I'm not exactly sure which "line" this would be crossing that wasn't similarly crossed a long time ago by things like forcing people to wear seat belts
You don't see the difference between forcibly detaining someone for the purpose of breaking their skin to apply foreign substances to their bloodstream, and, mandating the use of safety equipment in dangerous vehicles? Really? This is so off topic so let's not go there - we'd have to start another lounge thread for pro-vax'ers who will defend the right of other sane adults to refuse medical treatment...
The anti-vax crowd can refuse treatment (the fate of their children is another issue though...). The anti fluoride crowd can drink bottled water, or purify their tap water. The anti software-backdoor crowd can use obscure linux distros.
No ones rights are being infringed and no one is dying on a hill, as long as the above statements remain true. It seemed to me that Lactose was attacking this status quo by drawing similarities between those who don't like mandatory software backdoors and those who want to refuse medicine, and also hinting (in my reading) that these groups should not be allowed to do so, or that their arguments for doing so are of so little importance that it's ok to trample them. Underlying these arguments is the issue of personal freedom though, which should not be trampled lightly, hence my response.
So everything's fine with our rights as long as I can just move to Linux. If hand-made OS's were legislated against, then yes, that would be a hill worth dying on - that would be a fight for individual freedom.
But I want to use Windows, so this, below, isn't a whinge about rights, this is a whinge as a customer -- these things are objectively terrible:
- There's no schedule or bandwidth limits for when patches are downloaded. Those of us with regular broadband connections can be financially harmed by this simple oversight. Every other content distribution app that I have (e.g. steam, etc) lets me specify bandwidth limits and/or a download schedule... and also lets me pause their download activities. Win10 does not let me (easily) do any of that -- I have to "hack" the OS to pause a download, enforce a download schedule, or enforce a bandwidth quota.
- The schedule for applying updates does not give me enough control. If I'm running a mission critical app that needs to run 24/7 for the next 5 days, I should be able to tell the PC not to reboot for the next 5 days. Windows 98 had to be rebooted daily for a variety of reasons, and then with XP, 7, 8 it's finally a lovely and stable OS that you can run for months on end if you like... and now they undo all of that in 10 by taking control away from these power users... Maybe they want these customers to buy some server-edition OS, but AFAIK, there is no SKU that is aimed at regular desktop power users who may be doing this kind of work. There's no SKU for desktop users that doesn't treat you like a child who can't be trusted with a PC. Trust has value.
- Lastly, in tin-foil hat mode: Intel and MS are working for the NSA, they are part of the "surveillance state". This is just a fact of life now; to pretend otherwise is a laughable position. Most of us just just shrug and hope that this never actually means anything to us personally... Windows update is a back-door into your system. It's hopefully secure enough that no one other than Microsoft (and the NSA) ever use it to get our PC's to execute their code... but by using Windows, you are implicitly consenting to MS/NSA running whatever code they like on your PC, whenever they like. There is a moral argument to be made about refusing to cooperate with a surveillance state, in which case we should all boycott this system... I am personally as of yet too lazy to do more than shrug my shoulders, but others may understandably have more fire in their belly about this.
These are all valid reasons to use a competitor's product (e.g. Linux, or even Windows 8!) instead of theirs, which makes these objectively bad business choices. We actually have downgraded several PC's to Win8 for reliability purposes in our office, because the above issues are real and have actually cost us money.
There's also (thankfully rare) fun horror stories about when updates go wrong... like last year when a Windows update kindly contained malicious code designed to deliberately brick connected hardware devices that had been produced using counterfeit Chinese chipsets. That was great, having the boards that I use to flash code onto my micro-controllers suddenly all become unusable because the vendor that I bought them from had bought them from a factory who used a vendor who bought chips from another factory who may or may not have violated IP law... In that case, the fix was actually to use Linux to un-brick any affected device :o
At least if I had clicked an update button between the devices working and not working, I might have suspected that the update was the cause, instead of wasting hours fiddling with them :lol: