In which jurisdiction(s)?

If you're going to give a statement like that, which blatantly contradicts the stated position of lots of companies selling consumer devices that are subsequently modified/jailbroken, then you'd better have more than an AC post saying all those companies can't enforce their terms, because.

For example, I've just checked the current law here in the UK, and I've found various pages about the statutory minimal guarantees for consumer sales under EU law. I also found a couple of pages arguing that rooting/flashing your device can't therefore void the warranty, but their arguments didn't have much to do with what the law actually says. I did not find any documented case of someone flashing custom firmware onto a device without the manufacturer's support, bricking that device, and subsequently compelling the manufacturer to accept legal responsibility for the consequences.

So please enlighten us, AC, on why those Internet rumours and the clear public statements of many companies like smartphone and camera manufacturers on this issue are all unenforceable.

A lot of people have reported problems with using their locally installed applications at all, or with features like the Typekit integration even if the software would start. It seems to be a much wider problem than just the on-line storage and activation for new licences.

Careful there, son. If they don't get what they want, customers will have less choice than the one monopoly provider charging several times what international customers in equivalent markets pay that some of those customers can choose from at present.

Which is unfortunate for the hunter, but more fortunate for women who don't like being burned at the stake. I know which group I'd prefer my society to support.

Luckily for us, there's an organisation dedicated to reviewing the best data that scientific studies have to offer, with contributions from thousands of practising scientists all over the world collected over more than 25 years. Let's see what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say:

Just to be clear, those quotations are directly from the highlighted key points in the sections about attributing the detected changes in the climate and what will happen in the future. The emphasis was retained from the original publication.

I'll leave you with one more quote, from a slightly less heavyweight source but no less valid:

Actually, I'm in the UK, and I'm reasonably sure my MP does lurk on Slashdot. :-)

1984: A cautionary tale about the power of the state and the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance.

2014: A real life documentary in which everyone carries around a mobile phone, everyone's car includes trackers with automatic remote location capabilities, major population centres are observed by numerous cameras logging to central databases under government control and backed by technology doing everything from facial recognition to gait analysis, even the privacy of your own home isn't private because there are literally cameras tucked away on your TV, and lots of people are OK with this as long as the pizza is still hot when it gets delivered and arrives in time for tonight's reality TV show.

Or just don't buy a TV that comes right out of 1984 with a camera and mic included. If you want to Skype, get separate (probably better...) inputs, and connect them up via a system you control and trust.

I'm rapidly coming around to the view that it should be legally required for anything you buy to declare all sensors it includes (camera, mic, GPS, WiFi receiver, etc.) and all networking capabilities (wired or wireless) prominently on the packaging, and to provide a hardwired switch to disable these facilities when they aren't (or shouldn't be) in use. It's crazy how many people are buying things that have all kinds of surveillance capabilities that have already been shown to be vulnerable and don't realise it because they just assume they can trust a TV from a big name brand like Samsung.

People keep saying that, but it's obviously nonsense.

If you walked around obviously looking up women's skirts in a park, I imagine they would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.

If you followed someone around with a video camera (or Google Glass or whatever) recording their every move, I imagine they too would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.

If you walked down the street peering into everyone's front window through a 2in gap in the curtains at night, do you really think most people would consider that normal, acceptable behaviour?

Try explaining to a police officer why you were hanging around with a video camera filming people entering their PINs at a cash machine, and see how far an argument that there is no expectation of privacy in a public place gets you. Or, you know, don't, because it's obvious that people do expect privacy under those conditions and that someone violating that privacy is unwelcome.

The "no privacy in a public place" mantra needs to die. It's an absurd proposition even today, as readily demonstrated by everyday examples like the above. Moreover, the origins of any laws that might (arguably) support the position from a legal rather than ethical perspective today are found in times where the risks to privacy posed by being seen in public were on a completely different (and much lower) level than they are today. Changes in those laws to reflect the capabilities and risks posed by modern technology are long overdue.

There is a difference between having a problem with some behaviour and being willing to do something dramatic enough to get that behaviour changed. It is unfortunate that such things are left to laws that are readily amended by the administration of the day for political reasons, almost invariably after some high profile but statistically outlying event that turns public sentiment enough for at least a brief period that the changes can be pushed through. This makes such illiberal measures borderline voter-proof, and IMHO that sort of situation is one of the most dangerous threats to civil liberties in modern politics.

The mere existence of footage that invades someone's privacy is reason enough for concern. Whether it has been leaked (yet) or not is at best a secondary issue.

It's not as if large government departments have a great track record on security and protecting privacy. And it's certainly not as if data originally gathered for one stated purpose has never subsequently been reused for other, very different purposes.

But these things won't just be recording what the officers are doing. If they're always on, they'll be recording everything else as well, and contributing to the same surveillance state that things like CCTV and ANPR do. The evidence seems to suggest that using cameras at times where some sort of confrontation or disagreement is likely is beneficial for all concerned, but that doesn't necessarily make running them full time (or keeping the footage they record if you do) a good idea.

Exactly. Only on a forum like Slashdot would "Have you filed a bug report?" be considered a credible (or at least +5, Insightful) reaction to reporting a wide-ranging problem that should never have existed, in the middle of a debate about why in the real world a lot of people still consider MS software to have a lower TCO than FOSS.

Ribbon was driven directly by monitoring how actual users were using the software. There's a fascinating series of blog posts about where it came from and how it developed. And although my initial reaction as a "power user" was similarly sceptical, the fact for me is that most people I know who've tried it came around to preferring it after a short time.

Metro is clearly a mess, but let's not pretend that was driven by the usability guys rather than the marketing/management types who thought everything had to be touch-friendly for no logical reason.

Then why are they still dominant? It's not as if the FOSS community lacks the resources to create a rival office suite or consumer operating system of a similar scale. They've done both, multiple times.

There's no need for pointless ad hominem attacks, and loyalty has nothing to do with my views anyway. I choose which tools to use based on what gets the job done best at the time, and as someone who has on several occasions in recent years had to contrast MS Office and Open/LibreOffice, it hasn't even been close on any of those occasions.

In business terms, the cost of even a full price MS Office licence is usually negligible compared to the ongoing support costs and and efficiency savings/losses for either product, and the ongoing costs and inefficiencies for Open/LibreOffice are much higher than for MS Office. You can complain about why they're higher and how if everyone just switched to open file formats or didn't get brought up with Microsoft products it wouldn't matter, but the fact is that those things do matter, so unless you can convince most of the people that these businesses work with to agree with you and make the switch, your argument is not a strong one.

I don't think it's a big secret that LibreOffice's help is awful, so wouldn't filing some generic issue to that effect be closer to mockery than constructive assistance?

If this had an isolated case that was overlooked, sure, maybe it's worth flagging. But the complete lack of any useful organisation across the entire help system, the complete failure of its search facility to find even the most basic topics, and the reliance on finding minor links somewhere in the middle of a page or hidden right at the end to navigate to any related topics or even anything resembling an index, these aren't just individual cases. The entire system isn't up to the necessary standards to compete with the likes of MS Office, and making it so would be a massive undertaking that I'm sure the LO devs are well aware is in need of doing without any passive aggressive bug reports from people like me.

Yes, it really is. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who is going to actually use the software and not just develop it. And if you want to be taken seriously in the office software market, catering to normal users instead of geeks is step #1.

Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing and all that stuff. FOSS projects like LibreOffice apparently don't, or at least not effectively. And that's the difference that makes buying MS Office almost an automatic decision for a lot of customers.