Sounds like this fellow followed a very beaten path of tech folk who decide to bypass college because a company wants them for their skills... and do not give a damn about their genital arrangement or skin pigmentation.

And get a blackberry Q10.. it can run all Android apps, has great battery life, unparalleled security, and you can be smug around your apple fanboi hipster friends who no longer know what a bbery is.

Rules (and blind adherence) multiply in the absence of common sense.

and yet /. folk cheer on the demise of BlackBerry.. the one phone that has a near flawless security record.

and yes, full disclosure, I own a z10. I also find it to be the best smart phone I've ever owned with battery life that my android friends can only dream about.

and weren't willing to play ball our way we'd decry them as a murderous regime.

Huh? No politician out there would dream of touching social security or medicare with a ten foot pole. Heck, we don't even have the most basic means testing. The senior voting bloc is too powerful. And yet.. everyone knows that these entitlements will not.. CAN not exist in their current form for the next generation. So, in short, the seniors are voting themselves some pork taken off the plates of the working generation.

If you need another example look at unions. They bribe / strong-arm / do whatever it takes to get preposterous sweetheart deals made with politicians that are based on pie-in-the-sky investment strategies. Just look at CALPERS and others.

When someone tries to point out that these agreements will bankrupt the municipality they fight tooth and nail to keep their loot even when it means cutting back on schools and everything else that benefits the upcoming generation.

They know that above all the oil must flow. Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher. Without flowing oil the economy suffers (many past recessions were precipitated by high oil prices), the common man starts to get irritated at higher food prices, less disposable income.. for those that had disposable income to start with. The house of cards starts to sway even more.

Cheap oil is the real bread and circus that keeps the masses subdued. Some dead whales and dolphins isn't even a consideration.

People will vote themselves entitlements at the expense of future generations. It's the fatal flaw of democracy.

I'm not sure it matters much anyways. Barring a total miracle like Rossi's unicorn reactor it seems we've already passed the point of no return. If you haven't had kids -- don't. As painful as that sounds.

No self-respecting foreign firm with any sort of confidential info is going to do any business with any US cloud or services provider. Throw in the FISA secret rubber stamp machine and who knows what other data siphoning is in place and you may as well just mail copies of everything to any three-letter agency and, most likely, their MIC bedfellows.

America's standing slips by the day. Thank you MIC and the myopic zealots that are part of das Home Security apparatus.

What? Obama worked out all the loopholes to enable spying? Please! That's suggesting he actually gave enough of a rat's ass about the Constitution to worry about side-stepping it. No need, just have a quasi-legal court apparatus working in secret that approves everything that gets near it.

Then, when the annoying asses^H^H^H^H^H public makes a fuss about this egregious violation of our nation's founding document you do what a duplicitous, double-speaking, consummate politician does.. say something like "Look - I know there are concerns about finding the right balance between our civil liberties and our security and frankly I share them. I am appointing a special secret committee of NSA folks to review all this and report their findings to me. Now fuck off^H^H^H^H I want to assure you that your concerns are heard loud and clear. God bless America."

You have a good command of biology. My fundamental objection is with this statement:

What if there was a co-occurring mutation that was, at that time, more advantageous than the loss of vitamin C production? What if the loss of vitamin C production happened to a population living in an area with abundant ascorbic acid in their food? Maybe they killed off their less-lucky neighbours? The notion that something is because it's got to be optimal is false. There's a lot of flexibility to life even within a species.

It may be true that we've some advantage by not producing this vital anti-oxidant. I just rather doubt it.

The error in your statement is that you believe evolution only accumulates the good and never the bad. Why is there a whole raft of genetic diseases in the human population now? Shouldn't they have been "selected out" a long time ago?

...in Massachusetts. Seriously, no joke. After the marathon bombings there was an unending outpouring of adulation for the "first respondahs." You'd think they had, at enormous losses, turned back the Taliban from invading Cambridge and raping the childrens. Not, in actuality, shut down the entire city while they raced around with giant hardons in a largely bungled effort to locate a bleeding, unarmed boy hiding in someone's boat in their back yard (whom the homeowner found and frankly should have clubbed to death on the spot). In the process of arresting this unarmed miscreant they unleashed a barrage of fire on the boat very nearly killing the kid in the process.

Meanwhile folks are still running around with their "Boston Strong" shirts on in one of the lamest displays of self-congratulatory faux heroism that I've ever seen .

The cops and firefighters are milking it with giant billboards touting some BS about being "on the home team", trying to get people to donate to some police fund. It's pathetic.

This 501(c)3 nonsense is just further evidence of their warped perspective of what it is "to protect and serve."

It amazes me that you subscribe to the idea that a local desktop hard drive crash wiped out all email for a high-ranking IRS official... and that the IRS is essentially shrugging at any notion of ineptitude. Clearly you know fuck all about tech.

I've been to NZ.. it's a wonderful place. Beautiful, raw, remarkable in all of its unique features. It's also pretty fucking empty with more sheep than people. There isn't a threat within 5,000 miles unless Australia turns Taliban. The worst thing they need to look out for is Chinese fishing poachers emptying their seas.

In all seriousness, please, kiwis, tell me why you have a //spy agency//?! Enjoy the wonderful land you live in and leave the stupids to the rest of the world.