Hey, I've paid a lot for this name, and continue to do so. So if that's sarcasm, the joke's on you. It actually is my official and registered alias. You might try it some time -- proves that you actually care about what you say, standing behind your own words and whatnot.
What you're missing is that in the IT industry, specific models of hardware and specific versions of software isn't specific at all. So that's actually a very wide swath. Models have sub-models and configurations and versions, software versions have subversions and minor versions and releases and bulids too. But that's not what I mean.
The techniques by which a given professional uses those tools, how they put things together, their general attitudes towards the big-5 orientations, that's where your flexibility is.
The reasons that job requirements list the components, and not the techniques, are:
a. techniques are very difficult to read, write, understand, and accurately describe. Doing so would be incredibly confusing and never quite right.
b. most components simply aren't compatible with most other components. So much so that any professional with enough experience to have an opinion also winds up having a preferences. He simple doesn't want to fight with other components.
c. within any specific component, there exists a sub-world of amazing things that particular component can do that nothing else can. If you find the right expert, specializing only in that component, there are some wow things.
So then you should start fixing that problem. Your problem isn't with censorship. Your problem is with the ability for laws to spread unimpeded. That's the problem on which you ought to be focusing your efforts.
They actually aren't "removing" anything. They simply aren't allowing others to sell access to it. They aren't taking down the web-site, and they aren't even taking down the web-site's hosting. They are simply not permitting the telecom company to re-broadcast it for money.
That means you can start your own telecom ISP, make it your business policy to not censor, make that the promise to every paying customer -- make it evident and obvious that's exactly what you're selling and how you differentiate your business -- and the government actually won't be able to stop you, nor will they want to do so.
The fact that you won't create such a service, and neither will the existing telecom companies, is a different issue.
So if that's your argument, you might want to open with it.
You can't usually leave most buildings that you've entered -- because you've usually entered them for a reason that has no reasonable alternative. Think about renewing a licence, grocery shopping, the bakery, movie theatre, home improvement store. For most people, the alternative is another home improvement store of the same brand twenty minutes away.
Let's use the movie theatre as a great example. Actually, it might be the perfect example. A movie poster for next year's movie is, let's say, your idea of vulgar. You're at the movie theatre to see the latest disney movie (these days that covers both star wars and toy story, so you can pick). Whether or not you've brought your 8-year old nephew is up to you. It's a 5 minute walk from your home.
But you see the poster, you'd be forced to stare at it while standing in line for tickets and for entry into the cinema, you don't like it, so you leave. You walk back home. You get into the car, and you drive fifteen minutes to the next theatre. It's the same brand, and they have the same poster and same layout. So you get back into the car, and you drive another thirty minutes two towns over where the theatre company is different.
But they show the same movies, and therefore they have both the movie you want to see, and the poster that you don't.
So your only remaining option is to not go to any movie theatre until next year's movie poster is taken down -- which will be next year.
It's all private property. It's all recreational. And there's no getting away from it.
Now no one's saying that you find the colour green offensive. But there's something that could be in a movie poster that would ruin your night. It might be something very gory from a horror movie. It might be a perfectly fine scene from an R rated horror movie when you're trying to see a PG rated disney movie.
Ultimately, government censorship is supposed to be like movie ratings. This doesn't contain that. You won't accidentally see that when you're looking at this.
Web-sites have links. Web-sites have frames. Web-sites have ads, pictures, and public comments. Obviously there's going to need to be some limits some where.
You shouldn't like it. But you should desire it. And you should definitely expect it.
The Internet began as a freedom of speech thing the same way me standing in a park did. But that was in the '80s. Now, the Internet acts as a full publication and broadcast system, like me putting up a six-storey banner on the side of a skyscraper.
There have always been laws governing what you can say in a public arena.
Today, it's the norm for 3-year olds to use online systems, as well as educational institutions, and a whole host of real-world legitimate and vital purposes. It's no longer an optional activity at all in most circles.
So the question to ask yourself: is there anything that you wouldn't accept painted onto the side of a downtown building? You can always walk a different way to work and not see it. I'll bet there's something that you would call inappropriate as a public display. It may be something as simple as your grandparents kissing.
Whatever it is, that's what we've come to. And it's no surprise. For all the reasons that broadcasts have ever been appropriately restricted, so should the internet be.
Now, you can certainly complain with the way that it's done. You can be upset at the sheer number of false positives. You can be correct in saying that it may actually be impossible or unfeasible to enforce. But then that becomes the debate, not the need for the restriction in the first place.
I promise you that right now, today, there aren't too many business owners. Stop scaling everything to infinity. We're not at any risk of every 50+ running a business tomorrow.
Oh, and many 50+ retire, semi-retire, run businesses without many employees, some have no problem finding work, they "hire" each other, and six 50+ can get together to run a company -- doofus.
And yes, it's got everything to do with your age and experience, but not the way that you think. I expect younger people to be inexperienced, and need supervision. I expect a young contractor to require management, and being told what to do. I also expect someone with your age and experience not to be a drain on society. I expect you to be running your own business, hiring your own young employees, and creating jobs.
If you've spent four decades working in the industry, and you haven't gotten to the point where you can start creating jobs, instead of just consuming them, then I don't value your experience anymore. It's that simple. It's your responsibility to start putting your money where your mouth is and to start taking your own employment risks. No one's ever refused to hire a company because the owner is 50+.
So that's my advice to you. Start creating jobs, stop consuming them.
Oh look, a hugely significant percentage of humans in a given environment want to do something. It comes with an added danger. Let's prohibit them from doing it! Because that works. It's always worked in the past, with everything from alcohol to abstinance.
Or, we can do what actually works. We can train people to do it well enough to lower that risk of danger.
Make it a part of the drivers' test. Make it just another mark on the drivers' licence -- same as glasses, motorcycles, and transport trucks. I learned to drive in a blizzard in the dark, and just did it again tonight for over an hour. I can learn to text while driving on a clear day. Teach me. I'll learn.
very simply: 99% of classroom education isn't actually visual, tactile, nor aural. Math is numbers, graphs are relationships, algebra is logic, english is literary, poetry is aural, and plays are visual but how many poetry readings and plays are in classrooms these days?
The museum is 90% visual and 80% tactile (even when you aren't permitted to touch it, you can still see the texture and infer the tactile). Welcome the part of the brain that's bored in the classroom.
More parts of the brain being engaged, more to knowledge to associate with other knowledge, less being bored and blinder-focussed, better learning.
More recently, I've thought that the lack of interest in handicap solutions by non-handicapped people is actually the fault of the handicapped.
Follow me, patiently please.
Major intersections around here have bleeps and bloops to indicate "safe" passage for blind pedestrians. Do I know what they mean? No I don't. Do I pay for them? Yes I do. I'm forced to pay for them, yet no one has taught me how to use them. Why do I not care about them? Because I ignore them as an unknown background element.
Similarly, we have braille on our bank notes. I'm very proud that we have braille on our bank notes. Most of us don't even notice. The side-walk ramps are another excellent example. There are countless.
The reason I blame the handicapped is simply this: they say that I don't need the assistance.
In truth, I don't need the assistance. ..NOW.
I plan to live to 95 years of age, at least. I plan to lose much of my eyesight, and a fair bit of my hearing. I plan to walk very slowly, and to stop taking 15 flights of stairs for fun. I also plan to get some form of motorized side-walk vehicle, by the time I'm 70. I don't plan to get the off-roading model. I also fully expect to break my leg in my 40s, probably twice, and I expect to spend a year in a wheelchair following a significant car accident at least once in my life.
If today's handicapped would stop asking for me to assist them, and instead start asking me to invest in my own handicapped future, they'd treat me the way I deserve to be treated: as one of them. Right now, they treat me like an outsider; that's their fault; and it's to the detriment of us all.
The problem with the 12:1 or 20:1 ratio is that you take the mail-room guy who is earning minimum wage, and you limit the executives seven levels and thirty floors up. What'll happen is quite simply that this company won't hire any mailroom employees -- instead they'll simply contract it out. Personally, and professionally, I like that. But it won't solve your problem at all.
Not allowing a company to deduct more than 100:1 as an expense makes a lot of sense. It's also quite consistent with your laws in general -- it's not socialism at all. It simply because taxable revenue. It won't stop the executive from making the same amount as now, it'll just give you tax dollars when he does -- something that you desperately need these days.
"it's easy to contemplate these tasks being accomplished . .." without security, without reliability, without stability, without privacy, without confidentiality, without accountability, without redundancy.
If I were to do that, I'd be in breach of at least half of my NDAs, and a few of my SLAs.
The solution isn't to ban a perfectly reasonable way to create a usable tool. The solution is to require the plastic-pellet company to use an additive that x-ray machines can detect.
My ceramic kitchen knives, which need zero metal, have a slight amount of metal purely so that they do get detected by metal detectors -- touted as a future-proof feature for any eventual law.
So, I'm cruising along the highway at normal/safe/legal highway speeds. There's an on-ramp just ahead, with a car about to merge onto the high-speed roadway.
The merging driver should be going the full speed of the roadway. But he isn't. Because he's not actually a good driver. Instead, he's still travelling at on-ramp speed -- 20% below the highway limit, not at merging speed.
The safest thing for me to do is to accellerate much faster to get past the merge area before he gets to it. I have the room in-front of me, not behind me. The surface is safe, the visibility is safe, my car is safe and capable, and I'm very alert. So I accellerate to 30% over the limit for the 4 seconds it'll take.
You show me the insurance company that notices my excessive speeding as the safe driver and the slower merging car as the unsafe driver. I sped, to a speed that on paper is dangerous, illegal, and inappropriate. I just avoided a potential high-speed collision -- likely between the merging car and a third car behind me who couldn't see anything.
Had police unwittingly pulled me over, I'd have appeared before a judge, plead "guilty with a reason", and the judge would have agreed. Meanwhile, my insurance company would have done what, exactly? Would they have even asked me why I was speeding?
So now you're selling your postal service -- one of the most heavily regulated and citizen-protecting services -- to a private corporation. Really glad I don't live there. Let me know how it all turns out.
It's a military fighter jet. It's built to attack and defend with bullets and missles and bombs and explosions and death. It has chaff and radar and ground support and air support and parachutes and exploding canopies and emergency beam-out.
And the most common element, indeed pretty well the only element at that altitude -- birds -- can take it out likety-split.
So what you're saying is interesting.
If a military super-power were to take 100 fighter jets at a cost of a trillion dollars, and move to attack a village in the middle of brazil, the entire village would be protected by their homing-pingeon aviary. Release the doves.
Nice. Excellent planning. Let me know when you've invented a stealth bomber that doesn't work in the rain, a fighter jet that can't fly across the international date-line without being towed back by a boat, or a space shuttle that can't be in orbit across new year's eve.
Dude, my neighbour's home office is 20m from my home office. If lightning strikes the 5m between our two houses, believe me when I tell you we won't care about the backup hard drives.
There's a lot of talk about wifi. That's just dumb. It's your neighbour. Run one nice ethernet cable. Put it into a proper conduit. Bury it in a small trench 18" deep. We're talking about 50' of ethernet cable.
As for your neighbour's house burning down, it's crazy unlikely for two houses to burn at the same time. Assuming you have a fire department, they focus on keeping the fire from spreading. It's often way too late for them to save the first house, but very easy for them to save the second. When was the last time you saw two houses burn together, in any reasonably-sized city?
So yeah, full-speed ethernet, to a NAS -- neighbour accessible storage. Or hell, it can just be an external hard drive sitting in a window, and you can run eSATA or USB in your conduit.
If you live in a neighbourhood like mine, you could probably run it across the entire street of backyards, across twenty neighbours -- we built the fences together -- and solve the problem twenty times in a row.
You know, I've been developing internet applications for over two decades now. I've got a successful business, and the last thing that I'd ever recommend to my commercial clients is an open source philosophy. It simply won't work for them, since they tend to have zero in-house technical expertise. That's a longer off-topic discussion.
But...
In this case, I simply don't see why your government was ever trying to build a web-site at all. You're talking here about national health-care -- by definition a socialist endeavour, and a good one at that, especially in theory.
Your government should have (and still should, by the way) simply hire a proper application designer to put together a well-thought-out plan for the site. Spec'd and documented to an initial-draft stage, with some decent mockups.
It should then have been (be) handed over to the nation of open source developers to take it from there. That's my definition of "by the people". A year later, and zero additional dollars spent, a few thousand open source programmers could have, once and for all, proven that the concept works or doesn't work -- both the web site and the open source philosophy.
You'd think that given the extreme costs, and the extreme debt, that perhaps your government would have allowed its own citizens to make it happen all by themselves.
Allowing the people to govern themselves makes a lot of sense when you're talking about healthcare -- a system that the people actually want, and you're asking them to pay for it through taxes anyway.
You could have had it all. You still can. $1 billion dollars of sunken costs later.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I've paid a lot for this name, and continue to do so. So if that's sarcasm, the joke's on you. It actually is my official and registered alias. You might try it some time -- proves that you actually care about what you say, standing behind your own words and whatnot.
What you're missing is that in the IT industry, specific models of hardware and specific versions of software isn't specific at all. So that's actually a very wide swath. Models have sub-models and configurations and versions, software versions have subversions and minor versions and releases and bulids too. But that's not what I mean.
The techniques by which a given professional uses those tools, how they put things together, their general attitudes towards the big-5 orientations, that's where your flexibility is.
The reasons that job requirements list the components, and not the techniques, are:
a. techniques are very difficult to read, write, understand, and accurately describe. Doing so would be incredibly confusing and never quite right.
b. most components simply aren't compatible with most other components. So much so that any professional with enough experience to have an opinion also winds up having a preferences. He simple doesn't want to fight with other components.
c. within any specific component, there exists a sub-world of amazing things that particular component can do that nothing else can. If you find the right expert, specializing only in that component, there are some wow things.
So then you should start fixing that problem. Your problem isn't with censorship. Your problem is with the ability for laws to spread unimpeded. That's the problem on which you ought to be focusing your efforts.
Fix the system, then you won't need to fight it.
Well, until then, I consider it rude to talk to a stranger without introducing yourself. So I'm done talking with you.
They actually aren't "removing" anything. They simply aren't allowing others to sell access to it. They aren't taking down the web-site, and they aren't even taking down the web-site's hosting. They are simply not permitting the telecom company to re-broadcast it for money.
That means you can start your own telecom ISP, make it your business policy to not censor, make that the promise to every paying customer -- make it evident and obvious that's exactly what you're selling and how you differentiate your business -- and the government actually won't be able to stop you, nor will they want to do so.
The fact that you won't create such a service, and neither will the existing telecom companies, is a different issue.
So if that's your argument, you might want to open with it.
You might want to not censor your name here.
You can't usually leave most buildings that you've entered -- because you've usually entered them for a reason that has no reasonable alternative. Think about renewing a licence, grocery shopping, the bakery, movie theatre, home improvement store. For most people, the alternative is another home improvement store of the same brand twenty minutes away.
Let's use the movie theatre as a great example. Actually, it might be the perfect example. A movie poster for next year's movie is, let's say, your idea of vulgar. You're at the movie theatre to see the latest disney movie (these days that covers both star wars and toy story, so you can pick). Whether or not you've brought your 8-year old nephew is up to you. It's a 5 minute walk from your home.
But you see the poster, you'd be forced to stare at it while standing in line for tickets and for entry into the cinema, you don't like it, so you leave. You walk back home. You get into the car, and you drive fifteen minutes to the next theatre. It's the same brand, and they have the same poster and same layout. So you get back into the car, and you drive another thirty minutes two towns over where the theatre company is different.
But they show the same movies, and therefore they have both the movie you want to see, and the poster that you don't.
So your only remaining option is to not go to any movie theatre until next year's movie poster is taken down -- which will be next year.
It's all private property. It's all recreational. And there's no getting away from it.
Now no one's saying that you find the colour green offensive. But there's something that could be in a movie poster that would ruin your night. It might be something very gory from a horror movie. It might be a perfectly fine scene from an R rated horror movie when you're trying to see a PG rated disney movie.
Ultimately, government censorship is supposed to be like movie ratings. This doesn't contain that. You won't accidentally see that when you're looking at this.
Web-sites have links. Web-sites have frames. Web-sites have ads, pictures, and public comments. Obviously there's going to need to be some limits some where.
You shouldn't like it. But you should desire it. And you should definitely expect it.
The Internet began as a freedom of speech thing the same way me standing in a park did. But that was in the '80s. Now, the Internet acts as a full publication and broadcast system, like me putting up a six-storey banner on the side of a skyscraper.
There have always been laws governing what you can say in a public arena.
Today, it's the norm for 3-year olds to use online systems, as well as educational institutions, and a whole host of real-world legitimate and vital purposes. It's no longer an optional activity at all in most circles.
So the question to ask yourself: is there anything that you wouldn't accept painted onto the side of a downtown building? You can always walk a different way to work and not see it. I'll bet there's something that you would call inappropriate as a public display. It may be something as simple as your grandparents kissing.
Whatever it is, that's what we've come to. And it's no surprise. For all the reasons that broadcasts have ever been appropriately restricted, so should the internet be.
Now, you can certainly complain with the way that it's done. You can be upset at the sheer number of false positives. You can be correct in saying that it may actually be impossible or unfeasible to enforce. But then that becomes the debate, not the need for the restriction in the first place.
I promise you that right now, today, there aren't too many business owners. Stop scaling everything to infinity. We're not at any risk of every 50+ running a business tomorrow.
Oh, and many 50+ retire, semi-retire, run businesses without many employees, some have no problem finding work, they "hire" each other, and six 50+ can get together to run a company -- doofus.
And yes, it's got everything to do with your age and experience, but not the way that you think. I expect younger people to be inexperienced, and need supervision. I expect a young contractor to require management, and being told what to do. I also expect someone with your age and experience not to be a drain on society. I expect you to be running your own business, hiring your own young employees, and creating jobs.
If you've spent four decades working in the industry, and you haven't gotten to the point where you can start creating jobs, instead of just consuming them, then I don't value your experience anymore. It's that simple. It's your responsibility to start putting your money where your mouth is and to start taking your own employment risks. No one's ever refused to hire a company because the owner is 50+.
So that's my advice to you. Start creating jobs, stop consuming them.
Yeah, I didn't maintain the logical direction, but I think my point was clear: each involves a forced behaviour.
Of course we can. Especially with the new definitions of "drunk".
Damn. Wish I could mod you up. Agreed.
Oh look, a hugely significant percentage of humans in a given environment want to do something. It comes with an added danger. Let's prohibit them from doing it! Because that works. It's always worked in the past, with everything from alcohol to abstinance.
Or, we can do what actually works. We can train people to do it well enough to lower that risk of danger.
Make it a part of the drivers' test. Make it just another mark on the drivers' licence -- same as glasses, motorcycles, and transport trucks. I learned to drive in a blizzard in the dark, and just did it again tonight for over an hour. I can learn to text while driving on a clear day. Teach me. I'll learn.
very simply: 99% of classroom education isn't actually visual, tactile, nor aural. Math is numbers, graphs are relationships, algebra is logic, english is literary, poetry is aural, and plays are visual but how many poetry readings and plays are in classrooms these days?
The museum is 90% visual and 80% tactile (even when you aren't permitted to touch it, you can still see the texture and infer the tactile). Welcome the part of the brain that's bored in the classroom.
More parts of the brain being engaged, more to knowledge to associate with other knowledge, less being bored and blinder-focussed, better learning.
More recently, I've thought that the lack of interest in handicap solutions by non-handicapped people is actually the fault of the handicapped.
Follow me, patiently please.
Major intersections around here have bleeps and bloops to indicate "safe" passage for blind pedestrians. Do I know what they mean? No I don't. Do I pay for them? Yes I do. I'm forced to pay for them, yet no one has taught me how to use them. Why do I not care about them? Because I ignore them as an unknown background element.
Similarly, we have braille on our bank notes. I'm very proud that we have braille on our bank notes. Most of us don't even notice. The side-walk ramps are another excellent example. There are countless.
The reason I blame the handicapped is simply this: they say that I don't need the assistance.
In truth, I don't need the assistance. . .NOW.
I plan to live to 95 years of age, at least. I plan to lose much of my eyesight, and a fair bit of my hearing. I plan to walk very slowly, and to stop taking 15 flights of stairs for fun. I also plan to get some form of motorized side-walk vehicle, by the time I'm 70. I don't plan to get the off-roading model. I also fully expect to break my leg in my 40s, probably twice, and I expect to spend a year in a wheelchair following a significant car accident at least once in my life.
If today's handicapped would stop asking for me to assist them, and instead start asking me to invest in my own handicapped future, they'd treat me the way I deserve to be treated: as one of them. Right now, they treat me like an outsider; that's their fault; and it's to the detriment of us all.
The problem with the 12:1 or 20:1 ratio is that you take the mail-room guy who is earning minimum wage, and you limit the executives seven levels and thirty floors up. What'll happen is quite simply that this company won't hire any mailroom employees -- instead they'll simply contract it out. Personally, and professionally, I like that. But it won't solve your problem at all.
Not allowing a company to deduct more than 100:1 as an expense makes a lot of sense. It's also quite consistent with your laws in general -- it's not socialism at all. It simply because taxable revenue. It won't stop the executive from making the same amount as now, it'll just give you tax dollars when he does -- something that you desperately need these days.
"it's easy to contemplate these tasks being accomplished . . ." without security, without reliability, without stability, without privacy, without confidentiality, without accountability, without redundancy.
If I were to do that, I'd be in breach of at least half of my NDAs, and a few of my SLAs.
The solution isn't to ban a perfectly reasonable way to create a usable tool. The solution is to require the plastic-pellet company to use an additive that x-ray machines can detect.
My ceramic kitchen knives, which need zero metal, have a slight amount of metal purely so that they do get detected by metal detectors -- touted as a future-proof feature for any eventual law.
So, I'm cruising along the highway at normal/safe/legal highway speeds. There's an on-ramp just ahead, with a car about to merge onto the high-speed roadway.
The merging driver should be going the full speed of the roadway. But he isn't. Because he's not actually a good driver. Instead, he's still travelling at on-ramp speed -- 20% below the highway limit, not at merging speed.
The safest thing for me to do is to accellerate much faster to get past the merge area before he gets to it. I have the room in-front of me, not behind me. The surface is safe, the visibility is safe, my car is safe and capable, and I'm very alert. So I accellerate to 30% over the limit for the 4 seconds it'll take.
You show me the insurance company that notices my excessive speeding as the safe driver and the slower merging car as the unsafe driver. I sped, to a speed that on paper is dangerous, illegal, and inappropriate. I just avoided a potential high-speed collision -- likely between the merging car and a third car behind me who couldn't see anything.
Had police unwittingly pulled me over, I'd have appeared before a judge, plead "guilty with a reason", and the judge would have agreed. Meanwhile, my insurance company would have done what, exactly? Would they have even asked me why I was speeding?
So now you're selling your postal service -- one of the most heavily regulated and citizen-protecting services -- to a private corporation. Really glad I don't live there. Let me know how it all turns out.
It's a military fighter jet. It's built to attack and defend with bullets and missles and bombs and explosions and death. It has chaff and radar and ground support and air support and parachutes and exploding canopies and emergency beam-out.
And the most common element, indeed pretty well the only element at that altitude -- birds -- can take it out likety-split.
So what you're saying is interesting.
If a military super-power were to take 100 fighter jets at a cost of a trillion dollars, and move to attack a village in the middle of brazil, the entire village would be protected by their homing-pingeon aviary. Release the doves.
Nice. Excellent planning. Let me know when you've invented a stealth bomber that doesn't work in the rain, a fighter jet that can't fly across the international date-line without being towed back by a boat, or a space shuttle that can't be in orbit across new year's eve.
Dude, my neighbour's home office is 20m from my home office. If lightning strikes the 5m between our two houses, believe me when I tell you we won't care about the backup hard drives.
There's a lot of talk about wifi. That's just dumb. It's your neighbour. Run one nice ethernet cable. Put it into a proper conduit. Bury it in a small trench 18" deep. We're talking about 50' of ethernet cable.
As for your neighbour's house burning down, it's crazy unlikely for two houses to burn at the same time. Assuming you have a fire department, they focus on keeping the fire from spreading. It's often way too late for them to save the first house, but very easy for them to save the second. When was the last time you saw two houses burn together, in any reasonably-sized city?
So yeah, full-speed ethernet, to a NAS -- neighbour accessible storage. Or hell, it can just be an external hard drive sitting in a window, and you can run eSATA or USB in your conduit.
If you live in a neighbourhood like mine, you could probably run it across the entire street of backyards, across twenty neighbours -- we built the fences together -- and solve the problem twenty times in a row.
You know, I've been developing internet applications for over two decades now. I've got a successful business, and the last thing that I'd ever recommend to my commercial clients is an open source philosophy. It simply won't work for them, since they tend to have zero in-house technical expertise. That's a longer off-topic discussion.
But...
In this case, I simply don't see why your government was ever trying to build a web-site at all. You're talking here about national health-care -- by definition a socialist endeavour, and a good one at that, especially in theory.
Your government should have (and still should, by the way) simply hire a proper application designer to put together a well-thought-out plan for the site. Spec'd and documented to an initial-draft stage, with some decent mockups.
It should then have been (be) handed over to the nation of open source developers to take it from there. That's my definition of "by the people". A year later, and zero additional dollars spent, a few thousand open source programmers could have, once and for all, proven that the concept works or doesn't work -- both the web site and the open source philosophy.
You'd think that given the extreme costs, and the extreme debt, that perhaps your government would have allowed its own citizens to make it happen all by themselves.
Allowing the people to govern themselves makes a lot of sense when you're talking about healthcare -- a system that the people actually want, and you're asking them to pay for it through taxes anyway.
You could have had it all. You still can. $1 billion dollars of sunken costs later.