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.

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.

Next you are going to tell me that the Republicans want to push grandma off the cliff, take food from starving children, and ruin the environment.

Yes... What's your point?

When underground radioactive elements decay, helium is a byproduct (look up "alpha particle radiation"). Because it's a noble gas and doesn't bond with anything, it seeps its way to the surface, where it escapes into the upper atmosphere. Some helium can instead become trapped by non-porous rock, in underground pockets. Those same pockets sometimes have natural gas deposits.

So you find a natural gas deposit, tap it, and what comes out as well? Helium. It's not the main product they're after when they go drilling, but it is valuable enough to set aside and sell.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.

Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.

Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.

I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.

And why would efficient use of screen real estate be applicable only to netbooks? I would like the majority of my screen to be used by what I am currently working on, not a bunch of user interface clutter.

Also, note this statement in your own Wikipedia reference,
"Canonical announced it had engineered Unity for desktop computers as well and would make Unity the default shell for Ubuntu in version 11.04."

Uh, ok, like another reply says, how often do you need to look at every application on your system?

Here are a few scenarios that come to mind.
    1) Need to run a specific application.
        a) Click the Dash, type a few letters, click the application or,
        b) Click the Dash, click the categories view, filter by category, click the application or,
        c) Find your application, drag it to the Launcher for quick access
    2) Need to see all "Internet" applications.
        a) Click the Dash, click the categories view, filter by category
    3) Need to launch an application, but don't remember it's name, only something vague about it.
        a) Click the Dash, type a few letters (not necessarily the beginning of the name), go aha!, click the application
    4) Need to find a document that you were working on, but don't quite remember the name or where you put it.
        a) Click the Dash, type a few letters (not necessarily the beginning of the name), go aha!, click the document

On the classic interface, 1b and 2a are possible. The rest are not. So while Unity may require a couple more keypresses in some comparisons, it seems more capable and flexible to me as a desktop.

Now ads are annoying, yes. I don't like that. Thankfully you can disable it. I also don't like the global menu, which this article is about. They seem to be changing it.

why do you think Unity was not designed for desktop computers? been using it on one for almost 2 yrs...

That makes more sense. Thanks.

I did that with Slashdot. I don't like the way it worked out.