Water bills typically don't go up a lot in droughts. That may change, but the way they've been managed in California in the past, they don't raise the rates because of a shortage.

You can also refer to the water table as being an "aquifer" and if you read my post you'll see that I explicitly called that out as finite.

Are you talking about California? Drought doesn't hit poor people any harder than rich in California. Other areas, especially where subsistence farming is practiced, yes.

First, people like to talk about "consuming" water. Water isn't consumed because it isn't turned into something else permanently, unlike say, oil or coal, which do not replenish in a reasonable amount of time. The only time the amount of water being used is actually relevant is when it's being pulled from a finite source for irrigation, like an underground aquifer or a river. A large portion of the planet gets sufficient rainfall to support all manner of agriculture. Raising alfalfa in California is dumb. Raising rice in Japan is not.

Feeding cattle on grassland that is not irrigated is not "consuming" water. As long as the land is not over-grazed it's not really an issue. In fact, the grass needs to be eaten and fertilized to thrive - it's co-evolved with large ruminants like cattle or horses.

So, these statistics are meaningless because it depends on where you're growing the crops as to whether or not you're consuming a finite resource. They're only useful in a local context. There are other side effects of raising cattle, such as deforestation, that are relevant.

Just because it's done doesn't make it a good idea.

But it's so much more fun to rewrite from scratch!

It's snowing in Tokyo right now so I'm curious if he's camped out. I'd like a picture of "sad iPhone in snow"

Kids these days.

Customer and Border Patrol should stick to enforcing customs laws AT THE BORDER. Once it's entered the country they should have no authority. We've also seen them trying to enforce copyright, as in the recent Google Glass case. They're already out of control at the borders with their warrantless searches, their authority should be rolled back, not expanded.

That would be kind of nice, but will it make "Linux" (i.e. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) into a major gaming platform? There are people who run Linux as their major desktop and keep a Windows partition around for gaming but is that a large market?

I think Steam OS has a decent shot at being successful, but is it fair to call a machine running Steam OS a Linux machine? I don't think so (unless you want to call Android a Linux machine as well) and if that's the case, then no, I don't think Linux will become the #2 gaming platform.

It's a variant of Linux but it's not for use with a general purpose computer. By that standard, BSD (iOS sorta kinda) and Linux (Android) are already major game platforms.

As far as functions, I'd say bcopy().

Well, to modulate an electric current you need an electric current (that's how a transistor works). Amplification isn't done by increasing the voltage/current of the reference signal. You use the reference signal to modulate a higher voltage/current. Once you have a transistor-equivalent we know how to use that to do all kinds of interesting things.

Their presentation makes analogies between "reactive programming" and spreadsheets and specifically references the power of "chaining" to have multiple functions firing as the result of changes.

There are a number of issues with this kind of event chaining that you run into as you get past the toy cases.

1) Fan-out. How many actions are being kicked off by a simple change?
2) Latency - this is a direct corollary to the fanout. Are all of the chained functions being run synchronously? If so, what happens when someone introduces a very slow function that gets run as the result of a user input. So the user changes the price of a part and every purchase order in the system is suddenly being updated?
3) Synchronicity - of course, as soon as you find out that your synchronously run chained functions slow things down you start running them in the background. Now, you have a problem where you don't know if something is up-to-date or not. And, in this model, it's not possible to find out if something is up-to-date.

The examples that they gave are very poor use cases for triggers even. Most general ledger systems I've looked at, running on top of a database, would just recalculate the balance on demand. If your database is large enough that the recalculation starts to take significant time, you cache the result and invalidate it using a trigger. Most GL systems typically make entries much more frequently than they need to calculate the balance for an account. If the recalculation of the balance takes significant time, you probably don't want to do it every time an entry is made anyhow.

Hey, at least you used numbers that had a basis in reality Though I think the no-nuke nuts must have decided they liked the "can't contain it" argument without understanding the context.