I know everyone wants an electronic everything, but it sounds like in your situation paper records may actually be optimal. If you have to have a paper system in place anyway, why do the added expense of going digital as well? Sometimes, what is really needed is to optimize the paper system, rather than replace it with an electronic one.

iCloud is a useless service. It intended to compete with DropBox, I think, and failed miserably. I think iOS developers should all individually opt to develop for DropBox rather than iCloud.

AWS has actually been pretty good if you actually do a proper deployment. I can only think of one time when they had multiple availability zones down at the same time. If you don't deploy across multiple availability zones, then it is just like any other hosted service. I often use it that way, too, it just isn't the magic fix-it-all system if you don't use it like it is intended.

It will be interesting to see how effective this is. DNA is not the sole source of information for an organism's morphology. Nuclear transfer has shown some traits which are not dependent on DNA. It will be very interesting to compare the morphology of the final organism to the original, extinct species.

By "creating a LotR visualization tool", does that mean they have cloned Peter Jackson?

The ability to sense when my children are misbehaving? That would be more helpful than infrared, I think.

But the seeds naturally produce other seeds. That is what seeds do. Did the farmer sign an agreement stating that they would not re-gather the seeds? If not, I don't see how Monsanto has a case. They sell seeds. The natural result of a seed is to produce more seeds. That would be like selling someone a printer and then coming back and claiming copyright on everything it prints.

If, however, the farmer signed an agreement, then I think the stupid person is just the farmer, and Monsanto is just taking advantage of fools.

This is a cool piece of history, though I wonder how much real functionality was in the original 1.0 version. Were they doing CMYK back then? Anyway, I want to check it out, but I don't anticipate seeing many technical marvels.

The real problem with COBOL is that, as Larry Wall has pointed out, you can't write poetry with it. There just isn't any good poetry that starts out with IDENTIFICATION SECTION.

The one thing I do miss about COBOL is easy access to fixed-point numeric processing. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is still missing from nearly every language.

We moved from subversion to git and I would not look back. I liked subversion, but there is nothing in subversion that I can't also do in git, plus I can do a lot more in git. Branches and branch merging is much cleaner in git than subversion. In addition, the fact that everyone has a copy of the repository means that (a) all operations can be done offline (yay!), and (b) you have automatic backup copies of everything. I can look through all commits (using gitk) straight off of my machine whether I'm connected or disconnected. It's wonderful.

"Yes, those documents have been securely destroyed". It's good to know that it isn't just IT that does security theater.

The real way to compute cybercrime numbers:

1) number of copies of Norton sold * price
2) number of copies of McAfee sold * price
3) number of copies of Windows sold * price
4) number of copies of MS Office sold * price

Adding up 1-4 will give a good estimate of cybercrime. We should probably add in an additional $10 million to also cover phishing scams.

Objective-C has 90% of the power of Ruby, with 90% of the static-compile-time checking of C++. I actually started an objective-c implementation of Rails (called Newm), but haven't had time to do a lot of work on it. Ruby developers waste half their lives writing tests for things a compiler could catch automatically. About 80% of Rails application bugs could be caught just by having decent compile-time type checking, which Objective-C provides.

The real question is why is pseudo-reporting taking over for real reporting. The report by Nature is misleading at best. There has been *no* removal of evolution, just a removal of outdated evolutionary ideas. Many of the textbooks are simply replacing outdated evolutionary examples with more modern ones. What should be news is that it took a group of creationists to convince the education establishment to modernize their textbooks. Don't take the Nature report at face value - if you prod further, you'll find that *what* they are being asked to do is not problematic, they are just mad because creationists are the ones asking them to do it. I put more detail here.

The bigger problem is the large barrier to entry for new treatments, and the crazy legal system we're in. If the barrier to entry were smaller, then it would be worthwhile to someone to make cures, even non-drug cures. But if it takes $40 million to do it, what individual doctor can do that? Therefore, only the large corporations who only know the dollar sign can get in. And, with the legal system, doctors are pretty much confined to industry BS in their treatments. We have to prepare for the ability for doctors to make educated guesses *and* be wrong. This means two things - (1) patients should be more involved, and (2) doctors should be less liable.

If we put those two things in place, we could get more cures and less "treatment"s.