The problem with your analysis is that you have the facts wrong.

If you look at a chart of revenue and spending in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.

Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.

Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.

If they know what URL is being called to cause the problem, Site B might be able to figure out Site A from logs for the client's that include the Refer in their request for it, but once they've identified the URL itself, they can just fix the actual vulnerability or block that specific URL with a redirect or something similar.

Once I found a major party's official state website allowed anyone to post and execute arbitrary PHP with full access via just filling in a comment text field, I stopped being surprised by how clueless people were about configuring their sites...

Exactly. That's the sort of thing I mean by "transparently to the user". Sorry if my sarcasm was too obscure.

I did not say it was OK. I said they can. It is not unconstitutional for them to do this. Your indignation is amusing though. I agree with you. It's a stupid move, particularly the getting caught part.

Why, it's not just bots! If you put a link out on a public web site, real people might even click on the link for you!

Next you'll be suggesting that you could do that transparently to the user and have their browser re-use their already logged in session on another site to do things with their credentials for you!!!!

What will they think of next? It's a good thing we have these wonderful stories to explain how this whole web thingy works with all it's links and stuff...

A capture rate of 100% is unreasonable. By definition, every document is grabbed and analyzed. It is unreasonable because there is no reason for the seizure of the documents. There must be a reason for the necessary warrant in order to capture of the documents.

The government's behavior in that manner is completely contrary to the protections laid out in the 4th Amendment. Anyone who disagrees with this is wrong, full stop. As there is no war declared, there can no national security argument to be made to override the Constitution. Until we repeal the 4th, a capture rate of 100% is unconstitutional because there is no specific warrant process. The judiciary may not exempt themselves form the warrant process, nor may the Congress pass a law declaring warrants unnecessary - the Constitution overrides both these actions (or inactions).

Thank you for calling me out about the moron part. But respectfully, I disagree with you. I will not be kind, nor civil to someone who disagrees with me on this point of Constitutional interpretation. Anyone who trades freedom for security (in peacetime) is wrong - morally, ethically, and practically. As there is no declaration of war, these Government actions are illegal and the support of these actions traitorous. The people who enacted these warrantless programs should be tried, found guilty, and then places in jail / banished / put to death / pardoned (pardoning would be best, much as Ford pardoned Nixon).

I'm not sure this is a troll. Disagreeing with a moron is not a reason to mod someone down.

That being said, the NSA can spy as much as they want on foreign countries. However, the people have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The emails and faxes definitively qualify as papers and effects. The 100% capture of these constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure. The NSA has prima facie been violating the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. Their actions are unconstitutional. It's as simple as that.

No man can be a traitor for upholding or protecting the Constitution, which is what Snowden did.

Probably the same thing the British did when the Russians sent an assassin into London in 2006. Which is to say, nothing at all.

Don't you mean insurance? Or are you conceding now that this has nothing to do with insurance. Wait until you see the bill....

I'd be willing to wager that more people in the United States will have no insurance a year after the ACA took affect than in the average of the 10 years before. Care to take me up on that wager?

Raising the price of something and making it fit an individual's needs less doesn't typically lend itself to a higher sales volume.

How about we start with the health care proposals at the bottom of this economic analysis?

Because in the world of government ACA website contracting, all the contractors can deliver their X and the thing can still not work at all.

This was a failure at a higher level than the individual contractors involved. Picture taking a few committees with folks like your local city council members/school board members and having them architect and design a $500 million IT project and lay out the specifications for other groups to execute in small chunks.

You get things like a design that couldn't possibly work, contradicting specifications, no testing nor bug fix time, etc...

The bottom line is incompetence at the very highest levels of government.

If Obama was smart at all, he'd have known this was coming and gracefully "given in" to the Republicans who were demanding a delay in ACA implementation in exchange for some concessions from the GOP on spending/taxes. Then he wouldn't look like such an idiot that his only "major accomplishment" is such a clusterf***.

As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage.

You missed a few caveats there....

As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage, as long as:
They never make any changes to it, including price, deductibles/copays (over $5), etc...
They comply with the coverage mandates in the law, like lifetime limits, covering adults up to 26, etc...
It's not an HSA plan.
It doesn't make "too" much money for the insurance company in any particular year.
It doesn't need new enrollees to offset people who drop coverage.

So yeah, as long as time is frozen and no one ever wants to adjust anything, except to follow more expensive mandates and lose money on it, your provider can keep offering the plan.

I mean, it's not like the Obama Administration knew that "language in ACA regulations dated July 2010 estimates that "40 to 67%" of consumers will lose their health policies", right?

Except of course, when traffic lights stop working, people still navigate intersections just fine without them. They don't degenerate into car chaos...

What you're missing is that order is a prerequisite for law and government. You can't form a government unless people have already created social order. It's not the other way around.

People create order in society. Society doesn't create order among people. "Society" isn't a thing with an existence and will outside of the individuals within it.

Good. It's nice that they're having a good time. And I'm pleased to meet their friends on Slashdot!

"Every single"..."pretty much incapable of doing simple math when they get to talking about budgets"

So Paul Ryan, the quintessential Tea Party Republican, Chairman of the House Budget committee and member of the Bowles-Simpson Commission can't do math when talking about budgets?

Your comment seems to say much more about your personal political bias then they do about the math and science knowledge of Tea Party members of Congress...

Next you'll be claiming Ron Paul has less medical knowledge than your average liberal....