As far as OpenBSD is concerned, "the general usability of the system in everyday settings" is the bottom priority.

No, in fact the lack of general usability is a goal OpenBSD strives for.

Be grateful they aren't still using punched paper tape for installs.

Similar to how the English Crown supported piracy against the Spanish in the 17th and 18th centuries?

I bet many parts of the fridge were made in the PRC, a country formerly renowned for large numbers of starving and hungry people.

First world hipsters buying IP-enabled fridges have allowed many of those formerly staring Chinese peasants to become part of the world's middle class.

Except Gary Kildal who famously refused to sign the IBM NDA on the advice of his wife going surfing instead. Microsoft then bought MSDOS 1.0 from one of said garage geeks. But all they needed it for was to be undetected long enough to be able to sell MSBasic while they worked on a clone.

The Windows key was appearing on DEC keyboards before it was a Windows thing. And that is from Symbolics as many of the DEC engineers were Symbolics graduates. And when DEC crashed, Microsoft bought up most of the talent. Given the state of Apple at the time, it was pretty much the only option if you hated UNIX.

I am surprised that nobody has brought up a pathetic piece of bought-by-lobbyists research 'the fable of the keys' written by a couple of K-street hacks for an organization calling itself 'the independent institute'. This tried to claim that path dependence and network effects don't exist. Microsoft funded the 'study' while they were fending off the anti-trust suit.

One of the examples that the authors tried to expose as 'myth' is that Dvorak was more efficient. And they do actually have some evidence to suggest that the studies on efficiency are unreliable. But that does not prove their case. All it actually shows is that the Navy realized that there was no point in performing further tests because they were not going to switch from Qwerty regardless of what the result was. A 10% improvement in typist productivity was not worth the cost of retraining. Many typists would refuse to be retrained. Nobody would want to learn a keyboard that was only used in the Navy under a program that might be cancelled at any moment.

The same goes for their effort to 'prove' that VHS was better than Betamax. Like the idiots trying to disprove evolution, they don't make their case and all they do is to show that things are a little more complex than the naive version of the theory they are attacking suggests. The point of VHS and Betamax is that what made a VCR better than a competitor was not picture quality, it was how many movies you could buy and watch on it.

When you don't work and get your income from the government (who gets its money from taxpayers) then there is no incentive to look for work.

When the consequence of unemployment is certain starvation, there no no incentive for any job to be better than slavery

I see Slashdot posters make up "facts" out of thin air, too.

Too bad so much of our public policy is based on these "facts".

Isn't it immoral to starve people when you don't need to?

I think that you will hear the counter argument that it is immoral to tax some people to provide subsidized food to others. That not having enough money to buy adequate food is due solely to bad\personal choices that government has no business re-mediating.

The argument is that people who make the wrong choices did so freely, and deserve to go hungry or die.

Since the Catholic church under Benedict threatened to excommunicate Kerry for supporting abortion, they are clearly not holding up their end of any bargain.

It is completely consistent to insist that no law be made based on or requiring religious observances and that what religion is permitted be regulated by the state. The price religion has always paid to be allowed to operate is to obey the laws of the land and support the government order.

Religious organizations invented many ways of parting gullible rubes from their cash.

It wasn't until the mid 1800s that medics came close to saving more patients than they killed. And that was because of the introduction of science and the scientific method.

Semantics is a Greek word. It means 'meaning'.

So if you are fine with just debating meaning...

Employers are required to provide coverage under the ACA. It is a requirement not an option so they don't get to choose what they provide, end of story. In the future they will be required to provide coverage for abortions. Tough noogies.

Religion is a control freak thing and becoming a priest is a great way to get your rocks off telling other people what to do based on some tendentious reading of the history of a guy who never existed.

Nobody requires the Catholic church to run a business taking public money to provide social services. I would prefer that they stopped and the services were provided by secular organizations. Getting the church out of adoption policy was a good thing. I look forward to their other social programs shutting down. There is no shortage of secular organizations doing the same work without tying the effort to a religious recruitment drive.

I think pretty much every employer would prefer not to be involved in health care. It is a stupid system. But the reason that it was necessary is that insurance does not work when the insurer knows the individual risks. The individual insurance market began to collapse in the 1980s.

The only way to save the insurance model is with a mutual mandate, insurers have to be mandated to cover everyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions and individuals have to be mandated to buy insurance. Which is what the ACA does for the individual market.

Employer based coverage worked because the pools were big enough to spread the risk. But they only worked for employers with a large enough number of employees. Which was a huge drag on the economy. People could only work for a high risk startup if it was adequately funded enough to provide full benefits or if the employees had insurance through their spouses.

The only way to get the ACA passed though was if people who already had insurance were assured that they wouldn't lose it. Many people have subsidized insurance built into their employment package and would lose substantially if that happened. Which is why the ACA has big tax penalties for employers who drop coverage and requires the coverage to meet certain minimum standards.

The idea that employers have a right to impose their religious beliefs on their employees should make anyone who actually believes in freedom of religion puke. But the republican party has a feudal view of society in which employees are mere serfs to their employers. I think it will hurt them in 2014 and 2016 though because women really don't wan't little Ricky Santorum getting his rocks off by controlling their access to fertility control.

Since the Democrats held the House, Senate and White House when the ACA passed, gerrymandering was not an issue. The filibuster was an issue because the Republicans were corruptly preventing Al Franken taking his seat.

The Republicans are the party complaining about the ACA and they only hold the house and that only due to gerrymandering. So they don't have the ability to change the law because they don't have a democratic mandate despite holding one house of Congress.

The filibuster is gone now so it won't be an issue in future. While the rules have not been changed for legislation or SCOTUS appointments, there is no doubt that they will be if either party ever gets control of the house, senate and WH. Since the democrats are close to being the only party that can win the WH under the current electoral college arrangement, that means any change would come from the Democrats. But the forcing function here was the Republican's threat of the nuclear option under Bush. Once the threat was made, the end of the filibuster was inevitable.

Nobody is saying that the Republican's didn't have the right to obstruct

What they don't have the right to do is to obstruct the bill and every attempt to make technical amendments and then complain that there wasn't time to debate it properly or protest about problems the Democrats have tried to fix.

The US has universal healthcare no, so seven million people will get healthcare. Boo-fucking-hoo republicans. Your mental masturbation sessions will not be quite so sweet today when you can no longer enjoy the fact that millions of poor people will die early because your party denied them care.

Having derided the ACA as 'Obamacare' you have now ensured that one of the main pillars of the US welfare state will be named after a Black man who was elected President. A permanent reminder that the Southern Strategy of pandering to racism and bigotry failed.

There is only one way to avoid that outcome being permanent and that is to allow Hilary to replace Obamacare with the much simpler public option that would also be cheaper.

Yeah, it stopped that civil rights bill, can't have black men voting, next thing you know it a black man will be President.

Republicans don't believe in democracy, they try to 'win' elections by stopping black people voting to this day. And they arrange to have the broken voting machines in Democratic precincts.

Congress had more than enough time to debate the ACA. The Republicans were never interested in discussing the implementation and they still aren't interested.

In this particular case there should be no religious exception whatsoever. There should be a super tax on the Catholic church and the money go to pay for free abortions.