I've never seen one of these nag screens on my Win7 machines. In the office, I use Win7 Pro in a managed domain. At home, I use Win7 Pro with no domain. I never did anything consciously to prevent it. I may have done something, like disable automatic updates, which had a pleasant side effect of preventing these nag screens. Does anyone know why I'm one of the lucky few who has never been prompted to update?

No, they don't. They make a few pennies per gallon, and if that's all a gas station sold, it would go out of business within a month. The real money is in the convenience store. They sell snacks, drinks, cigarettes, etc., at a huge markup. The gas is just there to get people to stop. That's also why all these gas station are putting up those obnoxious screens on the pumps, which play videos highlighting their "delicious snacks, and refreshing drinks." It's all about the up-sell.

This makes me wish I spoke Swedish. I'd love to move there. It has a beautiful countryside, beautiful women, and beautiful privacy laws. I also wish I spoke Danish for similar reasons.

Low price items? There's a reason we call it the "$200 store" around here. You spend at least that much every time you shop there.

In general, I agree with your premise. That's why I never buy the extended warranty on anything. A store wouldn't offer the warranty if it didn't result in a net profit for them. If I can't afford a replacement for an item breaking, then I can't really afford the item in the first place. For Amazon, selling you a prime membership is better because it removes the shipping cost from the equation when a customer is considering whether to purchase an item from them or not. That turns into more gross sales, and also allows Amazon to make up the difference through economies of scale. As a customer, is that better for you? You no longer have to worry about shipping costs, so purchasing items through Amazon is more convenient. You also don't have to plan a trip to the store, which can also be more stressful and expensive if you have kids. How much is your time worth for you? How much wear do you put on your vehicle, and spend on gasoline, when you drive to the store? These answers are different for each of us, but I think more of us fall on the side of prime membership being beneficial for us than those who don't.

I admit that I didn't read the article, but I don't think drugs and alcohol are things which are offered exclusively to prime members.

I'm a prime member, and I find it to be immensely useful. When I calculate how much money we save, prime membership is clearly worth it. On average, the items my family (i.e. my wife) shops for cost significantly less through Amazon than through a brick-and-mortar store. The only advantages that a brick-and-mortar store hold for us are the absence of shipping fees and delivery times. With prime membership's included 2-day shipping, those shipping fees become a small fraction of the prime membership cost, and 2-day shipping delivers the items sooner than I can schedule a trip to the store and buy them. Altogether we save time and money. It's true that their prime streaming catalog sucks, but that's not the main reason for most people to purchase a prime membership. Prime streaming, by itself, is definitely not worth $100/year.

Gravitational waves are the result of Chuck Norris doing push-ups. All this "gamma ray" stuff is just Chuck Norris deniers grasping at straws.

For those who didn't immediately make the connection, the words "no such agency" in the summary was a reference to the nickname for the NSA. It would have been better if they capitalized it as No Such Agency.

To be a drone it has to be remotely piloted without requiring line of sight by the operator. Your three examples fail the "remotely piloted" requirement because they are in a fixed location.

She's obviously not Catholic, so it wouldn't apply. She probably follows some Eastern or pagan religion. Wicca perhaps?

As a person who can honestly say that I haven't cursed in over 10 years, I find this survey to be inaccurate. Even I sometimes say non-profane expletives, such as "you STUPID piece of junk!" Knowing that I'm far from the majority, and that I sometimes find it difficult not to lose my temper, I seriously doubt that 61% of computer users, in almost any population group, would never curse at their computer.

That was the most hilarious episode I ever saw! BAZINGA!!!

Except that many parts of the grid heat up during peak hours, and the engineers who designed it did so with a dependency on low power consumption at night, which would allow them to cool down. If you have a bunch of cars in an area charging at night, there won't be enough time for the transformers (etc.) to cool off before companies open shop in the morning and start heating those components up even more. Then one day, BOOM!

It's not just peak performance of the grid that matters, it's the minimum, peak, mean, and average.

I worked with one of them for a little less than a year. I couldn't stand it. Within an 18 month period, a team of 8 lost 2 employees, hired another, lost 2 more, then lost the new hire, but had one of the first 2 that left decide to return because the job market was a mess. This was a team developing customizations to an enterprise application, and the turnover could be boiled down to 2 things. The first is the manager, who was an overbearing and micro-managed everything. The second was the brilliant jerk. He literally wrote books about the system we were developing our customizations for, but he was hyper-critical of everyone's work, and our manager had him do a peer review of everything our team produced. It was one of the most miserable years of my life.