When the Menzies government went looking for a new bomber aircraft in 1963 it was with the requirement that the bomber should have sufficient range to drop a nuclear weapon on Jakarta. So, no, it does not surprise me that the Australians spied on the Indonesian president and it would surprise me even less if later turns out that the Indonesians reciprocated by spying on his Australian counterpart. In fact the only thing that will surprise me is if it later turns out that spying on each others presidents is all these two countries did.

Is that one of the side effects of intelligent design?

He just wants a couple of extra billions for his offshore account before he buys a villa in some gated community patrolled by ex-special forces and lives the easy life and if he wants to take the risk one can't fault him for that. Of course, all of this is according to 'the people briefed on the matter' whoever they are ('the people', it sounds like a news summary on Fox News). At least this way his employees know they have until early next year to find new jobs before the company gets 'acquired' and most of their jobs, except for a few key personnel, will be axed during the merger by a bunch of expensive designer clothes wearing, Harvard Business School degree wielding 20 somethings.

Surfing while driving isn't the only crazy thing people do while driving. Myself I have: operated my navigation aid while driving, flipped through the music library on the car stereo while driving, I have also answered calls while driving but I have a completely hands-free bluetooth enabled stereo for that. Out of those three I'd say the finding the correct music track on the stereo is probably the most distracting (makes you wish Siri actually worked properly). Over the last 20 years I have observed other drivers: texting while driving, bending over the back of their seat to pacify their kids in the rear seat while driving, applying makeup while driving, applying hair products while driving, reading a map/magazine while driving, using the rear view mirror to observe themselves as they pick their teeth while driving, eating yoghurt or some similar food product while driving and that's what I can remember off the top of my head. Nose picking also seems to be a very popular activity among drivers but I'd rate that as somewhat less dangerous than and distracting than most of the other stuff I have listed unless you are in the habit of examining your boogers before you eat them.

...with lots of enthusiastic help from market Capitalists. That leaves all participants in the Cold war with a fatally flawed system of government.

WxWidgets, support for OS X, Cocoa, GTK+ 3 ... if you are a geek that kind of tells you everything you need to know to make a well educated guess. If you are not a geek, and missed the link to their website in the summary, WxWidgets is a cross-platform library for GUI development on Windows, OS X, Linux and mobile/embedded flavors of these same OS'es. It allows you to develop apps for anything from full blown desktop OS'es through mobile phones, to things like cash registers and handheld credit-card swiping machines.

No, according to Forbes it will probably be curved from top to bottom like the LG Flex, not curved from side to side like that Samsung device. That, IMHO, makes a bit more sense than curving it from side to side since (as the Forbes article points out) it addresses that little pain-point where either the phone is too far from your mouth, or not close enough to your ear. And I'm afraid that both Apple, LG and Samsung were all beaten to it on the curved mobile phones front by Motorola, the DynaTAC was shaped to bring the microphone closer to your mouth, a feature it inherited from much older conventional land-line phone designs.

That sums it up pretty nicely. Outside of Slashdot nobody gives a rats ass about this holy war against the Anti Christ (aka. Apple). People buy what they like and a lot of them like phones with large displays.

It would be more funny if you used this unique trait of the Tesla to scare other drivers. How about this? ... there was an interview in one of those car shows on Discovery Channel with a Ford owner who wrote: "Don't tailgate me, I explode on impact!" in large letters on the rear window of her Pinto.

The thing that killed off Blackberry was not the fact that they stuck with what they were good at. The problem was that they sat with their thumb up their ass for far too long and didn't improve the things they were good at. It might also have helped if they had tried really hard to become extremely good at new stuff. Microsoft, Apple and then Google, with it's Android OS starting doing everything Blackberry did, including push-mail which was one of the Blackberry killer features, but the competition was doing it better. By the time Blackberry finally got off it's ass and innovated it was too late. Once Android started taking off it became increasingly obvious that for any OS to compete with Android it needed to be able to run Android apps and Blackberry realized that too late. That's still true today, any upstart Mobile OS that's just hit the market and that wants to compete seriously with Android needs to be able to run Android apps seamlessly. You need a large volume of Apps for your upstart (Linux based?) Mobile OS to even be considered as an option by consumers and the place that has the biggest App collection is the steadily growing Android monoculture. You can also try to break into Apple's walled garden but I don't recommend it, I hear their lawyers have sharp claws and they bite.

Funny, when I tell the average consumer that when they use Google Maps it streams information about their movements back to Google who archives that data and sells it, most of them are surprised. When you tell them that Google, Facebook, et al. track their browsing habits even when they are not logged in to those services... same reaction. You may be perfectly aware of the parasitic relationship you are getting into with Google but the average consumer is not, hence the outrage over the NSA surveillance. When the shitstorm over that dies down the media might just turn the spotlight on Google, Facebook et al. and people will be just as creeped out.

And people are worked about the NSA... At least they are only tracking the movements of a relatively small percentage of the citizenry, Google would seem to be tracking every Android user and many iOS users' movements.

Bah! What we are seeing here is obviously an alien mining operation.

If you are worried about Apple finding out where you live when you signing up for an Apple ID, keep in mind that when you sign up for G-mail Google is parsing your personal correspondence. Google is also archiving your search history, you can disable search history in your account but they probably keep tracking it nevertheless. If you start using Google Docs they may also be parsing that data. I'm not sure what their policy is on photographs that you upload to Google+/Picasa Web Albums but you are probably not going to like that either if you are worried about Apple knowing your name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. Also, why would you be more worried about Apple finding out your: name, mailing address, email address, and phone number than you are about Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Ebay finding out the same data?

Yeah but they still have a point, their business model is not based on "collecting, storing, and analysing data about every aspect of your life" and then converting it into cash. It's a question of prioritization. If living outside of Apple's 'walled garden' is more important to you than your privacy then by all means use Google's services and devices running their OS. Alternatively you could use products from a third party although that is, admittedly, not easy in the growing Android monoculture we find ourselves increasingly stuck with. In the mean time perhaps we should all consider not going for click-bait like this story.