I agree with some of what you say, but instead of education level I would say higher salaries based on skill and experience.

I happen to work in the industry and yes, that is the biggest problem. The Law Firm would have nobody to blame but themselves, and anyone that has worked with Lawyers knows that taking on that much risk for things outside of their core competency (Technology) is not something they are jumping to get into.

Don't get me started on the continued love of TIFF...

Small problem with that plan is that for #4, Walmart would have to cave... if there is one thing that Walmart has shown to be outrageously good at, it is controlling their suppliers' pricing.

But it is competition for Amazon Unbox.

He did state he was coming from the view of a Developer. Quality is a QA/IT/DBA concern, not Development.

One of the main reasons for this is that the DBAs are the ones that keep the production environment functioning. Devs get to put in whatever random thought that crosses their mind and when it breaks in production and data is lost, or clients are impacted they just shrug and say "Odd, didn't expect that".

A 'modern' DBA should be trained in whatever development cycle that dev is using, which may include Scrum/Agile, in which case the process would be integrated and the delay of implementation would be greatly reduced, but not eliminated. It really isn't a bad thing to stop and think about the big picture from time to time.

The issue is when the management sets up a reward system for DBAs to be roadblocks (this is usually done by crucifying a DBA for a database failure, even if it is proven to be a poor design from Development) that creates the type of environment you are talking about. It is a perfectly valid response to management to be protective of their job. The issue isn't the DBA, it is the structure around the technology groups.

The proper audience is BOTH.

Dev's doing data structures is generally less than optimal (Disks have to spin? Just buy faster ones), DBAs doing logic flows is generally bad (This is the optimal data structure, so let's just change the business logic a bit). Both working together will build a much better application because it broadens the amount of concepts that can be taken into account.

The key with ACID was that it allowed applications to offload a lot of basic logic of data consistency to the database, and that was a great thing.

But I think NoSQL is coming out from the fact that there are still times you don't need/want to do that, usually involving massive amounts of data that can be processed in chunks that can just be "done again" if something goes wrong (sort of like Map/Reduce recovery).

no downside and no negatives? What about the fact that dealing with a plastic disc is stupid? From the moment I saw two computers put together on a network in the 80's I was waiting for physical copies of media/games to go away. Now that all the technology is ready we are stuck behind stupid licensing and protectionist companies.

Most large licensing deals carry an NDA requiring the buyer not reveal the specifics.

That's what everyone did growing up if you are from the country. You left in the morning and if you missed lunch, that's your problem. But you had to be home for dinner.

The risk of kidnapping, molestation, etc. is no higher today (and in many cases lower) than it was then, but today there are 24hour news channels that cover every single incident and completely changed the perception of a world.

But as a parent you have to remember your responsibility, which is to prepare them for the real world, and that real world will be a bit mean. They must be able to rely on you completely, but you must also allow them to learn that mistakes aren't the end of the world, which means sometimes you have to let them make mistakes.

Also minor injuries are some of the fastest learning tools in the world.

There was a study done (which I can't find right now) that indicated that all the safety features had 0 impact on the overall safety of the roads. Ultimately a human is hard-wired with a specific risk tolerance, all you do by adding safety features is make them behave in a manner that will bring the risk tolerance back to where they are the most comfortable.

I can't find the exact study, but a related conversation:

http://www.autoobserver.com/2011/05/focus-on-safety-how-driving-rates-on-the-risk-thermostat.html

It is bad parenting, but it is also almost mandated at this point. We were in the suburbs and one of my older children realised he could get to the porch roof from his window in his room. Now, I pretty much spent most of my childhood on one type of roof or another (Barn, house, tree house, etc) from the time I was 8, it was fun and exciting. A neighbour spotted the kid on the porch roof (which wasn't even all that tall) before my wife had successfully removed them from said roof and read my wife the riot act and threatened to call the police and CPS.

Ultimately we had to lock the windows down, which is not something my parents (or probably any parents of people my age) would have ever thought to do. My father's first response was "If you break something don't come crying to me".

The entire push to use example.com (which I always thought was pretty dumb) was because foo.com or bar.com might actually exist and do something, therefore if your point is valid, the entire point of example.com is invalid.