Why do your figures leave out the increases before the ACA was passed?

It's a victimless crime. Or rather, a crime where the victim deserves it. It kinda cancels itself out.

Then are you offering the correct premise or should I keep guessing 'til we both lose interest?

So you are ALSO saying that the information presented is incorrect ... that the people at HHS had NO idea that the site wasn't full of holes in terms of security and functionality. That the "cherry-picked" emails that show the administration knew the site was a train wreck are referring to something else, because the site wasn't a train wreck when it went live. Right? I see. So if that's incorrect, then what you're saying is that the administration did NOT know that the site was a train wreck. Which makes them stupefyingly incompetent.

So your idea of "nothing to see here" is either:

1) The administration knew exactly what a train wreck the thing was, but lied about it. Or...

2) The administration, at every level, was so foolish and incompetent that it had no idea whether or not the system was useless, and in lacking any sort of knowledge one way or the other, just assumed it was fine.

The main controls on a train are to go forward and backward. Hardly something that needs advanced artificial intelligence and 3D spacial comprehension. It is basically a one dimensional problem when operating a train, and monitoring the rails to make sure that one dimension situation doesn't change into a 3D problem. Sure, there is monitoring the equipment on the train itself where the motors are far more complex, but even that has its limits and isn't too complicated.

. I merely pointed out that as someone who works in the field I might be qualified as a person making an informed choice and not just one of the sheep buying what they're told.

A show of hands here: How many of you know someone who "works in the field" who doesn't really know his ass from an RS 232 connector?

Or maybe the view from inside the brotherhood of computer techs is somewhat different from the view from outside. You might want to make note.

Not you, Marlin. You're probably a fine person and an excellent computer tech. But beware of making appeals to authority. They are a logical trap.

If someone calls themselves a chef or a foodie, it may not make them right when they say how long you should boil pasta, but it means their opinion about it IS based on care, thought, and knowledge

Wow, is that ever a crock. So, a person calling themselves a foodie means they've have exercised "care, thought and knowledge"? If I call myself a world champion surfer, does that mean I've ever waxed a board? Appeals to authority are one of the most dishonest forms of fallacy:

http://www.nizkor.org/features...

An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:

Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
Person A makes claim C about subject S.
Therefore, C is true.

But maybe you're just not familiar with logical fallacies. Well, that's something about which I know a thing or two to snatch a phrase from esteemed computer tech Marlin Schwanke. And you will not find an "ad hominem" anywhere in my post. If you think you also know a thing or two about fallacies, I invite you to point mine out. The purpose of my post was to point out the fallacy via sarcasm. There was no ad hominem. I didn't say Marlin Schwanke was stupid, or that all computer techs are stupid or that he's somehow a bad person or a Republican. I just pointed out the absurdity of claiming this authority as if it meant something.

I'll just bet you're a computer tech, too. And that, my friend, you can take as an ad hominem.

Everybody who has paid for their own trip to the ISS so far has gone through cosmonaut training at Star City (at least a six month training effort where they learn all of the sub-systems of the Soyuz spacecraft) and have become fully qualified astronauts in their own right. They usually have been involved with experiments done on the ISS as well, and usually bring up something to do. They are also responsible for performing "chores" while at the station.

About the only thing these "private astronauts" don't perform is an EVA to do repairs on the outside of the ISS.

I would imagine that when Boeing or SpaceX does the same thing, a similar kind of training is going to be required. If anything, because they are American companies needing to work with NASA a whole lot more, they will be required to be much more active in regards to NASA experiments (the previous astronauts were guests of the Russian Federation). The most certainly won't be merely floating in space and staring out windows.

NASA is only paying for the flight slots. Both Boeing and SpaceX plan on reusing their respective spacecraft, although for this particular CCtCAP contract I'm pretty sure they are supposed to be all brand-new vehicles.

The CST-100 is more like the Space Shuttle so far as it needs some refurbishment that takes a little bit of time, but it is still supposed to be just a couple of months turn around time from a landing to a new launch. SpaceX is aiming for "commercial aircraft" style of reuse where they want to relaunch the vehicle potentially within the same day it lands.

Even the Dragon spacecraft which is going up tomorrow (Sunday, Sept 21st) is merely sold for the mission, and SpaceX gets that vehicle to use for its own purposes. At the moment, SpaceX is using the opportunity to take the Dragon apart to study the engineering issues that have shown up on each mission, but that will soon end.

None the less, they are real spacecraft that have life support systems which have been operating as if they could be occupied. One of them had some biological specimens (I think some insects) and it was definitely pressurized in the interior volume, not to mention that Bigelow has gained the experience of operating these modules over a long period of time.

Bigelow Aerospace is currently slated to send up a vehicle next year on a Falcon 9, and supposedly a Falcon Heavy has also been sold but not on the manifest right now. With the current launch rate that SpaceX has been pounding out lately, this seems pretty likely to happen unless it is Bigelow who isn't ready.

I tried to read the linked page but somehow I still do not understand how that camera be " Fully Open Sourced"

Can someone enlighten me a bit on that, please?

Thanks !

So what you're saying is that: 1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context. 2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground. I see.

BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration - they simply do not have any clue to anything that they are involved with

It is not only the Obamacare - everything else, from Syria to ISIL to Afghanistan to Europe to Islamization of America to you name it - everything that Obama has touched on it turned into a mess

In fairness, that implies that you currently don't have anyone with design experience looking at your product designs. Maybe getting some input from a designer, even a student, could be helpful? Admittedly, a student might make things worse by trying to push silly ideas.

Especially in the context of this (which I agree with):

The sort of design that Apple does is not just about beveling the edge. Because first, you need someone capable of understanding whether the beveled edge will make it more or less attractive than a nice, clean, straight edge. Will it look dumb? Will it feel cheap? But then also, because you need someone who can look at the whole package and evaluate what effect that beveled edge will have on the usability of the device. Not just bare function, i.e. it successfully performs [function X], but usability, i.e. it performs [function X] in a way that's intuitive, easy, understandable, and pleasant. It's not easy to balance form, function, and usability.

To some degree, I think it's an implied response to the latent, often heard criticism that people who use Apple are a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about computers. Especially in the context of responding to someone calling Apple fans "sheep", which implies that they're stupid followers and that their opinions are thoughtless and uninformed.

I've found that if you say anything positive about Apple in a public forum like Slashdot, there's a decent chance you'll get a response that implies that you don't understand computers very well. As a result, I'll admit that I sometimes feel the need to throw out something that explains that, yes, I'm very familiar with other systems and can provide praise and criticism of all of them.