Insurance auto and home are funny industries. While most business try to retain long time customers and treat them well the insurance industry does the opposite.

The logic is apparently chaining insurers is something people find a pain in the ass. Being a long time customer does not add to your value as far they are concerned. No they are so efficient at paper work the overhead of on-boarding etc from customer churn is so low they don't care. They figure you having been on the rolls for awhile means you won't bother to switch and they can keep over charging you.

Just changing carriers every four years or so will frequently get you better rates.

I consider it an opt-out, because if you just click Next, your previous settings are changed.

I'm really concerned that it might give children autism! I mean, imagine surviving an almost guaranteed fatal case of hemorrhagic fever, and the becoming autistic?

I think we have to ask ourselves "Would Jenny McCarthy give her ebola-stricken child this vaccine?"

Whatever MS's justification, they do actually ask you if you want to change your current apps for certain functions during the final stage of the upgrade phase. What I don't like is that it is essentially an "opt-out" rather than an "opt-in".

When I upgraded to Windows 10 yesterday, there was a screen that came up that asked me if I wanted to reset the default apps. I said no for my browser and media player, and when it completed, Chrome and VLC were still the default applications. I think it's a little underhanded, but not as underhanded as the article suggests.

So your defense of them is essentially that the system of checks and balances does not work and sitting politicians of high enough rank an sufficiently important appointees are above the law?

Just want to be clear.

The issue is significantly more nuanced than that. Most people, and certainly most biologists and behavioral experts agree that there are certain animals that demonstrate sentience in a fashion at least analogous to the way humans think and feel. The great apes, and chimps, in particular, are among that rather rare group who share a significant number of emotional and cognitive traits with humans (little wonder, we're only separated by a few million years of evolution). So the idea here, so far as I understand it, is that those similarities are significant enough that chimps should enjoy, if not human rights, then at least some rights elevated from other far less human animals.

I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.

But to pursue this in the courts is ludicrous. Personhood is fairly well defined in most, if not all, jurisdictions and it pretty much explicitly excludes anyone who isn't a member of H. sapiens. This is going to need to be something that is dealt with at the legislative level, and it's going to be a long fight.

Generally speaking, self-defense is specifically listed as a valid reason in laws pertaining to negligent or reckless discharge of firearms. But you'd need to prove that you specifically fired in self-defense, and show that the direction of the shot etc was conductive to that claim. Following Joe Biden's suggestion and discharging a shotgun in the air to scare off the intruder would likely get you charged, for example.

Yes. With a sabot slug and a rifled barrel or choke, it's possible. Not with smoothbore & birdshot. And definitely not aiming up at a moving target.

Sure there was self interest. Still I think they deserve a lot of credit here. Rather than the typical "Its not my code" response from a developer who is sure the problem is elsewhere (rightly or wrongly) they actually found and fixed the problem. That is good behavior!

That sounds to me like you have a badly undersized unit. Its also possible that something isn't working right maybe the A-Coil is caked with crud and inst transferring heat into the loop efficiently?

Either way that sounds terribly inefficient and is probably costing your a fortune to run. Its probably worth talking to an HVAC guy.

What you are talking about already exists, and has existed for decades, and is in use on tens of thousands of households across the fruited plains.

It is a discrete laser that can emit three distinct wavelengths.

Try JRMC. It's not free, but you get what you pay for. And, at least ~5 years ago (last time I needed something like WMC), it was good.

You might actually find Win10 to be less flashy than Vista/7/8. It's mostly flat with few visual effects, gradients and the like, and even transparency can be deactivated.