Reminds me of the old joke "What's the opposite of PROgress?"
CONgress.

It's pretty bad when there are approximately 150M new PCs sold (Gartner estimate) and you give free upgrades to existing Windows customers, that there are only 50M Windows 10 installations? Seems that the vast majority of those new PCs must have been sold with Windows 7 on them.

Well, Hulu offers both commercial and commercial free subscriptions. They report 9M subscribers for the commercial version and 3M for the commercial free version. Based on their users, it would appear that commercial free is important for about 25% of their users. Since both versions offer the same content, using them for the analysis rules out other "important" issues such as available content. Nielson states that the demographics of Netflix and Hulu viewers are the same, so unless one can come up with an explanation as to why their viewing preferences are different, I'll stand by that the commercial free is not important to most people.

YMMV.

The fact that many others subscribe to various services that do include ads. No opinion, just direct observation.

Then Amazon Prime would not be a benefit to you. On the other hand, many people do shop a lot with them which makes their decision matrix different. I, too, don't have a prime account, but I do see a number of shows I would watch if they were available on Netflix. My problem is that if I'm going to subscribe to three or four streaming services, I might as well have cable.

For the old price of a Netflix subscription, you can have Amazon Prime, get equivalent content that you did from Netflix and free two day shipping on stuff you order. Netflix's solution to the competition -- raise prices. Yeah, that will work. [/sarcasm]

That is not the same as saying that ads are not important to most people. If the question had been phrased "Would you be willing to have three ads at the beginning of a show if that meant a 12.5% reduction in your subscription rate?" would probably generate a different response. (BTW, the 12.5% is the amount of the rate increase for most users).

Most surveys are a) not statistically valid and b) are consciously or subconsciously biased to the answer the questioner expects. As such, they aren't really very useful at all.

Obviously if one has the choice to watch a program with or without ads, most people would chose without ads. However, that is not the choice being presented. It is to watch programs with ads, say on Hulu, or not watch them at all. And even Hulu has started allowing all the ads to be preloaded at the front of content to keep from interrupting it.

So the question really is not about the importance of ads, but the importance of being able to view the content.

The OP used the term "have" correctly. To use it in the way you intend would be like saying nobody has to wait to go to the bathroom as they can always choose to go right where they are at. In short, it doesn't require one to be coerced with a gun until one has to wait for something. I bet you had to wait, just for this post and nobody was holding a gun on you to do so, or did you choose to wait?

So? Bush was an Ivy League graduate who pushed to dumb down the education system. Politics isn't about doing what's right, it's about appealing to the masses. Well, the masses of donors, that is.

The US army isn't switching to Windows 10. They are switching to something that looks like Windows 10, but supposedly has certain features removed or disabled. Of course, re-enabling them is just a software patch away, either from official sources or not.

I agree with this. It's not that gas prices were higher than anticipated. It's that they built their energy plan on a speculative market. That is the flaw in the system. Now they are faced with regulating the market, which is undesirable for investors or ignoring it, thus hurting consumers (and businesses, too). But, hey, it's easier to say gas prices are higher than anticipated than we f*cked up.

How can they have higher than expected gas prices? Surely, they didn't think the glut of oil and natural gas would be permanent in their cost analysis! By what means could electricity ever be $14,000(AU) per KW/H given the current world energy climate? Something else is the cause of this and this just smells like a coverup.

But, but, but, they don't intend to break the law, so it is okay.

It doesn't matter if they never promised to offer that feature, they did in fact offer it. So, removing it after the device has been purchased is a valid consumer complaint. Car analogy - car manufacturers don't promise the top speed one can drive their vehicles, but if they apply a software update that suddenly throttles the vehicle to a max speed of 70, people would rightly be upset, even if that is the legal speed limit.

Manufacturers warrant a product for a particular use, but that doesn't mean the purchaser can't use it for some other use if they so choose.