http://eliteownage.com/dinomeat.svg

This is old news. These methods have been around at least as long as C has. It only works in isolated situations and doesn't make you a good programmer. Or person.

The linked site says that it's OK to use the fiber for business if you're running a "small" business FROM YOUR HOME.

Terms-of-use cut is whether you LIVE there (apparently as a primary residence, not camping out at the office) rather than the site being an office-only.

I suspect they might waffle if you set up the next e-bay/facebook/netflix class service in your back room. But for people like me, with a consulting business, it would be just fine - and explicitly allowed - to use the fiber for mail service, VLAN-on-the-road, etc.

That would be a horrendous design. Another good reason to verify income later on rather than make it a one shot deal. So, what if your income changes in a couple weeks?? What then? If it is a one shot application and you can't revise your inputs then that means you might get a better paying job and suddenly be unable to sign up online for a plan without an appeal even though you might be subject to fines starting January 1st if you are not covered. Actually I really hope you are incorrect and this is just some bad documentation telling you incorrect information.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't asking these questions. Their answer doesn't matter.

The discussion is not about whether these guys are innocent as the driven snow or guilty as sin.

The discussion is about whether the GOVERNMENT is following the rules, what those rules are, and how the GOVERNMENT's claim and the rules affects all of us in the future.

The government always uses the worst scum they can find to establish a precedent to use on us little guys later. That's why, for instance, it's child pornographers and molesters they go after when they're attacking free speech, censorship of the Internet, or the privacy of your electronic records and communications.

You don't get to relax the rules just because the accusation is great. If anything, it's when the accusation is greatest that it's most important that the accused's rights be protected.

The government doesn't get to break the rules itself when it's going after rule-breakers. The legal system is about the RULES for handling breakers of the rules. Trying to get the rule-enforcers to enforce the rules on themselves is extremely difficult. The only thing we've found to work even moderately well, so far, is to make them LOSE when they break the rules themselves. Thus the doctrine of "fruit of the poisoned tree" - the suppression of evidence collected illegally.

The result, of course, is that when the police and prosecutors break the rules, the accused goes free, even if he's guilty as sin. Yes, if he's an offender and likely to repeat or escalate in the future this is bad. But a runaway government is worse.

He's a child molester? A runaway government is worse.
He's a serial murderer? A runaway government is worse.
He's part of a conspiracy to set off a hydrogen bomb on Manhattan Island? A runaway government is worse.

Because a runaway government descends into tyranny. It kills or maims anyone it wants. It steals the resources of anyone it wants. It controls the lives of anyone it wants, for its own benefit and their detriment. It does it to everyone, in detail. Until it is stopped.

Without such tools as suppression of evidence and "standing" to compel revelation of the information necessary to determine whether evidence should be suppressed, it almost certainly won't be stopped in our lifetime, short of a violent revolution - after which the replacement would likely be even worse.

According to every news report I have read the healthcare.org system is basically unusable for signing up for health insurance right now. Having a system that sends an email after the fact if post processing determines more information is needed or something couldn't be verified is better than having people walk away without completing the transaction because your processing is taking too damn long.

That's why when presenting the Forbes article I said "On the one hand it makes sense that you don't want to scare people off with high healthcare insurance prices until you know if they are eligible for subsidies" I think Forbes is spinning the requirement a bit. Because it actually does make sense from a policy and usability standpoint to not scare off people that have low incomes by presenting them with the full unsubsidized prices. For instance if you lived in Ilinois and wanted a "Catastrophic" only plan which has high deductibles and very little regular health coverage and you were presented with the lowest cost family plan which is $556.30 per month. Then it really is better financially to just pay the fine and pocket save the money you otherwise would have spent on minimal health insurance. But if you do qualify for subsidies then at some price point it becomes a no-brainer to sign up for subsidized coverage rather than pay a monthly fine that would be equivalent to a good portion of a premium cost.

ACA is full of bad requirements... That said. If a large employer doesn't offer health insurance, which is essentially what the law is saying about Congress and the White House since they would not be offered insurance, then they would go into the individual market and then based on income would either qualify or not qualify for subsidies. Seems pretty simple to me.

Usually a large employer would be required to offer plans or pay a penalty, so really the only difference here between how this would work with Congress versus another large employer is that it would be redundant and wouldn't make sense for the government to pay itself the penalty for not offering a health insurance plan.

Sure, Congress and the White House would have to pay higher salaries to their employees to retain people, but it seems like the benefit of transparency outweighs what would likely just be an offsetting cost of providing money for people to buy their own insurance. Really, this does have the effect of making Congress and the White House live with the worst case of Obamacare... as an individual having to see the full cost of insurance premiums when your employer opts out of providing subsidies or provides the bare minimum of subsidies.

People's experience with Obamacare is going to differ greatly based on circumstances, having the people that make and administer the law experience the worst case of a non-compliant employer putting their people on the individual market seems to me only fair.

Interesting Forbes article on how healthcare.gov is designed to prevent people to see the full prices of the healthcare plans which is what is causing the upfront bottleneck. On the one hand it makes sense that you don't want to scare people off with high healthcare insurance prices until you know if they are eligible for subsidies, but on the other hand it means you probably have to verify the data entered against what are potentially hundreds of millions of records just to display a screen with prices for the plans.

Seems a better option would simply to take the persons word for it up front, let them see the prices displayed depending on the personal and family information they entered and then only do the background verification after they "checkout" and actually purchase a plan. That way they just get an email later on if there is a problem with anything they entered or if the prices change based on something determined based on the background check and credit check. Or if as news reports suggest they are going to have to go through an income verification process as part of the Senate compromise, then doing the credit check up front in "real time" is an extra step anyway. Could even make the insurance companies do the final eligibility check as part of their 15% commission.

Trying to process through hundreds of millions of records in less than tens of seconds is a stupid thing to try to do just to keep people from finding out what your prices really are even if you have hundreds of millions of dollars to blow through. They could have fully insured 100,000 more people for the money that has been wasted just on healthcare.gov.

of current spending.

The Kobayashi Maru ploy only works when the other guy doesn't notice what you're doing.

Apparently Mr. Moalin once missed a telephone call from "Aden Hashi Ayrow, the senior al Shabaab leader," which makes it likely that a little more was going on than merely the donation of "a small sum of money.

Really?

Was it really A.H.A. who called?

Was he really calling the defendant? Or did he misdial the number?

And I could go on for pages.

What the government is claiming is that the defendant has NO RIGHT TO ASK for the information necessary to CHECK whether that is what happened, NO RIGHT TO CHECK whether the information was collected legally, and NO RIGHT TO GET IT THROWN OUT if it wasn't.

Says the government: We get to use this against you and you can't challenge it.

Seems to me that anyone being prosecuted with such information NECESSARILY has standing to challenge it. Nobody else could POSSIBLY have more standing.

To claim that the defendant doesn't have standing is to claim that NOBODY has standing. It's to claim that the government can make up ANYTHING IT WANTS, enter it into evidence, and NOBODY can check it.

The government needs to put up or shut up.

= = = =

There used to be a solid division between the intelligence services and law enforcement. That let the intelligence services collect information for fighting wars under looser rules which, though they might not be constitutional, at least didn't vaporize the constitutional rights of defendants in criminal trials.

Then the congress passed laws for, first the "drug war", then the "war on terror", that tore down this boundary. So now we have the end game, where the NSA and the federal prosecutors light their cigars with burning copies of the Fourth Amendment.

I'm more concerned with:
  - Our successors not realizing the media contain prtentially valuable recorded information early on, resulting in the media all being destroyed long before the successors' technology is up to decoding them.
  - The burying of the information of interest to them in enormous masses of uninteresting or unintelligible chaff, resulting in the data of interest never being recovered and used. (Imaging one copy of Wikipedia buried in 500 years of LOLCATS.)

A society that watches waaaay too much reality TV, Cops and America's Funniest Home Videos, and thinks that Jackass is great shouldn't be too upset by the occasional boom.

And do what when they get there? Mars is the Atacama Desert without the thick atmosphere, high moisture content, normal gravity and nearness to civilization.

Explorers have been dying since man started exploring.