Please read the transcript in its entirety. Specifically the latter parts about trade agreements and bi/multilateral negotiations. Placement of liability (w.r.t. the US common law) makes reform hard to envision yes, but that is just a minor concern in the bigger picture.
The surveillance state was never intended to stop terrorism, it is the true terrorism.
This malice cannot be explained by incompetence.
The guide does mention using a read replica to replicate from, an intermediate RDS instance between your offsite, but I've had no trouble replicating directly from the master instance.
One thing they don't cover is replication over SSL. AWS has failed to mention this shortcoming in the docs last time I checked. To have MySQL replicate over SSL, the master and slave both need an SSL certificate signed by the same CA, which would require you to obtain a cert+key signed by the AWS RDS CA.
Of course you have the option of tunneling the replication connection into a haproxy or stunnel running on an ec2 instance, but that has it's other shortcomings. You can't use the ELBs, since you can't register the RDS instance with an ELB.
As I understand it, the "friction" induced in your finger is purely a sensation. I mean how much force can it actually apply to your finger?
Also, the actual nature of the surface isn't altered - I wonder if you have two sensations at once?
Personally, I've been waiting for this for a long time... touch-typing on a screen (as it is common today, iphones and androids being ubiquitous) sucks, as you mistype regularly, even as you look at your screen.