I take it you've never heard of Libya or Syria? Not saying that in some situations a peaceful revolution can't be successful, but at the same time I don't believe it's the only means of doing so. American history shows that both ways can be successful, but it really depends on the leader.

Not to mention as we've seen in the Arab Spring uprising, it's one thing to use your military against a foreign nation, it's a totally different thing to use it against your own population. Soldiers generally don't like pointing their guns at their bothers, sisters, neighbors and friends.

Modern commercial aircraft are "reliable" because they get hundreds of hours of maintenance each year. Car engines are reliable, but require regular maintenance as well (oil changes, timing belt, etc). But generally it's all the electronics which start failing (electric door locks, powered windows, etc) for a wide range of reasons. My BMW for example has had various electronic problems including a recall on the spark plug coils (talk about an old technology and they still can't get it right!) and various other electronic gremlins (one of which killed my battery every 5 days if I didn't drive it because the A/C sucked 800ma/h even when off).

Frankly, I've been in tech now for nearly two decades and if it's taught me one thing it's this: very very few people/organizations know how to make reliable software & electronics. Those electronics which have to be reliable (or people die) are very very expensive vs. your normal commercial/consumer electronics (your iPod for example). Even systems designed with reliability in mind can fail (Amazon AWS outages for example).

Now start thinking about the conditions and elements a firearm is designed to go through with minimal maintenance: moisture, dirt, sand, salt, harsh cleaning chemicals, shock & vibration, etc which can cause corrosion and in general wreak havoc on electronics. Cars and plane electronics can have a lot of weather sealing (which adds bulk and weight) which is isn't so reasonable in a firearm you are supposed to carry and hold with one or two hands.

Simply put, added complexity reduces reliability and significantly increases costs.

That said, the best safety is training and being responsible (storing them in a safe, etc). Teaching people to respect (not fear) and how to properly handle firearms is the best safety. That's why I don't trust "safeties" on my firearms and I treat them as *always* loaded unless *I* personally have just verified it's state because a safety can fail for a variety of reasons (poor design, abuse, poor maintenance, etc). I won't even trust someone else verifying it for me- I have to visually check it myself.

That said, there are some really crappy guns being made which nobody should ever own/buy, but they're cheap. I do wish there were some appropriate safety/reliability testing standards that firearms had to pass and each one was given a rating (sorta like how safety ratings are done for cars). California does this which sorta gets it right, but causes problems for smaller manufacturers (like Les Baer, etc) which make very high quality firearms as well as other problems. A federal standard would help here, but frankly, I don't think I'd trust the Gov't to do it well and so a lot of gun owners like myself are hesitant to support such a measure and instead prefer to do our own research.

But you lost me the moment you mentioned ATA drives.

In my case, kicking and screaming. Our IT dept uses Oracle extensively for various things and for various reasons that basically forced my team to also use Oracle although we'd all prefer PG or yes even MySQL. Now that my team is moving to JRuby (which is awesome btw), Oracle driver suckage is less of a problem, but we all find Oracle a PITA to use query wise and it's not nearly as well supported in the OSS community for things like ActiveRecord (although recent versions of the oracle_enhanced-adapter seem to have solved many of our problems), etc.

That said, there have been some things that Oracle does really well and actually makes easy compared to PG/MySQL, but it's been a constant learning exercise for us. That said, little things like having to use WHERE ROWNUM = X, rather then LIMIT which basically always requires a subselect to get correct results is just annoying and makes our code less portable.

Not to say other RDBMS don't have their own set of problems, but at least we have a few decades worth of combined experience of PG/MySQL so we know how to avoid/work around them. But hey AC, thanks for the troll!

Might as well just ask: Which is better a BMW M3 or Ford F350 4x4 with 6.7 diesel?

Both are great, have their place and will get you from point A to B, but neither are a practical replacement for the other.

My current programming project is a mixture of Cassandra and Oracle (although, to be honest, I'd rather be using PostgreSQL or even MySQL).

At least here in California (your state may be different) the CTA (California Teachers Association which is the largest teachers union in California) is *very* powerful in state politics. Per wikipedia:

"The CTA is the most influential spender in California politics, spending more money on politicians and to influence California voters than Chevron, AT&T, Philip Morris and Western States Petroleum Association combined"

So yeah, if you don't think teacher unions don't influence politics here you're not paying attention.

Unfortunately, here in the Bay Area, diesel is often more expensive then premium and 30-40 cents more expensive then regular. Annoying since diesel is basically a by-product of refining gasoline, but the global market for diesel is exploding (the US is the worlds largest exporter of diesel) and the newer cleaner ultra-low sulfur formulations are sending the price skyhigh compared to what it used to be.

That's basically what happens today with most protocols like SSL/TLS. For each new connection, the client and server negotiate a new key via public key crypto like RSA. Actually, based on some comments in the article, like needing more "transactions" to help break the encryption, makes me believe the NSA is actually working to break RSA then AES.

I always make a point to include "books, magazines, websites, blogs, manuals, nutritional food labels, directions for building Ikea furniture, etc"

I've found it better then asking what their hobbies are and if they say they don't read anything then it's an immediate fail. Overall I've found it tends to allow people to open up a bit more about what floats their boat then trying to be all PC about things. Some people give really bland answers (especially if they don't read much), but I've found that the A players tend (but not always) to get really excited about this question and can talk about it at length. YMMV.

Actually, Ron Paul had to work his way through college by delivering mail, doing laundry, working in a coffee shop, etc. His first year was paid for money he had saved by delivering newspapers, mowing lawns and running an honest to god lemonade stand as a kid. At one point he was offered a full athletic scholarship, but turned it down because he was still recovering from an injury and didn't think he would be competitive.

But hey, it's always just easier to to assume facts which happen to solidify your world view then do any research isn't it?

Well depending on how Amazon is using EC2, they could be doing the pre-caching in multiple zones so there may not be a single point of failure. But seriously, is this really a concern when:

1. The Kindle Fire screen, battery, PCB, etc are all a single point of failure
2. Your WiFi base station is probably a single point of failure
3. Your home cable/DSL modem is a single point of failure
4. The wires running between your home and the network POP is single point of failure
5. The DSLAM/whatever it's called in cable-speak is a single point of failure
6. etc etc etc

Yes, I know if you're using it at work you prolly have multiple WiFi access points and possibly redundant routers/connections to the internet, but why are you watching movies and playing angry birds at work?

Hell, the whole internet has gone down for large segments of the US due to construction workers/etc indiscriminately using backhoes to create huge fiber cuts, not to mention under sea cables being cut for various reasons.

I mean there's a lot of valid reasons why you may not want a Kindle Fire (I'm personally not interested in tablets at all), but I find this to be one of the weakest arguments out there.

While I have no doubt that proper chiropractic technique is safe and effective, there is always the possibility that the chiropractor didn't use proper technique or doesn't use the correct technique for the problem. That and I can say from personal experience that different chiropractors have different techniques and some are better then others. My last chiropractor was actually a husband/wife team and even though they tried to use the same technique, there was clear differences between the two of them. While they were OK (neither harmed me) I honestly have a hard time recommending them because I didn't get the same results as the guy I had used prior who unfortunately moved out of state.

My current chiropractor is much better and is far more open to listening to me and working with me and my life style to improve my health. Frankly he listens to me while my old one wanted to tell me how to live (specifically stop racing motorcycles).

Another reason I would give a negative review of my old chiropractor is that while he correctly had me get a MRI for my lower back, he then dismissed the analysis by the neurologist THAT HE RECOMMENDED and then made no changes in adjusting me. After I changed chiropractors, I had a new analysis done by a different neurologist (recommended by my current chiropractor) and the result is he changed how he adjusts me and the results have been fantastic.

Long story short, it's more then about someone causing your physical harm, but rather adjustment table side manner and technique which works for the patient.

Lastly, I'm really tired of the "us vs. them" mentality that chiropractors tend to have with the medical community. I'm not paying you so I can listen to how poorly you're treated by evil Big Pharma or people with Ph.D.'s. Bad mouthing others is a poor way of building a positive and long term relationship with a client.