Except that scraping publically available data, while non trivial (assuming it's in diverse formats, anyway) isn't handling that data securely. At least many of the servers this has to be pulling from absolutely must handle data securely - it'd be kind of bad if you could use the interface exposed for this to randomly pull up IRS data on anyone for whom you had a SSN and mother's maiden name, wouldn't it? Not even to get into medical information, which has specific legal protections.
I'm not trying, BTW, to argue that the site is well done. I've seen little of it, and even what I have seen raised more than a few design flags for me. But I don't know enough about the overall architecture to really comment. (Technically, while I have designed some fairly large scale distributed systems, what I have the most experience in is auditing and providing design improvements for performance, reliability, scalability, and disaster fail-over and recovery of large scale distributed systems. So, in theory, it'd be my area. Or, at least my old area - I've kept my hand in a bit, but the last several years have been primary devoted to neurobiology.) But it is important to understand the complexity of the problem.
My sister, in Washington State, is fairly poor. (She's an aerialist and aerial instructor, and working retail part time to fill in the gaps. I'm hoping she'll be doing a bit better as she builds her personal trainer clientele, but artists generally don't make a ton of money.)
On Tuesday afternoon, she called me up because she didn't have a lot of experience picking insurance plans - this will be the first time she's had insurance since she turned 18, and she's in her early thirties. We went over the options, and chose a local HMO we both know*. She'll have a $200 deductible, $1200 out of pocket max, modest co-pays, and easy access to providers.
After her subsidy, she will be paying $5.62 a month for this coverage.
I. Am. Ecstatic. (Especially since I've essentially been her back up health insurance in an emergency.)
* Not my favorite place in the world, but decent enough and it's the coverage we had growing up.
I do think it's useful to make a distinction between preferences being used in a corrupt way, and preferences actually benefitting those they are aimed at helping.
Or that the process of government contracting imposes extra expenses and deters talent.
Most of the companies that apply for government contracts are companies that are in the primary business of landing government contracts, as the process is heavy and arcane enough that it deters most other people. People who work for such companies have to have a higher tolerance for bureaucracy than do many people in tech (though I think this is a cultural difference rather than skills per se).
I'm fairly uneasy with how many people are happy to jump in with the idea that giving preference to women and minorities is why quality is low and costs are high. (Which you did not say, but which has been repeatedly mentioned here.) I think we have a system complex enough that navigating and gaming the system becomes the primary skill that allows one to get contracts. Preferences may be used to game the system, but that doesn't mean it's about incompetent or corrupt women and minorities:
Well and that if the only people who buy insurance are the ones who "really, REALLY" need insurance (i.e. those with major health problems) the whole system will go into a death spiral. Rather more serious than pettiness or obstinancy.
I'd be curious about this greater complexity assertion. A large part of the project requirement is that it effectively and securely pulls data from a large number of already existing government systems. In my experience, dealing with those kind of externalities is most often neither easy nor cheap... and certainly pretty darned complex. What are you comparing it to?
Actually, congress has power of the purse, not just the house. And bills, starting in the house, need to be approved by the senate.
It would be one thing if the bills that weren't being brought up to vote had the votes to pass them - as a "clean" CR seems to in the house - but I'm pretty sure this wasn't that.
Boehner can bring it up for the vote whenever he wants. What in question is the political consequences of doing so. Blah, blah, blah, maybe it will cost him his speakership - but honestly, considering how much members of his own party have been willing to flout his leadership already, I'm not sure it would make that much of a difference. Do we have other digestible compromise candidates for the job in the wings?
Mm. I don't think that an attempt to attach a defunding that has failed to pass congrees 40-odd times to a budget bill can count as anything but political theatre.
Actually, that's not yet a given one way or the other - unless the measure past in the last couple of hours - though in the past furloughed workers (during shutdowns, as opposed, to, say, the sequester) have been paid retroactively.
(And, in fact, I did much of my undergraduate work in political economics - albeit with an international emphasis - before going into a career in software engineering. Then computational biochemistry research, and now neurobiology. I am fairly certain I'm not a poster child for a failing educational system...)
What you are stating isn't established fact, but a partisan assertion.
Though if we're going to be precise, it's not just "the Republicans" but factionalism and the Speaker's inability to command respect from members of his own party. (This isn't a particularly partisan statement - or at least, observers from both the left and right have reached the same conclusion.)
And we have a sufficient number of republicans publically stating that they will vote in favor of a clean resolution to pass it were it to put to the vote.
Oh, and for the record, I did my undergrad work in Chinese Language and Literature and Political Economics, then I worked as a software engineer, mostly at Microsoft*, for many years, then I spent a couple of years doing martial arts full time and getting my body back together, then a couple of years doing computational biochemistry and some experimental database work (and getting something of a background in biomedical research), and now I'm working on a PhD in Neurobiology.
So, my education is still totally messed up. But people keep letting me do cool things. And my experience so far has been that an awful lot of rules can be gotten around if you ask around about it and are clearly willing to work your ass off. (Yes, I'm good at navigating bureaucracy, but I also am not trying to get anything by anyone. Well, okay, maybe my physics prof when I was an undergrad.)
* And while I'm joking, I'm also not joking. I've never taken a math class at a college level - I lied about having taken calculus to take the physics classes I wanted back in the day, and am otherwise totally self taught, and have only the last fave years or so really been going back and filling in the gaps in a rigorous fashion, thank you Apostol. I've never taken a class on programming, though I've helped teach classes on programming. (Though this is a bit of a cheat, because my dad was a CS prof.)
Well, actually, it's not. I attended the University of Washington, starting in 1986, first through their Early Entrance Program, and then returning in 1988 as a regular student (at fifteen). I never graduated from highschool, I never got a GED.
Obviously, my situation was unusual (and my younger sister did get a GED before she was 18, so perhaps WA is more relaxed?)
I missed that, actually. I was a child of the seventies and early eighties, and missed much of the self esteem movement.
Though... at least in some areas, there's been movement away from this for some time. A decade or so I was teaching martial arts to a bunch of highschoolers in an IB program, and those kids were pretty hard core about their academics. And the undergrads I work with now (in an academic context, my martial arts students here are mostly older) tend to be pretty darned focused, and show no signs of being coddled academically.* Of course, it's a fairly comptitive school, and the ones I've taken on as research assistants tend to be among the more motivated. Students in classes are a bit more of a mixed bag, though it's still a filtered group.
On the flip side, I did most of my hacking before they really got into enforcing laws against it (and much of it before there was laws to speak of). (And yes, in this case I mean hacking into things, which I have only the slightest contact with these days, as opposed to other uses of hacking with which I'm rather more involved. I was fairly non-malicious, though there were a few pranks I played on my father's grad students that have me wincing pretty hard in retrospect.)
I had to go to a private school to get (neo) Marxist indoctrination. It was pretty great;-) (for one year. Between dropping out of college - I was 13, and got into a fight with my program administration - and going back for lack of other reasonable options.)
Public school... well, one of the lines that annoyed me the most is about how your gifted child will be fine. For some kids, yes. Or maybe your district has a decent gifted program. But for many children gifted education is a type of special needs education, and keeping them in a standard setting is not only cruel, it's likely to turn them into angry disaffected hackers who get lousy grades and blow things up for kicks.*
Er, not that I'd know from first hand experience or anything.
Gods, when people say that your teens are the best years of your life...
* Oh, wait, technically that was the gifted program, right before they decided I needed to try college.
I think the interesting case is increasingly Apple, not Microsoft. (Though whether Cook can keep momentum is an important question. If he's Apple's Ballmer, well, we may well yet have the year of linux as a primary workstation.*) What does the BSD kernel really mean? In the academic space, it means that for many domains Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant, because so many of the good tools (and the tools you don't have to pay for) are coming out of a unix world, and can be made to run on Macs without that much hassle, and Windows it just a royal pita.
On the other hand, when it comes to oppressive control of an environment, Apple is about as non-open as you are likely to get.
* I tried to make myself say "Linux on the desktop" but it was hard to type with the laughing.
Actually, I think Linux is the community. (I mean this quite seriously.) And as such, Android has some overlap with linux, but isn't quite the same thing, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you? It will be pretty interesting as a map emerges of what prices are available where.
(I believe her plan would be about $260 without the subsidy. She is, as I mentioned, fairly poor. But then, that's pretty darned decent coverage.)
Except that scraping publically available data, while non trivial (assuming it's in diverse formats, anyway) isn't handling that data securely. At least many of the servers this has to be pulling from absolutely must handle data securely - it'd be kind of bad if you could use the interface exposed for this to randomly pull up IRS data on anyone for whom you had a SSN and mother's maiden name, wouldn't it? Not even to get into medical information, which has specific legal protections.
I'm not trying, BTW, to argue that the site is well done. I've seen little of it, and even what I have seen raised more than a few design flags for me. But I don't know enough about the overall architecture to really comment. (Technically, while I have designed some fairly large scale distributed systems, what I have the most experience in is auditing and providing design improvements for performance, reliability, scalability, and disaster fail-over and recovery of large scale distributed systems. So, in theory, it'd be my area. Or, at least my old area - I've kept my hand in a bit, but the last several years have been primary devoted to neurobiology.) But it is important to understand the complexity of the problem.
My sister, in Washington State, is fairly poor. (She's an aerialist and aerial instructor, and working retail part time to fill in the gaps. I'm hoping she'll be doing a bit better as she builds her personal trainer clientele, but artists generally don't make a ton of money.)
On Tuesday afternoon, she called me up because she didn't have a lot of experience picking insurance plans - this will be the first time she's had insurance since she turned 18, and she's in her early thirties. We went over the options, and chose a local HMO we both know*. She'll have a $200 deductible, $1200 out of pocket max, modest co-pays, and easy access to providers.
After her subsidy, she will be paying $5.62 a month for this coverage.
I. Am. Ecstatic. (Especially since I've essentially been her back up health insurance in an emergency.)
* Not my favorite place in the world, but decent enough and it's the coverage we had growing up.
How about using a minor past injury in military prep school to claim disabled veteran status?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr1kwC0je1Y
I do think it's useful to make a distinction between preferences being used in a corrupt way, and preferences actually benefitting those they are aimed at helping.
Or that the process of government contracting imposes extra expenses and deters talent.
Most of the companies that apply for government contracts are companies that are in the primary business of landing government contracts, as the process is heavy and arcane enough that it deters most other people. People who work for such companies have to have a higher tolerance for bureaucracy than do many people in tech (though I think this is a cultural difference rather than skills per se).
I'm fairly uneasy with how many people are happy to jump in with the idea that giving preference to women and minorities is why quality is low and costs are high. (Which you did not say, but which has been repeatedly mentioned here.) I think we have a system complex enough that navigating and gaming the system becomes the primary skill that allows one to get contracts. Preferences may be used to game the system, but that doesn't mean it's about incompetent or corrupt women and minorities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr1kwC0je1Y
Well and that if the only people who buy insurance are the ones who "really, REALLY" need insurance (i.e. those with major health problems) the whole system will go into a death spiral. Rather more serious than pettiness or obstinancy.
I'd be curious about this greater complexity assertion. A large part of the project requirement is that it effectively and securely pulls data from a large number of already existing government systems. In my experience, dealing with those kind of externalities is most often neither easy nor cheap... and certainly pretty darned complex. What are you comparing it to?
Actually, congress has power of the purse, not just the house. And bills, starting in the house, need to be approved by the senate.
It would be one thing if the bills that weren't being brought up to vote had the votes to pass them - as a "clean" CR seems to in the house - but I'm pretty sure this wasn't that.
Hence "other" digestible compromise candidates :-)
Boehner can bring it up for the vote whenever he wants. What in question is the political consequences of doing so. Blah, blah, blah, maybe it will cost him his speakership - but honestly, considering how much members of his own party have been willing to flout his leadership already, I'm not sure it would make that much of a difference. Do we have other digestible compromise candidates for the job in the wings?
Mm. I don't think that an attempt to attach a defunding that has failed to pass congrees 40-odd times to a budget bill can count as anything but political theatre.
Actually, that's not yet a given one way or the other - unless the measure past in the last couple of hours - though in the past furloughed workers (during shutdowns, as opposed, to, say, the sequester) have been paid retroactively.
Strong words from an AC!
(And, in fact, I did much of my undergraduate work in political economics - albeit with an international emphasis - before going into a career in software engineering. Then computational biochemistry research, and now neurobiology. I am fairly certain I'm not a poster child for a failing educational system...)
What you are stating isn't established fact, but a partisan assertion.
From which Hastert wants to distance himself...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/10/03/former-speaker-hastert-calls-the-hastert-rule-a-misnomer/
Though if we're going to be precise, it's not just "the Republicans" but factionalism and the Speaker's inability to command respect from members of his own party. (This isn't a particularly partisan statement - or at least, observers from both the left and right have reached the same conclusion.)
Because smaller governments are magically more effective?
And we have a sufficient number of republicans publically stating that they will vote in favor of a clean resolution to pass it were it to put to the vote.
Though considering that society tends to heap a lot more scorn and abuse on women so exposed than men, maybe not.
Oh, and for the record, I did my undergrad work in Chinese Language and Literature and Political Economics, then I worked as a software engineer, mostly at Microsoft*, for many years, then I spent a couple of years doing martial arts full time and getting my body back together, then a couple of years doing computational biochemistry and some experimental database work (and getting something of a background in biomedical research), and now I'm working on a PhD in Neurobiology.
So, my education is still totally messed up. But people keep letting me do cool things. And my experience so far has been that an awful lot of rules can be gotten around if you ask around about it and are clearly willing to work your ass off. (Yes, I'm good at navigating bureaucracy, but I also am not trying to get anything by anyone. Well, okay, maybe my physics prof when I was an undergrad.)
* And while I'm joking, I'm also not joking. I've never taken a math class at a college level - I lied about having taken calculus to take the physics classes I wanted back in the day, and am otherwise totally self taught, and have only the last fave years or so really been going back and filling in the gaps in a rigorous fashion, thank you Apostol. I've never taken a class on programming, though I've helped teach classes on programming. (Though this is a bit of a cheat, because my dad was a CS prof.)
Well, actually, it's not. I attended the University of Washington, starting in 1986, first through their Early Entrance Program, and then returning in 1988 as a regular student (at fifteen). I never graduated from highschool, I never got a GED.
Obviously, my situation was unusual (and my younger sister did get a GED before she was 18, so perhaps WA is more relaxed?)
I missed that, actually. I was a child of the seventies and early eighties, and missed much of the self esteem movement.
Though... at least in some areas, there's been movement away from this for some time. A decade or so I was teaching martial arts to a bunch of highschoolers in an IB program, and those kids were pretty hard core about their academics. And the undergrads I work with now (in an academic context, my martial arts students here are mostly older) tend to be pretty darned focused, and show no signs of being coddled academically.* Of course, it's a fairly comptitive school, and the ones I've taken on as research assistants tend to be among the more motivated. Students in classes are a bit more of a mixed bag, though it's still a filtered group.
On the flip side, I did most of my hacking before they really got into enforcing laws against it (and much of it before there was laws to speak of). (And yes, in this case I mean hacking into things, which I have only the slightest contact with these days, as opposed to other uses of hacking with which I'm rather more involved. I was fairly non-malicious, though there were a few pranks I played on my father's grad students that have me wincing pretty hard in retrospect.)
* Street smarts? Generally not so much.
I had to go to a private school to get (neo) Marxist indoctrination. It was pretty great ;-) (for one year. Between dropping out of college - I was 13, and got into a fight with my program administration - and going back for lack of other reasonable options.)
Public school... well, one of the lines that annoyed me the most is about how your gifted child will be fine. For some kids, yes. Or maybe your district has a decent gifted program. But for many children gifted education is a type of special needs education, and keeping them in a standard setting is not only cruel, it's likely to turn them into angry disaffected hackers who get lousy grades and blow things up for kicks.*
Er, not that I'd know from first hand experience or anything.
Gods, when people say that your teens are the best years of your life...
* Oh, wait, technically that was the gifted program, right before they decided I needed to try college.
Ballmer's push towards hardware and services seemed aiming at just such a reinvention.
I think the interesting case is increasingly Apple, not Microsoft. (Though whether Cook can keep momentum is an important question. If he's Apple's Ballmer, well, we may well yet have the year of linux as a primary workstation.*) What does the BSD kernel really mean? In the academic space, it means that for many domains Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant, because so many of the good tools (and the tools you don't have to pay for) are coming out of a unix world, and can be made to run on Macs without that much hassle, and Windows it just a royal pita.
On the other hand, when it comes to oppressive control of an environment, Apple is about as non-open as you are likely to get.
* I tried to make myself say "Linux on the desktop" but it was hard to type with the laughing.
Hm.
Actually, I think Linux is the community. (I mean this quite seriously.) And as such, Android has some overlap with linux, but isn't quite the same thing, either.
But still, I think we all win.