This is an excellent point. 3D printing is a potentially transformative technology that is very much in its infancy. How many things are there that are made out of a single material, or even a small number of materials suitable for 3D printing?

Can you print chips? Capacitors? Can you make a metal latch on a plastic body? Right now I think the answer to all those things is no. 3D printing is great for modelmakers, and some specialty niches, but it is a very long way from replacing any significant manufacturing. And even when it evolves to that point I would be surprised if a capable printer would be something that it would be worthwhile to buy for your home.

I really don't think it is that simple.

Admittedly the government can't control the money supply of bitcoins; it is not even clear that that is a good thing. The argument against the gold standard is that it takes monetary policy off the table. But aside from not permitting unlimited issue of bitcoins, what else would be different?

Suppose my employer paid me in bitcoins, and I was able to conduct all of my transactions in bitcoins. OK, my company contracts with ADP to do their payroll, who in turn do direct deposit to my bank. The bank holds my store of bitcoins. When my credit card statement comes, I tell the bank to transfer n.m bitcoins to the credit card company.

The point is, without a significant reworking of the entire financial industry, it doesn't matter what currency is used. ADP still knows how much I get paid (and have you noticed how ADP is cited as a source for unemployement data now, because they process so much of the payroll in the USA?). My bank knows which transactions have been made on my account, and report to the financial regulators in the same way. The credit card company knows what I am buying, just like they already do.

The only way that I see bitcoin making a difference is if the entire things is completely decentralized, taking banks, payroll companies and credit cards out of the picture. And you know what? I think of myself as a privacy geek, and all of that is too much hassle for me. What is going to be the motivation for the average person to completely dismember the financial services industry?

I find it hard to believe that anybody is the least surprised by this. Look around your organization. Surely there is some guy down the hall who has taken it upon himself to keep track of something that is not required but that makes his job easier or piques his interest. After awhile people start to realize that he has a list of which customer has been sent which update, something which for some reason is not tracked in the CRM, but is sometimes very useful to have. He faithfully maintains the list for several years, until he moves to a different job. Turns out his successor does not find the information as useful, so stops collecting it. 2 years later it is hopelessly out of date and it gets deleted.

There were *millions* of people involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That kind of semi-official record keeping had to have happened thousands of times. Suppose I work for a battalion of engineers doing electrical grid repairs. The CO has to make a report to Brigade every month on various metrics. Some staffer compiles the info every month for a Powerpoint. After the tour ends and the CO is no longer reporting to Brigade every month, why would I continue to maintain the data? Who is going to come asking for it? So I delete it. Now repeat that for thousands of records.

-citation needed-
I have never yet seen any evidence that MS had more than trivial calls to undocumented APIs. Given the siloed nature of the company that is nominally being addressed by this reorganization, you would expect that the Windows group wouldn't cooperate with the Office group, and would not do anything to make life more difficult for ISVs, who after all are what drive much of the adoption of Windows.

Not at all. Otherwise no professional sports team would be coached by former minor league players. Management is a distinct skill from any of the technologies used by an organization. That is not to say that someone who has no background in IT is going to be a successful IT manager, but as you go up the ladder the need to be conversant with technologies currently in use becomes less and less important. If that were not true, the implication would be that the CEO would be required to be competent to perform literally any job in the company, since all functions report to the CEO.

One of the hard parts about management is dealing with limited information and knowing how to assess the information you are given. You don't have the time to be an expert, you don't have time to understand the details, so you concentrate on putting together a staff that you do trust.

That seems completely backwards - you are pushing all of the routine care onto the insurer, and have no coverage at all for the catastrophic events. I would much rather have a typical HDHP - pays basically nothing until $X out of pocket, with that cost blunted by an HSA, and then it pays for everything.

In my experience it is more that the soul sucking nature of Notes administers a thousand tiny disappointments every day, but it still gets the job done. And if the company is using Notes for applications beyond email/calendar, the implementation costs of a migration can run into the millions of dollars, even leaving out the software costs.

I had the same reaction, right down to the Lake Wobegon reference. Perhaps they are differentiating between software offered for sale versus tools internal to a business? To some extent that would also explain the difference in quality - cost to fix is much higher if you have shipped thousands of copies, versus telling the one consumer of a report in finance to ignore the one number that is wrong.

Would you prefer that the bank went insolvent and people lost everything? Like it or not, when you deposit money in a bank you become a creditor of the bank, and when something goes bankrupt creditors lose money.

Bank insurance exists to increase confidence of the bank's creditors. Instead of a mad rush to be first in line and get your money out at the first sign of trouble, thereby precipitating a bank collapse, it says that you have no risk up to a certain limit. That makes a bank run much less likely in the first case.

If it is a publicly traded company, you can see the salary of the CEO and other highly compensated individual in the annual reports.

Salary of Congressmen is public knowledge (though not necessarily their outside income).

Chairman of the FED is a quasi public position, and I bet the salary is publicly disclosed.

Scientologists and lobbyists I can't help you with.

In my mind, the big failure was that we didn't replace the dollar with coins, we added new dollar coins and kept the dollar bill in circulation. Inertia was enough to doom the changeover.

The benefits of the change mostly accrue to the government - coins last an order of magnitude longer, but aren't that much more expensive to produce. From the consumer perspective it is not obvious that one is preferable to the other, so why bother to switch?

Don't forget that over the last 40 years your taste buds have been - we'll say changing, because that sounds better than deteriorating - so even identical foods today probably don't taste like they did 40 years ago.

Aging sucks, and your taste buds are not exempt.

I am in complete agreement that there are many bad patents out there. But at the same time, many novel and non-obvious patents become completely obvious once you see them. If you see the solution and immediately know how to recreate it yourself, that does not says that the initial implementation of it was obvious.

Until source control systems work on semantics and not textual diffs, it is not as simple as that. If I get your code, reformat it to my style, change 2 lines and check it back in, I have completely polluted it as far as a diff goes.

If you want to have a rule that says all code gets run through a formatter prior to check-in, that would work, but it would mean that everyone would spend lots of time converting to and from the approved check in style.

Disclosure: I used to work for a company owned by Pearson.

$120 for a test is very much the reality of clinical testing. The research, norming and validation of the test are not cheap, and while I don't know anything about this particular test, instruments like this are normally developed and refined over multiple years of research. You are talking about lots of administrations in clinical settings, and follow ups to determine the eventual outcome of the patient. And research papers in peer reviewed journals to convince people in the industry that you have statistically valid results.

And any clinical test has a small market, since the number of people that can use it is relatively small. And usually getting paid by health insurance to boot.