I don't think Apple or Google making phone encryption suck so criminals can find and abuse the law enforcement backdoor would improve public safety.

Any of the hundreds of articles about how Apple Pay works. Here's one that explains that the device gives the credit card terminal a 16-digit randomized token and a unique one-time-use CCV. Payment processors use the pair to identify the credit account to bill.

In short, your actual credit card numbers never leave your device. Google for "apple pay token" if you'd like to dive into further detail.

"Also, how is wholesale genetic engineering for positive traits like this really different from eugenics? I don't get it."

It's not, really. And I'm not so sure eugenics is as bad an idea as some people think it is. The main difference is that now we are almost at the point where we have hard data that directly points to what genetic trait changes result in desirable and undesirable outcomes. Old-school eugenics was just about putting someone's subjective thoughts on what would be the ideal offspring into practice. It's a little different when you have data as opposed to someone's opinion. That's IMO why eugenics got such a bad name -- people were just saying that poor people, or people who looked a certain way, wouldn't make ideal breeding partners. They weren't looking at the actual genome and seeing what characteristics a potential offspring would have. The problem is that any scientific modification of the population is against most religious peoples' beliefs no matter how much benefit it could have.

The thing about J2EE was to illustrate that Java is everywhere. Most of those J2EE systems have a Java applet-based front end provided by the same consulting company that wrote the back end. Hence, million-dollar change orders to get it to support something other than JRE 1.6.51 running on IE 6 (as an example.)

The reality of the Java situation is that it's not just consumers hosing their machine by visiting a website hosting an exploit. There are tons and tons of crappy internal Java applications running in businesses everywhere. A lot of them are poorly documented, or the developer isn't there anymore, or the consulting company who wrote it wants a million bucks every time you want a change. Like it or not, Java is the language of large business...I'm sure we're going to be talking about J2EE in 40 years the same way we talk about COBOL. Most of the "mainframe modernization projects" large businesses go through consist of hiring the lowest-bidder consulting body shop to rewrite all the business logic in J2EE running on WebSphere or WebLogic. The consulting shop chooses Java because they can get a bunch of fresh CS grads who have exposure to the language, and it's reasonably portable.

I deal with this all the time. Java introduced the "expiration date" in version 1.7, and it took them months to add in a very poorly documented way to disable the dire warnings that our users get when running internal code. Microsoft made it worse by expiring the Java ActiveX controls that weren't on the absolute latest versions as of August. At least they provided a policy to shut it off right from the start.

Stuff like this is a pretty stark reminder that we're just a bag of chemicals, even though we've evolved the capability to do things like...post on Slashdot.

This kind of thing is done in a somewhat limited fashion with high-risk pregnancies/IVF to select for embryos that don't have Down syndrome or other profound mental handicaps. And if an ultrasound indicates something wrong further along, amniocentesis is performed. Those tests are easier because it's the absence or malformation of a chromosome, and they're less controversial because the difference between a kid with 10 fewer IQ points in the normal range and a Down syndrome or Fragile X kid is huge. Someone who is otherwise normal might not be as smart, but someone with a mental handicap is never going to have a full life and be a hardship on their family.

Given what we know about genetics now, I actually don't think selecting out traits that are clearly undesirable is a bad thing as long as there's some randomization and some things left to chance. 100 years ago, we only understood that "something" was responsible for traits, not that a particular sequence of nucleotides in your DNA causes the cells they create to behave differently. The problem is that there are still lots of religious people who reject all of this and blame diseases and defects on God's will. Not that Gattaca's a good example, but the main character's defects were a direct result of his parents rejecting genetic engineering and having kids the "old fashioned way," similar to religious people having a huge family, getting a couple of kids with issues, and just shrugging it off as unavoidable because, well, you know, God.

The registry has always been multi-tenant, even on a standard box with one user it's 5-6 files depending on OS version, and on a terminal server there can be hundreds of registry files open at the same time, plus registry redirection and virtualization is already part of App-V.

Where were they found? Next to the plants set up by Western companies that filled them in Iraq, of course. Who has control of those plants now? Why, ISIS of course. Don't worry, though, the people who thought it was better we didn't know about these things are assuring us that all those weapons were hurriedly destroyed.

You bring up a good point, one that causes a lot of friction between the generations. Since Millennials are delaying or skipping the whole parenthood thing, there is often a comparison in workplaces between the 20something who just got done pulling 2 all nighters to get the (whatever) working vs. the 30 or 40something who had to take another sick day because they had to take care of their sick kid. In bad workplaces it amounts to a subtle form of age discrimination. In more enlightened workplaces (like mine, thank God...) there's a better balance where everyone pitches in where they can.

Choosing to be a parent really does mean giving up a lot of freedom. I could make 2 or 3 times my salary if I were willing to travel around the country/world 300 days out of the year and parachute into and out of various consulting gigs. And not that I would want to, but I could work for a crazy SV startup and play the stock option lottery. The problem is that parents who have jobs like this don't keep their families for very long unless their spouses are really understanding or perfectly happy to just keep spending the money you make and say nothing. But, once you do have a kid or two, your priorities shift. I actually want to be home at a reasonable hour and have a stable enough job to make sure we can pay for things and keep the lights on. A 20something "rockstar" IT consultant doesn't have any worries beyond rent and buying grown up toys. (My grown up toy budget is almost zero now, but the other toy budget is quite a bit more!)

This is a pretty good example of a policy that, even if it's well-intentioned, kind of sends up a red flag about the company. This would tell me that employees who do not give over their souls to the company and complain about 90-hour death march weeks on projects will be replaced by the 100 other women lining up for their jobs.

The other thing all these hard-working 20something women need to look into is the actual amount of effort required to turn those frozen eggs back into kids. My wife went through 2 successful and a few unsuccessful rounds of IVF in our mid to late 30s simply because we didn't think we would have problems having kids after our lives stabilized a little. It is *not* a straightforward process. Fertility treatment, even if partially covered by insurance is insanely expensive. It's also invasive, painful and not guaranteed to work. Fertility clinics make huge coin on 40something executives who all of a sudden decide they want kids. Because of this, doctors charge rates on a similar scale to plastic surgery -- huge inelastic demand, high cost, and a self-selecting affluent clientele.

The fact that Facebook and Apple will pay for services like this isn't the problem -- the problem is the message it sends. I do agree, especially after being a dad of 2 kids, that people need to wait until their lives stabilize to some degree. People we know who had their kids earlier are perpetually in debt and miserable. (We're perpetually not in debt, but still dealing with huge fixed expenses, so I think we're at least a little better off. Plus, when you come home and both of them run up to you and yell "Daddy!!!!" you kind of forget that you don't have a ton of money saved outside of retirement.) But the corollary of this is that parents who wait until they're 40-plus will probably miss out on a lot of the "being a parent" experiences just because they're too old or still being workaholics.

That work-life balance that everyone seems so quick to want to get rid of needs to come swinging back towards the middle a little bit, in my opinion. I am not opposed to working hard, even for someone else. I regularly put in more than the required effort at my job, and have been rewarded for it by my employer. I am opposed to companies expecting (and getting) 80+ hour work weeks rather than staffing projects properly. Having those same companies tell their female employees to put off that messy child rearing thing until they have extracted their best work sets a very bad precedent.

I find that cloud backups are an excellent complement to local backups. I have a 6TB Synology unit at home that stores all our family photos, Time Machine backups, scans of all our important docs, etc. I love and trust that little server. I also have it configured to ship nightly backups to Amazon Glacier so that if my house burns down and takes the Synology with it, I can restore it all and have my digital life back.

I guess I could buy a second unit and keep it at work, but that's a lot more effort than setting up a scheduled job to sync everything up to a remote server without my manual intervention.

The last time I did it was this morning when my kid's school emailed a permission slip that I needed to sign and return. I like not having to go find my laptop, locate the same email, and print from there when the thing I want printed is already being displayed on the phone screen that I'm staring at.

Yes, they should be experts in gear they may not themselves be using. They should also not complain to the government office responsible for receiving complaints about such things, because ISPs always do such things as honest mistakes and not as predatory rent seekers.

We need the equivalent of HSTS but for SMTP. Maybe it replies with a "250-ALWAYSTLS" to EHLO, and clients and other servers cache the fact that "server foo.example.com always wants TLS". Then those clients can warn users when their messages can't be delivered according to the recipient server's TLS policy.

This would be so easy if we had DNSSEC or an alternative equivalent, so that you could publish something like an MX record but with added content like "always use an encrypted connection" (perhaps replacing MX records with SRV, maybe?). They'd have to be signed, though, or you could count on ISPs to forge false records.