They essentially want congress to live by the same means the people who use the exchange will have to

Congressional staff gets special-cased because they're forced into the exchanges (this is a feature, not a bug!). Most people with full-time employment get employer contributions; the intent of the "special treatment" clause that everyone derides is basically giving Congressional staff the equivalent of a private employer contribution towards their insurance. But, here's the thing -- the Democrats would gladly accept this if it were offered to get things rolling again. I saw the glee when it looked like that was going to be the only, symbolic demand being made pre-shutdown; sadly, it didn't come to pass.

and either delay the mandate for as long as the executive order allows Big business to ignore it, or force big business to play on the same terms as the citizens

Has the House offered a proposal in which cutting off the subsidy for Congressional staffers and undoing the executive order giving big business a deferral was the only change made? I'm entirely serious here.

1. A flipper -- someone looking to buy low and sell high, with lots of cash on hand. The "buy low" part of that makes this a very undesirable option.
2. Someone looking for owner financing (such as a wrap). I've actually gotten an offer of this sort already, but folks who can only buy with owner-financing aren't exactly the best-qualified buyers, are expecting a substantial discount for being willing to pay a lump in cash... and am I going to trust my own credit rating to their responsibility? Nuh-uh.
3. An idiot paying too much for a loan (because the most cost-effective ones in this price range, even for well-qualified buyers, may be arranged through private lenders -- but are actually FHA-backed). There aren't many of these around.

The downside is that their less-pessimistic competitors undercut them on rates and win big.

Until, of course, the pessimistic view proves right, and those competitors go under. Or, if you're really pessimistic, get a bailout.

I only spent a few minutes looking last time I was in the US, but I found lots of mobile phone shops that were willing to give cheaper SIM-only deals and even more such deals were available online.

The question isn't whether you can get a SIM-only deal. The question is whether you can buy an unlocked phone directly from a major carrier.

Then name some "good programs" written in Lisp.

Off the top of my head...

• ViaWeb. Read that link; it's worth it -- Paul talks about how his startup's success could be directly attributed to the decision to use Common LISP.
• My last employer's high-bandwidth real-time metrics analysis program. Sorry, closed-source, but we gave a talk about it at Clojure Conj.
• Incidentally, we weren't the only people to decide to use Clojure for that exact same problem -- Storm was written by Twitter to solve the same problem (distributed realtime number-crunching), and does so beautifully.
• ThreatGrid does large-scale real-time malware analysis. Guess what their platform is written in?
• Cascalog is one of the most widely-used library on top of Hadoop. Yup, it's in Clojure, a LISP.
• PuppetDB was developed by a good friend of mine over at Puppet Labs. Backend? Clojure.
• Datomic is perhaps one of the most interesting datastores out there -- moving the CPU work involved in queries out to the clients, making reads exceedingly scalable (and able to do things like blocking network calls with zero impact on other clients). Guess what it's implemented in? Right.
• Overtone is a "live programming" environment for music synthesis. If you have the time, Sam Aaron's talk using it to demonstrate the basics of psychoaccoustics (not to mention building the instruments he uses on-stage and using functional techniques to decompose Bach's canons and reconstruct them at will)

And so forth. Every conference has more people announcing interesting projects they've written, and I've only skimmed the very top -- ones which are exceptionally memorable. There's a lot going on, and more all the time.

Seriously? Now, private, for-profit companies are just asking people for cash? What kind of balls does it take to do that? And, somewhat related, what kind of idiot would give them money?

Someone who wants to live in a world where the product they're proposing to build exists, I'd expect?

So? Signatures happen on the HSM, which also stores the key material; only the cleartext data going in and the signatures going out are on the bus.

And if you mess up in the lab, the HSM kills its keystore and game-over. (Or, if it doesn't, the folks on the other side were insufficiently paranoid / excessively cheap and it's Their Own Damned Fault).