not that i am that religious, but in the bible there is the story of the king with a dream about a composite statue; gold head, clay feet. aren’t you afraid that you are looking at the clay feet right now? no trolling intended, but the US don’t look very healthy to me.

PS: yes, in Holland we also screw up government IT, but not this way. it’s just incompetence mixed with decadence over here.

Compared to…. ??????

You should really watch this.

Applying for Health Insurance: Then and Now
John Green attempts to apply for new health insurance coverage using the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges and then through a private insurer that existed before the ACA (aka Obamacare) went into effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9RVy6FWkg

So yeah the contractors are shitty relative to….
But the process is far better relative to….

Your omission of the relativity to the “old” way of getting insurance “seems” to lack overall perspective. It still wouldn’t mean that the contractors don’t suck… as you clearly pointed out, they do suck.

One of Healthcare.gov’s minor shortcomings is that, at last notice, it is JavaScript-dependent. To quote from the website:

“The page could not be loaded. The Healthcare.gov website currently does not fully support browsers with ‘JavaScript’ disabled. Please note that if you choose to continue without enabling ‘JavaScript’ certain functionality on this website may not be available.”

They are saying, in effect, that they will not sell you insurance you are legally required to buy unless you let them run JavaScript programs on your computer. Granted, this is probably a case of Incompetence rather than Malice, but it still needs to be firmly stamped out.

Insistence on JavaScript, Flash, etc. for websites which perform essential government functions may not technically be a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, but only technically. It is certainly a violation of the spirit. With a standard interface- such as “clean” HTML, assistive technologies can hook up to known connection points. JavaScript breaks these known connection points. Certainly, I don’t think a sensible bureaucrat would want to go to court over the matter, when he could just as well fix the website.

It is sometimes claimed that websites need JavaScript for input validation. However, input validation in client-side scripts (Java/JavaScript/Flash/etc.) is a dumb idea. A “bot” can easily intercept such scripts, and impersonate them. Input validation should always be done on the server side. Client-side validation validates nothing.

Likewise, it is unnecessary to use scripts for basic site navigation, for getting from the main page to various subsidiary pages. This also relates to the Americans With Disabilities Act. Subsidiary pages should be described in words, encoded as letters, and more specifically, as ASCII codes, and the standard link tag allows one to associate a string of text with a URL. An assistive device can easily identify a link, and skip from link to link.

Beyond that, use of JavaScript is stupid. JavaScript is well known as the primary facilitator of computer viruses, botnets, etc., and trying to legally compel people to use it comes very close to intentional sabotage. I habitually boycott commercial businesses which attempt to insist on JavaScript.Client-side scripting is a form of “unsafe sex,” dangerous to both parties. It facilitates attacks in which the bugs of client and server are cascaded off against each other; the creation of self-propagating bot-nets which flow back and forth between servers and clients.

Certain video-oriented applications use client-side scripting as a matter of necessity or expediency, to expand video or game-state data from its compactest form into video. However, this kind of thing cannot be considered necessary for selling insurance.

——————————-

Indeed, compulsory Javascript may even be unconstitutional. In an article published twenty years ago Michael Swaine, of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, pointed out that compulsorily installed software, such as JavaScript in this case, is a violation of the Third Amendment, which forbids quartering of soldiers in private houses.

At the time, there was a minor uproar about a legal case known as Engblom vs. Carey. Ms. Engblom was a New York prison guard who lived in a state dormitory on the prison grounds, for which she paid rent, and had a lease, just like a college student. There was a prison guards strike, and she was immediately locked out of her dorm room. The dormitory was subsequently used to house National Guard troops who were being used as strikebreakers. When Ms. Engblom was eventually able to return to her room, she found that her belongings had been looted by the National Guard. Available accounts are not clear, but presumably the Guard made off with television sets, stereos, sporting goods, etc., the kinds of things which could be readily sold at the local pawnbrokers, and the state government probably told them, unofficially, that such items were legitimate plunder. Ms. Engblom eventually sued the state (more specifically, the governor, Hugh Carey), and, in a novel move, her lawyer added a third-amendment claim. This probably reflected the difficulties of pinning down responsibility for the looting. The Federal Court of Appeals decided that Engblom had a legitimate case, but let the state off the hook on a technicality.

Swaine worked up an argument about how this might apply to computers, specifically to compulsory anti-virus software. He pointed out that a “soldier” can be a man, but it can also be a war-robot, or even a computer program, and a “house” can be a computer. One cannot really eliminate the possibility that General Alexander, of the NSA, is trying to get _his_ code into Healthcare.gov. The idea would be to carry out JavaScript-bug-based attacks on every single computer in the country, install massive number of botnets, and spy on everyone’s private papers.

Michael Swaine, “Swaine’s Flames– Dobbs v. United States,” Dr Dobbs’ Journal, December 01, 1993
http://www.drdobbs.com/swaines-flames/184409137

About the same time that Swaine was writing, the lawyer Tom W. Bell did a law review article on the Third Amendment, in response to Engblom vs. Carey. He found that cases of quartering had happened during the Civil War, but that there had been no legal remedy, and hence no case law. Other than that, there were simply no precedents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey

Tom W. Bell, “The Third Amendment: Forgotten but Not Gone,” 2 William & Mary Bill of Rights J. 117 (1993)
http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/3rd.html

Of course, commenting on Bell, one might observe that there is a historical discussion of the Army’s role in settlement, notably Richard C. Wade, _The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities_, 1790-1830 (1959), and Francis Paul Prucha, _Broadaxe and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Development of the Northwest, 1815-1860_ (1953). The gist of these is that the Army was way out in front of settlement during the nineteenth century, building roads, sawmills and other infrastructure, and founding cities, which started as forts. Far from the Army wanting to lodge with the civilians, it was the civilians wanting to lodge with the Army. This was a major reason why the Third Amendment was moot in peacetime. It’s much the same reason that there are almost no early American cases of “enclosure” (ie. Kelo-type takings). The economy was running in precisely the opposite direction.

There were a couple of exceptional cases where the Army bought forts from the fur-trading companies (Ft. Laramie and Ft. Bridger, I believe). These fur-trading forts had been founded by permission of the local Indian tribe, and subject to the axiomatic condition that white farmers were not welcome in the vicinity. I understand that when the Army tried to acquire the first Bent’s Fort, along the Arkansas River in Colorado, the owner, William Bent, burned it down and told them to make their own improvements. He then moved downriver to where his trading partners (**), the Cheyenne Nation were now living, and built a new fort.

(**) And relatives, Bent having married into the tribe.

Something similar was happing in eastern coastal cities. The Coast Artillery was changing from flat-trajectory muzzle-loaders, with an effective range of three miles or less, to breech-loading, high trajectory guns (battleship-type) with a range of ten miles or more. It was abandoning in-bay forts, and moving to forts on the most remote available barrier-islands, where these guns could be used effectively. In San Francisco, the Island of Alcatraz became a prison because it was surplus in its original role, a Coast Artillery fort. One can observe that the significant Coast Artillery forts of the Civil War, places like Ft. Sumter, are, to this day, separated from their cities by belts of water and swamp. They were far enough out that the Confederates had to fight battles to occupy them, rather than merely making uneventful arrests.

I don’t know about some other eastern cities, but at least for Boston, the dominant tendency was to put new real-estate developments on landfills in swamps, simultaneously abating a nuisance of mosquito breeding grounds while creating favorably situated land. A classic example is the Back Bay, the defining example of posh uptown districts. The building developers did not try to redevelop the inner city, a la Baron Haussmann in Paris. Hence there were no Kelo-type cases. That was left to the late twentieth century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eugene_Haussmann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Paris

As for the Third Amendment in the Civil War, one must not view it in isolation, and lose sight of the whole atmosphere of dictatorship which the war brought in. Abraham Lincoln treated the Constitution as more or less completely optional, to be dispensed with when it got in his way. This was perhaps inevitable, given that the Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney, was a secessionist Marylander. Justice John A. Campbell, from Alabama, resigned in 1861, and entered the service of the Confederate government. In 1862-64, the Supreme Court got five new justices. This, of course, amounted to “Court Packing,” of the type which Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened, but did not actually carry out, during the Great Depression. Other incidents included the arrest and deportation of Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Back in 1993, when I was in the History Department at Temple, one of my classmates in Professor Russell Weigley’s American Military History seminar did a paper on soldier voting in the Civil War. One of his findings, as I recall, was that soldiers were brought in to vote in doubtful districts in states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, swamping the local inhabitants. The breaches of the Third Amendment, such as they were, occurred in a context in which the whole political process was being subverted. That is why presidents in difficulties, such as President Nixon in 1973, try to “wrap themselves in Lincoln,” by way of saying that everything is permitted to them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Campbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Vallandigham

In many respects, the most outrageous single action of the Civil War was the execution of Mrs. Surratt, after trial by a military commission. Received historical opinion is that she was hanged as a kind of proxy for her son, who had made good his escape. The normal custom of the time and after was that ladies, however much they might have involved themselves in political conspiracies, were not to be executed. Cases which come to mind are the American Civil War spies Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd; the French Commune leaders Hortense David and Louise Michel; and the Irish Rebel leader Constance Gore-Booth (Countess Markiewicz) in the aftermath of the Irish Easter 1916 Rising. About the only thing which could get a woman of some standing (*) hanged, was killing her husband (petit treason), or just possibly, her husband’s children from a previous marriage. See Ann Jones’s discussion in _Women Who Kill_ (1980), particularly the case of Mary Hartung, a boarding-house-keeper’s wife who gave her husband rat poison because he was a rat. To put it in our terms, you do not _ever_ execute a twelve-year-old girl who has revenged herself on her molester, even if she has reduced him to hamburger with a twelve-gauge shotgun and a couple of boxes of shells. When you cross that line, you are into totalitarianism.

In short, this was the extremely messy context in which the comparatively minor offense of quartering troops took place.

(*) the type who employed servants instead of working as a servant. Before mechanization and modern plumbing, the most basic and profound social distinction was who cleaned up whose filth, eg emptying and scrubbing chamberpots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Surratt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Boyd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_O'Neal_Greenhow