Free software, as good as it often is, does not do well in a consumerist society. We believe that anything good costs money and inversely, if it costs money it must be good and the more money it costs, the better it must be. What's more the implied belief is that if it's free, it can't be good.

But depite all that, it's not just people that are increasingly using it, it's that business is increasingly using it. I don't mind, terribly, that commercial software business actually uses free software to make their stuff... I do but I don't. VMWare still pisses me off in the sense that their product is Linux all over and yet they won't make a Linux client for it. (Way to take without giving back VMWare!!!)

But where the whole industry is going is changing. Where things will be in 3 to 5 years will be quite telling of where we're going and whether or not Microsoft will remain relevant into the future and all that. But one thing I know is certain: Things will not stay the same simply because Microsoft doesn't want them to change. And as Microsoft is apparently terrible at change, a pretty dismal picture is being painted for them. And seriously, are people really buying into the "cloud" nonsense?! Especially now with the NSA controlling the world's data?

Free software is and will be the way forward. Nothing is killing it. And I'm pretty sure open source software will be the way to restore trust in computing and in the internet.

I'd be delighted if standards existed in this area; but they don't(to my knowledge, if they do, please let me know).

Keyboard, video, and mouse? Well, VNC is pretty antiquated; but at least it runs on almost anything. Your other options get thin, fast.

USB over network? Assorted proprietary implementations exist, no standard. (Even the capabilities of serial over LAN, as ostensibly standardized in IPMI, can be a bit...uncertain... from vendor to vendor and product to product).

"Secure boot" is mandatory on Windows RT(ARM) devices. I think that x86 Win8 devices are required to support it; but OEMs can do whatever key-fill they like, and can, at their option, support turning it off or end-user added keys.

I'm not saying that they didn't make a mistake somewhere, more than a few locked bootloaders have gone down; but it isn't going to be trivial.

I suspect that the inconvenience offers a built-in deterrent. To use one, you have to plug something into it, and the design offers no means of securing a device(as the pay-charge stations often do, in the form of little 'lockers' or similar that will hold a cellphone until you return).

How long are you going to stand around babysitting your phone in exchange for a few watts of free electricity? It's a convenient thing to have if you are taking a walk and need to top up your phone; but that's a pretty lousy hourly rate.

Aside from pure vandalism, which is possible; but wouldn't be deterred by fees, the only potentially sticky use case I can see would be the homeless. They have the fewest other options, and comparatively low opportunity costs for being near one of these as opposed to elsewhere. I suppose we'll see what team NYPD decides to do if they show up...

...still don't know her last name...

Unless the vendor doesn't support some update that you need because of a change on the server side(either a sufficient version bump that the protocol isn't totally interoperable, or something like moving from Citrix to VDI).

At work, we've had nothing but nightmares with HP's support for their thin clients. One of their WinCE models had a mystery timekeeping issue that kept the clock stubbornly out of sync. After a couple of weeks of hammering they escalated it to engineering, who confirmed the problem and then told us they had no intention of fixing it. The next model ironed that one out; but the last citrix client that HP supports is old enough that Citrix support people start making nervous noises when you mention it, and the official solution for VDI is 'buy a new one'. They also have a Linux based build; but that has (and has had for at least four years, despite my attempts to find somebody who would listen) a pathetic excuse for a 'kiosk' interface that allows you to dump unsanitized commands directly to the shell, along with at least one trivial root-escalation technique). On the plus side, these things are just overpriced VIA x86 boxes with limited RAM and IDE flash-disk-on-module units, and a nearly stock AMI BIOS, so we were able to just spin our own minimal Linux image, and most of the thin client software vendors have an x86 linux client freely available.

The hardware has been sturdy enough, only a few deaths over the entire deployment; but it was massively overpriced for its specs, and HP must have recruited its printer driver team to make the software suck so badly.

Why would ASIC be concerned about software-based traders? They know that, while it renders them somewhat inflexible, they are both far faster and substantially more power efficient by doing it in hardware...

If I were to do business in Japan and moved money in and out of a Japanese account for my business in Japan, does the IRS have the right to tax my business in Japan?

The IRS taxes on US business activity... in US currency. Not sure I agree with the IRS getting involved with something like this especially since I think they really don't understand what they are getting involved in.

Yeah, I get that already... Thanks NSA. I have ceased using a backup service for all my stuff -- I'll start subscribing to your services for data recovery.

"STEM: because your outsourced replacement isn't going to train himself"

If the shotgun shell evidence was relevant, it would reinforce their theory that squirming is an admission of guilt. They wouldn't leave that out unless the evidence was "inconclusive." That's the thing about shotgun shell evidence. It's either inconclusive or it's not. It's never proof of innocence.

Don't confuse the actual lack of a right to compel you to share it with an imagined lack of a right to do what I please with it once I have gotten ahold of it.

What happens if I go back on my word and share it with others anyway? There's no privity, so they're not bound by the agreement. Your efforts to enforce it against them would be for naught. Now they've gotten access to your work, and they have a free speech right. If they publish it, they're within their rights to do so. I'll suffer a little for the breach, but breach of contract is far from the worst thing in the world.

Your post is full of errors -- misunderstanding the Copyright Act and the prima facie elements of an infringement action, failure to recognize the existence of a commons, your weird belief that you have to be aware of rights in specific things in order to merely passively possess them (being left property by long-lost relatives you didn't know you had is such a well-known concept that it's a cliche, for crying out loud!), and so forth -- but the main mistake you make is this:

You just don't believe that people have a natural right of free speech. Or of any other thing, for that matter. But it's a fact that we do, and this is widely recognized; you could do worse than to start by looking at the Declaration of Independence. Not all rights are of this sort -- copyright isn't, and due to its inherent conflict with free speech, never could be. But your refusal to accept that copyright is merely built on top of a more fundamental and universal right means that we really have nothing to say to one another. The standard model of copyright hinges upon this; rejecting it is like rejecting Kepler in order to stick with Ptolemy. And while I hope that no one finds you any more convincing than I do, I bear you no ill will and I hope you come to your senses soon.

You have to admit that these discussions help some. I'm sure others might argue to the contrary, but discussion and debate brings about new ideas (for some) to consider.

...and I might add that the shotgun shell evidence was not mentioned as direct evidence of guilt in this case. If they had matched the shells with the shotgun, they wouldn't need to rely on "he was squirming in his seat when I asked him!" as evidence. "He just LOOKED guilty as hell!"

Seriously...