Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my annual MBA-sponsored lobotomy.

Not just a lobotomy, but an annual re-lobotomy just to make sure! Brilliant!

While true, that statement isn't particularly useful since it's also true of pretty much every government program everywhere.

As more and more people become familiar with it, people would realize how easy it is to code.

But it's not easy, at least for many people. There are some people who naturally find programming easy, some people who will never be able to code no matter how hard they try to learn, and not a whole lot of middle ground in between. Membership of these groups does not strongly correlate with age, sex, race, education level, or previous occupation; it just seems like programmers' brains are simply wired differently.

I never made it as far as 7 of 9 but the very idea of a cute friendly and cuddly borg makes as little sense in that setting

Well, that's for sure! If you had, you wouldn't be describing 7 of 9 as "cute, friendly and cuddly."

Voyager was so bad that it put me off the rest of Deep Space Nine

FYI, DS9 was actually good, especially in the later seasons.

Because that's what you end up doing in high-school computer classes after you've finished your work, and high-school computer classes are so easy that anyone with enough talent to be a decent programmer finishes the work really quickly.

My friends and I, along with a bunch of non-geeks who just wanted an easy A, took a CCNA class in high school. We spent literally 90+% of our time in that class playing Counterstrike or Starcraft. (The non-geeks were less adept; they spent 50-80% of their time playing browser-based games or chatting with each other.)

It's also what the CS majors do in college.

To be fair(ish), the problem is more with my brokerage accounts and student loans, not so much with my employers or banks.

I have an HSA and a HDHP, and it is vastly more cost effective (for me) than the plans available on the ACA website.

Goddamnit do any of you people read what I wrote? THE PLANS ON THE ACA WEBSITE ARE NOT COMPARABLE TO HSA PLANS.

Of course they cost more than your HSA-eligible plan; they have more coverage and lower deductibles!

Back before the ACA, when I was shopping for health insurance on sites like ehealthinsurance.com, there were in fact plans that had the same coverage and the same deductible as an HSA plan offered by the same company. In fact, the plans were exactly the same except that one version was HSA-eligible, and the other was not. The only difference was the fact that the HSA-eligible version of the otherwise exact same, completely comparable plan had much higher premiums than the non-HSA-eligible version.

The ACA has only made things related to HSA-eligible plans worse because a) they're a lot less common now in general (for example, my employer no longer offers one, but apparently used to), and b) you can't buy one from the federal exchange / ACA website.

FYI, I would love to have an HSA-eligible plan since my wife and I are both under 30 years old and healthy, yet just the employee-paid half of my wife's coverage costs something like $400/month. But I can't have an HSA-eligible plan, because neither my employer nor the ACA website offer one, and I'm not about to buy an individual plan outside the ACA website because that fails to qualify for the subsidy and would therefore be even more exorbitantly expensive. (It also doesn't help that by the time the people running the ACA website got their shit together the open enrollment period at my job had already ended and now I'm locked in for the year...)

You must have missed the part where I said "same terms otherwise." Sure, an HSA-eligible with a $10K deductible is obviously going to be cheaper than some "cadillac" plan with a $500 deductible, but it's not going to be cheaper than a non-HSA-eligible $10K deductible plan. Quite the opposite -- it will in fact be more expensive despite having the same coverage and the same deductible, and by a large margin, too.

I don't understand how people manage to file in January or February... most financial institutions can't seem to be bothered to send me the necessary forms (e.g. W-2, 1098, 1099, etc.) until March!

then you must also sign up for an HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan)

If you can still find such a thing (especially for a price that isn't 2x as much as a non-HSA-eligible plan with the same terms otherwise)...

Is it sad that I know it well enough to reference it on Slashdot, but was not yet born the last time you thought about it? Maybe I need to acquire a more modern taste in music...

Are you sure you haven't got that backwards? 50/50 parity is certainly possible (for example, if you threw out all the excess male programmers, made additional females do programming at gunpoint, or some combination of the two), but achieving 50/50 parity using either of those means would not be desirable.

I think this Ted fellow linked from the summary makes a good case against it being "reasonable" at the end of his second post:

This bug would have been utterly trivial to detect when introduced had the OpenSSL developers bothered testing with a normal malloc (not even a security focused malloc, just one that frees memory every now and again). Instead, it lay dormant for years until I went looking for a way to disable their Heartbleed accelerating custom allocator.

Building exploit mitigations isn't easy. It's difficult because the attackers are relentlessly clever. And it's aggravating because there's so much shitty software that doesn't run properly even when it's not under attack, meaning that many mitigations cannot be fully enabled. But it's absolutely infuriating when developers of security sensitive software are actively thwarting those efforts by using the world's most exploitable allocation policy and then not even testing that one can disable it.

Should they have done? And how should they have known? Genuine question, and finger pointing would be inappropriate right now: how do we make sure that certain security strategies and issues are as well known as, say, stack pointer issues are today.

Hell yes they should have known, because the people responsible for one of the most important security applications in the entire world damn well ought to be experts!

"In the year 2525..."