Matthew Garrett

I happen to agree that we cannot let Microsoft push their "Patriot Act" restrictions on us. For the last two decades PC's have needed anti-virtus software, mainly because Microsoft didn't implement the protections Intel built into the 386+ x86 hardware. The majority of viruses operated through buffer overrun situations which could have been avoided through the use of boundary protections. But Microsoft didn't bother. At the beginning they didn't bother because it would have taken more memory. But after they subsidized the memory manufacturers, enough memory was available, but they didn't bother. Now they are poised to take over the computer landscape using UEFI as the tool and viruses as the excuse. They caused most of this trouble, and now they want us to give up our freedom, supposedly to protect ourselves. But I believe Microsoft writes such poor code that even after the boot becomes pseudo-secure, there will simply be an entire new class of malware that takes advantage of something else. We will still have malware, and our freedom will be gone as well. I for one am not ready to let Microsoft determine the look and feel of computing forever through this maneuver. The above posting was to idiotic, and the person was not uninformed. If you haven't gulped the MS-CoolAid then you don't buy all this stuff. I consider myself very knowledgeable about the issues,and after reading the guidelines for Windows 8 compatibility, it was obvious they were written by lawyers, and not technical people. The only reason I can think of for people to buy ARM based Windows machines would be if they were sold under cost until such time as the x86 PC market collapsed. Then we could count on the prices ring up, and our freedoms would be gone.