So in other words they can choose between China paying them a visit to bring them corrupt free market communism, Russia dropping in to bestow upon them the blessings of cleptocracy or the USA taking another crack at bringing them plutocracy when all they really want to do is practice their own home gown brand of nepotism and corruption?

Seattle is rainy as fuck, though.

There is no such thing as a winnable war, nuclear or otherwise, and anybody who thinks there is such a thing has either never experienced war or that person is dumber than a palette of bricks.

As long as it is only the US government's corruption, abuse of power and their ongoing rape of the US constitution that Snowden is exposing then I'm pretty sure the Russians are perfectly happy to allow him to continue and if Snowden has half a brain he will allow the Russians opposition to handle exposing the similar shenanigans of the Russian government.

I would only bother with Objective-C if I was anticipating having to develop a lot of code for OS X or iOS which might be worth your time since there is money to be made there and IMHO it is a fun language to code in. There is a FOSS Cocoa implementation for Linux, GNUstep but I don't know how current it is or how much cross platform development it allows. Integrating C++ code in Objective C programs (aka. Objective-C++) is as easy as integrating C code into a C++ program so for cross platform purposes you'd be best advised to write as much of your business logic in C++ or even C and use more platform specific languages like Objective-C for view and controller logic. Basically write as much in C++ or C as you can since both can be used in Objective-C apps. That way, if you also want to, say... have an Android version you could write Java wrappers for your C/C++ code. Finally be very careful about what system calls and libraries you use. Just because something is available on Linux does not mean it is available on OS X, the other *NIX'es or Windows. I have all to often seen people end up with egg on their faces after spending significant amounts of time developing something on Linux and using everything Linux offer with wild abandon only to find out hat several key functions or even entire libraries are not available on other target platforms like, say Sun OS or AIX or that even if these are available they behave in a totally different way (example: Lex/Yacc). When doing CP development, even if it is just across multiple Linux/Unix platforms, it pays to write unit tests and regularly compile your software and run the entire test battery on target platforms other than the one you do most of your development work on (which is likely to be Linux).

That depends on your use-case. If you are Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi you might be better off just shaving your beard off and avoiding cameras. If you are a private citizen who is not trying to hide, not wanted by the police and is just plain old creeped out by being under constant surveillance then this might be a product you want even if it makes you stick out like a sore thumb. It also depends on how commonly accepted this technology becomes. If the public at large eventually gets so creeped out by being under constant surveillance that half of them wear a device like this there is very little the security services in most western democracies could do about it without looking like the Gestapo or NKVD.

... all of that and anal probing.

Can I have my nobeta back? Because this shit is nearly impossible to read and is not formatted in an acceptable way. This is worse than all the internal monologues Deckard has in Blade Runner.

Financial disclosure is standard procedure in scientific publishing. Problem is, of course, that few AGW denialists ever publish anything in scientific journals.

What I find ironic is how they manage to mention the people who actually cracked Enigma twice and only in passing. First one of those British intelligence types blurts out something about Enigma being "stolen by Polish intelligence" and a second time when Turing claims his machine is based on "an old Polish decryption device" (or something to that effect). At the time this movie is supposed to have happened the bomba kryptologiczna, which is probably what they are referring, to was about 3 years old. That may be dated technology today but by the standard of the 1930s three years was not 'old technology'. Turing achieved great things but he and his team didn't crack Enigma all on their own with British ingenuity. They stood on the shoulders of people like Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski and many others who cracked Enigma with Polish ingenuity. They were the ones who originally had the audacity to think that they could crack the world's most sophisticated cypher technology with the meagre resources the Polish cypher bureau had.

Lunix hurrr durrr NSA secret hurr durr privacy hurrrrr

Over 20 years of buying Macs for my family? I don't think so. My employer hands outs Samsung brand Android phones to employees who want a company bought phone. You'd be surprised at how many of those get trashed every year. A couple of dozen of them got sent to the recycler with a broken display from the wear an tear suffered by people pocketing them. According to the Samsung agent the ribbon connecting the display to the motherboard came loose (and people whine about 'bend-gate'). The same goes for their sizeable fleet of Lenovo and Dell laptops, workstations and monitors. The Lenovo laptops for example suffered from ethernet cards that just died after a few months of operation and we had to issue large numbers of users with USB ethernet adapters. Some of the Dells started to suffer bulging battery syndrome and we also had a brief flirtation with using Windows laptops from HP who suffered kernel panics every 3rd or 4th time you plugged them into a (HP brand) dock. I have a lot more examples but I'll let this suffice. I can't honestly say that these other 'reputable vendors' have a noticeably lower fault rate than Apple. I'm just sick and tired by these opinionated wing nuts who come here writing an angry post condemning some companies entire product line based on their experience with one or two their devices that they bought. If you are in the IT business get used to the idea of suffering equipment failures or get out o the IT business.

OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence! .... Get a grip will you?!? Sure there are some problems/bugs Apple doesn't fix and that I had to research and solve myself but then again I have had the same sort of hardware and software related problems with Windows and (Sacrilege!!) Linux. I have been a Mac user for coming up on two decades and I cannot say that I have ever had a major problem with their service. Some of the things that I have had issues with are:

1. A Macbook that refused to boot out of the box. Exchanged without a world of protest for a functioning unit.
2. A Macbook that had a defective display. The display was swapped out three times, because of two defective Sony LCD panels. The first time they replaced the LCD when I bought the laptop in for a RAM upgrade without me even having to ask them to do it.
3. An Apple cinema display that I traded in because of dead pixels. Exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
4. Several charging devices whose connector cables wore out. All were exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
5. More software problems than I care to remember, many solved via the Apple support forum. I have also initiated several support issues with Apple online and so far they have never refused to help me.

Let me dispel a few myths for you (and apologies in advance for robbing you of reasons to feed your irrational hatred of Apple) Apple products do not always 'just work' out of the box, whatever Apples marketing dweebs may say Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support, Apple is no worse than any number of computer software and hardware vendors that I deal with on a regular basis and in my experience Apple is quite a bit better than many of them.

Yep. This is blogspam.

So TV and internet sites like Slashdot have pretty much the same functionality, then.