My electric company recently (last year) changed out its billing system.

The new billing system required me to reset my password to be between 6 and 8 characters, letters and numbers only (but is at least case sensitive).

Let me understand this correctly. You found Comcast's DNS isn't perfect and doesn't resolve some names. It does not appear to be malicious in any way, as the two domains you find affected are a foreign furniture store, and your friend's brand new website. It's fairly obviously a bug.

So: you call Comcast Tech support, demand to talk to the Boss of Comcast, and then write a 10,000 word article (I didn't count) about it on Slashdot where you know 90% of the readers will take "Websites inaccessible on Comcast" as meaning "OUT OF CONTROL MEGACORP MONOPOLIST COMCAST IS CENSORING WEBSITES!!!"

This makes sense to you? This is what you do? Really? Really?

Just curious, but that time you got a duff cable modem and had to send it back, did you write a 60,000 article on how Comcast has banned you from the Internet, and did you demand to speak to the PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNET? When it rained that one time and you attempted to tune in the cable TV, only to find many of your channels were inaccessible, did you write a 75,000 word article on how COMCAST IS DROPPING CHANNELS and did you call tech support demanding to talk to THE LORD HIGH RULER OF TV?

I think I've found an article where the discussion would be likely improved for once if the Betoddlers spammed it with anti-Beta comments.

Ya know, you're assuming all water used in ag is pumped out of the ground. True in some areas, not in others. And that it's not replenished fast enough -- true in some areas, not in others.

I find it rather telling that the most resistance to building dams to store the winter melt comes from areas with the most hue and cry against ag water use. (Did you know that some parts of the Sierra Nevada can achieve a snowpack in excess of 50 FEET?? Where do you think all the water goes in the spring?)

There are parts of Calif that are now desert, but were not before Los Angeles siphoned off all the surface water. Think on that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

And you are right, grass evolved to be grazed (and it doesn't really matter if it's bison or cattle). If it's not grazed, eventually it's overtaken by invasive weeds.

Yeah, uh-huh. And to really throw people off, this was never mentioned. In stead they sent the only slightly credible they could find among their little junta and had him lie to the UN.

And actually, just before the invasion, Blix et al were reporting that compliance was materializing. But you know, "too little too late" because the generals already had their battle hardons on.

Initially the 'family farm' size was restricted to 40ac (btw not so much restricted, as what you could homestead) but that quickly proved nonviable, hence the expansion. In a great deal of the American West during the time of expansion, even 160 acres wouldn't feed your family, let alone produce enough surplus to sell a crop.

And see my post above on why many CA farmers (especially in marginal water areas) now grow alfalfa in preference to other crops. It was either that, or go out of business entirely. (Which many did as well.) I watched the change while I lived there. You'd be shocked at how much formerly-productive Calif cropland is now a wasteland of invasive weeds. (Tho where sheep are still pastured, the native grass has recovered.)

And also to protect some river-spawning salmon -- which to my understanding, isn't native in the first place, but rather is an invasive species.

Indeed, the standard rotation for farms around here is one year of potatoes, two years of wheat, and three years of alfalfa.

At what it costs to pump water nowadays (what with the high price of diesel and electric in CA), you can't make money with row crops anymore. Where I used to live in SoCal was once all onions and carrots and occasionally other vegetable crops. As the cost of water went up, those crops gradually went away (the last onion crop near my place, ca. 2005, was left to rot in the field because the cost of diesel to harvest it exceeded the value of the crop).

That land either went either to weeds or to alfalfa, because alfalfa is the last crop you can make money on. You don't have to plow or plant it every year, you don't need to hire a labor gang to harvest it, and you get multiple crops per year (some fields in SoCal are cut every couple of months year-round), and it doesn't need as much water per ton of product as most row crops do.

As of 2011, alfalfa in SoCal retailed for up to $450/ton (vs. as low as $75/ton for midwestern hay), and since CA restricts hay imports, and since there's little other hay grown in CA, alfalfa had a captive market and growers could sell every bale they could cut.

So, after this water falls elsewhere in the world, does that mean there will be no more evaporation off the Pacific? Because it sounds like you're assuming California will get no more rain in the future.

What most people here are not aware of is that much of the northern CA Central Valley was swampland before it was drained for ag use. (Some of it still is, which is why there's a levee system.)

Don't you love the logic here? Any water used is gone forever, since obviously there is no evaporation and no subsequent rainfall. California water is used up and magically fails to be replenished by water/rain that evaporated off the Pacific.

If any of what they claim was true, agriculture would have ground to a dusty halt after the first season, rather than having continued for thousands of years. Even if one takes it forward to just include modern agriculture... explain to me how it continues to operate from one year to the next if their theory s true.

Most of these concepts start life as animal rights propaganda, which has no problem with delegating facts to the dustbin if that furthers their cause.

California's problem isn't agriculture. It's that too much of what used to be local water now gets shipped off to the cities for domestic use. Did you know the Owens Valley wasn't a desert til after Los Angeles took most of its water?

Which is, if you think about it, is rather evil.

I think the bar for being "evil" seems to have been lowered quite remarkably in that case. It used to involve, at the very least, cruelty and malice. Now, apparently, it's posting some terms and conditions about the use of your services when those services are pretty much optional and when the terms and conditions are more about protecting consumers from brand confusion ("Oh, I'll just buy this Google Play tablet. (One hour later, at home, after cash spent) Wait, it doesn't run half my apps because it's actually just a "compatible" Android-like operating system rather than the real deal?") than they are about Google making money.

Points to note:

- Android is still FOSS
- Google Play is optional. Sure, Google are doing everything they can to encourage you to use it and encourage developers to build stuff on it, but it's not necessary
- Google does not sell Google Mobile Services. And the chump-change it makes in terms of compatibility testing barely pays for the services it covers.
- While Google makes some money from the various stores they sell, between bandwidth costs, transaction processing, etc, nobody out there believes it's a significant source of revenue.
- Finally, until GMS, people were screaming at Google about "Fragmentation". Even today, Android bashers still insist on posting highly misleading pie-charts showing how many different versions of Android are still in use vs iOS.

We can scream at Google when they insist that versions of Android bundled with GMS must no longer allow users to install apps via third parties. Until then, faced with a choice between "Google are doing this because they want control of teh users", and "Google are doing this because they want manufacturers to stop fucking up", we'll go with the former.

Nah, PHP still is used for those things. It shouldn't. The fucking language should DIE. But it's still there. It spreads like a virus, people get exposed to it because they're forced to hack their Wordpress distribution, and the next thing you know they're thinking it's "pretty cool".

Visual Basic was never this bad.

Kathleen Sebelius

What, she drafted the law that said the government would magick up a website in a few months from rainbows and moonbeams?

The law set hard deadlines for a technology project nobody had ever tried before and that was just one of the signs that it was drafted by someone who had no idea how technological projects work in (or out of) government. The results would have been equally horrifying if congress had passed "The Moon Shot Act of 1961" after JFK's speech with a deadline of colonizing the moon by October 1.

IQ tests for politicians? No, it's not egalitarian. It's not the American way.

I'll say! What does IQ have to do with whether the person will vote for or against abortion?! You have to focus on what's important here!

The guy who had to learn what an ISP was, or the guy who didn't know and didn't ask and made government policy on it anyway?