Fortunately, the huge majority of the market agrees and as long as Windows 7 is widely used, there will be software support for it. Microsoft thinks they can force people to do anything just because they are Microsoft, but the truth is there is a reason that all ATM's are still running on Windows XP and are still produced with Windows XP embedded. When windows 10 will get the majority share it will mean it will have stabilized and Microsoft came to their senses. Like it was with Vista. They tried for a few years to push users to get it, spend millions, if they could have sold it at gun point they would have. But in the end they just went back and made Windows 7 which worked well. Same with Windows 10. They will push it like crazy for as long as they can, and if it won't work, I can already smell a Windows 11 in the long run, even if they said they gave up that model.

Imagine having an army of idiots precisely mapping with their smartphone GPS's huge areas in countries, virtually for free, on their own time and with their own equipment.

If it wasn't used initially, I am sure after this huge success the black suits have surely contacted nintendo with an offer to access and use all that data. It's not conspiracy theory, it's exactly what happened with Facebook. After it became mainstream and it's potential was noticed, one of the investors is the CIA R&D arm.

It's no secret, the same people who funded face recognition technology startups, license plate recognition, mapping, and who knows what else.

I think it was called IN-Q-Tel or something.

My computer is usually running 24/7 since it manages some other things.

It's not a problem anymore of course since the first time it happened I took precautions, completely removed the installer, then made it hidden, then installed an utility that deleted all Windows 10 related stuff.

For me it's not a problem. But imagine my boss in his late 60's who is not that tech savy, who just clicked ok, and at 2 AM in the morning installs Windows 10 and everything is different, some drivers don't work properly, etc. A nightmare

Microsoft deserves to be sued by every single person that this happened to.

It's not funny, that's actually what the new Windows 10 Upgrade dialog looks like, happened to me personally.

It just said tomorrow it will upgrade to windows 10, if you don't access this dialog by then, it will go on automatically.
If I was gone over the weekend, as I usually leave my computer on in case I need to remote in, by the time I was back, it would have upgraded without any interaction.

The level of lack of respect from Microsoft is truly incredible.

Before jumping on me, please try to argue with my ideas, and not with me personally. I do not own a gun, I am not even american, but I have visited the US a few times, and I work with americans on a daily basis.

One thing I know, back from when I was a child, was that guns are sort of like nuclear weapons. If you know somebody had a gun, or that there even was the slightest possibility that they had one, criminals would normally avoid them. Usually it was foreign businessmen, or off-duty law enforcement, but by default, the mentality I saw in every stupid ass punk that would try to make a living by stealing.

I don't think the average pro gun confiscation american realizes that even though criminality seems high now, how high it will be if everybody was sure nobody had guns. They keep bringing the Europe argument, but in most large cities in Europe, people don't go out after a certain hour, and it's something relatively normal. Yes, the suburbs are safer, but only because usually they have a dedicated police patrol around the clock (perks of living in rich neighborhoods).

But still, you will never hear on the news about the fact that there were let's say 10 houses broken into this week. It's just not news, and people get the (mistaken) idea that wow how safe it must be there, compared to us where some guy broke into 1 house in a month and got shot.

Think about all the mixed religions, languages, and people who are in the US from all over the world. The average criminal would never risk getting shot for a mere wallet let's say. Of course not, he's not stupid. But where there are no guns, even $50 is well worth the trouble.

Normally what I noticed in that in the US crimes involving guns are incredibly broadcasted on the news for some reason, and I don't mean mass-shootings, I mean some robbery gone wrong, some idiots starting a fight and devolving to guns, and so on. That kinda drives the average person to believe there is a gun problem.

Just my 2 cents, as a non american, I think banning guns would skyrocket petty crimes. I know they exist even now, but still, probably not even close.

I just read today, on the UK motorway, lorry trucks are being robbed and destroyed using knives and rocks, and if you call the police, they won't even show up because it's not a violent crime, it's just stealing, and they will come when they have time to certify the damage and give you a paper you can take to the insurance and that's it.

Because education and common sense are completely relative terms.

Education in Islam = Knowing the quran by heart.
Common sense in Islam = Killing anybody who is not muslim, who is not straight, and in the end who does not agree with Islam.
There is no such thing as common sense/education, it's not measurable and certainly not enforceable.

Will the firmware randomly create ads?

Basically the new leader has the entire country oriented towards computer science. He basically built a small city just for them, with much higher standards of living than the rest of the population. They even have malls, restaurants, taxis, cars, everything. So now every teen has incentive to be good at software as it can be their entire family ticket out of poverty and hunger. He can move his family, and his parents to a free apartment there. Of course it's still very controlled, imagine something like checkpoints with armed guards to bypass if you want to even go in.

A former programmer becoming a lawyer could make a ton of money in these patents wars...it's actually not a bad idea at all...

[sarcasm] Stupid pharmaceutical companies and their damn vaccins ruining our children! [/sarcasm]

I think it was mentioned in the sense that they are companies that (theoretically) are worth billions, but influence very little the general productivity of americans. On the contrary. While electricity probably directly affected all other industries as well back in the days...

The electricity is already there of you charge at night. All the wasted energy at night time would simply be used to charge ev's. Also since the price of the wasted energy will no longer need to be included in the price of the daytime used energy it might actual get cheaper. I know it's not a 100% fix since we still have electricity generates from fossil fuel but think of the 80% energy in fossil fuel that is wasted in ICE engines. Nobody talks about that. I know electricity transport has losses too, but not 80%. Plus, fossil fuel needs to be transported too, and required massive infrastructure to be cheap, and if something goes wrong, it's really bad. I think electricity is the best option we have, but yes, the battery technology is nowhere near mass market yet compared to fossil fuels. But it will reach the good enough point soon, where charging 20 mins for 200 mile range is livable.

I used to think something like the Panem (hunger games) would never work in real life, but with every visit I make to the US it seems like it could and it would work very well as long as the technology exists. It's already happening. Think about it. This whole consumers are needed is crap. They are not needed. The elite pay very well the people that can make things happen, engineers, scientist, and whatever else they might need for a luxurious life. They can get minerals from the ground, process them, manufacture stuff with them with extremely few people needed. After that, why would they ever need the masses for? To spend resources? Ah. They would rebel. But if you have the technology and they don't, will they attack with spears? Bows and arrows? The middle East is a joke. It's not obliterated simply because the civilized world needs an enemy to keep the population in fear and prejudice Anybody serious believes that if the US would really want to they would not obliterate the entire middle East in a matter of months? They took down Iraq in what, a few weeks? They only sprinkle a drone or an airstrike here and there, just enough so that there's something to put on the evening news, but nothing serious. Even this whole ISIS thing, come on, who is gonna rebuild Syria after they finish things there? Western companies. Probably Russian too, so that everyone is happy. All the Syrians want to go home, no matter what happens, home is always home. And if they will have a booming economy while rebuilding everything, even better. The only thing keeping us in a consumer economy is a mindset. The mindset that every person deserves to have a home, clothes, a car. So the wheels keep turning. But as soon as we will lose that mindset, the takeover can happen with the switch of a button

I really hope not. That would take us back k hundreds of years in terms of slaves, inferior/superior races and all that...

There are literally thousands of government agencies who care :) So they can reconstruct anything or do face recognition on them in case of something :)