Hopeless or not, we have to do it. Right now all of humanity is in a single interconnected biosphere, that is one rich crazy dickhead away from becoming uninhabitable. How many people are out there right now claiming that we can do anything we want to the Earth and humanity can never become extinct, because God? We need to get sustainable populations off of this planet and somewhere they can survive for when the inevitable happens and one of those mouth-breathing morons hits the wrong button somewhere and releases super-Ebola into the atmosphere or something.

Not all Republicans are ignorant jackasses. Some just don't care about anything other than lowering their own taxes at any cost. Some have bought into the delusion of upward mobility that this country still peddles, despite all the mounting evidence that the difference between rungs in the social ladder are greater than any time in the past 100 years. And some are actually very nice people, but continue voting for Republicans for reasons of social inertia or the sunk cost fallacy, effectively rendering them ineffectual sockpuppets for the ignorant jackasses.

Democrats are slightly, slightly better, but really until someone succeeds in removing the massive amounts of outside money necessary to run for national elected office you'll never see anyone in the House or Senate who actually represents the people who supposedly elected them into office.

Nobody lives in the California Desert. Well, okay, we do have a decent retirement community out in Palm Springs, but the parts that most people settled on were temperate grasslands, forests, and wetlands (the Central Valley was an inland sea for much of the year before we dammed it all up).

The real problems are:

1) Irresponsible farming by agribusinesses. This one here is the biggie, but is really hard to control because the biggest agribusinesses have so much political clout, both here and in Washington.

2) 150 years of politics. For well over a century, the saying has gone, "Liquor is for drinking; water is for fighting." There are a byzantine set of local, regional, statewide, interstate, and international laws governing how water is used everywhere in the state, most of it based on environmental studies decades or centuries out of date, and none of it changes quickly.

3) Wetland destruction. For a long, long time nobody understood the value of wetlands in water table control, flood prevention, and ecosystem management, and so much of it was filled in and paved over in the last 100 years. This has proven to be a huge mistake, one that will take decades and billions of dollars to fix, and isn't helped by ignorant jackasses who insist that environmental concerns don't exist, that scientists are hucksters, and that God will provide everything we could ever want, forever.

4) Climate change. The theory is nearly 200 years old; the lab-scale proof is over 150 years old; definitive proof it's happening out in the environment is over 50 years old. It's happening, right now, and given politics and the endless prattle of ignorant jackasses it doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down any time soon.

Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.

Those wetlands you're disparaging are flood control systems. Those wetlands keep the rain from flowing straight out into the ocean; part of the reason we're in this mess now is that we've spent the last 100 years plowing them into the ground and pouring concrete over them (see: LA river).

And thus does Intel make the same mistake that hundreds of companies around the world have made before it: putting intellectual property in physical reach of the Chinese government. Fast forward five years and I'm almost certain we'll see Foxconn or some other Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government have a series of "research breakthroughs" that mysteriously parallel the exact technologies that Intel brought to its own plant, which is once again down for "inspection".

It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened already.

Start telling Congress how Europe and China can predict hurricanes better than we can, thanks to their supercomputers. Nothing like a good "The furners are beating us!" rallying cry to squeeze money from the right (hell, the left too).

That's why you go multi-monitor. I have a horizontal (cheap LED-LCD) screen for videos and entertainment, and a vertical screen (more expensive IPS) for getting real work done.

That's not what global warming does. Global warming heats the oceans first, screwing up weather patterns all over the world. Global warming means more hurricanes, heat waves, tornadoes, and ruined crops.

And you were doing so well until the end, too.

The science tells us that ebola doesn't spread until the patient starts showing symptoms. Once you start going beyond the science to indulge in paranoid fantasies you're leaving the realm of behavior that should be expected of reasonable adults.

Quarantining people for no reason is exactly equivalent to locking someone up for up to three weeks for no reason at all, and what's worse is that you're doing it to people who are selflessly risking their lives to help total strangers in a country they would never go to otherwise. These are heroes, and should be given a hero's welcome, not told to lock themselves in a room for three weeks and think about what they've done for a world that neither cares about nor fully understands what they've done.

It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful, so you have to eat more empty calories to get the essential vitamins and minerals to keep from getting malnutrition. This leads to higher rates of obesity, heart disease, etc.

The simple fact is that there really is no upside to high CO2 in the atmosphere, for anyone.

At least choose a suffix other than "shed" Maybe "vault" for "CypherVault" or "StoreVault"

The Latin word for "padlock" is "sera" "CypherSera"? "SeraCypher"? Bet nobody's squatting that.

"Cipher" comes from the medieval Latin "cifra" Maybe "BitCifra"? "CifraStore"?

Yes, and it's obvious that they have. The Los Angeles basin has gone from one of the most polluted regions in the world to relatively clean in 30 years, saving residents billions in health care costs. This is despite the basin being probably one of the worst places to build a city in terms of air quality: LA is basically a giant bowl that gets far less wind on any given day than most other similar cities. Compare to other cities around the world where pollution is a large and growing problem. Around here the only real remaining problem is the port, because we still have to cater to every other states' and countries' dirty, inefficient, leaky ships and trucks, and the water, because water politics have 150 years of bureaucracy weighing them down, and there remains a lot of complicated, expensive work to do to keep out gigantic ag industry satisfied.

California politicians didn't have anything to do with the law; it was voter-initiated. The politicians are still as short-sighted as ever; they're the ones who negotiated the union contracts at around the same time that back-loaded so much in retirement benefits 30 years down the line without allocating any money to pay for it that the state nearly went bankrupt a few years ago. Voter initiatives cause a lot of headaches, especially for politicians who have to live with them, but it's largely because of that initiative system that California can boast that it's doing really well for itself, despite getting screwed by our conservative national government (the state only gets back about 50 cents in benefits and funding for every dollar paid in federal taxes; if the state seceded from the US we'd pay off our debts in a few years, but then the rest of the country would go bankrupt in about the same amount of time so nobody really wants that to happen.)

Screw that. I have to switch ISPs all the damn time, at least once every year or two, because of some corporate BS or another. When a new company comes in with their new "wifi router" I just plug it into the internet port of my own router, turn off the ISP's wifi, and continue on my way.

Currently I'm running Cisco Linksys WRT400Ns, and I guess they work for me enough that I don't need to switch them out anytime soon, but wouldn't recommend them to others now because they tend to give me oddball problems and need to be reset fairly often, and aren't compatible with 802.11ac.

Frankly, anyone who does business in China should come to expect this. Stories abound about how Chinese companies "compete" with foreign companies in China: you wake up one day and find out half your manufacturing and IT infrastructure is "missing", some of which returns in a few weeks, and then three months later a new, Chinese-owned factory opens up down the street, making products that look exactly like yours minus the brand names and serial numbers, which just happen to have great contacts with the Chinese government so that factory ends up with all the lucrative government and commercial contracts while your company just continues to bleed money on its "China strategy".

This is just the next step, for companies like Microsoft and Apple that rely on their brand to sell product despite having government-owned knockoffs everywhere. A foreign company managing to actually compete with an honest Chinese company? Why, they must be cheating. And we will find cheating, whether or not it exists, and take what's rightfully ours, that is, anything that ever touches Chinese soil.

Even if you look only at violent crime, crime rates have plummeted pretty much every year since the 1950s.