Drinking water is not distributed evenly over the surface of the planet. Some areas have an abundance, others do not. Climate change means that some areas become more arid, causing widespread and long lasting droughts. Usage of various poisons in agriculture and other pollution is making it into ground water, slowly causing well after well to be unfit as a source for drinking water. On top of that, the consumption of water in many areas is larger than the replenishment due to rainfall, so local reserves are dwindling. In the richest parts of the world this is not much of a problem as alternatives exist, but they come at a cost.

Regarding fracking, the heavy use of water is an issue that has been raised, albeit I think mostly due to fear of the chemicals used seeping into ground water.

The leadership of ISIS is dominated by military officers who served under secular dictator Saddam Hussein (source). So, unless all these people just had a religious awakening (not entirely impossible), the leadership of ISIS is simply trying to grab a lot of land and power for themselves. And they found that a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist agenda would aid in their recruitment. Especially in Iraq, where the Shia dominate government and Sunnis are being persecuted.

Good point. I will take your suggestion under advisement.

I considered something like that. Then it occurred to me that it was basically like having an extra password to remember.

That one would leave me out. Given how "security questions" have been handled in the past, i.e. to be anything but, my response to that sort of thing is to type in random text and usually a lot of it. I also don't see how it increases the security. If the email address of the user has been compromised, it is likely that the intruder would have an easy time finding the correct answers to the questions. In your example, there is actually also no need to send a password to the user. If the questions are answered correctly, you could send the user directly to step 6. Indeed, most recovery tools that I have used include steps 1, 2, 3, 6.

In my experience, JNI is not significantly worse than similar wrappers, but the approach certainly would not be my first choice. I used JNI for an embedded Android app, where the performance of raw C and C++ was needed to do the heavy lifting. Good points with SWIG and the JVM overhead, though.

It is possible to use C++ with Java. Try to look at Java Native Interface (JNI). It comes with a performance penalty on each call across the interface, but if you are using it for networking, the penalty will be negligible.

If you are working on Windows, it is possible to do the same with C# using a CLI interface wrapper. I have no idea if that trick works on Linux/Mac.

Trivially removable would be to provide a dismiss item to the context menu. Having to figure out that it came with a windows update and which one to remove to get rid of the icon required actual work on my part. I agree that it is silly to suggest suing MS for a free upgrade, but I *do* find it to be bad manners on their part to not supply an easy way to remove their advertising from my desktop. Sort of like a guest not leaving her or his muddy shoes at the entrance to your home.

According to bbc, only 37% of the votes cast were for the tories. Blame the British first-past-the-post system for giving absolute majority to a party supported by only 37% of the voters.

You wrote "We are all the same, Milgram proved that". I just noted that 35% was not the same. 35% is also not a sole outlier, but a pretty large minority, so, going by the empirical evidence you cited, your statement is clearly false.

Where in my post did I write that organization is the same as a "big military machine"? Regarding your second point, I think that Islamic State and the Vietnamese Liberation Front qualifies as organizations.

They need to agree on what to do and do it. In my view that is organization, even if the structures are informal.

The total war scenario was enacted in Europe in two acts, showing that even with millions of armed men defending a country it was possible to invade and conquer if the invading army also had millions of armed men. Armed populations did, however, make it a lot more difficult for the Nazis to hold (e.g. Russia and Greece). But if we are looking at present day, nuclear weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles pretty much means an end to that kind of invasion. At least until one side manages to nullify the nuclear deterrent of the others. It is a MAD, MAD world :-(

No, Milgram did not prove that we are all the same. Quoting wikipedia:

So, 100% of the participants knew that they were doing something wrong and spoke up. Some 35% of the participants did stand up to the authority figure and refused to follow their orders. As I remember it, the initial experiment was conducted on white middle class college students, so I would be very hesitant to use it to generalize anything about the rest of us.

As I understand it, the 2nd Amendment was supposed to ensure against invasion from the British Empire by keeping the population armed, so any attempt at invasion would allow the armed population to spark a popular insurrection.

But it is really beside the point. A population is only able to stand up to oppression if it is organized, and in most advanced countries, governments and corporations are going to back down if an organized population demands change, e.g. Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. In most cases governments and corporations will just be biding their time, waiting for people to go home and settle back down into their lives, so they can roll back the concessions. A recent example is Egypt. Sometimes they will fight, but it is extremely dangerous, as there is no telling where it will end, e.g. Syria and Libya, not to mention destructive.

Going back to the US, it should be clear for everyone that the US rulers have successfully managed to keep its population disorganized through a variety of techniques such as sowing distrust between its citizens, massive surveillance, union-busting, mass media and the stacked circus of democracy.

Not necessarily. As prices increase, number of sales decrease and profit per sale decreases. I'm sure Amazon has done a lot of studies into these relations in the ebook market, and found the sweet spot that maximizes their profit. Increasing prices to pay taxes may result in lower profit than paying the tax out of their own pocket ... or they may leverage their dominance in the (e)book market to force publishers to cover the tax. This notes that Amazon forced UK publishers to cover their 20% UK VAT in 2012, even though they actually only paid the Luxembourg 3% VAT, with Amazon pocketing the difference themselves.