If you did you are / were a complete fool and here is why...

Our government, believe it or not, generally acts in the best interest of us. How do I know this? Because at a time in my life I worked for it.

You can site all of the lobbying abuses, sweetheart deals, back room dealing, etc. etc. but the general thrust of your argument would still be wrong

Senator A votes to have deal B go through and for the most part he does it for two reasons, re-election money or to get a project / company / entity to do business in his or her state because fundamentally his interests generally align with the people who elected him or her to office.

When it comes to national security everyone had a total freak out when a bunch of guys from Saudi Arabia flew airliners full of people into buildings. Was the NSA kinda clueless? Maybe, were our politicians? Very much so, so they did what all politicians do, they gave an agency carte blanche and looked the other way while saying you had damn well better cover our asses from here on out..

What is really funny about this, is that the so called "Meta Data" is noting more than your phone bill. Ah but the chink in the armor are phones you can buy with a prepaid sim in them for cash. You don't know who made a call you just know that a call was made, so even that data is hard to deal with because you actually have to track the device down, put some eyes on the ground and search for 1 person out of the population of [insert large metropolitan area here ] to see who is using that phone. I think we could go a long way towards prevention of bad things my outlawing them. You want to buy a pre-paid cell phone, fine, we scan your photo ID so at least we have a picture of the person or perhaps a finger print. Do that and we catch half of the gang bangers tomorrow.

You see I really don't care who knows the number I made a call to or got a call from, what I do care about is them knowing the content of the call, and I am not even sure the new data center in Utah could hold all audio from every call made. What this is really is know if two baddies are talking to each other, or a baddie is calling a guy who works for the FAA, an airline, a company that manufactures chemicals that can be made into explosives, etc. you get the idea.

As to Diane Feinstein I think she should have to register as a foreign agent of Israel since she their US lobbying arm. I used to vote for her but have voted against in the last two senatorial elections and I am a Democrat!

I have found that Navteq -> Nokia -> Here have the best maps AND the best Link / Node sources.

Google just plain sucks because you have to feed from their API but they do have damn accurate maps, as to their routing engine well...

OSM is pretty good but the level of cruft is quite high and takes a LOT of work to make it usable so...

What do you mean "stealing"? The plans for cryogenic engines have been all over the internet for a long time now. The basic technology of the original F1 engine from the Apollo program was pretty common knowledge over 10 years ago. You really can't steal a design that has been pretty much open to the public at large. The innovations of the F1 engine were the cooling of the nozzle with the cryogenic fuel and the turbo-pumps, both of which have been pretty well understood for a long time.

Admittedly, scaling them might pose a technical challenge but I don't think it would that hard. The hard stuff was dealing with the shock wave problems that wanted to tear everything apart and even solutions to those problems have been in open scientific journals for a long long time.

Have you ever looked at some of the equipment on the outside of the space station? Most of it is is quite delicate as opposed to oil rigs that are mostly very large steel pipes that you can pound on with a sledge hammer and do very little damage to. Everything on that space station is built as light as possible / practicable because it has to be pushed into orbit by chemical rockets.

Lots and lots of it is behind something else, lots of it has complex cable connections. The more robotics you send up that more and more things have to be designed to be accessed by those robotics and therefor become less compact which on the outside of a space station is not good since there is limited surface area all the crap that must be there to begin with.

They have yet to build anything with as much dexterity ( even in a space suite glove ) as the human hand. They have yet to build camera's that are as good as the human mark 1 mod 0 eyeball at catching sight of something, if even for the briefest of moments and reacting immediately to that, if required.

Quite simply put, there is not a robot built yet that can replace humans doing some of the most delicate and difficult tasks. Think about cross-threading. Even in a space suit you can feel that slight resistance of threads not quite aligned and stop twisting before you mangle them, stop, turn the thing in reverse a bit and feel the threads align and the resume turning the coupling, screw or bolt.

Every day they get closer, but for now there is not a manipulator that can do that. Remember repairing the Hubble and they had trouble with the access door closing? The guy in the suit could feel which section was not aligning correctly and apply pressure in a different vector to get the access door to click into place. I for one would be quite happy if they had a manipulator / robot that could do that since it would not require risking a life to do the work that needs to be done; however, until that day then people in those pesky suits are going to have to put em one, head out of the hatch and play mechanic in a very hostile environment.

Casandra is a key-value store and does not do the things you need like joins and sub-queries. Data stores such as these do have their application sweet spots though. If you don't need critical analysis of relational data these types of programs are pretty cool.

PostGres is a fine DB, but I would guess that your figure is derived from PG being in single user mode and nothing else making demands on it while it was doing that. They do however desperately need to fix the TXID rollover problem since in hi volume data inserts the vacuum process really kills performance. PG has other issues like portability which machine and disk configuration dependencies really put a hurt on, but everything is a trade-off.

I use a smaller drive array that has much faster disks for the things I can fit on them and the performance really goes way way up, but cramming in about 11 million rows a day 24/7/365 just gobbles up storage, so I have to keep it on the big, and much slower disk array.

Keep in mind that while doing all of this the system is servicing the request of many other processes and users, and like most databases we are IO-bound in many instances as the primary storage array spends lots and lots of time running at or very close to 100% utilization. all in all we rarely dip below around 2000 TPS and are often peaking in the area of 6000 to 8000 and we do all of this on a single dell 12 core box w/48G of ram.

One of the many problems is that most people do not know how to tune Oracle. Properly tuned Oracle, even when running on inadequate hardware, oracle can support TPS levels that many DB's only dream about with full ACID as a matter of course on the same hardware. I have watched Postgres, MS-SQL Server and DB2 just hit the floor while Oracle kept chugging right along, not always mind you, but more often then not.

I am currently running 11gR2 on hardware that is at best adequate and can assimilate the entire output of 80% of the state of California's highway loop detectors ( approximately 50,000 raw data rows inserted every 30 seconds 24/7/365 ) and that into a rather poky 15TB drive array with 7500rpm 2TB drives, in raid 5 no less, then query all of that data filter,clean and analyze it and shove that data into another table all in the same 30 second period.

The DMV project was a nightmare of never ending changes of requirements. When you think about the basic project, it aint that hard, but when there is no point at which you could say it was stable because the target just kept moving, I don't care who takes it on or who's DB engine you throw at it, it will fail.

When it comes to scaling something out, you take you best guess at what you load will be. When your prospective load might be a large percentage of 300 million people it is a hard target to pin down and that is what ( along with a few bugs that escaped unit testing ) was their ultimate undoing. No one knows who's DB engine was behind it but I doubt it was any of the "web scale" DB's since they don't support ACID very well and this was one of those when it was absolutely essential.

I will give a person one chance to take them off and put them away around me. If it is a public place that I spend money, I will be polite and ask, "Please put that camera away.", if they refuse, I will go straight to the business owner, tell that that I am leaving and will no longer spend my money in their establishment as long as they allow those things, and leave. If it is in my home, they get the one chance and if they refuse, they will be unceremoniously ejected, if they argue the point, they get my fist right into their google glasses and then they will be thrown ( literately ) out my door and off of my property.

As to the rest, if someone does not have social skills to know that constantly twiddling with their latest toy while in a conversation is just plain fucking RUDE I will make them aware of that and then leave.

After finally getting ipTables syntax firmly implanted in my brain they are go to fucking make something new, that does the same thing?

The "quick documentation" is only how to download and build it. The very few examples are horribly described and laid out. Assign a chain to a verdict , uhhh hows that again?

Calling out a bug for comparing a quoted string to null, eg: '1234mhgt' = null tripping up the optimizer?

No wonder Oracle is ignoring their asses. I would too!

Data is nothing but a collection of information. The information itself is unimportant. What is important is how that information will be used. The way information is used is the predicate for its organization.

After you grok that then you can start to learn how electronic systems store and retrieve information.

One of the things that has never let me down is the fundamental understanding of how computers work. Remember that no matter what whiz bang shite you read about, computers do exactly two things: They loop and they branch nothing more nothing less.

Once you have that in your head, then you can begin to think about how the results of your analysis of the uses of the data can best be organized to make the job of the machine smaller and faster.

None of this is intuitive. It is all based on understanding gained from reading books of theory and the practical application of those theories and by trial and error. Every data use case will present its own challenges, but if you want to do serious database work never ever let a coder dictate the data schema. Never let them short cut and make your data organization match the organization of the data structures in their code because 99 times out of 99 times they have organized their data structures to suite their coding style and 99 times out of 99 times it will be completely hair brained and not have any relevance to the best way to store and retrieve some data from the mountain of data you need to store.

It's not.

The reason aircraft engines are built so very simply is for reliability. Everything you add is just another thing to malfunction. When you are 1500' in the air, over a city, you have pretty much no wiggle room. Find someplace to land now! At 1500' you have less than a minute to get it figured out and and around 1 more minute to get the thing on the ground.

MANY people have tried to adapt car engines to GA aircraft only to see them fail, time and time again. Cooling problems, vibration problems, fuel problems, you name it.

Diesel engine technology is being heavily tested and one or two have even entered production, but those have a very long way to go before they can be said to be reliable. And that is reliable to a standard that everyone can basically bet their life on, not just the pilots, not just the passengers, but people just like you, living your life peacefully until that airplane comes through your roof.

For any airplane to fly it is always the weight -v- lift -v- drag -v- power trade off.

I would love to adapt a Ferrari flat 12 for aircraft use. It runs on unleaded, meets California smog rules, you can get LOTS of horsepower out of 5 liters ( 12 cylinders ). Basically you get 480hp and 480 foot pounds of torque at about 6800 rpm and when you reduce that to 2400 rpm or so you 480 foot pounds * ( 6800 / 2400 ) and you can go really fast.

Actually I would have to say it went off the rails at 1.4. Prior to this it was a language that fulfilled a laudable goal. After that it was just down hill and that course has not changed. It is the classic too many ornaments on the tree condition.

Java as a language for the web is utterly laughable as evidenced by the massively bloated applications that are Tomcat and Glassfish, Weblogic and the rest.

But the ultimate insult is the world wide web. Stateless, anonymous and ultimately hideous to try and accomplish anything of substance. While some might disagree, they have only to look at web sites with very large java back ends to notice how lethargic they were are and continue to be.

I know everyone love to shit all over Oracle, but you cannot lay all the problems with Java at their feet and to try and do so makes you look rather, well, for lack of a better word, foolish. The problems existed long before Oracle acquired Sun.