If you have so few choices in that state, I'll bet the problem is government-based cronyism.

I think it's called laissez-faire capitalism. Too little regulation means that the market will concentrate on the most profitable customers and not necessarily provide any service at all to others.

The point of insurance is that it's a risk pool that lowers the cost of saving to pay for a catastrophe for every participant, based on the probability that most folks won't need it. But it doesn't work for the folks who aren't allowed in the pool. And the reality is that everyone will need it sometime, and that it is normal for a society for some proportion of its people to be sick.

We have actually had some good insurance regulators in California. I don't know much about the current one but he seems to have achieved a pro-citizen rather than pro-company record.

I did not check with the state before I rejected the trash plan, perhaps it wasn't legal.

Valerie has insurance which covers the three of us, but it's her insurance. If she lost her job or if other things happened that I decline to contemplate, we would not have been able to obtain that sort of insurance or indeed anything that wasn't a fraud or a rip-off.

Given that some of the other 50 states implemented exchanges and that the Federal one exists, a total of 7 Million sounds reasonable with 1.2 Million coming from California.

Are you able to show us the terms of your plan? The reason I ask is that I was offered what turned out to be a "trash plan", and the sort of things that aren't being grandfathered are rejected because they don't meet a minimum standard of care. In my case, a catastrophic injury such as in an auto wreck would not have been covered significantly.

The lady who famously confronted Obama on this issue had a plan that limited its payout to a few hundred dollars.

There were two sorts of plans available: There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury. Basically, it was a "feel good about being insured until you try to use it" plan which had the main purpose of producing income for a fraudster. I am very glad that such things are being prohibited now because I know there are lots of people who are not as careful readers of terms as I am.

The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.

California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.

I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.

Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.

There's nothing that will protect you against the amount of "0 days" that Windows 7/8/2008/whatever is going to be vulnerable too either. That's what "0 days" pretty much means -- it hasn't been fixed because the people who would fix it have just learned about it, or not learned about it yet at all.

Now, granted, at least if a "0 day" hits Windows 8, Microsoft will probably make a patch for it after a while, where they won't for XP ... so it should eventually be fixed after it's hit "1 day" or "20 day" or "296 day" or whatever status where XP wouldn't ... but don't go thinking that keeping up to date on patches will stop "0 day" exploits.

So what?

That may not be a viable solution, but what he's doing is. He has a usable computer, more secure than most, that does what he needs it to do.

You aren't trying to claim that what he's doing isn't a "viable solution", are you?

And even if he did upgrade ... he'd probably still want to do all that stuff.

... and yet his efforts will probably stop 99.9% of the crap that affects "modern" Windows versions with their clueless users.

Installing Windows 7 or 8 wouldn't make his job much easier or make his computer much more secure.

Patton told his troops they were strictly forbidden from dying gloriously for their country, but were instead expected to make the other poor bastard die gloriously for his.

When we send soldiers off to battle we expect them to win and come home alive. We accept that reality will not always permit this, but that's the nature of the beast. If we send people on a one-way trip to Mars, we are demanding that they die gloriously for us -- which is exactly what Patton forbade his soldiers to do.

Your comparison, not to put too fine a point on it, is crazy.

Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.

The problem is it has no real relationship to the Windows operating system that users relate to.

Actually, it does.

The Windows 8 "metro" UI is very similar to what the Windows phone uses (and that's the term they use, so it's why I used it.) And it gets a *lot* of flack on a desktop, and rightfully so -- as you said, it doesn't do windows (the ui feature) at all and each app is full screen. Which is great on a phone, but kind of silly when you've got a 23" monitor or two and all the app is doing is telling you the time.

But other than the Metro UI, Windows 8 is very like Windows 7, and indeed ... Windows 8 on a PC is likely acceptable for somebody familiar with Windows 7 if you install Classic Shell and never go into the Metro UI stuff.

Now, perhaps the government shouldn't have given Microsoft a trademark on that word, but that's not Microsoft's fault, and the PTO gives out lots of trademarks on generic words.

But if your biggest complaint about Windows 8 and the Windows phone OS is that Microsoft should have picked a better name ... that's high praise, indeed. Most others have much more significant complaints than the *name*.