Totally understood. The trick is: you can tune your own signal/noise. Its very handy and I get essentially all my news via Twitter these days.

Its all on Twitter man...

Apple's ability to sell its stuff both to well-heeled Boomers and debt-encumbered Millennials is the envy of many companies. Only booze skips across generational borders quite so effortlessly and merrily.

But it is in the timing of entry into the car market more than on any particular innovation that I think Apple may neatly capitalize.

As millions of Boomers prepare to go gently into that good night, an orgy of spending should accompany their last two decades. Health care, obviously, will account for the bulk of it, but before the worst medical bills are seen there's still time to clean out the estate in grand fashion. Quite a lot of this will be vanity spending, as current trends show, including age-defying creams, injections and implants. And little says youthful as eloquently as driving in an Apple Electric iCar to your hip replacement surgery.

Watching jealously from the sidelines with Lana Del Rey droning on the turntable, Millennials will take consolation from the fact that the job market will generally improve for younger folk. Keen after the lean barista years to live large, the iCar will be just the canvas on which to splatter their new affluence to greater effect than was allowed by iPhones, Watches and Mac Minis. That shit was tiny; this shit will be big.

To both groups, Apple can sell an idea as well as a vehicle. That idea is Your Own Personal Halo. The wish to consume with less guilt -- not reducing consumption patterns, but dressing them up in an ersatz techno-idealism (electricity is free! driving improves the climate!) -- should have tremendous appeal to those raised on Woodstock and Transformers cartoons alike. As Steve Jobs himself might have said, "Here's to the Panglosses..."

"Psssst. Hey, sick person. Try this. The first one's on us!*"

*Free as in Daraprim, not free beer.

I don't carry a torch for Rand Paul, but I am grateful for his act of resistance.

You ask what effect is achieved by his resisting. I will reply, unromantically, almost none.

We could argue about public education (did he really reach anyone new who doesn't already know the Patriot Act is evil?) and about self-aggrandizement (was he merely campaigning?).

To my way of thinking, we are living in a time when our votes count for little, our representatives do little for us, and against this condition of a democratic people isolated from control of the state, a sickening reversal of control is instead true: the security state is ascendant and it is our freedom that is waning.

If my apprehension of our position vis-a-vis the state is correct, this means that most protest will be reduced to a minor symbolic key. Its value, then, is in what it symbolizes, and I would say a filibuster on this point of authoritarian government power symbolizes a refusal to surrender casually. A refusal to be cheapened to the point of not caring; a defiance.

Quantifying such things is easy. What is the net benefit? Again, almost zero. But not entirely. A spark is kindled, or if you prefer, a flicker is kept going in a small and dull flame, with the hope that later we may fan it into something bolder and more valuable.

The value of this filibuster is sustaining hope.

Agreed. What gets forgotten in the debate is that Java is a reference implementation of all true OOP constructs: Interface Abstract Class Class Which when applied judiciously, allow u to do things like inversion of control, dependency injection and test driven development in a strongly-typed environment, and this strongly-typed nature, when properly embraced, makes it easier to write software which you can refactor as often as you desire with orders of magnitude less risk than with "fsck-all-typed" languages like ruby or JavaScript. So, if your application does little more than pushing data into and reading data from some storage engine, then okay, JavaScript is an okay choice. If your application is growing into having significant business logic, then JavaScript will turn into thousands of lines of spaghetti untraceable closure hell , whereby each refactoring attempt will almost certainly have catastrophic consequences in production down some obscure execution path in some anonymous callback function you couldn't be bothered unit testing because how the fsck do you write a unit test against that anonymous function? There's not a concept of a Class in JavaScript. Sure you can mimmick inheritance patterns with prototypes with albeit some unintended consequences (hasOwnProperry) and encapsulated properties by having your closures reference variables from their enclosing context etc, but those techniques are what i call "expressively contrived" Strongly-typed OOP languages have very-well established tried and true patterns for writing test-driven code Ruby while not strongly typed, at least has a concept of Class/methods/inheritance/polymorphism . Problem with Ruby is as i am writing things TDD in it, the first half of my tests are there to ensure that my methods behave correctly when i pass them arguments of the wrong types, and my methods are littered with lines of code ensuring that my arguments have the expected properties. Totally retarded. And Ruby doesn't know anything about an Interface, but that's okay because it's got "fsck-all-typing" so it's not like you would even try to enforce modicums of contracts. Anyway, as applications grow in complexity, building things TDD in strongly-typed OOP languages leads to more fun, and frequent refactoring which makes ur code more stable instead of more brittle. I've written a crap ton of JS code. Java code too. And PHP. And a minimal amount of Ruby: I've appreciated their strengths. And drawbacks. Feel free to learn the same thing I have the hard way: this panacea mentality to stacks is just one big circle jerk. If you think JS, in its current form, is the only true way to build web applications, then by all means, keep that head firmly planted in the sand while the rest of the World out innovates you with a blend of languages and platforms best-suited for their use-cases.

Which gets me to thinking: with free electricity, wouldn't that be a great business opportunity, to build a cloud of servers in poorer Greeks' basements? Maybe that is the real plan behind the free electricity idea.

Hyuk-yuk.

It's not "thinking," you tone-deaf dolt, to joke about a nation that's suffering a severe depression. Your crack has the moral value of someone saying, "Say, 9-10 would have been a great day to short the airplane industry, har-de-har!"

It's simply you hanging your autism out before the entire board.

Here's another idea:

Apple products can be deactivated remotely, even laptops.

Each device has a serial number that can be linked to the gift cards which can be linked to the stolen credit cards.

Do a little bit or leg work, deactivate the illegally obtained devices. Even if you don't nab the thieves, you make this scheme way less profitable.

A reminder: sensible men and women have already voted on the merits of Congress.

As Gallup confirmed once more in its December 14 poll, Americans agree on at least one thing in our most divided land. We're led by idiots, chiselers, maniacs and fools:

"Natural" means "tested by hundreds of thousands of your ancestors who lived to reproduce", provided this is actually true for whatever you're eating.

"Artificial" means "some lab tech trying to feed his/her family on 50k/year synthesized it and then it passed FDA testing without killing anyone or making them sick right away"