From TFS:

I've worked at a Fortune 100 company, who was looking to add a DevOps team, because our development and our deployment teams weren't working together as smoothly as we'd have liked. The development teams didn't know anything about the hardware their (very hardware-specific) software ran on, and the hardware teams didn't know what parts of the software needed testing on new hardware.

Of course, it's ridiculous to ask the hardware guys to be present at all of the software meetings, and vice versa. DevOps fills a role bridging the gap. Outside of IT and platform-agnostic software development, the "ops" part can be a customer-facing role. In the shelter of software development, any incompatibilities can be blamed on hardware, rather than the real underlying cause of "poor testing across platforms"

Because going to grad school means more innovation and industry, improving society as a whole. That's why you pay taxes to fund grant programs that helped my colleagues. I paid for it out of my own pocket, so you didn't subsidize it at all. Rather, the government recognizes that my expense was ultimately for society's benefit.

...but that wouldn't seem fair. Those who use their income to help others then still have to pay taxes as though they were bringing in large profits. Those who are selfish and do nothing to improve society end up keeping the most money, ultimately leaving the government to support all of the society's charity needs.

What about the economy of the contractors working on those projects of which you don't approve?

And here I thought the premise of capitalism was private ownership of goods and interests.

Absolutely correct. The fiber being hung on the pole only benefits the telecom company, whereas getting drunk contributes toward a global supply chain supporting farmers, brewers, and bartenders. That's what you meant, right?

Yes, everybody, including the government, contractors, single mothers, and you.

The broken-window fallacy is that government spending is somehow more effective than regular spending. You seem to understand that well enough, but it seems you've missed that the inverse is also true: Government spending is no less effective than "regular" spending. All spending is a transfer of wealth, and the only difference is where it's transferred to. When you're spending money, you get to decide. When the government's spending, the legislators decide.

Well, that pretty much sums up the issue right there. On the face of things, it seems straightforward.... everybody pays whatever the government thinks they owe.

On the other hand, there's so many ways the government can screw things up royally. One year, they missed an education deduction I had because they didn't know I'd gone to grad school that year. They hadn't accepted the paperwork the school had sent in. The proper resolution was for me to write and sign a letter affirming that I had done what I'd claimed.

Sure, it'd be easy in a perfect world for the IRS to handle everything, but it'd require absolutely no unexpected deductions. The whole point of those deductions is (ostensibly) to make taxes more fair, so why should we encourage undermining that fairness?

Bribery and deceit are fairly ineffective at effecting long-term policies. Nobody wants to be the politician caught taking handouts.

On the other hand, one of the best ways to convince someone to go along with your requests is to make a clear statement of why your goals align with the decision-makers' goals. If the politician wants more jobs in his district, you explain how your technology helps make jobs. If the politician wants to improve schools' performance, you highlight the educational opportunities supported by your technology. Be sure to note how a proposed piece of legislation helps or hurts your technology's growth. Brand is important, as always. That's what ties together all those separate messages. Foobar Inc. is good for education. Foobar Inc. is good for local homeless shelters. Foobar Inc. is in favor of this bill.

It's not sneaky or underhanded. Every politician knows they're being manipulated, but it all makes sense. The obvious decision to benefit their constituents is the one presented to them. What representative would turn down more jobs or education?

Of course, here in the Internet echo chamber, life is simpler. Corporations are bad, and individual opinions are good, whether or not they benefit society.

You don't believe in the existence of bad or sloppy engineers?

Around here, it's supposedly the FOP badges and/or stickers that help. Or it's the parking lot stickers for the local hospitals. Or it's the toll road transponders. Or it's being the next-to-last person in a cluster. Or it's being in the left lane. Or it's matching speed with the other speeders around you.

It's just like gambling. Everyone has their system that they think works, and nobody's ever done research to actually check if the statistics hold. Somebody sees a pattern and they think it's just so good that it must be right.

Why can't that be the case? Why isn't it possible that God would write by proxy the truth as he wanted it to be known at the time?

In the Beginning, God created a multi-dimensional manifold, having three large spacial dimensions and one large temporal dimension. Within this space he created a ball of superheated free fermions, and endowed with complimentary bosons, but you're not going to know about those for two thousand years. Then He relaxed the pull of gravity just a bit, and the whole thing exploded in an event so large that your language doesn't have a word for it, and your brain can't really even comprehend the scale of what happened. Then, after a time that you also can't comprehend, and a series of events you also can't comprehend, the rock you're standing on was formed.

In comparison: In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth... And we'll just leave it at that for now, okay?

Frankly, I like to think the Bible has just passed its expiration date.

You're not the first. I find it amusing.

The Biblical authors were simply advanced in their understanding of proper measurement technique.

It's worth noting that the Ecclesiastes verse is not in the context of astronomy, but rather highlighting the relative impermanence of human works. Humans and their ambitions come and go, but the days keep coming and the wind keeps blowing.

There's no reason to think it isn't referring to the apparent position of the sun, relative to an Earth-bound observer.

I take it you've never seen a DBA in a code review.

The ability to write well-formed SQL queries that are efficient and correct is also a specialized skill. It may not be one you recognize, presumably because you've had it for so long, but the majority of applicants I've encountered are not suited for doing production SQL work. They might be able to write a simple query, but finding someone who understands keys, indexes, views, and all of the other efficiency-improving features is a rarity indeed.

In my experience, it's not much harder than finding developers with any other specialized skill set.

Hadoop and HBase are exposed as libraries with well-documented APIs. If you're trying to hire developers who can't read an API doc, you have bigger problems than database choice. If you want to hire someone who already knows what they're doing, then your prospects are similar to finding a dev who already knows a particular 3D engine, or kernel development, et cetera.

If you're hiring competent documentation-reading developers anyway, and are willing to pay the expenses while they learn the idioms of this particular library, then there's no additional difficulty in the hiring process.

None of the above.

A beggar would be easy to infiltrate as, so it'd be ideal for surveillance. A car dealer would make many contacts, so it's ideal for spreading material. An elected official has power, but he also faces a lot of scrutiny. An aide to the official, however, would be a reasonable choice. There's easy access to the power, less scrutiny, and much more capability to contact other aliens.

"Why not" is because the cost/benefit analysis is not in NoSQL's favor. NoSQL's downsides are a steeper learning curve (to do it right), fewer support tools, and a more specialized skill set. Its primary benefits don't apply to you. You don't need ridiculously fast writes, you don't need schema flexibility, and you don't need to run complex queries on previously-unknown keys. Rather, you have input rates limited by an external connection, only a few entity types, and you know your query keys ahead of time.