"Outlook.com does not scan your emails to offer up contextual ads"

Bollocks

"Will someone please sue these fuckers!"

In the UK there is something called the Small Claims Court which is designed for, well, small claims. It costs very little to get into and involves magistrates (IIRC). The fees are here https://www.gov.uk/make-court-.... Lawyers are generally frowned upon as I recall because it is a form of arbitration between reasonable people.

It might not sound very exciting but you claim for your costs for reinstating your system after it was broken. So if you do it yourself, you might price your time at say £20 per hour (reasonable) or you might hire outside help at say £30ph. It will take say five hours to find and copy all your data off to a USB disc that you had to buy at say £80 plus the two hours trip to town. Then you have to restore your system from source - let's say you still have a Windows restore partition - that will take a good two hours. Then you have to patch it - another five hours. Reinstall your apps - another five hours.

So 5*20 + 80 + 2*20 + 2*20 + 5*20 + 5*20 = 17*20 + 80 = £420 minimum

That's for someone who knows what they are doing and are being reasonable. For an IT duffer then the £30+ph is more likely because they will need professional help (receipts please).

The whole point of this is that MS (if they really are pushing forced installs) will end up with some form of court judgment against them and you will get recompense. The SCC is not a get rich quick scheme. It is designed as an easy to use and cheap way of reclaiming monies. It has worked very well for me and some friends in the past. In one case the threat of SCC was enough to make a very, very large multi-national do the right thing because of the fact that the SCC is a serious court and a judgement against you can look a bit shit (especially when publicised.)

Now, if after restoring your system it does yet another win 10 breakage then you can always do it all again. If a few 1000 people do this it could be interesting.

I am making a big assumption here which is that you will probably have to persuade the magistrates that your system was broken by MS's automatic "update". You would have to make a formal claim to MS first requesting payment for your time. You would also have to demonstrate that they refused to comply.

Worth a crack though

Cheers
Jon

In the UK the govt mandated electronic document formats are things like PDF, CSV and ODF. https://www.gov.uk/government/...

I still find it hard to believe, given our, *ahem* questionable approach to standards (we ratified and pushed OOXML forward as an open standard).

"Finland and Japan are pretty much homogeneous."

Attempting to describe any country as homogenous is not a very good idea. I (possibly) understand where you are coming from but even within notional national boundaries there are other identities. For example (somewhere I do know about) within the UKoGB&NI, there are at least four national identities (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) then there are the other - relatively - nationalistic movements such as Cornwall (Kernow) and others that arise from time to time. You may or may not know or at least be dimly aware of Eire - the Republic of Ireland - which was once part of GB and gaining independence in the last century. Then as we slide back through time it gets increasingly complicated and involves bits of what we now know as France and Denmark with a light dusting of Sweden and a host of supporting characters. That's just the collection of islands to the right of mainland Europe. The history of the rest is a massively complicated web that has to be studied to be believed.

Notions of nationhood and ideas of some form of homogeneity just don't work. Apart from anything else, try and define what a nation really is. For example is Wales really a nation? Yes!! From one perspective it is part of England (I'm English). It is referred to as a "principality" and has a Prince of Wales (currently Prince Charles.) The Queen (Elizabeth), who is actually many queens eg Queen of Australia and and many other countries and in this case of Great Britain which includes Wales as part of England and Scotland. When we add in Northern Ireland we get the United Kingdom of GB and NI. Despite all that, Wales has a National Assembly ie local government and there is a national language which is fairly pretty widely spoken alongside English.

Japan and Finland both have a history that is rich and deep and bloody complicated. I know this purely because I know how the history of Europe works in some detail and I am gradually working my way out.

Parochialism is an easy trap to fall into. Please read and travel more: the world is an amazingly diverse place. You think the US is a bit mixed up? You have no idea mate. I'll give you three books to read for starters: "Germania" by Simon Winder, "1000 Years of Annoying the French" by Stephen Clarke and "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor. All three are admittedly by British authors.

Anyway - there is no such thing as a homogenous country.

I think you'll find that others eg inhabitants of the Sudetenland from the time will tell you their WW2 started in 1938. Being a Brit, I was brought up on the '39-'45 timescale but that obviously neglects the before and after that sears the national consciousness of many other countries.

"I know some people on slashdot think that WWII started Dec 7, 1941"

I've been to the war museum in NOLA (it bills itself as the National Museum I recall) and it doesn't represent WW2 in quite the same way as war museums I have visited in UK, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France. However the museum in New Orleans does star Tom Hanks - the other places I've visited can't compete with that.

My birthday is Dec 7 (and I am aware it is the day that Pearl Harbour was attacked.)

"The point of Gentoo, after all, is extreme configurability. It's not so much a question of tweaking for speed (a common misconception about Gentoo--and a common accusation about the motivations of its users); the big thing is that it lets you add or exclude features according to your own needs and desires. In Gentoo, you have to know what you are doing."

"A complaint we hear about Arch is that its developers drive many of the choices, choices that Gentoo leaves open to the user."

They are both fabulous distros as are all the rest. They have different focuses. I think the Gentoo ricer thing was laid to rest years ago - it was pretty old when I started with it in 2002. With Arch, you do tend to get what you are given and that is an awful lot, but you still have lots of choice - far more in general than other binary distros. Even then you still get far more choice than say with Windows or iWotsit. Moving back to Arch, you always have the AUR for your guilty fixes and Ubuntu has PPAs and frankly you can always get at the source and compile your own.

FFS - we have so much choice now it is an embarrassment of riches. Revel in it and enjoy a golden age. Did I mention *BSD? Sorry: more freely available choice - fantastic.

Cheers
Jon

"Ugh, installing Arch in itself, is an ingenious way to demonstrate"

So you don't like to know how your OS works or care about having the choice about what is on your PC/laptop. Perhaps you should not hang around a site with the strap line "News for nerds".

Me, I like choice: I like being able to decide for myself whether I want MS, Apple or Linux or BSD or whatever. As it turns out, I like the Linux way of doing things. I also like to mess around and tinker. So I choose Arch and Gentoo for my own stuff and Ubuntu, Centos and SLES in general for work. I also make quite a lot of use of FreeBSD via pfSense and am tempted to get in deeper.

I love having choice. Would you rather a monoculture?

BTW: My wife's laptop runs Arch - she doesn't know and she doesn't care. It just works and magically updates every now and then - again she doesn't know this, it just works. OK I'm a consultant but I have the tools given to me by the best and I no longer have to explain why that bloody yellow shield keeps on pestering her nor what the hell is Windows 10 and why it wants to install all the time and then suck her eyes out.

As the input is from /dev/zero they will get written quite quickly, depending on how much RAM is available.

The beauty of "do the right thing" is that you no longer have to be seen to be claiming the moral high ground. I wonder who they will be doing the right thing to or for. On the bright side, Goog's mission statement of doing the right thing will now be more accurate - literally and figuratively: if you are a shareholder.

"One of the many loopholes is that the chip and pins from europe can easily be used in the US without a password or a pin."

Or even a signature. I haven't bothered to sign my cards for years and US retailers don't seem too bothered.

Err actually it might be the retailers.

I am an EU (UK) citizen and we have had Chip and Pin for years. To the point that we generally don't even bother signing the back of our cards (no need)

I have bought quite a few things (non trivial amounts in some cases) in the US and signed for them on those digitiser things. Not once have I been challenged, despite not having a sig on my card and my bank could not possibly somehow verify my sig - they don't have it in digital form.

Perhaps I simply have an honest face: who wouldn't trust that?

"keep in mind, their cars are 100% legal in the much stricter European market"

Will do. However you might like to know that our (UK) Road Fund (annual tax for owning a car) is https://www.gov.uk/calculate-v... based on emissions.

I haven't looked too deeply into this and CO2 is not the same as NOx but I suspect there is a vague correlation. Anyway, 1.2M cars are earmarked for recall in the UK alone.

So no criminal liability in that particular Act. However, never underestimate the ability of an awful lot of Americans behind a class action suit to make a company wish it had never been incorporated. Well, at least for a few months until the coffers are replenished.

I also suspect that in the absence of reprisal under the specific legislation, that other less specific legislation may apply. I doubt that "conspiracy to poison US citizens" will get very far but there is lots of case law to dig through. M'learned friends will have a field day as always.

Then there is the situation in Europe. I heard on the news today that 1.2M cars are affected in the UK alone. The population of the EU as a whole is rather more than twice that of the US and given that VW is a German firm and likely to have more customers here then they are royally screwed.

Now, who else makes diesel cars: I doubt that VW is the only firm to do this ...