hahaha! A website with no NSA backdoor. You told a funny!

-- Bozo

To be fair, most sellers on Amazon Markets do the same, and price their stuff just under or at Amazon's price, and Amazon seems OK with that. Wasn't there a bug in the past where the software that people use to undercut Amazon had a big and was pricing stuff at 1 cent, and Amazon stepped in to help out with that?

So far it's worked very well for their customers, and has for many years. It's starting to seem pretty far-fetch that this is some elaborate scheme to do anything except lower prices to keep customers buying.

That would be a work of genius, and frankly I don't think MS is that smart any more. Still, if it turns out Pottering has been on the MS payroll all along, I might actually die laughing.

The stereotypes are wrong and harmful, on both sides of the fence. Racism ends when we stop judging people by race - full stop.

And on top of that: Good citizen complies, water supplies get more scarce, mandatory rationing is implemented as it is Every. Single. Time., in the form of "Everybody must cut back on their previous use by x%", bad citizen just waters his lawn three times a week instead of every day, but good citizen is screwed.

Yeah, I really hate "gadzillions and gadzillions of gallons of water" reporting on the water deficit.

Taking their figures, 42 cubic kilometers, and California with an area of 423,970 square km, that's a deficit of about 10cm of rainfall, statewide.

(Assuming I didn't slip a decimal point.)

Yeah, it grossly underestimates the issue, because that much rain all at once would mostly run off, and rainfall is not evenly distributed, but it's more useful than the nutty measurement that was reported in that article.

one acre is about 4000 m^2, a foot is about 0.3 m, so about 1200 m^3
You have 264 gallons per cubic meter, lets say 250 since the acre-foot estimate is about as accurate as Russian maps along the Ukrainian border anyway.
That gives us about 1200/4 * 1000 = 300000 gallons.

An acre is a rectangle bounded by a furlong and a chain (things you learn from rock music videos), or 22 * 220 square yards, so an acre-foot is 43560 cubit feet ~= 325850 gallons.

Most household water use is irrigation. Water use inside the house is a trivial part of overall national water use - low flow whatsit may save you money, but won't make a difference in the big picture.

The typical family uses an acre-inch of water a month, or an acre-foot per year, whatever that is in gallons.

But residential use is trivial over all - most water use is in power generation, and most of the rest is agricultural. California is one of the few states that actually uses saltwater for power generation, but still: mostly farms.

You might be a liberal if your solution to an engineering problem is "everyone else just needs to change how they behave and the problem goes away!"

In California (which started this discussion), "peak usage" is the majority of the day. Rush hour is from 6am to 9pm. That's what happens when you won't build enough roads.

And all to significantly improve everyone's quality of life, by giving them back often significant chunks of time every day they used to spend commuting. It's a worthy goal!

*Appalachians

Apparently I still have the trailer-park spell checker.

Sure, I had it great growing up in a trailer in the Appellations, single mother, etc. Leave me out of your privilege claims and stop fucking stereotyping me based on the color of my skin, you damn racist bigot.

I certainly understand that the mostly upper-middle-class-good-college Social Justice Warriors who have never done anything use with their life feel like they have unearned privilege. Yup, you do. That has little to do with race. Stop assuming that other people who look like you have a similar background. Stop assuming that there aren't people who look nothing like you but have the same background. That's exactly the sort of offensive stereotyping we're trying to stamp out!

Heck, none of these are very new, other than perhaps the scale of Bug Data. Agile was new around 2000. "Cloud" was all the hype around 2007. These are proven ideas now, though as you say you have to understand them, you can't just move your systems and hope fore the best.

A lot of people don't get this yet, though moving all your back-end systems to be cloud-hosted is as good as you can often get with legacy systems. Though the DB servers are often the sticking point (even if you can get cloud-hosted servers that work with your software, which is wonderful when you can, you still need to get the data there, and otherwise you have to be very careful what cloud servers you try to run your own DB servers on - sometimes there's no way).

Obviously, that's a lot of work, to think through security, availability, supportability, and so on, because the solutions to each are different in the cloud. They may be easier once you're done, but it can be quite difficult indeed for admins to abandon their tried-and-true bag of tricks for an environment where they need a new bag!