Not at the budget end. This deal gives you three months free food and accommodation during your stay in NZ, and probably a free trip home afterwards too.

Actually now I've read the actual article, I'm not sure that they are in any way authorizing the pirate copies, but only upgrading them to Windows 10. They will later "make it easy for them to move to legitimate copies.â

Yeah, exactly. Hopefully VMs would even be portable to new machines.

Good question. If Microsoft are taking this route, why not just make Windows 10 free? It seems like getting one of these free copies will involve a convoluted process of installing a "pirate" edition (where do I find one that's malware free?) before "upgrading" to the real thing.

However, I'm still tempted by the offer, perhaps I'll try to set up a Windows boot partition and a VM to go on my current Linux-only machine.

That would confuse the issue, since they were talking about "people who use non-default browsers". I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu, and it was installed by default.

I'd say you should also wear gloves everywhere in case your fingerprint is compromised. It's not like you can change it easily.

It's one more vote against the status quo.

I haven't seen it, but I have the same reaction to pretty much every Microsoft advert. The idea that a target audience for such crap may actually exist scares me.

It would be nice if the conventions were somewhat stronger. Miscommunication happens all the time just because people use langauge differently, such as words that have more than one meaning or which are used differently in different places. Human languages manage to be simultaneously overcomplex and ambiguous.

In its complaint, Microsoft alleged that some of the features of the Kyocera smartphones infringe patents the software company holds in the areas of power management for enhanced battery life, "self-aware" devices that respond to changes in the user's surroundings, text messaging and doing multiple tasks on a computing device at the same time.

So they have patented self-aware phones, and other amazing innovations like doing multiple tasks at the same time on a single device.

Three strikes and we let the rights holder go to court to get IP addresses? Given the rights holders have effectively had zero effect in getting the customer details from ISPs in the past, what are they going to do once they get them? If they can't get through the first stage of the legal battle and get thrown out at the discovery process, what chance have they got of actually successfully suing someone?

I hope some kind of court order would be needed before ISPs will hand over the customer details. However the article suggests that the details will just be handed over to anybody who claims an offense by any customer who has used up their strikes.

Then you can get their address and sue them for what exactly? And how do you know which IP address has politicians and rich supporters behind them?

Report the ISP's entire IP address range perhaps, it's sure to get one of them. I'd be interested to know what evidence the ISPs will require when deciding whether a report is valid. Also, whether they will accept reports from any copyright holder (I have a photo of my cat from this morning...) or just media organizations with a lot of lawyers.

Last time I checked it WAS the govt's job to do law enforcement, not the ISPs.

Traditionally it was a civil matter, publisher vs publisher. The government only provided the courts.

Aliens have perhaps refrained from eliminating humans because we have so much comedy value.

If spending $2 on a lottery ticket is so good, why not use every dollar you've got to buy lottery tickets. That will give you a much bigger chance of winning.