How do I block Southern California Edison (SoCalEd) from draining our backup battery? I had the battery installed because of health reasons.

My wife has COPD and Parkinson's. She needs electricity 24/7 to run an oxygen concentrator. She needs electricity to run the stair-lift in our two-story house. I have sleep apnea. I need electricity at night to run the CPAP machine that keeps me breathing.

During a public safety power shutoff (PSPS) earlier this year, we were without electricity from SoCalEd for more than a day. In the daytime, we had electricity from our solar system; in the night, we had electricity from our battery. The PSPS did not impair our health.

Actually, a PSPS is not my only concern. SoCalEd fails in my area without warning, without regard for the weather, at any time of the year. Sometimes, it is only for a few minutes; sometimes it is for many hours. If it happens while we are sleeping, we might not realize that we must report the outage. With our battery, we are protected.

Rather than relying on the "official" version published by a government where people are fire for telling the truth, I rely on [http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/constitution/].

I too use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. My list of 10 feeds, however, does not include news sources. My list includes a Web site hosting stories by amateur authors (some quite good), blogs, podcasts, and announcements of software updates,

Spectrum's fiber optic cables in southern California were recently cut, knocking out Internet and phone service across several very populous counties. It took several hours to repair. It appears the vandalism was caused by thieves thinking the cables contained copper. Copper theft has become a major problem across the U.S., affecting residential plumbing, public street lighting, and electrical service.

I am glad I have an over-sized solar electric system on my roof and a 12 hour backup battery.

According to the 17 June Los Angeles Times, the outage extended from western Ventura County (including Ojai and the city of Ventura) to central Orange County (including Anaheim),

The service disruption was not localized to Van Nuys. I live in eastern Ventura County about 22 miles from Van Nuys and have Internet service through Spectrum. During the disruption, I kept losing my Internet connection.

When I called Spectrum about the problem, I was told that, not only Internet service, but also cable TV and VOIP phone service was affected. I was also told that the problem would be corrected by 5:30pm Pacific time. It was actually corrected sooner. Also, we never lost cable TV. We do not have VOIP phone service.

Other users should not have to pay for Amazon's insatiable diet for electricity. If Amazon want more, they should pay for it. That is also true elsewhere, especially in the U.S., where state utility regulators keep raising the cost of electricity on everyone to meet the demand from growing data centers.

I graduated from high school in 1959. It was a very high-performing school. There were no computers.

After high school, I attended UCLA. In my junior year, I was living in an on-campus dormitory. Two engineering students on the same dorm floot dragged me to a meeting of the Computer Club. I saw SWAC ([National Bureau of] Standards Western Automatic Computer) a custom-built computer and one of the very first stored-program computers in the world. In the Computer Club, I learned how to program an IBM 7090 in FORTRAN. I am a gadget freak. To me that was the ultimate gadget, superseded when it was upgraded to an IBM 7094. Majoring in math, I changed my planned curriculum to emphasize logic and numerical analysis. At that time, no university in the U.S. offered a degree in computer science. By the time I received my BA in math, only three universities (not yet UCLA) offered degrees in computer science.

Now retired 21+ years, my whole 41-year career involved computer software. For over thirty years, I dealt with the software used by the U.S. military to operate its earth-orbiting space satellites.. I wrote specifications for new features and even for a total replacement of a major system. I taught military personnel how to use the software. I reviewed developers' specifications and test plans. I headed a team that performed system-level of software testing. Details of my career are at [http://www.rossde.com/retired.html#career].

Several fires are burning at the same time in Los Angeles County. Not all deaths were in the Palisades fire.

An arsonist was arrested for starting the Kenneth fire along the border between Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. That fire also killed someone. The arsonist might be facing manslaughter or murder charges.

The Alta Dena fire has caused about the same amount of destruction as the Palisades fire.

I believe there is at least one other major fire in the area. All of these are burning at the same time.

Trump is wrong about water. The California reservoirs currently contain above average amounts of water. We are not wasting water by sending it into the ocean.

The delta smelt are actually important. They are the food for the fish we eat. No smelt = no tuna or salmon.

There is no way for a ship leaving a Russian port on the Baltic to reach the Atlantic without going through the national waters of Sweden or Denmark. That is, they would definitely be within 12 nautical miles of either nation. Smaller ships can traverse the Keil Canal, but that lies entirely within Germany. All three nations are part of NATO.

The title "Meta Asks the US Government To Block OpenAI's Switch To a For-Profit" is misleading. California Attorney General Rob Bonta Rob Bonta is a state official and not part of the U.S. government. By law, the California Attorney General is the "super trustee" of all non-profits incorporated in California.

More than once in the past, a California non-profit has converted to for-profit. The largest was likely California Blue Cross, which converted in 1996 and became WellPoint.

The conversion of the System Development Corporation (SDC) in the 1970s -- where I was employed at the time -- provides a road map. Renaming itself the System Development Foundation (SDF), it incorporated a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary that acquired all of the old SDC's assets including the name System Development Corporation. SDF tried to dispose of for-profit SDC three times. Attempting public sales twice failed when general stock market conditions turned sour. A third attempt was blocked by the California Attorney General because the investment banker that advised the old SDC on how to convert was going to bring the new SDC to the public, which was a conflict of interest. Eventually, SDF sold its SDC subsidiary to the Burroughs Corporation in 1980. SDF used the money it received for grants to universities and other non-profits.

Windows Media Player itself was deprecated a few years ago. Try Real Player from [http://www.real.com/index.html], WACUP from [https://getwacup.com/], or VLC from [http://www.videolan.org/].

I think my process for updating software on my PC provides strong protection.

First of all, I block pushed automatic updates. Instead, I download a complete off-line installer file. I scan the installer file with three different unrelated anti-malware applications that I keep current. If nothing amiss is found, I disable my Internet connection and then execute the installer file.

While U.S. law provides there is an implied copyright on any original text, even if it is made public, I put the copyright symbol on all of my Web pages. I just now added "bing" and "bingbot" to my robots.txt file. Those two user agents of Microsoft appeared in a log of visitors to my Web site.

However, there are bots, crawlers, and scrapers -- all of which are really the same -- that ignore robots.txt. Among them are bots run by Amazon and Google.