a-ko

Reading these comments makes me sad. It's everyone trying to dig at your story for their own agendas.

• "DO YOU BELIEVE 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB?
• "WITH CANCER, DO YOU SMOKE POT? WHAT KIND OF POT DO YOU SMOKE? DO YOU BELIEVE IN MEDICAL MARIJUANA?"

Seriously people...

This is an area to which I disagree.

Star Trek's moral characters don't need balancing simply because this then shows that these people are exceptional within the human race and are not the norm.

I've always considered Star Trek, and especially TOS and TNG, to explore the fact that the emotional and mental state of these characters isn't some exception to the rule. That this is just how society in that time was.

We have this "duality" of "good vs evil" in real life. Star Trek's vision to me is to show that humanity has overcome all of today's current obstacles.

This right here is the largest reason I don't support the EFF and such groups. They spend more time fearmongering and misleading than actually making the valid concerns that really should be made. Their arguments boil down to "IT'S EVIL AND BAD FOR YOU JUST TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT!" than actually explaining why.

Even the link on their website with a breakdown spends a ridiculous amount of effort on DRM, most of which already exists in US law. And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, most people in the US don't give a damn about because it won't affect them.

Honestly, I think of all the copyright concerns out there "Happy Birthday" is about the only one that has been the largest problem for today's general public. Absolutely everything else doesn't matter to a vast majority of the US public, so I'd focus less on these issues and more on issues that do matter to a majority of people.

Just a couple of notes:

• Screen-scaling doesn't work quite as well as I would have hoped. It doesn't seem to be an independent control for each device. So text and objects appear larger on an external monitor than they would if I was directly connected to that monitor using a 100% screen scale.

• Loving the changes to 8.1 workflows on my Surface Pro. I had been running the preview of 8.1 but reverted to 8 a couple of weeks ago in preparation for the 8.1 GA. I actually realized I became reliant on things such as the 50/50 screen split. In fact, I became super reliant on it and it was VERY painful to go back to 8.

• Are we going to see a Windows Internals book series upgrade for 8/8.1?

• IE11 now has TLS 1.1/1.2 support enabled by default... and SPDY! Awesome.

• Bravo for beating other browser/OS vendors to TLS 1.1/1.2 support back in the day. I remember when BEAST was a big deal and I was like "uh, so just use TLS 1.2? Oh yeah... Apache mod_ssl does not support it."

App-Specific

• Skype Modern sucks compared to the desktop client. I see there was an update today, so I have yet to try it. Mostly surrounding multiple user conferencing.

• Mail App STILL does not support digital signatures.

• Twitter App needs a major upgrade.

Store Stuff

• Why is there so much crap allowed in the store? I've used all of the major "Stores" and find that Apple's closed-off system to be the best at keeping garbage out. We're talking unofficial apps that are massive trademark violations to fool users into installing something that spies on them or applications they don't trust.

• You should REALLY do a better job at highlighting first party applications.

• Search "Facebook" on the new store, and look at how many apps there are...Facebook+, Facebook+ Lite, Facebook TRICKZ, etc. This is all nonsense and it needs to be pulled under control.

For IE Team

• Please fix the IEAK. I like to get the latest IE installed on my workstation at work, but I have to manage IEAK for previous versions on the network. Our corporate standard is IE8, but I'm on IE10. Unfortunately, I can't build IE8 IEAK installs when I have IE10 installed.... Please for the love of all that is holy fix this!

Groups such as the EFF aren't technically wrong. These such provisions do lead to mass censorship. It's just that most Americans, which is the group that has the most influence in most of these laws, simply don't care about neither the issue at hand nor about the rest of the people it affects. We're already under most of these provisions and we sure as hell don't care about other people being under these provisions.

All a company has to say to appeal to the American masses is "This will help stop Chinese knockoffs from being imported into the country and protect American consumers." and they win. It doesn't even matter that the "knockoffs" aren't truly knockoffs and are often made in the same factories as the "legitimate" products to begin with.