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Productivity. Every employer loves it, and every employee is fascinated by it, especially if it comes in cute colors, a retina screen, and weighs under a pound... at least until such time as "productivity" results in the loss of the employee's job, which in turn makes the employer love it even more as it results in even higher profits, even if it means one more pink slip and a 91 million people outside the labor force. With a labor force already in turmoil as millions drop out every year never to be heard from again, made obscolete by the...

IT services major Infosys is expected to cough up nearly $35 million (Rs 215 crore) in penalties — said to be the biggest fine of its kind in American history — to settle visa fraud allegations with the US justice department. The settlement, reached with the East Texas Attorney's office, is to be announced on Wednesday, though the market has long had an inkling of the deal from Infosys' regulatory filing. Infosys acknowledged receiving a federal grand jury subpoena seeking records related to its sponsorships for B-1 business visas and its use of them, according to an October 11 filing,...

Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) blamed the private contractors retained by HHS to build and administer healthcare.gov for the website’s extensive glitches Tuesday on MSNBC. Waxman said Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was not aware of all of the “technicalities” pertaining to the Obamacare website and thus should not be held responsible for its failure. “She’s done a terrific job,” Waxman said, “I have a great deal of confidence in her.” The private sector, according to Waxman, failed to live up to their contractual obligations “even with all of the money they got.” The California congressman suggested...

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government... CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was "significantly over budget" and that it had been plagued by delays. The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI's gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. ... The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts...

Company to pursue action against HHS for using copyrighted web script. Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing...

CGI Federal is the Canadian IT contractor responsible for creating most of the ObamaCare website. Tuesday, after describing the site as a "complete train wreck," the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the company -- its origins, track record, and how it landed the ObamaCare contract. It is all worth a read, but one staffer told the Post that the working environment at CGI is so awful today that "People are getting sick, fainting in conference calls." The healthcare.gov debacle has taken its toll on the working environment at CGI Federal's 10-story complex in Fairfax, Va., according to a...

With all eyes on how many people have actually signed up for ObamaCare, it will be interesting to see how honest the media will be concerning this matter if the numbers are disappointing. For example, it was reported by Cedar Rapids, Iowa's ABC affiliate KCRG Wednesday that only five Iowans have actually been successful.

Not a single resident of President Barack Obama's home state of Hawaii has signed up for Obamacare, reports CBS's D.C. affiliate. Hawaii officials say Obamacare's nationwide website failures have prevented the state's citizens from accessing even basic premium and healthcare plan information. Coral Andrews, executive director of the state's Obamacare "Health Connector" exchange, said she does not know when Hawaii will be able to relaunch its busted Obamacare exchange.

Some state governments are willing to hire offshore IT service providers to work on healthcare IT projects under controversial contracts that don't bar use of temporary foreign labor, or workers on H-1B visas. Two multimillion-dollar government healthcare IT projects, one in Illinois and the other in the District of Columbia, illustrate what's going on. In Illinois, Cognizant was awarded a $74.1 million contract in June to upgrade the state's Medicaid systems to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. In January, the District of Columbia awarded Infosys a $49.5 million contract to develop a...

The Obamacare Sode said to be utter trash by several IT guys CLICK LINK AT OWN RISK! https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js

The new health-care exchanges created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, have been in the news lately. And not in a good way. The system has been overwhelmed with traffic and plagued by bugs. Who built the system? And why are they having so many problems? Read on to find out. What do the Obamacare exchange websites do? The exchanges are online marketplace where millions of Americans who don't receive health insurance from their employers will be able to purchase coverage. The system is designed to work like any other e-commerce site. Users can...

t’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress. The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose....

Yesterday, Jan Crawford told CBS This Morning that the launch of the ObamaCare exchanges have been “nothing short of disastrous,” but it’s worth noting a day later. Why? Despite the efforts to take down and revamp the Healthcare.gov website, nothing has changed — not the performance, not the promises, and not the administration’s refusal to release any of the stats on enrollees on Day 10 House Republicans reminded IRS ObamaCare chief Sarah Ingram Hall during a hearing later yesterday on ObamaCare implementation that they wanted a delay all along, while Hall insisted that everything was hunky-dory on her end: House...

Problems plaguing online enrollment in ObamaCare are not just due to high traffic, but are being compounded by structural problems at healthcare.gov, the federal government portal where people can shop for medical insurance. The Obama administration is now scrambling to fix technical troubles that contributed to a bruising debut last week for the new insurance marketplaces. “I think there’s growing consensus that it’s not just volume,” said Caroline Pearson, a vice president at the consulting firm Avalere Health who focuses on the healthcare law. Healthcare.gov — the main portal for consumers in 36 states to compare their coverage options —...

Just for fun, I tried to create an Obamacare account at Healthcare.gov this morning. At 6:48 AM CDT, I had no trouble getting in. Things were going swimmingly . . . until it came time to choose security questions and provide answers. As you'll see from the screengrab, I was informed that my account could not be created because "two or more answers to the security questions cannot be the same. You must provide distinct answers to the chosen security questions." President Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, or anybody else out there, please tell me, which of the following words are the...

The government's new health insurance marketplaces are drawing lots of rotten tomatoes in early reviews, but people are at least checking them out. Seven percent of Americans report that somebody in their household has tried to sign up for insurance through the health care exchanges, according to an AP-GfK poll. While that's a small percentage, it could represent more than 20 million people. Three-fourths of those who tried to sign up reported problems, though, and that's reflected in the underwhelming reviews. Overall, just 7 percent of Americans say the rollout of the health exchanges has gone well. Far more deem...

BANGALORE: As legal help becomes exorbitantly expensive in the United States, an increasing number of middle-class Americans are reaching out over the internet to lawyers in India for advice and assistance. A growing community of Indian lawyers is finding a business opportunity in helping Americans prepare legal documents. Compared with the $150-300 ( 9,150-18,450) per hour that US lawyers typically charge, enterprising Indian counterparts with online shops are offering their services for as little as $7-20 ( 400-1,200) an hour. "This is proving to be lucrative as requests from US clients are increasing," says advocate Mitul Desai who runs a...

We once sang about hoping to die before we got old, but quite a few of my fellow baby boomers have begun to sound like a cross between 1960s sitcom crank Granny Clampett and the 1980s SNL Church Lady when it comes to our kids' generation. I've heard some in my age group lament that the millennials refuse to grow up. I've eavesdropped few remarks like, "Back when I was my son's age, I had a decent job and a mortgage. But you can't get a mortgage on a barista's salary. Come to think of it, back when I was...

An American executive said he has been held hostage for four days at his medical supply plant in Beijing by scores of workers demanding severance packages like those given to 30 co-workers in a phased-out department. Chip Starnes, 42, a co-owner of Coral Springs, Florida-based Specialty Medical Supplies, said local officials had visited the 10-year-old plant on the capital's outskirts and coerced him into signing agreements Saturday to meet the workers' demands even though he sought to make clear that the remaining 100 workers weren't being laid off.