One of the most egregious examples of tech companies being shitty about asking their users for consent has got to be the Microsoft computer set-up screen.
Every single time I'm asked to set up one drive and register and a bunch of other options I'm given two choices:
Yes and Remind me in 3 days.
Bitch where the fuck is my option to say "One day the sun will expand into a red giant star. It will engulf the earth, and then all that will be left will be a white dwarf star. Over countless eons that white dwarf star will radiate away its heat into the void to become a black dwarf star. Over countless eons beyond that the matter in that black dwarf star will decay through various atomic phases and via quantum tunneling until finally all that is left is a sphere of heatless, lightless iron. That iron star may eventually fall into a black hole, where it will take countless eons more for that mass to evaporate via hawking radiation until finally it just joins the cosmic microwave background radiation until it redshifts away into nothingness. Then, countless eons more beyond that, on time scales a human being cannot even begin to comprehend, there is a chance that a spontaneous entropy decay triggered by one of the photons that once was our home star will encounter a point in space where a sponanteous entropy decrease starts a new big bang that re-creates our exact universe where everything is the same except I remember the preceding 10^10^10^10^10^10^10 yearsand in that new universe I will still say no to setting up fucking one drive."
Or you know, I'd settle for just being able to say no.
actual dropdown from AVG antivirus
AVG: "I'll let you postpone for a century each time."
Me: "It takes the Sun 225 million years to orbit the Milky Way. A century of those years would not be enough time. If we were to place the sun in orbit around the largest known galaxy, it would take roughly 1 billion years to complete an orbit. A century of those years would not be enough time. We cannot possibly answer the strength of my no with mere orbital mechanics.
Per XKCD "What if" 34, Hendrik Willem Van Loon once said:
High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.
imagine now instead of a bird, it is a fairyfly, the single smallest flying insect, at half a millimeter long. It comes, it picks up a single molecule every time it visits. It then takes that molecule of that mountain, and flies as fast as it can - so slow it's speed probably could be measured in miles per week and still be single digits - until it has crossed the width of the observable universe, then turns around and flies back, then repeats.
Imagine now instead of a mountain, it is a planet. A rocky body as dense as Earth but the size of Jupiter, an impossible world for an impossible fly.
When the fairy fly has transported the entire planet, molecule by molecule, we will call that one day.
Three hundred sixty five days to a year.
One hundred years to a century.
If you were to allow me to postpone for one of those centuries, I would still be annoyed because my answer is not 'maybe later,' my answer is a fucking no you insidious little fuckcasket."
