Short of actually being able to understand and verify every single piece of data that has gone into proving it - like it or not you take it on faith. Faith is a measure of trust in your sources in the same way that people respond differently to news from different outlets. I can walk outside and prove gravity. I cannot do the same with evolution.

The basic fact of most information we receive on a daily basis is that we trust it until we have a reason to question it. Evolution has zero effect on the daily lives of anybody outside of investigative curiosity. If somebody has their life changed by God (and it happens all the time) they'll spend a huge part of the rest of their lives searching for answers and understanding...and that will give them cause to question evolution because the Bible makes a tremendous amount more sense when reading it AFTER something like that happens to you. If you're not the slightest bit religious, you have no reason not to simply accept it because it doesn't affect you at all. Plus you can use it as a cognitive tool to reinforce your belief that religious people are all simply dumber than you because they don't fully agree with something that you claim to know as a fact, even though you're simply trusting your sources.

I generally don't bother arguing the point because people don't accept information that contradicts their world view and being able to verifiably prove something from that perspective from one side or the other won't have any affect on the lives of...anyone. It's just something useless to argue about. Getting into "arguments" where nobody is going to change anyones mind and you believe you are correct serves no other purpose than to boost your own ego.

Try to wrap your mind around this and see it from another perspective. If you KNOW God is very real (not believe; God has directly impacted your life in a tangible way...you KNOW) then come at the question from that side. If you know God is real your entire perspective on the Bible and everything in it changes specifically because any questions you may be able to have about it to try to cast doubt on its text go out the window...because ultimately you know the most important part of it is very real and that changes your entire perspective on it.

One of my favorite quotes:
"The test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many people like to assume that people just go sit in a service or read a book and are magically convinced to believe. That's naive. There is also this idea that people lack the critical thinking to question it. That's also naive since those questions are the first thing that everybody asks. It takes a lot of ego to assume every single person in those pews hasn't questioned it, strongly. Especially the ones who donate huge sums of money to it.

The reality is that life change happens much more often than most people would like to admit and hearing enough people you know give testimony about that life change creates trust in the information, even if it has not happened to you personally yet. This is buoyed by the fact that those people are telling you this because they want you to be able to receive the same help that they did. There is no financial motive. There is no other incentive than sharing their experience of something they didn't previously believe which they now feel obligated to express for the betterment of those around them.

Writing those people off, however, takes a tremendous amount of hubris. I never take any issue with a person who has questions. I only take issue with people who think they have all the answers.

These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?

That's true, but if you are in a situation where you are forced to brandish it in the first place you'd rather not have to wonder. Especially considering that we're now adding electronics and a power source to an otherwise totally mechanical devise you have to be concerned about battery life as well as function.

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.