Re: If you're getting tired of the notifications, just disable them
Being able to stop them isn't really the issue.
W10 is not free. There are free "upgrades" for some products for which people paid money. MS are significantly and materially changing the product after the sale. If I bought W7, and followed MS' recommendations regarding security patches, why am I no longer running W7?
It shows a great deal of contempt for the people who bought their products. Its bait and switch. Whether W10 is better or not is completely irrelevant.
I actually have a couple of windows installations on one disk. I don't really use them - one has an old Steam account on it and the other is reserved for "dodgy" use and they both hang off the same license. It will be interesting to see if I can upgrade one of them to W10, just to play with it. Play being the operative word. I moved all my "production" desktop (including Steam) to Linux quite a while ago.
I can afford to be smug because ditching windows of any version has almost zero impact on me. What can I say. I don't care for the cloud, I feel no need to have data seamlessly available to my phone and laptop but I really do object in principle to handing a great deal of power to corporates. I have nothing to hide, but I still have plenty to fear. In principle I object to making people so IT illiterate and/or ill-equipped that they can't look after themselves.
Look what happened to Novell and DEC and Sinclair and Amstrad and Northern Rock. What happens if that happens to MS or your cloud provider? What happens if Lehman Bros happens to Facebook. Where are all your photos of your kids? Did they go from Phone to Cloud in a "post-PC" era?
You might utterly trust corporates and government with all the intimate details of your life, but governments change. All it needs is a bit of hunger, the collapse of the currency and you'll be surprised what people will vote for. Did you dabble a bit in trade-unionism when you were young? Perhaps you had a running (email) joke about purchasing class-A substances which looks a little unfunny a few years later when your friend actually gets into dealing.
What happens when the data retention archive is so all-knowing and so well-protected that no-one can gainsay what the government says is in it. Its just computer data. How would you know if its been updated or if someone hacked it? What if they just said they hacked it and made stuff up? Just the existence of such a thing is dangerous. It isn't a question about who has what to hide, its about who can misuse it. Nothing, not the rare act of terrorism nor ease of use warrants the sucking of so much personal data into a cloud form, where can be so abused.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
