Hooray, getting more plastic knockoff versions of things, produced by slaves (hint: Communism doesn't treat people kindly), with zero regard for the environment, and shipped halfway across the planet.

No, all consumer x86 should have that ability.

Yes, as specified by Microsoft themselves. They shouldn't have to say it, but you know the OEMs are lazy as shit and wouldn't offer the option if they could get away with it.

Not that they all actually work properly to the UEFI specs once you do.

Meaning what?

But on an unlocked platform you should be able to add custom keys.

And you can, I have.

Anyways, some embeded x86 systems can be locked (beside intel allows it only on chips designed to go into DVR's and other embeded devices)

And locked down embedded systems are always a problem, but they don't require secure boot or UEFI to do so.

I block ads because I don't need to have every second of my life consumed with being fed advertisements (my adblocker on just one machine has blocked nearly one million ads in just 2014, so far). That it also prevents certain tracking and infection from nefarious advertisements and payloads is just a bonus.

Find a new model or find a new job, nutsacks.

secured the system against user violations such as overwriting the bootloader with one that isn't signed (like for instance, replacing or enhancing the BIOS with a signed EFI that prevents the user from installing alternative OSes such as OSX onto a commodity x64 or GNU/Linux onto a MS-subsidised laptop

Which has not happened. Seriously. All x86 systems have the ability to turn off secure boot.

It's actually a good strategy for MS, I think, and I believe Ballmer screwed up by not following this strategy.

For other companies, it only works in the short term because their competitors win in the long term because without good employees, the company can't develop new products. However, for MS, this just isn't a concern. They're a monopoly in many markets, especially in business software; companies aren't going to suddenly stop buying Windows, Exchange, Office/Outlook, etc. MS can milk their existing customers for a couple of decades I think, and could easily jack up prices greatly.

I think MS (and their products) will get worse before this gets better.

Doesn't matter, people will still buy MS products no matter what. Businesses aren't going to wean themselves from MS's enterprise software anytime soon. This was a good decision: the research efforts were costing money which wasn't being made up in new sales.

MS's best course of action is to cut out as much R&D as possible and other bottom-line costs, and then try to extract as much money from existing customers as possible by jacking up prices. Thanks to their monopoly position in several markets, this shouldn't be hard.

That's a really good point. But I guess they could just disable bluetooth. I'm starting to wonder if today's Apple is as incredibly stupid as Sony was 10-15 years ago. Though, Apple might actually be right: the people who buy Apple stuff are such sheep they, unlike Sony's prospective customers a decade ago when they tried to push proprietary audio formats, might actually buy into Apple's proprietary junk.

Learning programming is relatively easy. Learning to write maintainable code, on the other hand, takes skill and experience.

Clerks and accountants used to do amazing things with Lotus-1-2-3 macros because Lotus cleverly leveraged what users already knew about spreadsheets into a Turing Complete set of commands. But often these users eventually got themselves into a jam, or made something that nobody else could decipher.

The funnest job in the world would be to create fake front sites for dictatorial countries. For example, I'd make "CNN.com" grab content from onion.com, and stupid.com content would be used to fill up "Amazon.com".

In "1984", the main character's job was to re-write history with fake BS. He seemed fairly content at that job until he took the proverbial red pill.

"Get off my red lawn!"

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

Defend your ideas.

That often doesn't fly. You have to choose your battles carefully, and not be seen as "complaining" about everything. Before being "forceful" over an idea that was originally rejected, make sure it's something that really matters and makes a difference.

What's wrong with complacency? You get really used to it after a while even.

Amazon discovered it was for sale when they visited "buy.buy".