Is it 'management dickery' to have a dashboard camera to record police officers on traffic stops? Or to put a black box recorder in a commercial airliner? How about background checks for elementary school teachers? Surveillance cameras on bank tellers, or casino dealers? I'm all in favor of privacy rights for the general public, but there are certain professions that by their very nature require a higher level of scrutiny, especially on the job.

This has been a problem for decades, and less intrusive methods have not seemed to solve the problem. Yes, this comes down to a "this is why we can't have nice things" argument. But of all the things that health care professionals do that requires hard work, sacrifice, a high level of skill, or dedication to helping people, this seems like such a small additional step with a tremendous possible bang for the buck. (And please don't turn this into a slippery slope argument. You should look at the costs and benefits of any proposed intrusion on privacy on its own merits)

According to this, "it has been estimated that hospitalacquired infections are responsible for 80,000 deaths in the United States and 5,000 deaths in the United Kingdom." "Compliance rates were ... lower among physicians (32%)." So only 32% of doctors are washing their hands, killing 80,000 people per year. I will let the reader decide whether they want to compare this to the deaths caused by automobiles (32,367) or handguns (31,672), but apparently keeping hands clean in hospitals is a serious public health problem, and one that, of all people, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses should all be doing everything they can to fix it.

The good news is that micromanagement works: "The majority of the time, the situations that were associated with a higher compliance rate were those having to do with dirty tasks, the introduction of alcoholbased hand rub or gel, performance feedback, and accessibility of materials."

This isn't about monitoring bathroom breaks, it is about monitoring basic competence to do your job. A patient is supposed to end a hospital visit healthier than they started, and if health care professionals are doing things that make that goal more difficult then they are failing at their job. It's not the same as, say, monitoring the number of lines of code that a developer writes (where there is, at best, a tenuous relationship between the measured value and the quality of software - and probably none at all), it is a well-documented and serious problem that kills people. It's more like measuring whether a developer leaves his workstation turned off all day. Washing hands regularly is a necessary though not sufficient condition to make people healthy in a hospital, and if constant monitoring is required to get more than 1/3 of doctors to do it, then so be it.

I grew up with "programming" on the C64 too, and it is funny that it did not seem to help very much when learning to code for real. However, my undergraduate degree is in pure math (not statistics or discrete/applied math) and it's funny that the kinds of things that I learned on that C64 helped me tremendously in mathematics.

There is a unique blend of creativity and rigor that is very similar when you write a program or write a proof, that you need when you look at the blinking cursor at the top of a blank screen, or a sheet of paper that begins with "Thm:" and ends with a lonely "Prf:". You need to be able to connect what you know, and the tools that are available to you, and have some inkling as to how they might reach the goal at the end. Sometimes it is as simple as unpacking some definitions, or just plumbing together some libraries, but the tough/fun part is when you need to figure out some non-obvious trick that will get you to the other side. And once you have that insight, you are not done; both require a great deal of rigor, such as covering all possible conditions of a conditional branching structure, or making sure that counters and loops start at 0 and go to n (or is that 1 and n+1? :) ).

Now I work with statistics, and although the work deals with many more numbers, and most people would say that it really is "math," it really doesn't feel the same as the math I did at school except when I have to create some interesting data structure or use some optimization trick to get everything to fit into memory. And those neat coding exercises are more like "math" to me than a bunch of numbers coming out of some numerical method.

It probably takes ten pages of legalese to say "you will tell us every detail that you know about the bug that you found. Also, if you spend your money doing something dangerous and/or stupid, you agree not to sue us." And like you point out, there is the usual NDA and publicity stuff too.

As for child stars, IANAL, but I believe that there is a way to get judicial pre-approval (e.g., here). I'm guessing that in this case they have neither the expertise nor inclination to go through a judicial proceeding for a relatively small amount of money. But that still doesn't explain why they don't just have the parents submit the bug and sign the contract.

Though I detect a subtle distinction between GP and your post, you are both describing cash hoarding. But where I really differ with you is here:

I worry a lot about the Fed. Just because rates are low doesn't mean that monetary policy is loose enough. Let's check inflation:

"Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 1.1 percent before seasonal adjustment."

1.1% inflation does not sound like the result of loose monetary policy. But macroeconomic data has all sorts of issues with it, so for some theory, let's go to the greatest monetary economist ever, Milton Freidman:

Low interest rates are generally a sign that money has been tight, as in Japan; high interest rates, that money has been easy. source

So the rock bottom interest rates that you refer to are indicative that money has been tight, when it should have been loose. Therefore I hold the Fed responsible and Apple (mostly) blameless.

2 points: first, companies, just like individuals, may justifiably want to hold cash in order to deal with unexpected contingencies. In tough times, they want to hold more cash, and make less investments, despite the fact that it makes everybody worse off. That's Keynes 101. Now, Apple is probably taking it to an extreme, but given the rocky road they have gone through over their lifespan, maybe it is understandable that they want to have lots and lots of cash. Like how my grandmother who grew up during the Great Depression keeps a ball of aluminum foil so she can reuse the stuff - you know, just in case.

Second, when there is cash hoarding going on, it is the responsibility of the central bank (in the US, the Federal Reserve) to ensure that there is sufficient cash being spent. There are different schools of thought here regarding the power or impotence of the central bank when rates are already near zero, but to assign moral responsibility to a company that is doing what it thinks it needs to do for the long-term benefit of its employees and customers during the slowest post-war recovery seems misguided. Better to assign blame to the few members of the Fed who have the power to loosen the money supply but refuse to do more, or blame the hard money crowd on the right that see hyperinflation right around the corner and create an atmosphere where the Fed has to walk carefully, or blame the president for not putting loose money advocates on the FRB earlier than he did.

If you accept the Church-Turing Thesis is true, then Groklaw has the best explanation why anything run through a Turing Machine is just math, and therefore not patentable.

And the irony is that if done right, this is a product that could benefit from the cloud/Saas/whatever model. Imagine if instead of 20 Gb storage, they actually performed most of the rendering in a highly optimized compute cloud. Then you are no longer talking about comparing the price of the purchase of software versus the cost to rent it, then you would be comparing the cost to rent the software versus the cost of the software plus the the cost to build your own latest high spec image/video editing workstation. The economies of scale and reduced downtime would enable adobe to offer rendering performance at least an order of magnitude better than the typical graphics workstation setup at a lower cost per month over the useable lifetime of the hardware.

I agree, charging her as an adult is completely off the wall. This is exactly the kind of thing that the juvenile justice system is built for - a kid is accused of breaking a law (perhaps one that, as gp mentions, we are hyper-sensitive to after the Boston marathon, but a law nevertheless). The government has an interest in enforcing that law and, if the person is found guilty, punishing that individual.

But we, as a society, accept that kids can't always recognize the consequences of their actions and have developed a separate system of justice that, when they make the kind of mistakes that kids are wont to make (such as mixing chemicals inappropriately), we are able to show mercy in our choice of punishment, and then seal the records to make sure that one childhood mistake doesn't follow her for the rest of her life.

First, it is great that someone actually looked up the specific language. But after reading it, I am less worried than I was by just reading the summary. I partially agree with your analysis on the first paragraph. But it is not merely babble. If you read it from the point of view of a limited-government conservative, who believes in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, it is very important to tie the work of the NSF (or any part of government) back to justice, domestic tranquility, common defence, or general welfare. Therefore it is not merely vacuous - it is an important argument against the ~50% people who vote Republican and by pure chance will win ever other election (or so). In a democracy, it is best to convince your opponents rather than rely on out-voting them every single time, even if that means that you only get half a loaf.

Fortunately, you are right that it is broad enough to drive a truck through. But that is no mere accident; basic research, even from a Republican perspective, is often an OK government expenditure if it is argued carefully and respectfully, and the spending is carefully tailored so as not to be wasteful. And that is the real point of this - not to deny funding to science, but rather to prove conservative bona fides and push conservative priorities in science. Will that mean fewer grants to climate science? Probably. But maybe more funding to DARPA battery research. In two or four years, the hands controlling the purse-strings will probably change, and priorities of the NSF will change as well, so it's tough to get too worked up about it. I would be more worried if the Republicans just said that they are cutting off funding to the NSF rather than saying, as they are, we are going to defund X and fund more Y.

And honestly, if you were to ask me personally whether we need YACCS (Yet Another Climate Change Study) or a new DARPA challenge, I would rather have cool new robots!

a.k.a "Too good to check"

There are two differences between the US and Europe with regards to suitability for a common currency: 1) fiscal policy cross-subsidizations, and 2) labor mobility

1) Automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance provide short term assistance to areas that have localized recessions, with money from areas that have localized booms. The US has many of these fiscal transfers, both automatic and ad hoc, while Europe has almost none.

2) Over the long run, if you have labor mobility, places that are depressed for a long period of time (e.g., rust belt) become depopulated as people seek better opportunities elsewhere (e.g. sun belt). When Silicon Valley took off, people from around the country relocated to share in the boom. As much as Americans joke about the different cultures within the US, it is much easier for someone from Chicago to relocate to Los Angeles than someone from Athens to permanently reside in Frankfurt.

This is the kind of thing that touchscreens should be perfect for. It's basically just context-switching UI, such that when the program knows that you want to write a formula, it should switch from a virtual querty keyboard to a more appropriate input device. Maybe a virtual, periodic table keyboard, with two or three rows of numeric input corresponding to normal, superscript, and subscript. Or whatever. The point is that a customizable input device (like a touchscreen) is only better than a non-customizable one if it in fact, gets customized.

among other problems

When one of the CFL's broke in my kids room, I followed the EPA rules to clean it up. What a pain.

So I bought a bunch of no-name LED bulbs on Amazon and although the lighting is a little harsh (as many others have noted), it's a good light to read by (1000+ luments/75 W equivalent) and a lampshade helps (a lot).

Now I am just waiting for someone to sell a reasonably powerful G16.5 base led (like 300+ lumens/25-40 W equivalent) so that I can replace the remaining incandescents left in the house (except for the oven light!).