Windows Professional didn't start to include BitLocker until Windows 8. You need Windows 7 Ultimate for that, and that was withdrawn from inclusion with PCs along with Windows 7 Home Premium. Is Anytime Upgrade from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate still in operation?

And sometimes you get law enforcement officers who appear to have forgotten the rules of the road. Today I was in the right half of the through lane of a city street without a bike lane, with a right-turn-only lane (we drive on the right in the United States) to my right. A cop in a cop car pulled up beside me at a red light and told me I shouldn't be on the road because I'm blocking traffic. When I asked for clarification, he told me I ought to be farther to the right or on the sidewalk, and then he drove off. As far as I can tell, the first is illegal because the lane to the right is a turn-only lane, and the second is dangerous because it might cause me to plow into a pedestrian. Was this an attempted entrapment or just what the French call les incompetents?

Other comments to this story imply that you can't turn everything completely off without buying Windows 10 Enterprise.

For that, you're probably going to have to switch to GNU/Linux. Phone home code was introduced in Windows XP.

Do package repositories on GNU/Linux distributions count as an "app store" to you?

That's what suspend is for.

That's what your computer's battery is for. Put it in suspend and disconnect the charger from the mains.

I've seen people ignore six-month-old red warning icons.

I thought Red Hat chose the name "Fedora" for its community distro and IBM chose the name "PC" for the model 5150.

That can be handled with an awareness campaign analogous to the We Card program, building an expectation among citizens that if you're going to subscribe to porn, you're going to need to have handy a means of age verification.

But it does create a bunch of opportunity for the government to shut down your business on grounds of not taking legally sufficient precautions against underage access. It's a balancing act of liability for credit card fraud vs. liability for fines for noncompliance.

I don't see how they can continue to do that lawfully. From Windows lifecycle fact sheet: "End of sales for PCs with Windows preinstalled [...] Windows 7 [...] October 31, 2014"

"I'm a bee, I'm a bee, I'm a I'm a I'm a bee"
-- The Black Eyed Peas

There exists free (as in DFSG) solitaire for Android.

Are you referring to the fact that http://slashdot.org/subscribe.... "is not available at the moment. We apologize for the inconvenience"?

How does lack of BIOS "force" you to use Windows 8.1? The last time I tried Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, it supported UEFI just fine. And all the desktop applications I use either have a port, have an alternative, or work in Wine.

(Yes, I know that's not what it stands for.)

Once all non-Apple laptops sold in brick-and-mortar stores ship with Windows 10, choosing a MacBook instead of an entry-level Windows 10 laptop may cost more than just buying ad-free Solitaire for the five years that you plan to use the laptop. Or what am I missing?

If there's a "pancake face", it's Americans who wear too much makeup, or perhaps Americans who overindulge at IHOP, Bob Evans, and Denny's. And any country is a "gook", as guk is just the Sino-Korean word for a country, akin to Mandarin guó, Sino-Japanese koku, and Vietnamese quô'c.

Which country has that, plus a decent standard of living otherwise, plus practical qualifications for immigration?