How about instead of cost shifting and purchase pooling we actually work on what medical care costs in the first place? In the US you can got to Cook County or the US Federal court in the Eastern District of Texas and drive up a drug company's everyday costs by suing them in a class action for side effects they already disclosed before you bought their drug. There should be some sort of grand jury or board of people with a clue who decide the merit of these things before millions are spent on lawyers.

The for-profit speculative commission-only trial lawyers are a big part of service and product costs for drug companies, hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses, and even medical assistants and medical techs. If you want to make healthcare more affordable through insurance cost changes, change the cost of malpractice insurance so that only people who actually screw up need to pay exorbitant premiums. When I lived in Illinois it was really difficult to get a doctor's appointment within six months without crossing state lines because the malpractice rates caused several of the doctors in the area to retire early or move to more sensible states.

Also, why do we have federal and state funds going into basic research at universities that gets patented and sold to corporations to turn into products? If research comes from a largely government-funded school then the NIH or someone should be licensed to then sublicense any of those patents to all comers for a reasonable fee.

Also, why do the drug companies pay the FDA to fast-track drugs? The PDUFA means that in order to get faster drug trials, the deeper pockets get faster times to market. If we're spending billions of dollars to improve healthcare, why don't we fund the FDA sufficiently to get the best drugs approved fastest rather than the most heavily promoted ones? Why don't we partner with other developed countries to do joint trials that meet the standards of the FDA and its counterparts in, say, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and Brazil with all the agencies reviewing all the data and making decisions for their own constituencies rather than repeating the trials over and over?

Houston has a lower cost of living than Austin. Houston's a much larger city, too. They are close enough that employers match offers. Heck, employers in Dallas and Houston match one another, too. I'm not sure, then, how Austin works out as a better deal financially than Houston.

From the summary alone it's clear Facebook isn't "blocking" anything. They are asking people to remember to follow the law while on their property. They want to be sure that what takes place on their site is encouraged by them to be within the law. This makes Facebook potentially less culpable if someone violates the law in a post, as they've made it clear they want the laws followed.

I am not a lawyer. Ask a lawyer if you want legal advice.

I think technologists are often less likely to think about the more abstract arts, which is a shame. Having a poet in residence at a place like Caltech, while apparently at times challenging for the poet, I think is a wonderful idea.

Also, "Urinetown: The Musical" is a comedic Malthusian commentary on mismanaging resources, leading to a dystopian future.

Don't feel bad about not knowing the poem. The poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" I originally found from music. There's a group, or was anyway, named "Machines of Loving Grace". I found that through a classic bad computer movie (by which I mean a pretty good movie with bad representations of computers) -- they have a song on the "Hackers" soundtrack. I liked the soundtrack a lot, and was familiar with most of the other acts on it. I liked their song "Richest Junkie Still Alive" so much I researched the group, and was intrigued with the name which lead me to Brautigan.

It's a poem rather than a short story or essay. It's by Richard Brautigan who was the poet in residence at Caltech. It was first published in a volume of the same name, not all of which may be suitable for your audience.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (poem)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (collection)

Indeed. Also in some states (for example Illinois) your vacation/PTO is part of your earned income by law. Withholding that pay when you leave may be as illegal as withholding wages.

Using an IDE doesn't hurt you as a programmer. Relying upon one when coming up to speed with a new language may not hurt you either. Continually relying upon one surely hurts. Using one as a productivity enhancement while being able to program without it should be the goal.

I don't know for sure if there are any individual addresses they both serve, but there are certainly some areas where they are side by side. Some cities and towns they both list as service areas. Beaumont, Texas is one. Dallas is another. In Missouri they both list Kansas City, Lee's Summit, and Independence.

Near me, Time Warner operates in Spring Branch in Texas. Spring Branch is a district of Houston. Houston is served by Comcast, but I'm not sure about that part of Houston. Some of the other nearby cities and towns are a checkerboard of their service areas. There are also places you can get AT&T "U-Verse" or can't neighborhood by neighborhood. Which providers offer service in an area is a popular question when looking at a home here. This deal would eliminate an option even if only upon moving to a different part of the same metro area.

He's talking about a building contractor. The key word here is "contractor". Are you a contractor delivering bug-free code on contract? Are you an employee being paid to provide the output of your paid labor to an employer?

Don't get suckered into being treated like a contractor for pay and benefits but required to follow the rules of an employee. In fact that's illegal for your employer to try in some places.

The problem here is not the phones. Are they really playing the scantily clad rape victim game with phones?

The problem is that the People's Republic of California has already written the laws which encourage this. The law-abiding citizens have no way to protect themselves against the armed thugs who unsurprisingly don't care about laws about force and weapons.

Now they are trying to make rape less likely by ordering the wearing of chastity belts. Next will it be burkas? Nobody can have a hot new phone because it makes them a target? If there's still a land of the free, some Californians may want to move there.

What will be the focus in augmenting the police officer in this way? Facial recognition, license plate recognition, voice recognition, and easier maintenance of dossiers on private citizens come to mind. Feeding camera video of fleeing suspects, floor plans of houses and apartment buildings, and outstanding warrant information directly to officers already lawfully interacting with people does too. This has great promise but comes with a great threat of misuse.

Don't forget to renew that failed contract. If you don't have a contract or warranty active they'll charge you for things as simple as firmware downloads for the hardware they couldn't get delivered and configured on time.

There's more than one definition of "dull". Perhaps he doesn't mean "dull" as in "dullard" or a stupid person. Perhaps he means "dull" as in unexciting and uninteresting. Being boring and poorly social is true of some programmers, but it's true of some people in lots of useful professions.

There's an old saying about knowing what's more expensive in the long run. It's "penny wise, pound foolish". Paying this patent troll to go away this time is cheaper than a lawsuit. How much cheaper is the lawsuit, though, than setting a precedent of being pushed around by patent trolls and paying them off?

Perl 6 makes progress. It's slow, but it's fairly steady. There has never been a one-year gap in packages, let alone ten years. One of the compilers, Rakudo, is nearly feature complete and then just needs to be optimized. It has monthly releases.