You are confusing "own" with "control". He is right, you are wrong. The standard land deal in the US has mineral rights and air rights. You own core of the earth to space. But, like the power lines under your property that you don't control, you don't get to dictate the rules for commercial flights over your property.

Unlikely. I'd expect that 99.9% of helicopters "brought down" by a drone will be from boom strike (or other "pilot error") from the pilot's reaction to seeing one, not the impact itself. How would a dron differ significantly from a bird strike? A larger bird would be similar in weight to a drone, and with similar speeds. Does every hawk strike kill the helicopter?

Define "drone". Now, read your first definition, and tell me if it includes amateur RC aircraft. How about unguided model rockets?

You aren't acting like a pilot. Define the class before defining the rules around it.

I've yet to see a definition of "drone" that didn't include model rocketry or RC model airplanes. Like RC, the military drones are primarily flown by humans remotely using RF to control them. So most definitions that catch one catch both.

Perhaps you should define "drone" before launching into problems with "drones", as that includes model rockets, and the RC models.

Do you have any evidence to back that claim up?

There are a number of features in Chrome that optionally talk to Google. But you can change them all if you prefer. Do you have any proof that it "phones home" in any hidden way? It should be quite easy to prove; Wireshark is all you need.

FWIW, I know some of the guys who started the Chrome project. Actually, they didn't start Chrome, they started V8. The point was to prove that Javascript engines could be orders of magnitude faster than they were, and to push the rest of the industry to get better, so Google's apps would be able to do more, faster. The rest of Chrome was just to show off V8. Then it became successful, both at pushing Javascript engines to get better, and as a popular browser, and Google started to use it as a test bed for other ideas about how to make the web "platform" better. Security improvements like certificate pinning. Performance (and security) improvements like SPDY and QUIC. UI simplifications like the omnibox (which geeks like to hate, but non-geeks love). Better development tools (though Firebug was and is quite good). And so on.

I don't think "better tracking of users" has ever been a goal, stated or unstated, of the Chrome project. And, seriously, why would it? It's not like the normal web standards don't offer everything that's required for whatever tracking anyone would like to do.

Trial and error, I expect. Look at what other sites do. I realize that this isn't a very good answer. There isn't a good answer, just bad answers that are still better than passwords. Classic OpenID isn't the answer because users don't know how to use it and many RPs don't trust random providers. But as a practical matter providing login with, say, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL will give better than 95% of your users the ability to log on with better security than the password-based model you'd build, and do it just by clicking a couple of buttons.

If you find that your user base tends to have an account with some other provider (no, I can't tell you how to find out who your users are or what they use), then add that.

Hey, wether you visit to read, or you visit to start a Bro-splainer flamewar, it still counts as an ad impression.

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.

When the services go down, you can't log in to the relying sites. Luckily, core infrastructure like the account systems is a very high priority for the engineers, and the big providers have plenty of resources to keep them up -- and they do. My bank's site is down far, far more often than Google's auth servers, for example. How much more often? I don't know... I've never seen Google's auth servers down.

Pick the top several and you'll cover nearly everyone. For the tiny percentage of users that remains, you have to either offer password auth (which means all of the work and risks of maintaining a password system, but at least when you screw it up only a tiny percentage of your users will be affected) or push them to get an account with one of the providers you support.

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.

Not nearly as much as the haters assert.

If you are moving directly away, a solar sail would be more efficient.