Shaken/Stir isn't going to do anything but force the telemarketers to give more money to the telecoms for valid numbers. The real solution is automated call screening, as for example Google Call Screen. What should be mandated is for telecoms to provide automated call screening as a free feature on every line.

My landline connects to a small box that does automated screening. My phone doesn't ring unless the caller is on my whitelist, or has gone through the screener, which records them identifying themselves. I can choose to answer the call or send it to voicemail. It works.

What you've described aligns well with my experience of the times, and I agree that the dissolution of the family, and particularly its impact on child-rearing and wage levels, has a lot to do with where we've ended up. However in my estimation, the role of mass marketing and the rise of consumerism also played a large role. It seemed that during the 1980's, the status of capitalism was raised to the level of a deity, with a significant number of people actually embracing the premise that "greed is good". Many still do, and not just Boomers.

But I particularly like the question on which you concluded:

I don't think one partner necessarily has to leave the workforce entirely, but we do need to get back to a state where one full-time job or two half-time jobs is enough to support a family (and as you say, without going backward). I don't know how to do that, but as a general heuristic, I'd start by looking for policies and forces that are moving us in the wrong direction, and try to eliminate or reverse them. If this Information Age we're in is all it's supposed to be, there should be some way to get there.

"Full stack" is just another in a long line of terms such as "rockstar", "guru", "code ninja", or "jedi". I'm sure that some people who have used these terms have some more specific meaning in mind, but most of the people who use it just mean "someone who knows what the hell they're doing". And keep in mind that these are mostly people who don't know what they're doing.

When I read a job ad that includes "full stack", I interpret it as people looking for a savior. I ask myself if I think I could save them, and then whether I'd want to. The answer to at least one of those is usually "no".

Savior! I like the sound of that! Let's make that the new hotness in software job ads.

Could ultraviolet lamps slow the spread of flu?

This could make a big difference if it proves safe.

Started in 1969 at age 16, using SEL-840MP (FORTRAN and assembly), PDP-5 (machine code and BASIC), and Tymshare (CAL). Still employed as a developer today, using Scala, Python, and JavaScript. Just finished my Deep Learning specialization on Coursera with Andrew Ng.

Not on any prescription medications yet. I think I can take this in a few years.

I would definitely support the use of an open-source algorithm (and open-source data) to draw districts, as an improvement over the current methods.

However, I also agree with you that geographical boundaries as a basis for representation are largely obsolete. My thought is that it ought to based on some kind of sanctioned "interest groups", where each person is permitted to be a registered member of a smallish number of groups. An interest group would have representation based on the size of its membership. There might need to be a recurring "open enrollment" period in which people could change their group memberships, in order to provide some stability, but interest groups would be expected to come and go over time. Obviously nothing stops people from forming geographical interest groups, given enough people.

Of course this is a radical departure from the current system, and we should be concerned about whether it would be an improvement. But it could be implemented on a purely advisory basis, where the rules are established, representatives are elected for the interest groups, and these representatives vote on everything the House votes on. Then the voting results are published, and we can have a discussion about which system is better at representing us. This also gives people enough time to become accustomed to the interest group system, which hopefully would avoid some of the instability of its initial implementation.

So we could just do this now. Who's with me?

Delivery bots use much of the same hardware and software as self-driving cars, but have market pressures toward lower cost. If they are mass-produced, this will bring down the cost of self-driving cars to the point where even economy cars can be self-driving. Also the AI problem that delivery bots face is arguably more difficult than a self-driving car, in that pedestrian traffic is much less regulated. So they might also drive advances in machine learning from which self-driving cars will benefit.

On the other hand, if delivery bots start injuring a lot of people, the backlash may extend to self-driving cars as well.

Unfortunately our usual method for ascertaining identity is based on an assumption of privacy of certain personal information. The loss of privacy represented by this breach is certainly something deserving of our outrage. But all that justifiable outrage is dwarfed by the implications of no longer having a reliable way to establish identity in a mobile and technological society. While there is still time before the stolen information is widely disseminated, we need to use the doomed current system to bootstrap an identity system which does not rely on information privacy. Such a system probably should be based on some kind of multi-factor authentication, including both biometrics and digital tokens.

Just imagine having no way to prove who you are. It is one thing to have an individual identity thief steal your identity. It is another thing altogether for there to be no meaningful way to define your identity. Yes, we all have DNA, and most of us have fingerprints, but if our biometrics are not associated with our digital identities, then our digital identities are up for grabs.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like the fundamental infrastructure of our society is being undermined. I don't how much is due to cyber-attacks by foreign governments, and how much is due to glaring flaws in our systems being exploited by individuals. But I do know that if we don't start recognizing and solving problems aggressively, we are headed for some kind of collapse.

I started using Scala in 2011. The tooling was very rough at first, but I really liked the language as an alternative to Java. Since then I've adopted a progressively more functional style in Scala, and found it to be a very natural way to think about code. Some of my code is multi-threaded, and using immutable data structures, I find I spend a lot less time worrying about locking. And the tooling is now fairly reasonable in my opinion. Scala's interoperability with Java was a big selling point in the early days, but the Scala ecosystem is now getting to the point where it stands on its own rather well.

A really great development in the Scala world is Scala.js, which transpiles Scala to JavaScript. I despise JavaScript for any development larger than a page of code, so Scala.js was a welcome relief. If you work on large JavaScript apps, do yourself a favor and check out Scala.js. I look forward to the day when WebAssembly matures enough to be a target for Scala compilation. Hopefully then JavaScript will fade away, and someday it will just seem like a bad dream.

We don't know enough about geoengineering to be reasonably certain that our attempts wouldn't make things worse. But when things get bad enough, there's no doubt that we'll be trying all kinds geoengineering stunts, and in a completely uncoordinated way. It would be nice if we could stop making the problem worse, but there's a distinct possibility that it has already gone too far, that we've already crossed a tipping point, where positive feedback cycles make climate change inevitable.

The climate change deniers, at least the cleverer ones, are fond of pointing out how current climate models are lacking in accuracy. Personally I believe they are accurate enough to show that we have a bad problem that is only going to get worse. But I don't think they're accurate enough to predict the results of various geoengineering interventions that are contemplated. So we do need better models. Perhaps we could get some agreement on that point, and maybe some funding to make it possible.

What I would like to see is something like the International Geophysical Year, except with commitment to sustain that kind of effort for a decade. We need to increase the resources dedicated to data collection, as well as improving our geophysical models. And it needs to be an international effort, with all the data made freely accessible to everyone. By keeping the effort going for a decade, there is also a chance that a whole generation of young people might be inspired to pursue a career in earth sciences.

Crockford is half-right. We need to get rid of spaces too. I understand that linear text is a very versatile way to express programs, but it really lacks expressive power. Basically almost all of its expressive power comes from the syntax of the language you're using. Maybe that's a small part of why we have so many languages. Imagine if code were written in something like HTML, and when you edit it, your CSS (or CSS-like) settings determine how it looks. In fact you might have different CSS settings to emphasize different things in the code, with some parts being visible only in certain views. Imagine tools which could analyze the code in some way, perhaps involving external data such as a run profile, or a repository history, and generate a new view.

I understand that this would require a lot of tooling. I also think that any approach that doesn't work for all popular languages is not going anywhere. But there are a lot of concepts which are common across programming languages. Obviously one of the tools that would be needed is one that takes a linear text file in some language, and uses knowledge of that language to produce a marked-up output. We already have editors which understand something about specific languages, but they need to also understand the markup. For compilation, I think it should be possible to have a tool to strip out the markup, which works for any language.

Jupyter Notebooks are an interesting development in programming expressiveness. But their focus seems to be more on expressing the integration of the program code and the results of running the program. I actually think that's a great way to present scientific results. But when it comes down to code blocks in a notebook, it's back to linear text. It's ironic really, since the linear text actually is embedded in markup.

Look, I know it took the prokaryotes a long time (~1 billion years) to evolve into eukaryotes, but it was worth it, wasn't it? And what I'm proposing is not nearly as difficult.

I like a memory-safe language as much as the next person, but software security really is an open-ended problem. My language may prevent me from making a string that overflows its memory, but if the string I'm building happens to be a SQL query, my code could still to vulnerable to SQL injection. Of course there are several ways to build SQL interfaces which don't allow unchecked strings as queries.

The point is that the SQL injection vulnerability is completely analogous to the string overflow vulnerability. Strings were originally implemented as abstractions in languages which had no concept of "string". There have been many such implementations of strings, and a good fraction of them are not memory safe. But now we also have languages which implement memory-safe strings as an abstraction of the language. And people have used these languages to implement a new abstraction, SQL. Again, there are many implementations. Some are safe from SQL injection. Some are not. The ones which are not safe actually may be simpler to use from a naive point of view - like just building a string and passing it to a function. Some programmers may find that more appealing than an API which requires multiple calls or multiple parameters to make a query. It doesn't require them to learn a new abstraction.

Software security problems will always exist, as long as we continue to build higher-level abstractions with APIs which allow the abstraction to be subverted. Even when you have a safe API to a new abstraction, there's an excellent chance someone will come along an implement a "simpler" API, which is simpler mostly because it is vulnerable.

I'm talking about differentials in force with respect to a system capable of extremely non-linear responses. When polar ice melts, much of the weight that was on one plate moves to adjacent plate(s), so the force on the plate where the ice was decreases, and the force on the adjacent plate(s) increases. The change in the difference in force between the plates could exceed the weight of the ice. (And it could be a positive or negative change, depending on the relationship of the plates. A negative change could reduce the static friction enough to trigger a quake. A positive change could increase the stress enough to do it.) The changes in force may not amount to much in terms of magnitudes of the total forces in play, but it could easily be enough to trigger quakes which otherwise might not have happened for thousands of years.

An earthquakes occurs when the static force of friction at a point of geologic stress is overcome, or when the force on a geologic structure exceeds its breaking point. It is an extremely non-linear response, which can be triggered by small changes in these forces. Given that, it would be surprising if tidal effects were not correlated with earthquakes.

As the polar ice melts and its weight is redistributed over the oceans, I expect this also will result in sufficient changes in tectonic forces to trigger more earthquakes, and perhaps volcanic activity as well. It wouldn't surprise me if even changes in atmospheric pressure are sometimes sufficient to trigger a quake.