In a story that seems to pull together some of the more insane stereotypes about Manhattan parents and their attitudes towards pre-schoolers, Manhattan Mom Nicole Impresscia has apparently sued the York Avenue Preschool, claiming her "very smart" 4-year-old was not properly prepared for the private schools of New York, and this could harm her chances of getting into an Ivy League college down the road. Her lawyer, Mathew Paulose, appears to have an interesting definition of "theft":

"This is about a theft where a business advertises as one thing and is actually another... They're nabbing $19,000 and making a run for it."

Of course, that's not even close to what's happening, and it's hardly "theft." Perhaps there's an argument that the school overstated its claims, but that's not "theft." Even looking deeper into the complaint, Impresscia's big concern seems to be that the 4-year-olds had to spend time with 2-year-olds, and had to spend time learning about shapes and colors. Apparently, her daughter is all over that. I'm struggling to see how that hurts a child's educational ability, but what do I know? I guess I didn't attend the right pre-school (and my Ivy League degrees must be mistakes).

There have been plenty of stories concerning judges warning jurors not to research any additional items about a case online, but JJ points us to what is apparently a first (at least in California). A judge has ordered the jury to sign a document that they will not use the internet to research the case, and they can face perjury charges if they're caught doing so. Apparently, the reasoning is that most jurors tend to ignore the spoken warning. My guess is that many will ignore the signed promise as well -- in fact, as some behavioral research has shown, just telling them not to do it, may make them even more likely to do so. At some point, the courts are going to have to realize that you simply can't prevent people from looking up more info, and will have to come up with ways to adapt.

It seemed like a pretty straightforward campaign promise by President Obama: all non-critical bills that were passed by Congress would be placed on the White House website for five days for people to review before the President would sign or veto. It was a mostly symbolic gesture, since, once passed, there's not much that would likely happen to change the bill, but it could allow some to make the case, one way or another, for how President Obama should respond to the legislation. We were disappointed when, at the first opportunity, Obama totally ignored this promise and signed a bill just a day after Congress passed it.

Since then? It hasn't gotten any better. The NY Times is reporting that Obama has ignored this rather simple promise on nearly every bill put before him. That's not the "transparency" we were told to expect. Even worse, the White House has now "changed the terms" of the promise (which sure sounds like "breaking the promise"), saying they'll put draft bills on the website earlier and start the "five day" clock ticking then -- even though legislation may change before Congress votes on it.

And then... there's the bizarre claim that the White House couldn't fulfill the promise due to "unexpected technical hurdles." Really? Putting up the details of a law? And waiting five days? What kind of technical hurdles are we talking about. I recognize that there are campaign promises that get broken, but there are usually at least decent reasons why. In this case, it seems to be because no one in the administration actually cares. And that's disappointing.

AT&T caught a lot of flak at the beginning of April, when it updated the terms of service for its mobile data network, banning all sorts of activities on it. AT&T later said the changes had been made in "error" and removed the new language, though it later reinserted language banning "redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers" -- a ban apparently aimed directly at the forthcoming SlingPlayer application for the iPhone, which lets users watch TV from their Slingbox at home on their mobile device. The app has now been released, but it only works over WiFi, not the 3G mobile connection, because AT&T says, in a nutshell, that its mobile network doesn't have enough capacity to support streaming-video services if they take off. So all those cool data applications Apple and AT&T tout for the iPhone or other smartphones sold by the operator? Just remember they exist only at the behest of the carrier; if they threaten to expose its network's shortcomings, they'll get blocked.