Now you can get the great development environment of Linux and at the same time be subjected to the instability and intrusive surveillance features that Windows is famous for! Is a breakthrough.

Next, the appliance manufacturers will want two-factor authentication to connect your dishwasher. Maybe the appliance has a microphone so that it can check on what you are saying, or maybe it will have a chat with Siri or Alexa when you're not around. I want to just buy something and use it, and not have the manufacturer watching me and restricting my use of the thing I own. This sort of intrusive snooping seems universal with new automobiles and impossible to avoid. The trend seems irresistible and I don't like it.

Sounds like propaganda to me. How many of those bright young engineers have jobs right now? How many of them wouldn't escape to the West if they got the chance?

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there is some dissent and disagreement among a group of high-powered people, particularly when they are not being paid for their work. Open source projects die from this, just as they die from disinterest or from the exhaustion of the maintainers. The real surprise is that Linux has been able to continue and to improve for so many years already. It's a great gift that we all should appreciate, but it really is amazing that it has endured.

Facebook is fully invested in the surveillance culture and Linux is not. Apparently this is enough for Facebook to label the open source operating system as evil even though they use Linux themselves. This sort of people never seem to have any trouble with the "Rules for Thee and Not for Me" philosophy.

Microsoft continues their bullying to get everyone moved to Windows 11, their new high-surveillance platform. They will be making plenty from the information that they gather from you. The online Office program is a great lever because they can turn it off whenever they want, unlike the old binary copies that you used to get on a CD. Full disclosure: I have a copy of Windows 11 that I use for one program that requires it. Otherwise, I moved all of my computing to Linux about 30 years ago and have been very happy living in the Free World.

It doesn't always thoroughly clean the device. The standard practice at Hewlett-Packard was to remove the hard drive and mechanically crush it before donating (the remaining parts of) their old PCs to charitable organizations.

Who is asking for this? Apple itself is asking for this. Their servers will have a photograph of everyone who visits your house. I'm sure police authorities will enjoy having this information, too.

If they don't want to learn English it will have no effect on me. I once dreamed of visiting China but no more.

Perhaps they will make the sound effects programmable so that they can be modified by users. For example, I would enjoy hearing horseshoes clopping on the road rather than the buzzing roar of a gasoline engine. The starter sound could be changed to a horse whinnying. If you want nostalgia, you should be able to go all the way.

If a company performs badly for any reason and this sort of system is in place then the employees are the ones who are punished, not the owners or shareholders. It's similar ro a variable-rate mortgage: These are set so that the bank always gets a profit no matter what the overall market does. If the market takes a turn that is unfavorable for the bank, the mortgage holders must pay more. In merit-bonus-only companies, the employees get less when the company does badly so that the bottom line can be maintained a little while longer and the shareholders won't notice.

And, the company is in charge of the metrics for your bonuses and compensation. If they want to cut staffing expenses, they just set cut-off goals for everyone that are unattainable. Poof. Their costs go down.

If these plans proliferate, we can expect a resurgence of unions. Workers who are accustomed to a steady income that was agreed when they were hired will not put up with this.

Are all in California, and are all big Democrat donors. What a surprise that Greasy Gavin is protecting their rice bowl.

Hackers of the world, unite! The car manufacturers are colluding with the insurance and advertising industries to spy on us and sell the information about us that they gather. Let's turn all this crap off! If I got a new Ford with this audio monitoring in ti, the first thing I would do is cut the wires on the microphone. The other monitoring stuff is more complicated, but I am confident that we could take it out if everyone worked together on hacking the cars' operating systems.

There seems to be no statute of limitations on tax matters in the EU, at least in cases where the EU thinks it is owed money. Apple was following all the local laws during these years. Now the EU wants to bleed money from it just because its lawyers were smart enough to find a favorable tax location for the company. There is nothing more determined than a bureaucrat who sees some money he thinks he can confiscate.

What a great office and a great company. She died at her desk and no one even noticed for four days. There have been lots of stories about working conditions at Wells Fargo, but never anything like this.