Difference, and it's a whopping one, is that the Firefox telemetry is fully documented on, shock-horror, the mozila site. You get it clear and simple, and if you don't like it, you don't use it.

The MS stuff was undocumented, and now they are making up BS excuses as to how it's for the developer's benefit.

Did you try, ever?

After a long time in such denial, I recently migrated my family to Linux. The only thing that doesn't work is the 4th installment of a certain game, and for that I have a dedicated partition with Win. Everything else is on Linux natively or in Wine. Even some applications using Adobe AIR work flawlessly, which I was amazed about.

(There was a massive rant following this pro-Open Software, but I took my meds and deleted it)

Firstly: stop who? systemd developers? individual distro developers?

Secondly: where would the telemetry be gathered? the main advantage for M$ is that they get ALL of it. For each distribution to get their share would be much less profitable (monetary or otherwise), and there would be clear ability to switch it off completely (not like with the MS hydra, with new telemetry hooks constantly uncovered). At worst, you'd have to re-compile the stuff, and most probably there would be distributions already offering such versions.

No, I can never see Linux overall going anywhere near such state as M$. Individual, commercialized distributions maybe, but not the whole thing. This is the main advantage of choice under Linux

Disclaimer: Arch Linux rules!

Yes, it's pretty much an inner joke and, as someone else mentioned in this thread, a reflection of prestige and power. Nothing to do with science (or even populatization of it) at all. I quite liked the "placeholder" names, they made it easier to know what you were talking about, even if your latin was sketchy. "ununpentium" means 115, and it's easy. Now, only utter geeks will be able to remember what the atomic number for ones like Ytterbium. Call it something like "septnihilum", and it's way easier to remember. Well, some people have cars as "extensions", others have elements...

Is everybody so used to this by now that nobody's commenting? No signature "./ rage"?

Sorry, it flew over my head. Are you making some obscure joke, or an actual comment about lack of ability to cater for more than two parties in the exchange? We really should have tags mandated here. Some peoples' sarcasm is so deep, it eludes me.

And this, essentially, is the answer to the article, end of story. I'd upvote if I had the points. However, this being /., the discussion below continues in the vein of "my OS is better than yours"

Well, the difference is that, in prison, they are a drain on the taxes. Decent people work all their life to survive, yet criminals get all they need. What's more, exactly the same people who oppose death penalty are also very likely to make a fuss about prisoner's rights. Make criminals work for their upkeep, and make them work hard. If they don't, let them suffer and starve like normal people do when they don't work. And refuse them any benefits which would apply to non-convicts. They have thrown away their rights the moment they commited a crime. It's not about revenge. It's about punishment and deterrent, with minimum cost to the society.

And use them to replace politicians? AI FOR PRESIDENT!!! Seriously, I'm all for it....

Because what you are describing is key escrow, not end-to-end encryption. What WhatsApp implemented recently (I believe, correct me if wrong) is proper e2e, where only the sender and recipient have access, and even WhatsApp can't see the contents. It's exactly this kind of encryption that is being attacked and various agencies want to put backdoors in it. Also, if I encrypt data offline, and then send it (encryption completely apart from the sending medium or app), I want strong encryption without anyone but designated recipient to be able to access it. Any form of outside access would be a back door. Even explicit key escrow could be considered such, as it would require me to send the key somewhere for "safekeeping", deeply undermining the security in real sense (both sending and storage of the key would be vulnerable).