Speaking as someone who moderated a torrent site forum in my teens, there's unfortunately so much truth in what you said in that first paragraph. Especially the part about adolescent morality as policy.
Are you referring to Facebook like pages? They've been essentially pointless for a while now, since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post, money that for a "poor" or "just starting up" new venture is better spent elsewhere.
What they did was genius - encourage everyone to make their Facebook following central to their online marketing strategy, then lock them out unless they cough up.
"Windows is my favorite desktop OS ... I really enjoy the ease of use that I get with Windows where everything that I need to do just works."
I was in 100% agreement with this up until maybe a year or two ago, having flirted between Windows and Ubuntu for at least a decade. But now, I find Ubuntu 16.04 (MATE being my variant of choice) to work better out of the box than Windows, even with third party peripherals.
As one anecdotal example, I've a basic EPSON printer / scanner combo on my network. It's always been a fiddle to make work with Windows - you need to go to their website and download their driver and proprietary application so that Windows can find it and produce scans, and it's not all that reliable. The other day, I needed to scan something, and typed "scan" into my MATE menu fully expecting there to be a problem to solve. I opened up the Simple Scan application and not only was the scanner detected and online, but it just worked immediately with no quibbles. I get these sorts of pleasant surprises all the time now, to the point that I can honestly say it's easier to use than Windows.
All of the Applications I use have native Linux support (Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Steam, Unity with VS Code, etc) and work as well as their Windows counterparts. Lots of things I find are easier to set up compared to Windows such as Python programming with virtualenvs, CUDA support for TensorFlow and so on.
Plus - no UWP, no forced updates, no dodgy telemetry, no obnoxious adverts for OneDrive and Office popping up in Explorer... add all that up and it's a done deal. No Windows in this house.
You can take the "precog" metaphor used in Minority Report and replace it what's actually happening - dragnet surveillance combined with predictive modeling algorithms to assess each individual's threat level. This is happening so openly that the DHS have done a public Kaggle competition to improve their algos for body scanners at airports. Now extrapolate a very short distance from there and think about what they're doing that's classified. Even the most unimaginative of us can see what's happening here.
Over the past several years I've seen the automatic reflex response to this concern go from "well if you've got nothing to hide" to "well, I mean they're not watching me or you specifically, they don't have the man power". Well, you're right, but not for the reason you think. The fact is they don't need man power any longer. The algos are watching you.
Depressants don't necessarily make you depressed. The term depressant just means that they depress the nervous system, as opposed to stimulating it like coffee or cocaine. There's a link between depression and drug use because many drugs, depressants and stimulants alike, provide a short-term release of neurotransmitters such as Dopamine and GABA, which makes you feel happy and relaxed.
I'd say that Ubuntu MATE (16.04) with the redmond layout and advanced menu enabled is the best alternative to Windows 7 I've yet seen in a Linux distro.
> I might be biased, but I realized in the few years I lived in the UK that the services, health care, and general quality of life are overall better down there than up here. I obviously have only anecdotal proof of that.
You said you live in Birmingham. It's not a city known for it's fantastic services, health care, and quality of life. The UK is a very varied place in all of these metrics. I've known and worked with many EU nationals who've come to the UK, lived and worked in one place for a few years, and formed a strong opinion on things. You might not have a complete perspective.
> Investors in traditional TV providers are reeling as companies from AT&T Inc. to Viacom Inc. fail to stop the desertion of customers lured away by cheaper entertainment options such as Netflix and Snapchat.
What? Snapchat as an entertainment option? I thought it was a messaging app.
I work for a small software company, we pick our own laptops from the Dell business account.
Anecdotally, every Latitude we've bought has been rock solid, and every XPS - without exception - has had issues. Sound cards dead on arrival, random bluescreening, dead SSDs, faulty HDMI ports, you name it. Sometimes they'll send a new one, sometimes they'll send an engineer to replace the motherboard.
I can't recommend XPS based on my own experience. The quality control just doesn't seem to be there. The specs are too good to be true for the price anyway. If you need the specs, go Precision.