For the older Americans, 1 acre foot = 5,172 hogsheads.
Its also equal to 9.7 cubic rods, or 325,851.429 US gallons.
For the Aussies, that is 2 micro-Sydney-Harbours.

So remind me, what is the problem you guys have with metric?

And that is the cue for the spelling Nazis to queue up.

Canaries were for carbon monoxide, actually.

That would be The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford published in 1982,
which detailed how the NSA were intercepting all international calls by methods including replicating the phone-company satellite base-stations.

Or you could just get your internet connection in a false name. Or your grandmother's.

Its Thursday the 2nd. I have not had my coffee yet. Not funny.
I thought this junk was supposed to stop at noon local time. Was it posted from some Pacific Island near the Date Line?

Lets just bring back OMG Ponies every year and be done with it.

Wow, on what do you base that rant?
I've been using a current Chrome-OS device (ASUS Chromebox) and it makes a great desktop and HTPC.
You can run Ubuntu in a chroot, feels like native.
Or if you want to wipe chrome-os, you can install Linux native. No hack needed, just switch to developer mode.
This is not Android.

Do you have some rational reason to believe the new device will be locked down? No developer mode?

Of course you can. This is a mini-PC running a "real" Linux, not just android, and certainly not a chromecast dongle.
Linux uses SAMBA to access Windows shares.
These would make a great HTPC. You should be able to run a DLNA client or server. And Netflix will work too.

Well gee, I suppose Chernobyl is a good thing, since the animals are doing a lot better, now that the humans have mostly gone. It has become a wildlife refuge. Certainly far less affected than if the landscape had been drowned. Except for the fish.

Why do you hate handicapped and retarded people?

If the nuclear plants had not been prematurely closed, old coal plants would run at lower levels, or even be closed down. Lignite would stay in the ground, instead of the atmosphere.

1500! Wow. It is tragic and idiotic that Germany is replacing perfectly good nuclear plants with lignite.
But while the CO2 pollution is irreversible, surely the topsoil is being saved for later rehabilitation?
The loss of land is much more temporary than for hydro. And the land is less important than river valleys. The number of people and villages displaced, as well as wildlife effects, is much lower.

Wrong. The Fukushima exclusion zone will be gone long before the dam, let alone a thousand years. Thats pure propaganda. The most active isotopes are long gone now, leaving caesium-137 with a 30-year half life.
That will affect the area for centuries, but not so much as you think.

Chernobyl even, is only "uninhabitable" by law. Hundreds live there illegally, and no-one has developed a 3rd eye or superpowers yet. Background levels are getting low (less than on a commercial flight), though hot-spots remain.

When a hydroelectric scheme goes right, it renders a large area of land uninhabitable.
China's Three Gorges covers 1000 km2 and displaced over a million people. And if anything goes horribly wrong, ...

For a prototype, thats trivial.
For specialist equipment that sells a few thousand units, its a bit sloppy, but still tiny.
For consumer equipment with 70 million units sold, it is fucking obscene.

Who cares if he said nigger, on or off air? There was no racist context, unlike his Mexican comments.

As a kid (not in the US), the only time I ever heard or said "nigger" was in that nursery rhyme, until reading Conrad and Twain. Just an archaic word like pickaninny.
It is kind of funny that some people now find it so taboo outside of any such context. Better not mention the Agatha Christie novel.
The joke (if you can call it that) is on the taboo word. You may have noticed that comedians like to swear?