that was the laziest troll I have ever seen. I see you do it nonstop, but please do better than that.

umm, I get your intended point, but the reality of the situation is not like that. Whether you install vanilla windows, OEM,retail, or enterprise - there is plenty of tracking automatically agreed to by installing windows, which there is *no* opt out or opt in for, and that includes search information. Just because it doesn't pop up on your screen doesn't mean anything. In the case of vanilla windows, you are considered to have opted in by downloading the ISO. There are such disclaimers on the original links to the downloads. The only way to "opt out" of windows search tracking in a windows install is to *NEVER* have the computer able to access the internet. As in solely offline computer 24/7. So it's nice to believe you don't aren't being forced to opt in, but reality disagrees completely.

You don't have to go to google's homepage, and you don't have to have gmail or a google profile. But should focus on them, you're missing all the cookie tracking and unsolicited ad-spam that goes on whether you opt in or not. Calling attention to google is missing the forest for the trees and basically wasting your time.

okay, so the answer is - you opted in. I don't think you understand that you still have about 18 different variants of the "phone home ridiculousness" when you have finished an install. Whether you install bing is almost no impact. You're still sending them user data. You do not have the opt out.

you do understand that there is no "go backwards" on opting in, once you have done so if you're still using the OS, right?

if you try disabling the real microsoft phone home stuff it will immediately invalidate your WGA and the install will treat it as if you have an illegitimate license key.

actually, this article is creepy. being posted via a pseudonym for a known shitty slashdot editor, they only use that nym when they're posting "google is questionable" or heavily favoring microsoft type troll articles.

It's not even a remote surprise. You shouldn't expect reasoned and valid criticism of google, just bashing in said articles. This has been covered before on slashdot previously.

I don't recall people opting in to MS having a log of people's URLs in skype, even if it's under the bullshit excuse of "security".

do you have any idea how much this is a pot calling the kettle black?

The difference between MS and google is very, very explicit.

1: you can take everything out of google. they pretty much enable it. No such thing exists for MS.
2: you choose to opt into google in the first place. MS does not give you such an option, and defaults to you being opted in (windows, IE, bing).

Google is not a completely innocent company, but this entire article is the biggest fucking strawman ever (and the laziest).

how was amazon a monopoly?

I don't understand how you glance over or through this fact?

you can lower prices to whatever the shit you want, but individual deals with every publisher is what this wasn't. Low prices are not by themselves predatory, even at $0. This was collectively agreeing to the same thing and signing for it individually.

Hey, it's only...3, 5 years late! That's practically at the discarded tail-end of innovation!

not just in wyoming, 3 miles up a mountain in yellowstone. Also, there's cellphone signal even on the Appalachian trail these days.

how do people act like there's simply no signal? 2g is perfectly fine in plenty of instances in which 3g is not unheard of, either.

you don't need data (I don't either), but I can't imagine anyone needing to call 411 in alaska/wyoming to find something in the middle of a forest, even.

hey, at least the performance and battery life degradation is free! /s

just wait until this software is preinstalled on new phones from the MFR, cannot be disabled, or is put into hardware.

I'd give it a year.

ribbon would have been a-okay if.....
it wasn't made explicitly proprietary and happen to break anything that ends up having to deal with it. as sharepoint is used far and wide, this is a gigantic fuck you to anyone not using IE in that sense - as the ribbon simply does not function right in any other browser, which includes mobile. considering that no userbase uses exclusively IE unless their app is that poorly coded, this is so hamfisted that it simply reflects on Metro in the same light.

I don't doubt there are great MS employees who have passion and seek to do good things, but that's one very small side of the coin vs all the shit we've seen MS do over the years. you'd think they realize this by now, but I think the execs are so old and stubborn that I don't see a long term existence on the horizon for MS anymore.

and sure enough, here we are today. what has happened already?

the #1 supporter of patent trolls gets shut down by his own court. Does he whine about it? you bet.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130510155818152