Even if:

(a) that is true in the final RTM, which we haven't seen yet,

(b) it remains true in light of future updates, which of course you'll be required to install, and

(c) the user is aware of the risk and turns it off, which apparently plenty of people clued up enough to be trying Win10 early weren't,

presumably that will still only protects you if it's a driver update that goes wrong, as opposed to say, a kernel patch, or a security update.

No, they're probably using Pro, which has exactly the same fundamental problem just deferrable by a few months.

(a) No-one is talking about just Home. This affects Pro as well, which is what most power users and small businesses have.

(b) You choose your OS because of the software you need to run. Across my various businesses, the number of areas where the software available on Windows is significantly better than the alternatives available on other platforms is quite large.

The most promising alternative platform would be OS X, which has the same kinds of server and development platforms available as Linux or BSD but far better options for some kinds of desktop software. Unfortunately, Apple is currently probably the only company on the planet I trust less than Microsoft and Google not to shaft their users with built-in obsolescence, so I have little interest in switching to them for professional systems for now. If they get around to committing to real long-term support for their desktop/laptop OS one day, that view may change.

That only applies to the poor. Trump has (or used to have, no idea what he uses now) a hotel room as his "permanent" address. Many other politicians have had the same. And they were allowed to vote for themselves. It's only the poor and minorities that the system targets.

I feel your pain. :-)

Actually, the most recent system-crippling screw-up I had was installing the latest AMD drivers for a FirePro series card on one of our older machines. You know, the ones where you pay a fortune to have roughly the same hardware as a much cheaper gaming card, because of the quality and capabilities of the drivers? Except that this completely routine update, which we were hoping might finally fix the frequency glitches that have plagued the card from day one, took out the whole machine and even made it difficult to recover using the system restore feature.

Fortunately, this was a Windows 7 machine, so once we did have it up and running again, we just made a note not to install that update, and the user of the computer got on with their work the next day as normal. I'm not sure what the answer to that is supposed to be with Win10, if drivers are going to be pushed out via the same compulsory update mechanism. Presumably you're supposed to defer the driver update on every machine that might be affected (or via WSUS if you're big enough to use it) and hope that someone fixes the problem before the ticking time bomb goes off when you can't defer any longer...

With the diversity of systems running Windows, no realistic amount of testing will ever completely guarantee security updates are good. You still need a mechanism to decline known-flawed ones, and a mechanism for recovery and uninstallation the first time you get hit without warning.

In any case, the way Microsoft is going under Nadella, sadly it seems very unlikely they would do as you suggest. They are literally giving Windows 10 away free to huge numbers of people, and presumably they're going it because they want to be more like an Apple or a Google, picking up the revenues on the surrounding ecosystem, not just whatever they can find from the platform itself.

Those automatic updates would be the perfect way to show unavoidable nag messages to sign up for other Microsoft software and services, or those of their selected partners who they believe may be of interest to you, or to install spyware to feed back extra data, or to disable existing Windows feature that used to be free because some commercial interest makes getting you to pay for it a more promising option for them.

Not that I'm suggesting they'd ever do that sort of thing deliberately, of course. Maybe the Windows 7 update that has been nagging users about updating to Windows 10 itself was just an oversight.

Or stick with an OS that works without needing to develop a whole new set of sysadmins skills, like... any previous version of Windows, say.

And what shall we do when AMD drivers have a problem at the same time?

Perhaps you'd like businesses that paying their staff thousands per week to do CAD work or design game assets to just shut down for a few days until the drivers get sorted out? As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet developed a business model where complaining at a big business that screwed up is an effective strategy for recovering lost revenues from downtime, but if they ever do, it looks like it will be very lucrative in a Windows 10 world.

I surely don't know what you mean!

/glances at KB3079904, which was installed the other day to replace a different update that they got wrong just days earlier, and notes that this is what happened even with patching a serious security vulnerability

But defer is the word, and they're still forced on you within a few months if you want to keep security updates, even if they are potentially hostile, non-security updates.

I'm not going to say I told everyone so. Oh, no, wait, I did. And so did a lot of other people. Shifting to Windows 10 is a one-way trip to losing control of your own computer, possibly unless you're on Enterprise, because presumably the people with real money won't let Microsoft get away with this.

I did. You suggested UK, and I accepted that. My complaint about the UK was your lies that I was somehow personally vested in that system, as yet another of you ad hominem attacks.

I don't know why you bother to lie. I can look it up in the replies and see your lies. Plain as day.

What was the minimum number of votes to swing the 2000 election? It was about 270 votes (depending on how you count them).

If you note, it also indicated that nationwide Black vote was up sharply in 2008 for Obama's first election. From what I could tell from the AJC story, Black vote in Georgia was under-represented in GA, compared to the national increase in turnout that year. And it fell in 2010. About 1600 votes were discarded due to the inability of the voter to provide acceptable ID. So much for one man one vote.

FWIW, I'm not a member of the community. I play Wesnoth off and on for a few weeks every couple of years. I also like the random element and don't much care about characterization, world-building, lore or storytelling. Not that I don't like those things, just that Wesnoth is more of an occasional light diversion for me, so those things don't mean much.

Sure, it does, which is why managers convert such things into spot bonuses -- which are generally several thousand dollars.

The downside of rewarding primarily with peer bonuses is that it might create a culture of doing good stuff for peers in order to collect peer bonuses rather than doing good stuff for peers because it's abstractly good to do good stuff for peers. I don't know how real it was or was not, but I have heard that some obnoxious Googlers with special skills or access or knowledge made a habit of demanding multiple peer bonuses before being willing to do some task for some other team that needed it. The "one bonus per" rule pretty much eliminates that because -- to people as well-compensated as Googlers -- a single $125 bonus isn't worth the overhead of negotiating; it's much more effective to just be "nice" and do stuff for people who need it, gathering the occasional peer bonus and lots of kudos, as well as building the network of people who will offer support at promotion time and/or help you out when you need it.

The effect is the same: it incents employees with special skills or access or knowledge to help their peers, but makes it more of a "gift economy" where everyone tries to be helpful to others in expectation of eventual good karma coming back to them, rather than one of barter and bargaining in which people jealously protect their advantages.

"One front-line manager" != "management". The latter implies higher levels of company leadership.