Because when you get a call, anonymous or otherwise, that a shooting has happened, someone has been killed, and hostages have been taken and are being threatened, the police are not likely to send a beat cop to ring the bell with his hat in his hands.

I agree this is a symptom of the problem with the militarization of police, though. There needs to be a middle ground for an appropriate response that doesn't include a SWAT team.

That's a common misattribution. As that link notes, however, it is aa paraphrasing of a comedic play from 400 BC in which Socrates was caricatured:

I will, therefore, describe the ancient system of education, how it was ordered, when I flourished in the advocacy of justice, and temperance was the fashion. In the first place it was incumbent that no one should hear the voice of a boy uttering a syllable; and next, that those from the same quarter of the town should march in good order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either “pallada persepolin deinan” or “teleporon ti boama” raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner of Phrynis, he used to be thrashed, being beaten with many blows, as banishing the Muses. And it behooved the boys, while sitting in the school of the Gymnastic-master, to cover the thigh, so that they might exhibit nothing indecent to those outside; then again, after rising from the ground, to sweep the sand together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers. And no boy used in those days to anoint himself below the navel; so that their bodies wore the appearance of blooming health. Nor used he to go to his lover, having made up his voice in an effeminate tone, prostituting himself with his eyes. Nor used it to be allowed when one was dining to take the head of the radish, or to snatch from their seniors dill or parsley, or to eat fish, or to giggle, or to keep the legs crossed.

I'm particularly amused about the reference to dutifully marching to school, naked, in the snow. That the joke should be 2400 years old speaks to the truth of how the old perceive the young.

Because no networking vulnerability ever requires the use of packet crafting unless it uses XML. Yes, this is a failure of a plain text data serialization format. If only they'd used JSON, this never would have happened.

Really? My experience says the opposite. When you get to the point where you need clusters, high core counts, and standby sites, the licensing costs of your RDBMS are a drop in the bucket. Sure, $100,000 looks like a lot, but next to the $500,000 you're spending on infrastructure and the $10 million you're spending on the application itself, you're really not spending all that much.

Eh, there is less control in SQL Server over locking than there is in other RDBMSs, and it is infamous for escalating locks to the page or table level even when you ask for lower level locks. It's rare that it happens, but it's not unheard of. The fact that the system uses optimistic locking and there's no good equivalent to SELECT ... FOR UPDATE is also somewhat problematic.

It's greatly mitigated in 2005+ by using read committed row versioning (MVCC) and/or snapshot isolation, but those are database level options and you may need to specifically request the right isolation levels with your code. The biggest problem is that you have to remember to use the feature; it's just always on with Oracle from what I hear (I haven't used it since I was in school).

There's a mountain of documentation (and videos!) from Microsoft on all this. The greatest thing about SQL Server is the extremely high quality of the documentation. It's a joy to learn about compared to IBM's DB2 documentation (but then, anything is better than IBM documentation), and Books Online is a step ahead of Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Seriously, why aren't Election Days mandatory holidays? Do it over two days: The last Thursday before normal Election Day is Alternate Election Day, when people who will be working on Election Day must have off. Then everybody else takes Tuesday as a holiday. That, combined with absentee ballots should be an excellent start.

That's true, although it's historically not been enabled by default, although AC was kind enough to say it is now.

One of the biggest problems I find people have coming from a MySQL background is not understanding why aggregate queries they're used to working suddenly emit errors like, "Column 'LAST_NAME' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause."

The next big problem I see people having is people violating First Normal Form and then complaining that their queries perform really poorly or are hugely complicated, but that's not exactly MySQL's fault.

Instead, the application should be calling *into* the database, not the other way around.

Which is great... until you want two different applications to use the same database at the same time and need to occasionally do the same things the same way. When your data is more complex than what Amazon or Google use and closer to what a hospital information system or school information system use, you can no longer rely on a single application from a single vendor using a single database. Shit ain't that simple anymore.

I was born in 1976. I vividly recall both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I saw The China Syndrome probably 20 years ago.

Today, I had no fucking clue what "Uruguay Syndrome" would refer to. For that matter, I wouldn't have remembered what "China Syndrome" refers to other than a movie I once saw.

SQLite3 is a fantastic product, but it's primarily intended as an embedded SQL database, not an RDBMS. They're not really intended to do the same things.

On the other hand, at least SQLite doesn't "feature" silent non-deterministic aggregates.

My suspicion is that MS is planning to roll out a life cycle for consumer Windows 10 that matches OS X. That is, you should expect to pay for a service pack in the form of a point revision in a year or two.

Remember when Google switched GMail from HTTP to mandatory HTTPS back in 2010? You know what they had to do to cover the new TLS overhead in CPU, memory, and network bandwidth? Nothing. The biggest thing they did was patch OpenSSL to reduce memory per connection, and that patch has already been integrated upstream.

I'm not saying the other issues aren't real, but overhead is really unconvincing unless your network load balancer is a potato.

I always assumed CCV was designed to offer basic protection against incidental photographs of the card being taken, and other situations where only one side of the card has been compromised.

I've got one as well, and I've really liked it. I also replaced my aging G15 with this.

My only complaints are:

1. To use the LED backlighting -- and you'll want to because the keys are not easy to read without it on -- you have to flip a DIP switch that disables the context button (between the right OS key and right Ctrl) and turns it into the modal button for the backlighting. You rarely need to use this key, but I have missed it once or twice since nothing replaces it. I don't understand why they didn't pick something truly useless, like Scroll Lock, or let the button continue to function normally on top of the additional buttons. I like to be able to turn the light off, so I leave the DIP on.

2. The left shift key squeaks once in awhile. I tend to depress the far right of the key and it's a pretty wide key. It makes a squeak if I'm not careful. It's entirely my typing and I mostly don't do it anymore, but it did annoy me at first.

Otherwise it's easily the best keyboard I've used. For a mechanical keyboard, it's very quiet.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sign packages as a whole" since that wording is somewhat ambiguous, but apt, at least, doesn't sign individual packages. The only signature in place for secure apt is the one placed on the package file listing in the repository. That signed file contains the list of checksums (MD5, SHA1, and SHA256) for each package archive in the repository.