Just booted it. The EULA is frightening to say the least.
1. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content."
2. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions".
3. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social stability.
There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)
I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with Linux for now.
If this is really true [1] and not an exaggeration, there is no way on Earth I will touch this or let anyone I care about touch it with a 100-foot pole.
Closed source? Waive legal rights? to my own content? Not criticize China?
Not in 100 million years. Glad I switched to 100% Ubuntu. Donated and anticipating 16.04 LTS in April.
It's one thing to get pressured into a gray area w/r/t freedoms in exchange for some perceived benefit, but to explicitly waive them and endanger myself to a foreign power? Who knows what China would do? No way.
How do these people even make a EULA with a straight face and expect people to drink it up? Even though Windows and OSX are closed-source, at least hackers have a grasp on what it's doing and you're not instantly giving up rights and ownership when you turn it on.
This crosses my line in the sand.
[1] I've been trying to find the EULA online somewhere, but can't so far. Any leads? I'm afraid to install this and look at the EULA.
This should be considered malware for the first point.
The others are impossible for China to enforce outside of China but if your content somehow got to them via this OS, they can legally sell your content to anyone. It'd be your responsibility to challenge that in various courts. It's just not worth it.
If this is really true, wtf. I wonder why we see RemixOS for the third time on HN frontpage within days.
On the other side Win10 eula is almost as bad. The difference is they really enforce their things and even backported some to Win7/8 disguised as security updates. Why do they get away with this? Why do we occasionally see "positiv comments" about it on HN.
This must reach some sort of high point for satirically awful comments here. Really? Can you point to the bit of the Win 10 EULA that allows Microsoft to claim anything you create with it as theirs?
Take it from the positive side - looks like there will be finally a year of Linux desktop (even if because of being pushed out of other operating systems due to their draconian terms of use)! ;-)
Perhaps it is legal boilerplate for People's Republic of China companies.
Consider that an American EULA might require a "worldwide, sublicenseable, irrevocable [...]" user content license, and forbid activites illegal in the USA.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've written about this in Xataka (http://www.xataka.com/servicios/remix-os-promete-pero-su-lic...), where I work as editor, and after getting in contact with Jide's team they've let us known that these terms apply only to China and that they will update the EULA:
"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In full disclosure, we utilized the language (relevant to China and China only) and copied it over to the EULA for our international ROM. Our legal team has now reviewed this and has removed all language pertaining to legal and moral rights of the data as well as anything that mentions the Chinese government as this is not relevant to non-Chinese users. This is a very serious matter and will be corrected in all future releases of the EULA."
From the EULA, point 1 applies to anything you upload to their site or to "Jide services". Jide services require registration and are necessary to some functionality within the OS. This could be a horrible interpretation of giving up certain rights to content you share on a social network or site.
It's awful, yes, but it may not apply to everything you do within ReactOS. The other 2 points do apply to everything you do in ReactOS, so you're supposed to censor yourself based on Chinese government censorship policies whenever you use it.
I love most of the interface. There's still a few bugs that haven't been addressed, but it's 95% solidly done.
The telemetry capture is a huge issue for me and also no longer releasing the contents of updates. I've done what I can to limit or minimize how much information is collected, but I shouldn't have to do that.
When Microsoft released their metrics on Windows 10 usage (for example, how many times their Photos app had been used), people should've been absolutely livid. Who knows what else is captured besides the process list?
I've never understood that about deducting charitable donations. I've always had the principle that I shouldn't be getting anything for my charity. Otherwise, it wouldn't really be a donation to me. It would be make it conditional. I'm giving this money away, but give me some back from the taxpayers?
I might sound like a sucker, but that's just always been my thought on it. My mother once said something to me like that as a kid and I've applied it donating.
You never end up with a net plus by giving to charity; you are always giving away money. This is because the amount of tax you avoid is always less than what you gift. For example, you may gift $100, which ends up reducing your tax bill by, say, $30. If charitable gifts weren't tax-deductible the equivalent would have been paying $30 in taxes and having $70 left over to give to charity (for same $100 loss). The tax-advantaged status gives charitable gifts an extra bang-for-your-buck by giving you same net result (total outgo of $100) while allowing you to direct all $100 to the charity of your choice.
Also, notice that you're not somehow "getting something back" from other taxpayers in this scenario. You're just lowering your tax bill.
But the money still goes to charity. Essentially person A is just indirectly donating to their pet charity using political capital. As long as the charity is legit, I don't see the problem.
Right, there is no problem, this is not controversial. The linked article that started this thread is suggesting that somehow Zuckerberg plans to get this tax-advantaged treatment by making gifts to an organization that is not actually charitable. That would be a problem, but I would suggest that the linked article is mistaken in saying that this is what Zuckerberg is doing.
The reasons are mainly historical, but the non-profit lobby (consisting of charities, 501c3 non-profit organizations, churches and university endowments) holds so much power, that stripping them of tax-sheltered status would be a third rail for any politician running for office.
The historical reasons assume that many everyday community efforts (feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, abused women and children, planting trees, sheltering stray animals) is better done (and financed) at community level by community efforts rather than by central government and sending money to Washington D.C.
Played it for the first time at a Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. It's everything I had heard and it is offensive. It's also an absolute blast to play with the right people.
>If they were that powerful, they'd just hit the "Turn off Daesh and Al Qaeda" switches at the controls, wouldn't you think?
It takes an awful lot of patience, money and hard work to make constructive, trust-building relationships with people who have different beliefs and priorities than you do. It's tough work that only pays off in the long term.
Messing things up massively, however, just takes and handful of idiots with guns and a weekend.
Hurricanes (to put it in US terms) are powerful. But they don't have either off switches or controls. The CIA's influence in the world is just as strong or to put it in a way that your child-minds would better understand, reckless.
Are you a child, living in a constructed reality, unwilling to look past the set of beliefs that were erected by politicians, right-wing imperialist media and corporate empires? Or are you willing to find out, not only for yourself but also for future generations, how deep those rabbit holes go and how your democracies are in fact, Banana republics?
You need to think a little more critically about the actual mechanics of regime change and pulling off a coup d'etat.
Also it wouldn't hurt to lose the arrogance.
Running a country is not easy. You need to command loyalty from a group of people that can safeguard your place in the nation. Not just an army, but also groups of people who can fund and support that army. It's as true for a tiny island nation as it is for the USA. European colonialism had outsized effects on the Caribbean for that reason, way easier to keep a nation of 10,000 under your thumb than to control millions.
The CIA has resources comparable to a small army, but it must project these resources thinly across all the countries the US wishes to influence. It can buy guns and train limited numbers of rebels, but it cannot create a ruling party where before there was none. It can alter the course of politics in a nation, but that influence can't come close to actual control unless the nation is very small.
Once in awhile they got lucky, and their group of trigger-happy idiots overwhelmed the other group of trigger-happy idiots. It's arguable as to exactly how much damage this does. Obviously it has a negative effect, political chaos is generally worse for a people than stability. Try to measure the effects in aggregate though, and comparing them to what would have happened otherwise, and it's hard to really tell.
Political upheaval can destroy individual lives, but generally the industries underneath are left alone, it makes no sense, say, for a rebel group to destroy farmland, or a factory. Your efforts are much better directed at military targets, you're going to want that factory to keep making things once you're in power, being needlessly destructive hurts your interests too.
Never said that American interventionism was a good thing or that regime changes are justified. Don't know where you got that from but it's not from me. I'm just trying to put it in perspective.
Fire Stick ($39) will do ALL of that except for 4k. We haven't used anything in the house except Netflix and Kodi for a year. It's a wonderful little stick. Too bad Amazon had to be an ass and remove Kodi from their store (you just sideload it instead now).
What do you mean? Are you referring to playing stuff off of a NAS?
Our two Fire Sticks play of our NAS just fine. We even push video downloads in Kodi back to the NAS no problem. It took about an hour from pulling out of the box, to installing Kodi, configuring my streaming services and pointing it to our shared folders on the NAS.
Vaping was the only way that worked for me. I smoked cigarettes for 20 years and tried patches, nicotine gum, lozenges, and medications. Vaping did it. I worked my way down from 24mg and eventually stopped a few weeks after I had been on 0mg.
I have ZERO desire to ever smoke again. It's been about 4 years now and I'm still not (nor ever plan to be) an asshole ex-smoker telling other people to quit. Cigarette smoke still smells delicious though and I tell smokers when I'm near enough to smell it:)
1. "You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content."
2. You're also not allowed to oppose "the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China", harm it's "national honor and interests", or undermine it's "national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions".
3. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social stability.
There's other strange rules of conduct that just turned me off from the entire project. Besides, it doesn't see either of my wireless adapters and the desktop blanked out when it attempted to adjust my screen resolution:)
I'm still interested in getting completely off Windows 10, so I'll stick with Linux for now.