Yeah, I guess I shouldn't complain.

I've got two shitty, overpriced and under-performing services to choose from.

Consumer Choice!

Yes, lets be truthful for a second, shall we? Islamism has taken root in the places that have been subject to a century of careless political and military meddling by the western world. We resettled millions of European Jews in the religious heart of the middle east after world war 2. We used central and east asia as pawns in our "fight against communism" more or less from the 1940's through the end of the 20th century. We have aided coups, dumped trillions of dollars into the coffers of despotic, tyrannical dictators and warlords in Africa, Asia and the Middle East in exchange for natural resources. We funded and armed maniacs on BOTH SIDES of a regional dispute in the Iran-Iraq war. Then we used some terrorist attacks to justify the full-scale invasion and occupation of two entire countries for over a decade, destroying most of those countries infrastructure and politically destabilizing them in the process.

Then we sit back from the comfort of our countries where the "poor" have to settle for first-class emergency room care, last-generation iPhones and positively luxurious (by contrast) public transit systems, and wonder, "Why are these savages attacking US? We've tried so hard to help them! their IDEOLOGY must be incompatible with ours!"

The real question is not "when will we get the courage to deal with the reality of the Muslim threat" but rather, "what else can we possibly do to set these people further back on the cultural and economic scale?" and the answer is, nothing we haven't already, and now the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.

So when you want to talk about apologists, think about all the apologizing you're doing for the Bushes, Blair, Reagan, and all the other American and European war criminals that used their horseshit embrace of "Christian Values" to dupe voters into war profiteering and corporatist resource extraction and the expense of three generations of Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners.

Never understood the OSX superiority complex. It's almost like you guys are overcompensating for something.

Aren't school budgets usually based on property taxes? I would assume that if rent is so high, property value is equally high, meaning school revenues should be similarly high. Isn't the solution to "teachers don't make enough money to live here" to pay teachers more?

It seems you counter your own argument. Being white had something to do with it in 6/13 of the states. Also I seem to recall that while slaves/blacks were allowed to vote, that their vote counted as 3/5ths of a white person, and that they often didn't actually cast their own votes as it was done by their master "on their behalf"... Meaning if you were wealthy enough to own multiple slaves you got several votes.

At least you didn't bother to try and fail at the "male" part. Thanks for that.

Almost completely incorrect.

nvidia proprietary drivers (at least in Ubuntu) come as a DKMS package. The GPL source portion which interacts with kernel ABI is compiled at installation time, or on the installation of a new kernel. This in turn calls on the BLOB which is plainly not at all open source. This has been a sticking point for some time, as it is clearly nvidia getting around the rules in a sneaky way. Linus is not a fan.

Relevant to the current situation, because in 15.10, ZFS is available as a DKMS package. it compiles on the user system at installation and that is a difference from distributing a precompiiled binary that is dynamically linked against the specific binary signature of the distributed kernel binaries.

[Company] wants [government] to relax [regulation]

Yup. That's news.

Is there a point to using any operating system, or any software at all, that lacks features you need? Flash is still sadly a major component of the web. Certainly not as major, and its importance is definitely fading, but it is still essential for using many sites at full-feature. less than 5 years ago flash-driven uploaders were all the rage. A lot of video sites have not transitioned to HTML5 video. Many games still require flash, and this "workaday" setup seems very games-centric. (government work?)

A few reasons I can think of: automatic ZFS on root, ports system, and stability. Also, it's arguable (I lack any technical grounds for this statement) that BSD does a better job of "compartmentalizing" processes than Linux, so if you have to run Flash there might be no better way to do so.