Not to mention that bacteria have been known to transfer genes between bacterium near them. (Bacteria: The original file sharers!) Say one of these gets out and encounters a similar bacteria without the "confinement genes". Could it laterally transfer genes that would help it survive without the "lab required environment"?

I'm not saying we should never experiment on anything (we should) or that building in safeties like this isn't a good idea (it is), but we should never let our guard down and say "We've thought of everything! This has fully secured us against any possible problem!"

Next up: Car Ringtones.

I'm going to set mine to sound like the TARDIS.

This isn't a safety issue at all. A comparison would be: People are used to TVs being large CRT tube devices so we're taking our flat panel display and adding a huge back to it so people will think there's more "TV power" in the giant box.

This is all about the auto manufacturers thinking people won't like quiet cars and so intentionally making cars make more noise to trick people into thinking "noisy car" = "powerful car".

At this point, Blackberry is an actor who was told his character has to die, but who is overacting and prolonging his death scene to get more spotlight on him in the vain hope that the director will declare "Why that guy's got serious acting talent! I've changed my mind! His character lives!" Meanwhile, the director is groaning and wondering where those stage hands with the oversized hook are.

You aren't guaranteed an app ecosystem just because you release a product running RANDOM_OS. If I were to release a line of laptop computers that didn't run Windows or Linux, but ran some in-house developed, incompatible-with-everything-else operating system, I can't demand that Adobe release a version of Photoshop and Microsoft release a version of Office for my platform. I shouldn't run to every software vendor (open source or closed source) and order them to compile and support a version of their products for my OS just because it exists.

If my custom OS gained enough of a following, then I might be able to cut deals to have more applications developed for it. Yes, this means it is an uphill battle to introduce a new operating system. Even if my custom OS were superior in every way to all other OS's out there, it would have a rough road to travel. It could easily fall victim to the chicken-egg problem of developers not wanting to support an OS with few users and users not wanting to switch to an OS with few applications. That's just the way the market works, though. You can't demand support for every custom and hardly used OS out there. Software developers don't have the resources to do this and demanding they do it makes no sense.

And not just mobile platforms but desktop OSs and browsers also. I demand that Netflix be able to stream videos to my Lynx browser running in DOS!

Not to mention:

D. When it comes time for someone else to work with the custom written code, they will have to learn how the custom written framework operates instead of being able to say "Oh, that's jQuery/BootStrap/Angular/etc."

If you're the only one who is ever going to work on a site, feel free to spend time reinventing the wheel. But if anyone else is going to be looking at the site, it makes it a whole lot easier if they don't need to piece through your "homegrown jQuery" to find where the bug is or how to add additional features.

I run a few WordPress sites and log all bad login attempts. Around 98% of the login attempts use "admin" as the username. The remaining 2% are mostly split up between "administrator" and the name of the site (if your site is example.com, they try "example"). There are others, but these are the vast majority of attempts. If you change your administrator account so that it isn't one of these three, you'll get reasonably protected against brute force login attempts. (Go ahead and try to brute force my "admin" account passeword. Will never happen because it's not named "admin.") Add in some brute force protection plugins (5 login attempts and you're banned for a day) and you'll be pretty well protected against brute force attacks.

This isn't to say that you'd be 100% protected. One should always treat one's website as if there's a huge security hole that hasn't been patched up. You should still back up regularly and actively install updates. Still, it's amazing how the simple act of changing the "admin" account's username can improve your site security.

It depends. If the harasser is a star football player and the harasee is just some nerd then the harasee is told to either keep quiet or - in some cases - forced to apologize to the harasser for "making up stories." Best case scenario in too many places: The harasser apologizes in front of the teacher/administrator and the harasee looks like the uncooperative one because he/she realizes it's just a hollow apology and the harassment will follow worse than before once the teacher/administrator leaves.

Many schools try to ignore any bullying problem because ignoring it means they can claim there isn't one and that's easier than actually fixing the problem. We pulled our son from one school when we were told he couldn't possibly have been bullied after he was attacked & went to the nurse with bruises. The principal first claimed nobody saw the incident, then said someone saw my son start it (by putting his hands up to protect his face when a kid got in his personal space), and then claimed my son "is not the kind of kid to be bullied."

and how exactly do you expect a school to enforce a facebook ban for 1 year???

They'll have the parents cooperate to enforce the ba.... HA-HA-HA-HA....

Sorry, I thought I could keep a straight face saying that.

(This coming from a parent who has no qualms about taking away his kids' electronic devices if they get out of line. When they get old enough to partake in social media - my oldest is close - they will have "social media bans" when appropriate. Sadly, there are too many parents who think "electronic device" = "babysitter.")

For a long time there was a separation of "what happens in school is the school's business and what happens outside of school isn't." Nowadays, it seems like schools think anything that happens in the child's life - inside or outside of school - is their business. If a kid posts something ugly on Facebook while at home one night, schools feel they need to address it. I'd be fine with "addressing it" by having an assembly or some class time to discuss how to act in a proper manner online or how cyber-bullying isn't victimless. (Just because you see a screen name and not a person doesn't mean that what you type doesn't hurt them.) However, actual punishment should be up to the parents or (where appropriate) law enforcement, not schools.

I agree. The pathetic thing is that they keep trying to frame these requests as "we really want to do our job well but can't because of X." All I hear is "Doing our job with X in place is too haaard!" in the same whiny voice a kid might use if asked to take out the garbage instead of playing video games. These attempts aren't "we can't do our job" requests, but attempts to change the system - which was put in place to prevent abuses - because they're just too lazy to work within the system the way they've done for a long time.

When are we going to get some lawmakers who actually understand the fucking technology?

They understand the technology well enough. It's the Constitution they're having problems understanding.

They understand the Constitution well enough. They just don't care about it all that much. After all TERRORISTS and PROTECT THE CHILDREN (and the power grabs that these words enable them to achieve) are much more important to them than a 200+ year old piece of paper.

They would care because they don't want the FBI hacking into their employee's computers while connected to the company servers via VPN. This "caring" might be due to caring about their employees (rare but it does exist in corporations), caring about their own computer security (much more likely), or worry over a FBI VPN hack uncovering corporate wrong doing (definitely possible). Companies that rely on VPN will use their lobbying might to fight this and there are some big companies that rely on VPN. I don't see this as gaining traction.

Then again, if the government screams "TERRORISM" or "PROTECT THE CHILDREN" loud and often enough, they've proven they can get almost anything passed. It's time someone changed the country's root passwords!

Android compatibility can be a double-edged sword. Without it, they might not have the apps to attract users and without the users, they won't attract the developers to make apps. They fall into the chicken-egg problem that Blackberry has found itself in. Even if the underlying OS is vastly superior, customers won't flock to it without the apps.

On the other hand, if all Android apps work on Tizen, then customers might ask why they should buy a Tizen device instead of a "real Android" device.

Switching off of Android to their own OS is a very risky venture. They might supplant Android, but more likely it will blow up in their face and other Android manufacturers will gain ground/pass them by.