Have you been exposed to the US TSA yet? THEY define hostile incompetence.

I'm legitimately curious.. WTF is with New Zealand and its crazy need to have a spy agency? I've been to NZ. It's a beautiful and largely empty country. More sheep than people and all of that. Why on Earth do they feel the need to be part of the "Five Eyes"? It'd be cute if it weren't just another power-mad, rights-abusing secret stasi service like the NSA.

Any kiwis care to comment?

Boy that takes me back. When receiving a piece of email was worthy of your computer making noise and you getting all excited.

I think you mean yet another case of Stasi thugs bullying a citizen.

Interesting.. I came from android to BB10 and it was a pleasant upgrade. Android just feels like a desktop OS crammed onto a phone. multi-tasking sucks, apps get randomly killed, the whole things slows down. Z10, especially upgraded to 10.2 OS is smooth as butter. I can switch between apps, settings, and messages with total ease. And rumor is that shortly you'll be able to install apps directly from the Play Store.

gives a big toothy grin. Immutable, immortal, obstinate, rare, impervious to alchemy and gimmicks. Hated by the bankers, heavy to carry en masse, just simply good old fucking stupid gold.

When the power goes out gold is still there like the precious big turd it is. But I will take the turd over kanye-coins or bitcoins or shitcoins or other brave new world trinkets..

And no, the 'crash' in gold doesn't really matter. Smooth your purchases over time and forget about the yellow lump just like your don't think about the foundation that keeps your house upright.

Or should I say poor little treasonous babies. You actively participate in the desecration of the Constitution and then you feel all pouty that America is unhappy when it finds out?

Guess what, bitches, America doesn't need your uber algorithms, satellites, or any other fancy toys. You (the intel community) has demonstrated that you can't handle HUMAN INT (see: 9/11, boston bombers) so stop claiming you need this geek starship of SIGINT to protect us little lambs. Losers.

Sounds like all "Mo" needed to do was pull his antics via VirtualBox with some firewall rules in place to block any outbound but to Yahoo or whatever his preferred launching pad was for his juvenile noise. Sheesh.

Also can't shake the image of Moe Sizlack, the Simpson's bartender, muttering to himself as he sends off the next faux threat.

As much as I love my country and as much as I despise the rise of the MIC and the borderline treasonous activities of the NSA I don't think anything is going to change. The very nature of Government now is different. I'm not going to wax romantic about an imaginary time gone by when the Government was all humble and citizen-serving but it now has something of a life and intent of its own. The public is a captive source of funding and their desires mostly just aggravation when they run counter to the collective aims of the incestuous clique of government agencies and their contractors.

Throw in that accountability is mostly gone and there's absolutely no reason to believe anything with the NSA will change. They have nothing to fear. There will be a Congressional hearing or two, concerns will be expressed, they will emphasize "strict controls" and whatever other language seems appropriate. A committee will be formed that in six months to a year will produce a voluminous report nobody will read. Then the closed-door meetings will resume and the quasi-legal FISA courts will continue the rubber stamping. The only real hope is a true third party but the red/blue conglomerate will due whatever it takes to stop that from happening.

This is all well and good and inevitable but society really needs to think hard and fast about what we are going to do with a future where there are only so many jobs available for people with a shovel or a wrench. It used to be something like 30% of the nation was involved with food production. Thanks to industrialization that's now 1-2%. Even the last bastions of farm work -- fruit picking -- is being inched into by robotics. The farm hands who left the fields and went into the factories are now finding themselves being replaced en masse by sophisticated machines.

In the utopian fantasy the rise of the bots means the people have more leisure time and devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. In the reality playing out they go on disability and other "safety net" programs and lead meager lives of not-so-quiet desperation. As it is there are now more people going on disability than entering the work force. The economics of all this is just disastrous. From the government deficit on down to the generation of kids being raised in food stamp households the situation is untenable. One can only hope we find a path forward that does not involve increasing social decay and civil unrest.

It's a brave new world alright.

Secret program approved by secret courts run by a guy who has no qualms about lying under oath. Sorry but your credibility will only return once you get rid of FISA courts and replace yourself with someone who doesn't consider people who disagree with mass surveillance as being filthy, disobedient children. Massive ass that you are. And yes, he did make that comparison.

How about instead of trying to duck and weave around the NSA we do it right and demand they dismantle their illegitimate spying apparatus? Remember the part about where the government is supposed to answer to the people?

Which is almost why I hope the Government remains shut down and the debt default happens. Starve this god damned out of control machine and pink slip the agenda-drunk twats who toil to make the surveillance state happen. And since you're recording some details about this somewhere, NSA - a cheery "fuck you" to you.

I remember on 9/11 all the major news sites were effectively DDoS. I hope they and twitter now have a convenient switch to flip that will, in the case of the news sites, jettison all the garbage ad content and the complex page rendering code in favor of something more textual that would result in 100x page view scaling. For twitter I would imagine dedicating 10% of their infrastructure to purely asynchronous emergency broadcasts would do the trick in such a circumstance.

This is the best news I've read all week. Not that I want to see American jobs lost but so far this the only real consequence I've come across for the actions of those agenda-drunk geeks in the NSA and their raging boners for their data vacuuming machines.