Well, Red Hat found a profitable market. Apple found a profitable market. Google found a profitable market. Has Canonical? They're a private company so we don't really know but as late as a call this year announcing Ubuntu for Tablets they said they were not. Nor can I spot any big and obvious cash flows to indicate they would be, they're a contender in various areas but no big cash cows. It's the same as when Red Hat shut down Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux) in favor of the Fedora project, sure RHL was great for the community but Red Hat didn't see how they'd make any money on it. About ten years down the road and Ubuntu is exactly in the same spot, they have the same market and it's still not making any money. I think Canonical is suffering the investor's itch, they don't want to wait another decade to see returns.

Are you kidding? Windows 95 introduced such horrors as the ever-expanding task tray and the "shit icons all over my desktop" paradigm for installing new software. DOS was visible through the cracks too.

The fact that Apple can read iMessages and hand them over to the authorities is hardly surprising, especially given that we know they co-operate with the NSA. TFS leaves the last and far more interesting bit right until the end: Usernames and passwords sent in cleartext.

In other words all those people using Starbucks' free wifi are broadcasting their Apple ID and password to everyone else in range.

Attempting to tie Obamacare to raising the debt ceiling... Yes, I'm afraid that is the Tea Party's fault, and in their religious zeal to destroy government, all they're doing is fucking up the GOP.

USB support, at least with Windows hosts, still seems to be broken though. It just never, ever seems to work, or at best once and then never again. That made me switch to VM Ware a while back.

The for-profit companies running them broke even years ago, but it's debatable if tax payers ever will.

Building new capacity just de-values existing capacity. The more supply available the lower the wholesale cost. We basically have to pay companies to build new capacity. Subsidies, guaranteed pricing, free insurance, tax breaks, protection from NIMBY lawsuits etc.

I can't imagine the House Republicans wanting to go through this again. Everyone has taken a beating, but while the Democrats might be battered and bruised, the Republicans have hemorrhaged support. For some time, moderate Republican incumbents have lived in fear of the Tea Party smashing them in the primaries, but now the choice between accommodating wingnuts and winning in 2014 has become very very clear.

I'm sure Cruz and his ilk will want to pick another fight in January, but even he seems to realize the Tea Party has been damaged by this, and his actions and the actions of his compatriots in the House are threatening to bring down a civil war on the GOP.

Why did you think that? They knew the moderate Republicans in the House would eventually force Boehner's hand. Even Boehner knew it, but this little dance had to go all the way because the moderate Republicans are as terrified of the Tea Party as they are of voters.

Obama and Congressional Democrats have seen this growing weakness in the GOP since 2008, and have been waiting for a chance to humiliate Boehner. Now they'll sit back and watch the civil war in the Republican ranks make the Republicans' dominance of the house become an empty accomplishment.

That would be my assumption. So it isn't a done deal in the long term, but in the short and medium term, the Republicans won't get many, if any more chances to kill it. I'd say Obamacare, and whatever it ultimately morphs into, is now pretty much cemented into the landscape. Within a few election cycles, no one will be talking about repealing it.

I love this line of reasoning. It's the same reasoning that blames the Union Auto Workers and a guy who tightens bolts for a living for making shotty cars instead of the CEOs and Engineers who made the decision to use cheap bolts.

If the regulators are untrained it's by design. You don't just 'forget' to train the people that inspect your Nuclear power plants you know...

You sure YOU don't work for the NSA? The recording capability is what it is, but the reading capability is whatever you can put in a $100 consumer drive operating at 100MB/s with 1 error in 10^14 bits accuracy. What you can do with a >$1 million electron microscope at 1/1000th the speed at 1/1000th the accuracy is another matter. You might not want a 0.1 MB/s drive that corrupts a bit every megabyte but for forensics that's plenty. Never mind that all modern drives just pretend to offer you a linear disc, in reality it remaps a whole sector if a single bit fails. How much compromising info can you write in 4023 out of 4024 bits of a 4K sector? It's not useless but everything you hope to achieve with erasing is better achieved with encryption. Nor are they mutually exclusive, if you want to wipe your encrypted drive for that extra unrecoverable feeling go ahead.

I did say that it happens on a local, community level. It doesn't happen on a larger scale though. Katrina was a good example of the rest of the country not giving a shit.

To expand, for instance, how I ended up dealing with my bullies was I 'nothinged' them. No reaction, no response, no acknowledgement, they stopped existing for me. They ramped it up for a while, but quickly found less and less benefit in harassing me. However this worked because of the specific people involved.