Except with Obamacare, it's the law that you have to use the 1.0 buggy release.

It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.

IIRC, the separate "core" CPI that leaves out food and energy is for short term comparisons since food and energy can be very volatile. Large short term swings in those commodities can mask the "real" inflation rate in monthly reports. Of course, prices of food & energy are still part of the cost of living, and are considered in the CPI.

I don't know that it is entirely clear that without clean room BIOS, IBM would have dominated.

That is not what the GP was saying. GP was making the point that in a more heterogeneous hardware environment, MS would not have been able to build a monopoly based on a single dominant operating system.

Let's avoid the battle over "originality" and "creativity" and note that the issue at hand is actually whether the code in question is expressive or functional.

You can only get a copyright on an original work

You can only get a copyright for original expression, it does not cover the functionality expressed.

"But of course nobody in the US seems to actually give a shit about this part of Jesus' teachings or else you would not have the death penalty."

Excuse me Euroweenie. The death penalty is about as direct eye for an eye and you are likely to see.

Excuse me Anonytestes, but did you read the post you responded to?

Sweden hasn't been genetically and socially homogenous in a long time. They have Sami minority in the north, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian across the country and they have been taking refugees

You may have a valid point, I don't know the demographics. I'm from Chicago, where you can (I have) eat at a Swedish restaraunt owned by a Greek, served by an African, food cooked by a Swedish chef, with your table bussed by an Hispanic. As an American of Swedish and Danish descent, I don't think Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians are really that diverse from each other.

Surely chess is a game, not a sport.

Then why did my brother need to pass a physical in order to be on his high school chess team?
(OK, the answer is stupid bureaucratic rules, but still)
More seriously (or more pedantically, really), Sports and Athletics don't mean the same thing. If you're doing it for fun, it's a sport. If it requires athletic ability, it's athletics.

Problem is, most email to fax gateways use either TIFF or PDF, and most of them are TIFF. Though PDF isn't any better (in fact, historically it is much worse, security wise) . . .

Considering an image in a .pdf is typically a tiff with all the .pdf "goodness" wrapping around it, it shouldn't be surprising.

An individual should not have the right to decide which of his government's secrets should be revealed.

A government should not have the right to decide which of its policies & laws should be kept secret from its' citizens.

I've had the misfortune of needing to use an Oracle system with a web interface to deal with a large client for construction management & billing. If that experience is any indication of how Oracle will fix the problem, the Feds would be better off keeping the very crappy existing system. (seriously)

Moore's law is an observation, assumed to be true until observations contradict it, which is exactly what a scientific law is.
Also, correct me if if I'm wrong, but wasn't Moore's law about the number of transistors in an integrated circuit, rather than the (closely related) size of features?

And they don't care whether your car gets its energy from gas at the pump or natural gas at the generator.

Actually, most of them would probably rather sell more natural gas to the electric companies: Fracking has created a huge glut in natural gas supply in the US, which can't be easily shipped out of the country, so its' price has dropped dramatically in the US. On the other hand, the oil extracted by fracking can easily be sold on the world market at world market rates, even if we don't consume here.

1/2 " and 1" sizes are hardly 'the same everywhere in the world'
The world is metric.

Call it 1"NPS or DIN 25, steel pipe dimensions and threads are the same almost everywhere. (Note that the Nominal Pipe Sizes of common small steel pipes are not all that close to the actual ID or OD, anyway.)

One other thing.
You can improve dehumidification somewhat just by reducing the air flow of the A/C unit. You get a little less cooling, requiring the A/C to run longer, and reduce the temperature of the air significantly further below the dewpoint, ringing more moisture out. Of course, you can only go so far before running into problems so like freezing the coil or shutting down on safeties (if they're there), so YMMV.