Agree 100%. It's all a political game so some can feel good about themselves while the State as a whole slowly dies of dehydration. But hey, on the plus side, we'll get a $70 billion train that will whisk us from Bakersfield to Fresno in just 4 hours!

You're going to upset some desert snail-darter lizard or something, and since they might have a range of [$insert_insane_value_here] miles we can't do ANYTHING in the desert. It's for the children, don't you know! After all, we're flushing 4 billion gallons - enough for the ANNUAL needs of 175,000 people - so that 6 steelhead could swim downstream.

Yeah that was the proposed 2013 rate (as reported in the Ventura County Star). My last water bill was $120.84 for 4488 gallons of water (not including service charges, waste water, or meter hookup cost). Or about $0.027 per gallon, which is about double the high-end costs for desalination.

As for Texas, that's your problem. You should also be furious that you're being charged quite a bit more than the costs associated with desalination of water. But then, you don't have an income tax, so you're probably going to pay more in direct costs for basic utilties/State/County services since you don't pay as much into a general slush fund like we do in California.

Desalinated water in most of the world is LOWER COST than the water we pay for right now. Why wouldn't we keep the desalination plants running, when it's lower cost for the consumers and leaves 100% of the "natural" water available so we can send [URL=http://www.westsideconnect.com/opinion/guest_columns/water-alliance-government-ordering-billion-gallons-of-water-for-six/article_35c2d376-df16-11e4-a347-3326ba293ded.html]4 billion gallons downstream for 6 fish to migrate[/URL]. Lower cost, no concerns about fish migration - why not use desalination?

Here in Ventura County we pay more for water than in Israel or Saudi Arabia, two countries with much more severe water problems than California - and who get a large (or even majority) portion of their water from desalination. We have the world's largest body of water right next to us - and we simply don't utilize it. Desalination.

Precisely. This is much ado about nothing. Not to minimize the deaths, but this happens quite often and isn't anything unusual. Europe's had more deaths from heat in the past...

Because writing in Chinese or Arabic is something to be sanitized? According to the summary (no, I didn't RTFA - this is /. after all), having a long enough message so that the ellipsis happens between those ISO-extended characters causes the problem. Sucks to be a user who writes/communicates in other languages!

Heat waves have been killing hundreds to thousands annually in India for the last 3 decades - and most likely much longer (but reporting simply wasn't well done much further in the past). This isn't anything new, other than we finally hear about it. Living in extreme conditions, with poor sanitation and polluted and minimal water will kill.

Better yet, those same agencies are 100% supportive of fining private enterprise for the same thing... But they believe they are simply innocent victims of outside attacks and shouldn't be held responsible.

Lost interest - no animations...

Then ask for more. When I first hit 3 weeks, I asked for that at my next position. Did the same thing when I reached 4 weeks. Companies who want you will often give you that extra week, since they know going back in any part of the compensation package can be a killer.

Lucky bastard! You had hoops! We had to compound fracture our own arms in 4 places so we could simulate a hoop, and use our own faces as backboards. And that's the way we liked it!

Someone needs to learn of how the coolies were treated for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries. HINT: slavery (or as it was dressed up as "indentured servitude") wasn't just limited to those of African descent. Additionally, many of those whose families made it through the coolie period ended up having everything stripped from them - including homes, businesses, possessions, savings accounts, respect, reputations - during WWII when Roosevelt interned hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese and Asian descent. Slavery isn't just an East-coast/black thing, you know...

OK, so what OSX package would you use to design something like a Macbook Air? Why does Apple choose to use Creo and Altium - both Windows based tools? Because they like to spend money on Windows licenses instead of using their own in-house OS?

And what would these programs be that are suitable for designing something as complex as a laptop or desktop? I know, you'll point to FreeCAD - doesn't even come close. Something like NX, or Creo, or Solidworks or even Geomagic would be needed. I'm not aware of a single parametric 3D CAD package for OSX. Please enlighten me!