Wish I had mod points. +1

An unfired gun is the best defensive weapon that exists. The threat of death is the defensive deterrent. Actually firing is the last resort.

If a gang of 10 people are advancing on somebody and the target pulls a gun, all 10 people stop advancing or run away. If you have a taser or stun gun, you're a non-lethal threat to one of them...and you get one shot. Pepper spray is largely in the same boat (plus you have to account for wind). In both scenarios, you have to wonder if the battery has run out or the spray has expired depending on how long you've carried it.

Bullets last pretty much forever. The device is mechanical and has no dependence on a battery. As a defensive weapon it provides the greatest threat to an attacker and the highest degree of reliability to the carrier for those reasons. The second you start shooting it becomes every man for himself.

Up until you shoot, simply brandishing the weapon is an active deterrent without any need to fire. Brandishing a gun is actually considered assault for that reason. People often forget that when talking about concealed carry. It's as if people imagine that the idea is to tote it around so you can relish the opportunity to shoot somebody. I know many people who are not willing to pull the trigger that will carry an unloaded gun just so that they can pull it out in an emergency to diffuse the situation if they need to.

Additionally, when somebody takes a gun to commit a crime or kill somebody, they have every intention of pulling the trigger and are guaranteed to be armed. When somebody is attacked there is a much lower chance of those people being armed and/or able to retaliate so of course those statistics will be skewed.

+1.

If you can improve life with market regulations, sure. Personally, I prefer the type of regulations that simply require clear and accurate labeling which allow people to freely make a choice about their purchase. I do not support the type of regulations that require those choices to be made for me or anyone else.

Of course not. If you're in UX/UI or Game Development then you can be perfectly successful without knowing a thing about databases. Just about EVERYTHING else ends up using a database pretty heavily. Additionally, UX/UI work that is more AJAX heavy benefits significantly from understanding the stress put on a backend based on the ways their code is either sending or receiving data from the backend.

Mobile Apps and adaptive mobile point to database backed APIs. They often will have a local database utilizing SQL lite or the like.

So, to summarize:

Programming where database knowledge is important / critical include:
- websites (content, transactional, e-commerce, information management, search, business tools)
- mobile apps
- "big data" / analytics / scientific data

Programming where database knowledge is marginally important:
- user interface design
- game development

Unless you're storing information in flat files, a database is in some way critical to your application. Not understanding SQL as a programmer serves only to limit your options. Getting back to my earlier post, it's simple, it's powerful, it's everywhere. There's no good reason not to understand it.

Next time I work on a site that has 40 million lines of code between me and anything data access related, I will keep that in mind. For everything else, there's a database.

PostgreSQL covers the general case for every site these days. JSON/HStore data types. Geolocation. Custom indexes for custom data types. Extremely fast naive full text search. Multiple index searches on a single query. You can even write stored procedures, functions and triggers in Javascript.

If you're doing anything where data integrity counts, yes a database is going to be key. But far be it from me to jump to conclusions there. I was not aware that uploading LolCats is now the general case for website building. Didn't get the memo. Probably got overwritten in a race condition by somebody who had no idea what they're database was doing.

That's a complete myth. Just about every web based system that exists is an "information system" of some type providing a front end for a database. There are abstraction layers out there like Active Record and the like, but you still need to know what they're doing. The database is the backbone of everything.

Are there people who are adequate web programmers that don't know SQL? Yes. Plenty. And they all generally fall under the worst stereotypes of bad programmers because they can't be bothered to learn the basic functionality of the single most important piece of their application.

SQL is everywhere. Programmers can willingly choose to suck at it, but that's pretty stupid since

A) It's not that hard
B) It's insanely powerful
C) If you have a database as powerful as something like PostgreSQL and you aren't using it for all it's glory, its like owning a Lamborghini to go get groceries from the store.

NoSQL data stores have very specific use cases. Most of those revolve around extremely high write volume to one or two tables. Or caching layers. Or sorted sets. Or queueing mechanisms.

If you work at NVIDIA...no. You're not doing web/api/iOS/Android if you're working at NVIDIA. You're doing graphics drivers. If you're working at Google and you don't know SQL I'm fairly certain you'd be fired almost immediately.

At a minimum, most programmers today need to be competent with SQL and one server side language (Java, C#, Ruby, Python, PHP, Scala, Node.js). Smaller companies with smaller teams that require fewer people to handle more job duties require "best of the best" type programmers. The constraints on server side systems are the same regardless of language, so it's just a matter of what's popular where you want to work. Rails is in exceptionally high demand right now and there are a lot of free materials online to help you learn. There are also code schools popping up everywhere.

Learning something that's trendy is also helpful because NOBODY has more than a couple of years experience with it, like Node.js. That certainly helps too.

If you really want to do this, get in the door with an internship or a charity project in your spare time. Charities are a great way to see a set of needs and build something to solve a problem, which requires you to understand a lot of the needs of a system as the sole person responsible for it.

The #1 most important trait in this field is desire to learn. You have to enjoy what you're doing enough to want to keep up with the constant changes and new technologies that are coming out. If you do that, you'll go far.

If you don't, you'll end up in a cube farm at a telcom without a lot of mobility but you'll have a steady job as long as you don't have a huge screw up.

So...bear with me here:

- If your team worked their tails off to make sure things ran smoothly...tell them what you did to make it run smoothly and why it's helping.
- If your team kept the lights on and averted disaster in some way...tell them what your excellent monitoring facilities helped to detect in advance and exactly how you prevented the problem before it started
- If your team responded to tickets / infrastructure requests from development and helped other teams reach their goals...tell them how you did that

Is it so much of a stretch to not just say "Well, nothing died. You need not know why." and actually tell them WHY everything runs so well?

In company meetings and reports you aren't supposed to be humble. You're supposed to brag on yourself and your team because whoever is giving the report is the sole advocate for why your team is valuable. If you have somebody who is not doing that, then you need somebody else representing your team at these meetings.

On sheer ability to refuel quickly for long trips. It's the ultimate solution. Eliminate daily gas usage, but keep it available for long trips. Perfect.

Like the kind of people who go completely ballistic because somebody said something that offended them? Or that somebody shouldn't be allowed to say something they disagree with? Or that call for the firing of a company employee because of their political views?

You mean those kind of people? Because I agree those kinda people are pretty much crazy...but by and large those have been non-gun nuts.

"Gun nuts" get perturbed when you start adding mandatory point of failure to a device that is already perfectly safe with the idea of preventing a single non-existent scenario.

True, but prior to the withholding we had tested and more humane ways to perform lethal injections. After the company withheld the tested method they forced an exploration of alternative options.

Wasn't this only caused because the standard drugs used for lethal injection were withheld by a European company?

One of the things you can do with Puppet is get a change record of what WILL happen, specifically so you can show it to a CAB, get it approved, and then apply it during a scheduled maintenance period.

The one that jumps out at you is aluminum. A number of my wife's families have had tests done when they've reported these types of changes and in every case (not almost...every case) where testing was done both the mother and the child had very high aluminum levels. My best guess is that this can make the child more susceptible to additional aluminum in his system, which is used as a preservative and activator in just about every vaccine. Your body will naturally regulate it out of your system and we bombard our systems with aluminum every day (deodorant, aluminum food packaging, etc) via the adrenal gland.

Personally I think there are a large combination of factors contributing that could lead to someone being more sensitive to aluminum injected directly. Adrenal fatigue makes it harder to regulate these levels and as a number of pregnant mothers are working farther and farther into their pregnancy while still getting up multiple times throughout the night. I wonder if that's a contributing factor. Additionally, a computer scientist at MIT has used data analysis to link glysophate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) which can actually contribute to preventing aluminum from being removed from the body. Most children with autism have digestive issues of some sort and glysophate has also been indicated as a potential contributing factor for the rise in IBS/Celiac/gluten intolerance that we're seeing today. Many children with autism see behavioral improvements from moving to a gluten free, casein free diet too.

Clearly, this is all just speculation but it definitely warrants further study. The other thing that is extremely complicated is the studies themselves. There's a physician in Indiana who specializes in Autism that has identified over 340,000 different variations of it based on symptom patterns. He's trying to narrow it down to about 4,600 but the spectrum makes it exceedingly difficult to organize studies just because of the complexity of getting similar control groups together. Most people don't realize that part.