Scorched earth means to destroy (burn) the land to deny your opponent the ability to sustain his army in the field. I used the term exactly as I intended; to suggest that Oracle is more than willing to destroy Java (or at the very least chill independent innovation) in order to win a hopeless IP battle against Google.

Regardless of what database they used, to achieve the scale and performance they require would require similar clustering, memchaching, partitioning, sharding, load balancing, etc. There simply isn't an out-of-the-box database that can scale to this level without resorting to the kind of complexity that facebook has implemented.

You're confused. The problem is not MySQL, rather, it's tying an application to ANY specific database. No two databases implement all of the features of a modern relational database in the same way. Transactions, concurrency, prepared statements, stored procedures, referential integrity, mem caching, connection pooling, etc, are all implemented differently and in some cases not at all, and imply database specific limitations on the application. DB Abstraction layers, Object Relational Mapping, code generation/scaffolding, etc. all help, but don't entirely remove the need for regression testing, optimization and even kludges for each different database.

However there are good reasons to design for a single database. If, as in the case of Facebook, your application will only EVER be hosted in a single environment, it makes no sense to support multiple environments. Facebook doesn't sell an application to the public to be downloaded and hosted at your favourite ISP, they offer a service that is hosted on their own infrastructure.

If the performance requirements are such that regardless of which database you choose, it would require extensive tuning of both the database and the application, it makes little sense to do this for multiple databases.

I think the FOSS community would probably have been fine if MySQL had remained with an independent (and profitable) Sun. But Oracle is not Sun. For me, personally, the Oracle v. Google lawsuit pretty much gave notice that Oracle would go scorched earth on anyone who used "their" open source properties in ways they didn't approve of.

To be fair, I think if Facebook were starting over today with a clean codebase, and know they were going to grow into such a massive enterprise, they might have made different design choices. As it is, they are committed to MySQL and have tuned, optimized and tweaked the hell out of it to suite their requirements.

MySQL (or MariaDB, or SkySQL) are not suitable for use in banking, but the vast majority of database applications don't have the same requirements of banks. Banks have extremely high data integrity, retention and security requirements. Armoured cars have extremely high security and cargo integrity and retention requirements. But vast majority of transportation applications don't require armoured cars.

MySQL is demonstrably scaleable and is secure and robust enough for the vast majority of applications. It is used extensively in health care - which has fairly high privacy and data retention requirements. It's a matter of using the right tool for the right application. Sledge hammers are useful for breaking concrete, not so much for framing. Statements like "because banks don't use MySQL, you shouldn't either" are just ignorant.

Facebook at 13M queries per second would like to say "hi".

Windows 7 and 8 are improved, and a SSD improves things even more, but for me, fast booting and battery life are the most important features. I especially hate that you can't defer Window updates from delaying shut down and boot up.

First of all, it's not necessary to breach the bunker. It's not clear at this point that Cyberbunker has done anything illegal, however it this becomes the case, you don't need a SWAT team even weapons. Unlike during a NATO conflict, it is not expected that the staff working at the bunker live there 7x24. This is a for-profit enterprise and staff/managers/directors/owners have home and lives outside of the bunker. If and when that is charges are brought, you quietly arrest the owners/directors at their homes. Next you get a court order to compel their ISP to terminate their Internet connection - no need to dig up cables. You then seize all of their computers and begin a forensic analysis of their hard drives, extract their client information and proceed down the list. If at this point, the "bunker" is still operating, you freeze all of the companies bank accounts and see how long the staff continue knowing they are not getting paid.

Second, shutting down the bunker doesn't stop a distributed botnet. However getting access to their records can help you identify the network of compromised computers that run the botnet.

Finally, if it were necessary to "breach" the bunker, it is highly unlikely that the datacentre has the same protections that the NATO centre had. If this was an important NATO command facility, it would have had a nuclear power generator, not diesel generators. Commercial Tier IV datacentres can run for up to 96 hours without mains power. That's not all that long to wait for the lights to go out. Communications links don't have to be cut, they can just be turned off at the ISP's routers.

The SWAT team thing is part someone's blundering over reaction and part PR for Cyberbunker.

If and when Cyberbunker and it's owners/directors are indicted on charges, and a court order is issued for their arrest or an injunction issues to terminate their service, it's much easier to peacefully arrest the directors at their home, seize their computers and terminate their internet connection. No SWAT team or para-military group needed.

Now there's a thought, force the Gucci clad lawyers to go pay a visit to Senator Elmer Fudd and all of his inbred cousins back on the farm.

The real problem is that so many Americans have come to believe that the interests of the corporate sponsors are the same as theirs so dutifully parrot talking points that are not in their own interest.

The biggest downside is the inevitable tax payer funded broadband and video conferencing equipment in every member of Congress's homes. Probably cheaper than all the airfare, but I can bet a lot of members get the tax payer to fund their video toys, but still spend most of their time in Washington, because it's preferable to actually spending time in the dirty little backwaters they represent.

Yeah are your really that uninformed? You're confusing Lybia in 2012 with Iraq in 2003.

Investigation after investigation and report after report has repudiated any link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Both the 9/11 Commission AND the Senate Report on Pre-War Intelligence in Iraq concluded that there was no evidence of cooperation between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda had on numerous occasions tried to raise an Islamic opposition to Saddam in the North however they were largely put down by the Kurdish forces. It was only AFTER the US invasion that Al Qaeda found its foothold in Iraq.

This is either the most naive or disingenuous rationalization of the war I've seen in a long time.

While the "no war for oil" message was certainly out there, this was a dumbed down talking point for the young activists without a cause sector. I don't believe for an instant that Bush sought to profit from the war. The man is an idiot. With the exception of his ownership stake in the Texas Rangers (and he had no management control in the team), none of his private sector enterprises EVER profited. As a businessman and entrepreneur he was a three time loser. It was Dick Chenny (and Donald Rumsfield) who were evil (and did profit from the war). But you can't deny the connections between the Whitehouse and the oil industry. Do you think Chevron Texaco named an oil tanker the "Condoleeza" just because they liked the name? Policy usually follows money in Washington and there was a lot of oil money that benefited from, at least temporarily, constraining the supply of oil out of Iraq.

30 Million people in danger is a wild exaggeration. The population of Iraq pre-war was approximately 25 million. The biggest threat to most of the population was the impact of on going sanctions - which did not affect the Sunni minority, but disproportionately weighed on the Shia and Kurdish majority. France and Germany favored loosening sanctions for humanitarian reason, and as a result were labelled as terrorist lovers or opportunists hoping to capitalize on economic opportunities in Iraq.

Breaking down this 25 million a bit further, 35% of these were Sunnis who largely benefited from the Saddam Hussein regime. Another 17% of the population were Kurds who lived in the northern provinces which, while part of Iraq, were not under the control of Bahgdad. Certainly some portion of the Shia majority, (probably 15 million strong including the Kurds) had reason to fear Saddam Hussein. The Shia tribes in the South faced savage retribution as a result of them rising up against Hussein, with American encouragement, following the Gulf War. The Kurds had been subject to persecution and were waging a resistance in the North. I don't want to under estimate what a bastard Saddam Hussein was, but on the scale of other regimes in the last 30 or 40 years which have conducted genocidal campaigns against their own populations (and in many case operated with US ambivalence or support), Hussein was a small time thug. Yes he gassed a few thousand Kurds, killed thousands more in counter insurgency campaigns and probably tortured and imprisoned several thousand more, but in Guatemala alone it is estimated that Government death squads murdered some 200,000 civilians out of a population that at the time was between 6M and 10M. Yet US support for the Guatemalan military regime never wavered. And then there is Indonesia where the US Embassy in Jakarta provided Suharno with small arms, communications equipment, CIA advisors and lists of "communist sympathizers" - whom all ended up dead, some 500,000 of them. So let's not pretend that the US has EVER cared about how brutal a regime is. Our government only cares when it has an impact on US economic or political interests.

To your third point - no nation gets to unilaterally interpret and enforce compliance with UN Security Council resolutions. The US is in violation of scores of UN resolutions and several UNSC resolutions. Collin Powell made his case that Iraq was in material breach of UNSC resolution 1441 (among others) and based on this the US, with the support of only the UK, Spain and Bulgaria, authorized itself to enforce the UN resolutions. The fact remains that Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei reported to the UNSC, basically that there was no solid evidence of active WMD programs and that Iraq was complying in fact, but not in spirit. For example, there were a number of scientists that refused to be interviewed. It can be inferred that this was under threat from Hussein, however the UN or even the US can not force an individual in a soverign nation to be interviewed by weapons or nuclear inspectors. However the majority of the UNSC were in favor of continued inspections. Even lapdogs like Mexico didn't support it.

The term WMD is only vague to those who choose to make it vague or try to make chemical weapons factories out of weather balloon trailers. The terms of what weapons systems and components were banned under the UN resolutions of the 1990's were pretty well laid out. This "well never find the smoking gun ... I guess we'll never know ..." talking point is kind of like O.J. Simpson searching for Nicole's real killer on ever golf course in America. It makes no sense that Saddam Hussein, the Sunni leader of Iraq,would smuggle his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons out of the country to a fierce regional rival - Bashar al-Assad, the Shia leader of Syria.

If all you can point to are old training manuals, empty shells, aluminum tubes and meteorological trailers, it's pretty pathetic. The war was unjustified. The domestic opposition was meek. Congress and the Courts rolled over. Individuals within the administration who had reservations about the war (Clarke, Palme, etc.) were vilified and even Colin Powell checked his integrity at the door and got in line while the press led the cheering section. The Iraq war was a failure of all of the checks and balances of a democracy.