -- the AC low-runging is a punt at not having to work at moderation. But it doesn't work.
o Perversely limited set of mod types leaves moderators unable to moderate reasonably
o Limits on mod ranges penalize the very best posts (and don't adequately address the trolls, either, because...
o On slashdot, troll is effectively equal to AC with one person disagreeing, and...
o Because we can't attribute the "disagree" to the mod, it can't be remediated except by the...
o Random and future-behavior-only-focused meta moderation system.

And then we have:

o Ridiculous delays between posts for ACs AND for logged-in users. Big convo? Too bad for you.
o Inability STILL to handle many character entities after all these years. Not to mention UTF-*8, omg.
o Retarded signature limits. C'mon. Bad sigs should be moderated. It takes a lot of chars to use HTML.

And of course there are the short-bus elephants in the room:

o "Editors" that know nothing about editing. Or writing. Or what constitutes a "story"
o The "firehose", a way to vote up stuff that won't get posted -- can be a total waste of time
o And the continuous mucking about with the parts that worked, making them NOT work,
      while all of the above, which ACTUALLY needs fixing, goes unfixed.

I'd fire the bloody lot of them, frankly.

My proposed solution is simply that they don't force updates on those who don't want them, and instead allow users to defer or completely ignore unwanted updates and only install software they want on their own computer. This solution looks remarkably like how previous versions of Windows have worked prior to the new policy.

I'm seeing conflicting messages about what you can and can't defer/block now. For example, some posters in this thread have said you could already block driver updates before, but other sources (including the article you linked to) imply that this was not previously the case and has now been changed in response to the Nvidia driver problems that triggered this discussion. In any case, this is all academic if they do the sensible thing and don't force any update on any unwilling recipient.

Certainly some of these companies do have decent customer support -- I don't mean to imply that such issues never get resolved.

The trouble is, unless they all have good support, there is a risk involved in having automatic updates that wasn't there before.

What I honestly don't understand after all the discussions here and elsewhere in recent days is why so many people seem to be defending Microsoft's position. If they're worried about security issues not being patched, they could just as well leave updates on by default but optional, so those who know what they're doing can take steps to apply the important patches with proper testing and without risking unwanted side effects, while those who just plug in and go will probably get exactly the same result as they would with compulsory updates anyway.

As far as I can see, there is literally no reason not to do this -- which is basically status quo for most systems today -- unless someone at Microsoft has intentions that mean they would want to push an update that a clued up user/sysadmin would not want to install, which is the only time it makes a significant difference whether or not the updates are mandatory.

You're adorable. :-)

But seriously, the reality is that you have no power whatsoever to compel an organisation the size of say Nvidia or AMD to provide working drivers. Both provide drivers for their gaming cards that are frequently buggy as hell. Even their much more expensive professional workstation cards -- where almost the entire point is the supposedly better drivers, because the hardware is all but identical -- have all kinds of silly driver bugs that have been known to cause anything from screen glitches while using supposedly certified applications to outright system crashes.

Several people have commented in this Slashdot discussion that you can disable the driver updates within Windows update even if you can't disable other parts, though so far I haven't been able to find any official confirmation of that from a Microsoft source. Even if it's true, that in itself says something about Microsoft's awareness of the potential for forced updates to go badly wrong. :-(

There are plenty of previous cases where Windows Update has broken things. That's why a lot of us are so concerned. Been there, done that, spent the next several hours clearing up the mess, on occasion even resorting to physical media because the normal recovery mechanism was sufficiently b0rked that even booting that far wasn't happening.

Severe problems like the ones I was thinking of above? No, to be fair to Microsoft, they have usually fixed those within a day or two. (Drivers are a different question entirely, but as we've determined, those are a different case and not entirely Microsoft's responsibility.)

But minor gremlins that mess something up for people with certain hardware or software combinations? Or updates that aren't really necessary at all, like the Win10 nag messages? I don't see any rush to get those fixed.

In any case, as the financial folks will tell you, past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behaviour. The fact is, if you trust Microsoft to get this stuff fixed and it does turn out that they can't or won't fix whatever issue is affecting you, your business is screwed. What manager or IT group wants to risk their business's ability to trade or potentially their own personal livelihood in that way, entirely unnecessarily? Why would any rational person do that, if they understand the other options available to them?

Once again, the problem isn't just this specific issue, it's the uncontrolled risk associated with allowing anyone to force software changes on a PC you rely on.

And if you think I'm only bitching about this pseudonymously on-line, you're crazy. Every business I work with (and a couple of family and friends who have asked) has been actively making plans to avoid winding up on Windows 10 for a while.

BTW, my comments on this issue are mild compared to a few I've heard when talking to the sysadmins at some of those businesses. The language some of those people used to describe Microsoft's attitude here isn't something you'd repeat in polite company, let's say.

If it was working for whatever it was needed for before the update, and it wasn't after.

The entire point of the concern here is that Microsoft can and have pushed updates that are broken, and they can and have pushed updates that a lot of users didn't want and that had nothing to do with security (like the Windows 10 nag message).

Microsoft's idea of what constitutes an important update that I should definitely deploy and my idea of what constitutes an important update that I should definitely deploy have been diverging significantly for some time. My standard policy now is that I apply security updates, and unless I have a good reason to do otherwise, that is all I deploy.

That policy was a direct result of problems caused by earlier updates, and I think if you ask around you'll find a lot of sysadmins favour a similar strategy. Even if that weren't the case, the likelihood of Microsoft increasingly pushing unwanted changes that are in their own interest more than their users' seems high given their disclosed strategic plans and business model going forward.