"Ron C" wrote

| Oddly, I'm with nospam on the ads thing. Seems one of
| the first things I did when I set up Win 10 was to turn off
| all the tiles.

Yes, you can sort of do that. And the Start Menu, too?
You clean that up? And lock screen ads? It's all mild now.
That was my point. They're getting you acclimated. They're
establishing a new norm. It's like Google reading your email.
That's outrageous that they claim to co-own your
email. But they're not pushy about it, and people have
acclimated. Nevertheless, the implications are very real.
A corporation owns and stores copies of your private
correspondence. In the case of Windows, it's alsdo not
free. If you didn't pay for Win10 then you did pay for the
version you upgraded from. But Microsoft are trying to
redefine the product; to get you comfortable with the
idea that you've bought an entertainment/shopping/
services device and that nothing that happens on it
belongs to you.
It's already gone a long way from where it used to be
when you have to deal with the ads at all. It's your computer.
They have no business infesting it with ads. The question
of whether it's a notrable hassle is beside the point. They
have no business accessing your computer in any way --
even for updates -- without your permission.

In '99 there was an episode where MS was caught
reading registration info from the Registry when people
visited Windows Update. People were outraged. MS
promised to stop. They've managed to radically shift
the paradigm since then.

| ~
| The big pain for me is that I have Win 10 on a machine
| that I use infrequently. Seems just about every time I use
| the machine it installs updates that take ages to install.

That's another aspect of the same thing. It's a kiosk
device on which you're meant to buy stuff and rent
services. They're moving slowly, but they are moving
very deliberately in that direction. Your car is now a
taxi you rent. Presto. Forced updates is another thing
they have no right to do and yet people are accepting it.
The non-enterprise customer base is literally the beta
test group for corporate customers.

I was visiting with a neice today who does web design.
She uses only Apple products, but her company is
using MS Azure web services, so she needed to install
Win10 in a VM on her Mac. Both her Start Menu and the
tiles are full of ads. And it's Pro version Win10. That's
like a sick joke -- a pro version of Windows with Candy
Crush ads on the desktop. And if she makes the tiles
visible they flash with a changing array of ads and
pseudo-news.