The act of fracking, or fracturing, creates many tiny cracks.

Here's a thought experiment: Stick your head under a bucket of tightly packed soil (mostly clay) in a bottomless bucket and fill it up.

Now try the same thing after you use a spade on the soil in the bucket for a few minutes.

Get the picture?

One of the local farmers said "I expect when we run out this next decade, everyone will be very angry over the decisions we made to plant water-intensive crops in a very arid land for so many years".

It's like Global Warming.

It's coming for you whether you believe in it or not.

DevPAX, PAX East, or PAX West?

Mostly hardened traffic, but there you go.

Pretty sure it doesn't get counted in with the general Internet, since you guys run so slow, and we have 100 GB/sec ports at most major research universities and military installations, and 40 GB/sec ports within 1-2 mile radius of those.

It carries a lot more data, but no spam.

As you age, you'll realize why they sell bifocals and how come people who never had glasses buy reading glasses when they get old.

Choose one of the below:

1. Waiting in line for three hours for a badly mixed movie I could have watched next week
2. Dressing up as a Superhero without realizing how overweight I was until I saw it on the news
3. Becoming a Furry. What goes on in Furry rooms, stays in Furry rooms.
4. Comics. Because, duh!
5. Cloning Wil Wheaton.

I presumed they meant video. I listen to lots of podcasts, including some that probably had been streamed, but were saved as higher quality files for offline consumption.

So, although technically Spotify is, I don't include it. I do count Comcast OnDemand and stuff like Netflix, or if I watch a Sounders game they streamed live.

Sometimes I just use my giant HDTV to watch stuff live and watch streamed stuff on twitter or some other app on a cell phone (that runs over cable wireless) or tablet. Mostly have removed stuff - getting rid of all the apps now.

If you're not seeing the Matrix raw, you're doing it wrong, and they're lying to you.

following the convention for naming stars that are not dense enough to ignite "brown dwarfs", we could name these new, less dense, singularities... "brown holes".

I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.

There's nothing surprising in this. Most countries hire consultants and advisors from the same international legal/accounting firms, who themselves have been trained in the same schools of thought, and often the same universities. The international ascendancy is mostly a mono-culture.

when everyone is on the list.

The probable good news is that, given the incredible computing power at play, this should not take a very long time, since the reasonable suspicion criterion make it easy to add names.

The agile way, quick and dirty. Find the code for whatever task you're supposed to do and change it. You do not try to place it on some grand master blueprint like in waterfall. Nor do you, according to agile, need that blueprint to add a new feature. If your code change breaks anything then tests will fail. Now you've got regressions, that's a task if you need one. Don't build any extra abstractions. Don't make your code overly generic. Go back and add those only as they become clearly needed and necessary. The general sentiment is that we don't know what tomorrow will bring, so fix it for today and if we need to redo it later we'll do just that.

You ask for the big picture, agile's answer is that there is none. The whole code base is alive and trying to keep on top of everything else that's happening is too much wasted time. You just keep the bits and pieces you work on working as you make changes. If the architecture becomes a problem then we'll make that a refactoring task to solve that particular issue, but it's never a full review. If agile was to create driving directions they'd go something like "Take the road going closest to the direction you want to go. If it becomes rough, carry on as it's probably better to get through that go back. If you really hit a dead end, make the smallest possible backtrack that lets you get around it."

There are specific holes designed into all iPhones and iPads that show up in iOS allowing them to bypass any locking.

They're not "published" per se, but they're there and many suppliers of law enforcement software provide them, which work either over wireless or the data/power connection ports.

What warrants? They're already quartering troops in your pocket and purse.

I mention the iPhone and iPad angle, since more than 60 percent of all adult US citizens use those. You'd think Droids would be more popular, but that's not showing up in the government metrics.

Happened this summer, mostly May and June. Details in Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province and Georgia Straight, and Globe and Mail.

Comrade Harper had to "suspend" the TFWP because it meant his Conservative Party was not going to be reelected, and was going to lose half it's seats.

That's a sop to allow corporations to bring in H1-B to fill our community colleges.

Probably about half of the students in my math classes in Seattle Central are not American. Or Canadian.

Nothing wrong with that, but it's not helping with retraining when you outsource the jobs overseas.