Which is why my 'fave' snake oil is Obamacare, which at bottom is basically a wealth redistribution scheme. Trouble is, it's going to redistribute it in the unintended direction, just like most meddling ultimately does.

Sure, but how many? Tenth of a percent or so, at a reasonable guess? :(

Which I only believe if they pay for hosting by the day. Since it's more likely an annual contract...

So you wanna fix this? Don't apply Obamacare to the oppositions' districts. Apply it only where people want it (well, at least where their representative says they want it).

Side thought: I do wonder about the overreach into intrastate commerce.

I don't have insurance, because I can't afford it. (Check out what it costs if you're self-employed. It's more than I make.) Last time I needed emergency medical services, I paid for it out of my own pocket, and it was still only a fraction of the cost of a single month's insurance.

If I'm forced to buy this mandated insurance -- fact is I'll have to stop eating. Cuz there's no room in the budget for it, and because I do own a pot to pee in, per the gov't site I'm not eligible for the waiver thing. Guess it's time to retire, blow my savings, and go on welfare.

The very people whose pay should get halted FIRST.

Not only that, but consider the fact that 99% of the USDA site is informational -- it takes care of itself and is changed seldom to never. At worst it uses a little bandwidth, which I'm sure the gov't buys in bulk, so a website shutdown is negligible savings. To the contrary -- someone (probably a marketing specialist) was paid to write that prejudicial and inflammatory copy on the shutdown page.

I expect you're right about it costing more to 'shut down' some of these depts, than just leaving stuff to take care of itself would have. Do they really believe the parks will implode if they're not watched over every minute of every day?!

You might also enjoy
http://www.usa.gov/shutdown.shtml
Note the prejudicial language, and the inverted descriptions (so it *sounds* like essential services are shut down, and only if you read to the end of each blurb do you learn that THOSE services are not affected).

My guess is they hired a marketing consultant to write this.

Also I'm wondering how long before these drops become 'targets' for law enforcement.

Legal on all counts. The taxes is par for the entire course of all corporations and non-profits, if legally available to them. The rest of your stuff is hilarious, especially the Design Patents for clone hardware and OS X only on Apple hardware.

(And remember: They're smarter than you...)

By one measure of intelligence. I've done pretty well in most standardized and IQ tests, and yet, in many instances, my intelligence is more analytical than anything else. When it comes to other areas, I know I am sorely lacking.

In contrast, I know people (e.g. musicians) who intuitively process music theory (or even math), people whose reflexes in sports are miles ahead of my own (to predict where a ball may be and how quickly you can intercept it is also a form of intelligence), and people who can read emotions extremely well and manipulate them.

So, yeah, while people who belong to Mensa may be smart in some areas, I would question the blanket statement that they are "smarter than you" (i.e. the general populace).

Dun & Bradstreet uses case-insensitive passwords, and I think they had some other arbitrary limitation (it might have been "no punctuation", but that seems ridiculous, but that's what comes to mind).

Having SSL key access means they can capture stuff in transit, which means that either the end user key or the plain text decrypted email must be in transit... So, where is it transiting to and from? Or we're the FBI injecting something onto the page during transit to capture stuff in the users browser?

Does Lavabit do the decryption on the client end, or does the client send their key to the server? What exactly is going on?

Banks are still using "secret questions" and claiming that's a kind of two-factor authentication. Someone I know was once told by Citi something to the effect of "well, click on the links in the email, and if it gets you to a site with our logo, then it was from us."

And honestly, social engineering is still a huge and very easy target.

It only seems that way because they signed the deal with Lockheed for the F-35 LRIP6 and LRIP7 contracts on the 24th of September, which together total $7.8Billion.