There is nothing complicated about knowing what the available options are and matching them to an individual. There's nothing complicated about computing a person's subsidy eligibility.

If Kentucky can manage this kind of thing, then anyone can.

This system doesn't have to manage the ENTIRE health insurance industry. It only has to manage a very small part of it and most of that isn't even visible to the end user.

This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.

Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.

...and part of that relates to how large your corporation is. If you have more money, you can use that money in order to be a bully. It's the capital in capitalism.

The fact that Amazon has "earned" this position doesn't alter the fact that they could be abusing it and harming the overall market.

As a corporation, they are by definition trying to destroy the market. That's what corporations do. That's why capitalism can't be left completely alone. It will implode otherwise. Both it's fans and it's detractors acknowledge this.

> I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes

I have a greatly diminished sense of smell and I can still taste differences between different varieties of tomato at a CHEAP grocery store, never mind whole foods.

You're basically trying to say that different species of plant can't be different. That's absurd of course.

Then again, there's no helping a McTomato regardless of where you acquired it.

The problem with Walmart is that they really do know their customer. They spend a lot of effort and technology in understanding what sells at each of their stores. If you are shopping at a Walmart frequented by trailer trash, you are going to only be presented with trailer trash options. Plus their whole reason for being is cheapness, not being good.

An organization has no moral or legal accountability. Therefore it should have no rights either. It should be treated the same way a child might be for similar reasons.

You don't have to use an organization as a surrogate for your speech. You are always free to speak your mind without it. Therefore you aren't losing anything if some limited liability entity has some limits place on it.

What matters if some Robber Baron can buy ad time to push his agenda. As long as he's still free to do that, there is no breach of free speech. He doesn't have to hid behind some astroturfing organization.

The law doesn't need to be corrupted to enable astroturfing.

That's right. The journal that Cortney Grove gave as an example, Topics in Language Disorders http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/default.aspx , does provide free access to papers funded by NIH, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/_layouts/oaks.journals/nih.aspx

Nope. Doesn't appear to.

Here's an example paper which I picked at random from the journal : Differentiating Speech Delay From Disorder: Does it Matter?. There's a paywall on the journal site with a $30 fee.

And here's the result of a search on PubMed for the same paper. I'm danmed if I can find it there.

Perhaps this is due to my search coming from outside the US, but I doubt it. I don't think the papers are being made available, or at least, they are being made less accessable than the paywalled versions.

To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere.

I knew a researcher from a place around Eastern Europe way. He claimed he had access to a university alumni forum where almost any paper could be requested, and an aluimni working at an institution with access would post the request within hours.

They are light years ahead of us over there.

Well the President shouldn't know about these things. That's what his Secretaries of State are for.

The President is the Head of State. I put those capitals in for a reason. It is an almost religious position. A large part of the authority and legitimacy of the state is invested in the current head of state and their behaviour has to be of an appropriately high standard. This is difficult under an executive presidency like the US, but the principle still applies.

Of foremost concern here is the simple principle that there are certain things the president should not see or hear. Sometimes countries need to spy on others, or assassinate people, or steal, or whatever. But there is absolutely no reason why the President needs to be told about these things. The only time the President should hear about things like this is in the newspapers, shortly before he makes a pledge to hold the guilty responsible.

The President is not going to be able to uphold the law if all of the lawbreakers make him an accessory before or after the fact as a matter of routine.

This is to say nothing of the loss of legitimacy that comes with being involved this close to the coal-face of the uglier side of state operations. As bin Laden was being killed, the President should never have been allowed into a room where live images of people being shot and killed were displayed on screen. Without exaggeration: His aide-de-camp deserves to be court-martialed for allowing that. The damage to the image of the US President as a head of state will take decades to undo. Heads of State do not watch gunbattles on live feeds.

There is Politics, or PR-Politics as it is practised today. There is Government, and the business of running it. Then there is Diplomacy and grand and murkier business of deal with other countries.

And finally there is Statecraft, the art of running a country wisely. No PR-man, economist, scientist or other technocratic advisor can speak with any authority on this most essential of topics. It is nebulous, yet essential to all actions of the state. Systems ; political, economic, national, international, are made or unmade by the actions of senior officials and heads of state. It is essential that these actors have the gravity and respect necessary to inspire confidence in their actions. It is simply not possible to do this effectively if you have been repeatedly seen emerging from the latest political abattoir, covered from head to twitter feeds in fallout gore and scandal. Heads of State have to be above such things.

Not with major browsers like Firefox screaming blue murder at encrypted connections that haven't been officially by certification authorities. We can't have an encrypted web if browsers themselves are hostile towards it.

In most places where gambling is legal in the US, it is only legal with severe (usually localized) restrictions and an extreme amount of government oversight.

I don't think Antigua ever offered to compete on a genuinely level playing field with anyone. So trying to throw that idea out is pretty assinine.

It just demonstrates how clueless most of the anti-USA blogosphere is when it comes to this particular subject.

> The difficulty, of course, is that the US signed a treaty saying it would abide by this sort of ruling. So now what?

So what. This should be seen as an affront to national soverienty by pretty much every body rather than the anti-USA hate-gasm it's turned into.

If the shoe were on the other foot, everyone would be defending the country that dared to have it's own independent law.

Blatant hypocrisy all around.

Remember, this is the precedent you begged for.

I answered based on my current job title and that included a bit with a previous employer where I had to "dial in" from vacation adding another time zone to my grand total.

There's a lot of history between us and Plato. Their fads don't necessarily have any relationship to our fads.

The idea of vegetarianism as some sort of moral crusade probably at the very least requires a society rich enough to support such a vanity. For everyone else, it's eat what you can get your hands on as you don't have the luxury of being picky.

> life sentence means something between 10 and 30 years,

There is nothing "civilized" about this kind of doublespeak.

Nah, it's just something he remembered from some old computing magazine.