Congress decided by giving the FCC the authority. In a nation of over 300 million people no legislative assembly could ever hope to directly deal with every possible permutation of policy decision or interpretation. I doubt there has been a legislaturw since the rise of the nation state that could.

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.

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.

We are primarily a government contractor, and our main contract had a Siebel-based client management system (only a government would have the combination of money and stupidity to invest in an ancient technology like that, but oh well), and up until late last year, we had to run IE in the lowest security mode and IE7 compatibility mode just to make the ActiveX components function. The new version is by and large HTML5 compatible, and though they recommend Firefox, we've had only a few bumps running Chrome. I doubt more than a handful of our staff even use IE now.

Yes, well, we often hurt the ones we love.

About the only place I still see IE is on some web-based applications from the late 90s thru the mid-00s that were built using IE 5 and 6's very insecure ActiveX architecture. Up until last year, we were forced to use such software on one of our government contracts, and it literally meant viewing the site in Compatibility Mode with security settings cranked down to nothing. They finally updated the underlying Siebel engine to the HTML5 version, and after that everyone just seemed to go to Chrome. I suppose at that point where we start rolling out Win10 desktops, Edge might end up being used, but I have a feeling that MS has missed the bus here, and Chrome is king.

I think Firefox dealt it the mortal blow, and then Chrome finished the job.

Perhaps that is because it was written by SS-Oberscharführer Lennart Poettering.

So you regularly float at an altitude of 20 to 100 feet, do you?

I'd say if it's over my property at a low altitude, yes, I should have the right to shoot the thing out of the sky, and further, if I can determine who was flying it, I should have the right to sue them.

Drone operators are getting an incredible sense of entitlement out of playing with their toys. I think it's time for some serious and substantial financial penalties.

Keep your fucking toy way from my fucking property.

I was just being mischievous. I think the editors are... adequate.

No kidding. They need to be dropped on to the street from a very high altitude.

The way DICE has treated it, it's worth about whatever I can find stuck between the lint at the bottom of the pockets of my pants. Everything they've done in the last 12-24 months has only served to devalue the site.