What's the difference?

What matters to Microsoft is Windows sales per unit time. These are cut down for several reasons. First, computers are lasting longer. There are no longer massive improvements in performance in a few years, and so the number of replacements sold is down. Second, lots of people don't really need Windows, but can get by just fine with tablets and Chromebooks and such. Third, and this is probably minor, Windows 8 bombed because Microsoft insisted on pushing a crappy UI on it.

It isn't enough to simply look at the world as is. You must consider the world with universal deployment of kill switches and fully understand likely consequences as much as possible.

Yup. It isn't that bad. The addition of kill switches (to phones that don't already have them) isn't going to contribute significantly to possible oppression.

Stolen phones can be taken apart and sold for parts... Thieves doing this may well end up making more money than phone as a whole can be sold in an underground market.

Which doesn't seem to happen. iPhone thefts dropped after Apple introduced a kill switch. Lots of places have killable phones, and have found that thefts go down. This does appear to be an effective anti-crime measure, and that is good. That's empirical evidence, and I'm giving that a greater weight than your theorizing.

Note that phone thefts tend to be the snatch-and-grab type, not the holdup type. Holdups have a good many more dangers, and making them longer by interrogating the victim for credentials makes them more risky. Also, we don't have to wipe out phone thefts as a practice for such a measure to be good.

As far as cross-country driving went....

Shortly before WWII, the Army told a colonel to take a road convoy across the US and report how it went. The applicable word is "badly". Roads didn't connect up in any sensible fashion, weren't reliable, etc.

During WWII, this particular colonel had a really impressive career, getting multiple promotions. After WWII, when former colonel Eisenhower became president he started the Interstate highways as a defense program.

I'd bet that all cell towers have legally-mandated abilities to shut down for normal calls, and only respond to 911 calls and government emergency communications. I'm still not seeing remote bricking as particularly useful for a police state.

What would this accomplish that shutting off the cell towers wouldn't?

Okay, I'm at a critical situation, shooting video of the police doing something controversial. Assuming I'm not transmitting the video to somewhere else as I shoot it, how are the police supposed to know who I am and which phone to brick? They could always have an officer come over and talk to me, but the officer could always confiscate and/or destroy my phone at that time.

I'm having a real hard time thinking of real-life situations in which remotely bricking a phone is a real threat more than than shutting down cell towers or using a Stingray or whatever,, or physical confrontation.

A friend of mine, who worked for the FDA, insisted on taking any herbal stuff as teas. She said that was somewhat regulated, while a pill claiming to be a herbal dietary supplement could contain pretty much anything.

Except that it's really easy and fast to put up something that is legitimately infringing on a legitimate copyright (assuming you philosophically aren't completely opposed to copyright, and hence consider some copyrights legitimate - I consider copyrights morally legitimate if they're less than 28 years old, for example). Either you drop the idea of copyright enforcement, or you allow rapid-fire DMCA notices, or you make it easy to file life-destroying lawsuits.

The DMCA is a real problem, but so is the situation.

What's going to stop you from taking everything down? The fact that nobody will take you seriously. The DMCA process isn't mandatory to follow. What it does is protect the host from liability.

Somebody sends a DMCA request. The recipient can do a takedown and then the recipient has done its legal duty, and has no liability from the alleged copyright holder. The recipient can pass this along to whoever put up the allegedly infringing content, and allow a counterclaim, and then the recipient is completely off the hook legally.

If I'm running a site, and I get a DMCA notice from a RIAA member, I'm at serious risk of looking down the barrel of a lawsuit if I don't comply. If I get a DMCA notice from amoeba1911, I'm not going to feel threatened.

The DMCA requires that the person complaining have a copyright, or is authorized by a copyright author. This post is copyright by me, in the US and most of the civilized world, and so I can accuse any music site of infringing on it without committing perjury. (I believe that, if you can show that I knew the music sited didn't infringe on this post, you can sue me for actual damages, which are likely to be trivial.)

As far as computer systems, I don't think the law recognizes autonomous machine action. You're responsible for what you make a computer send out on your behalf.

Note: I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. If this becomes important for you, a quick consultation with a real lawyer isn't very expensive and can save you a lot of money.

My son's school district had a no-weapons policy, and they defined a weapon as anything that might be used to harm another.

Therefore, I was technically in violation every time I entered a school with my shoelaces, pens, keys, etc. I decided this wasn't a useful definition.

I don't consider weapons to be inherently immoral. The use of weapons does bring up moral questions real fast, but sometimes the best way to enforce the peace is to have a weapon. Sometimes the best counter to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, although not nearly as often as the NRA apparently believes.

Look, you may be a pacifist, which is a perfectly respectable philosophical opinion, if not one I share. (If you're not, then you really shouldn't object to weapons just because they're weapons.) Lots of people aren't pacifists in a strong sense. Lots of people have other philosophies or religions, which may forbid other things.

Should OSS be required to fail to work on days holy to various religions? It's really about as sensible as a no-weapons clause: it would satisfy a small minority of people with their own ethics.

The other simple solution is to ship your product as a closed binary with the LGPL stuff in a DLL (whatever format goes with your OS), and offer source code for the LGPLed stuff.

Since that's not actually a license, I pick Lisp. Not as clumsy or random as C++. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

FTFY

For practical purposes, Free software is Open Source software and vice versa, and the movements have a lot in common. The OSI and FSF pretty much agree on which licenses are Open Source and Free respectively. Their announced philosophies are way different, but a lot of the Open Source idea came from Free Software, as a way to get F/OS software more attractive to industry. I admire Stallman (although don't agree with him on everything), but he's a horrible spokesperson to the non-techie world.