Well, my employer decided to let me go , so after all these years of paying into the system, I figured the system owes me a little something back now. So I went in and put in all my information into healthcare.gov. Turns out I am not eligible for assistance, and the premiums are going to comprise 47% of the income from my wife's job. According to the information I read, assistance is only available for those that make between 100% and 400% of the poverty level, and we make less than 100% of the poverty level, so we are not eligible for assistance, nor are we eligible for tax credits.

Interestingly enough, we previously made between 100% and 400% of the poverty level, but we also were not eligible for assistance or tax credits back then either.

I can only conclude that nobody is eligible and all of the extra money that is being taken by various avenues to pay for Obamacare is being stolen by someone or many someones rather than being doled back out to those in need.

My wife is looking for a Wifi network security camera for the daycare. Ideally, we want one that we can set up an account on a remote server with a username and password that we share with parents.

Anybody have any suggestions?

I was doing some research for a project and happened back here. Hello slashdot.

Find me on Twitter, or put dot com after my user name.

One of the funny (tragic?) things is that my son and I traveled to Paris and bought tons of bandes desinnees including ones by some of the cartoonists that were murdered by terrorists today.

I stand with them.

Your right to claim blasphemy ends when you set foot outside the mosque.

I never steal media, and I don't like to download media either. I want to own my content, including the shiny disc that it came on. I don't want my software phoning home someday and due to some issue, like the company going belly-up, I suddenly can't play my game that I fully paid for.

But I saw a deal on Steam that seemed too good to pass up. There was a Tropico 4 Collectors Bundle with about 12 different downloads, all for $9.99. I already have Tropico 4, bought and paid for at my local Best Buy. And I have played through all the scenarios, so the downloadable content would be a nice change of pace. This seemed a reasonable price for 12 packages, so I went through the hassle of creating a steam account, verifying my identity, typing in all my payment information, telling them not to save it, and then, here comes the final payment page. $39.99. Excuse me? You lure people in by saying it costs, $9.99, and then on the final page, you say $39.99, with a little asterisk saying (some items have changed price since place in your cart)? Well, that seems unconscionably underhanded and slimy.

When I go back to the main page, it now shows $39.99 for the bundle. How do they do this, I wonder? Do they record it by IP address and present the lower price to people who have not looked at it before? Or do they just offer it for the lower price and as soon as someone tries to buy it, they up the price for everybody? It seems to come up as $39.99 for all my devices now, but they are all on the same cable modem, so they may appear to the outside to be coming from the same address.

Well, I have learned my lesson. Never trust a downloadable software company. Always buy a physical disc installation media.

So, while I can't admit what I may or may not have done in detail myself, one of the most interesting things at Christmas was finding out my dad was indeed part of the precursor to the NSA, confirming what my mom had thought.

Life is fun.

Well, after spending thousands of dollars worth of my time last year in getting healthcare setup for my family, I was notified that my premium, which had gone up by 50% last year when I signed up for ObamaCare, has gone up by 50% again.
So I tried to login using my password from last year, but it wouldn't take it. Apparently they think it is a good idea to expire passwords every 90 days for a site that people will use once a year.
So I had them send me a link to create a new password. Well, I still can't get in. It says I didn't answer the security questions correctly that I set up when I started the account. Well, that would be because I didn't set up any security questions when I started the account, so naturally I woulnd't know the answers. Also, one of the questions is "name a significant date in your life?" Well, it won't take dates as input.
So off to another year of spending thousands of dollars worth of my time just to get into this site, where they will probably show me that my current option which is now three times what I paid 14 months ago, is probably the lowest cost option now. Strangely my salary has not risen by a factor of three to keep up with the increase of Obamacare premiums. Why can't we go back to the cheap coverage that I had before Obama started this fundraiser for the insurance companies?

It's a pretty standard trope, but one that libertarians do not seem to believe can possibly exist. And it is a blind spot in economic justice in the United States of America.
 
 

The Lion and his Fellow Hunters, By Aesop
Once, a lion, a fox, a jackal, and a wolf went hunting. They caught a stag and killed it, and quartered the meat. "This quarter," said the lion, "is for me, as I am the King of Beasts. And this quarter is mine as the arbiter of the spoils. The third quarter is mine because of my part in chasing down the stag. And as for the fourth â" well, I'd like to see any of you dare to put so much as a paw on it." The other three animals were bitterly disappointed, but they slunk away, unwilling or unable to fight for their share of the meat.

Just because you help a lion doesn't mean he'll share.

 
So remember boys and girls, just because you help a rich man to run his business, does not mean he'll share the profits with you. Which leads us right back to an entirely Different Leo and his successors.

Anyone still lurking around this place? I see several people are still active here.... quite a huge pile of names I have not seen in a long long time.

It seems to be begging the question to demand acceptance of the prerequisites of the requirement to agree not to disagree. These prerequisites form a model of what it means to be rational. I'm not sure if they are the best possible model, or even if they work. This includes the hypothesis that a system is only efficient if and only if it has a model of itself, and the semenatic, syntactic forms, and (trustable) media that are acceptable to each of us. So, in short - it is reasonable to expect come to agreement with rational agents except about rationality itself. There it isn't necessarily a question of whether you agree or not, but a matter of how rationality can even work. A matter of tweaking the model to allow greater truths to be perceived between multiple agents. So, the #1 way to get out of any disagreement is to look at this model, or the idea of a model in general.

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:
 
You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.
 
But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, nonstop, from the time you die for the first 1,391,880 years you are in paradise. You're going to need eternity from then on just to rest up from that.

Look, I have an iPhone 5. I've owned iMacs, Mac SE, and my first software I paid for was for the Apple II+.

But I'm not that impressed today.

A watch? Why? Who wears those things? Just look at your phone.

Pay by phone? That was around in the 1980s in Japan and South Korea.

Seriously, what's next, Apple VCRs and Shoulderpads?

If your genetilia has been turned into a fine red mist by the dynamite vest you just blew up to kill 30 infidels in a coffee shop?

So this is a thing. It inspired me to write this:

Day 1: A "git clone git@github.com:thegreatoldone/offerings.git", "make -f makefile/unix" and I'm off generating Cthulhu Offerings cryptocoins!

Day 2: I managed to find a couple optimizations. It's almost as if the code is speaking to me! Also, switched to clang 5.1 and got an extra 8% performance boost with the LLVM toolchain. Awesome!

Day 4: My cryptocurrency generation is going quite well! I'm hoping to have enough to pay my tuition at Miskatonic University by the fall term.

Day 9: A quiet scraping noise seems to be coming from one of my hard drives. I should maybe have sprung for SSDs to save my coins.

Day 12: I awoke with a fever in the night, and the scraping noise has transformed into a frightful howling. Though the console monitor is off, strange non-Euclidean symbols reveal themselves from time to time on the screen. What it means I cannot say.

Day 17: My fever has broken, but I can no longer tolerate the sound from my compute cluster. I have pried the cover off to diagnose the problem, and the drive array is not in there. There is only a horrific eldritch non-emptiness that sears my very soul.

Day 22: Turning, turning, falling falling, Oh! How you speak! It is so...

Day 26: vvvvvvvvvvvmggggngl;l;;m122222

NO CARRIER