Air New Zealand: Not Patriots?

As the America's Cup frenzy subsides, we're hearing more behind-the-scenes stories of the good, the bad and the quirky.
I'll leave it to you to rate THIS...
When Team New Zealand was building its America's Cup AC72 catamaran, Air New Zealand denied them help - because the Kiwi sailors were sponsored by a rival airline, Emirates!
Team NZ approached the airline to use its carbon-fibre manufacturing facility, but senior managers turned them down. The airline had the only autoclave machinery in the country capable of producing the specific designs required by the Kiwi sailors. But Air NZ refused as it wanted limited sponsorship rights in return. But that couldn't be done, due to existing major sponsorship from Emirates.
After the rebuff, Team NZ's Auckland-based boatbuilders Cookson Boats found a way to change its autoclave technology to make curved dagger boards for the team, and that machinery was used almost daily for a year while the huge catamaran was being built.
Now *shock*horror*probe* Air New Zealand (which says one of its guiding principles is to champion and promote NZ and its business) says it provided the same service for Oracle!
Our govt pumped $36 million into Team NZ's cup campaign.
Air NZ is owned by our govt.
Yet Prime Minister John Key says Air NZ acted as a commercial organisation and made decisions it believed were in its own best interests.
An Air NZ spokesman said the airline had been strongly supportive of Team NZ, with a commercial arrangement to reduce its travel costs during the cup campaign: "The airline is grateful for the efforts of all Team New Zealand's sponsors, as a successful regatta has driven strong passenger traffic on our Auckland-San Francisco route."
Yes, I'll BET it's benefited financially...
Spite...? Or just straight-out business? You decide.

USA's Cold War Near-Miss

Recently declassified documents show that, in 1961, a hydrogen bomb nearly obliterated America's North Carolina! It would have caused a blast 260 times more powerful than the Hiroshima explosion!

Goldsboro USA: Hiroshima's revenge?

Parker F. Jones (supervisor of the nuclear weapons safety dept at Sandia national laboratories) says that just one simple, vulnerable switch prevented a nuclear catastrophe.
Two H-bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on Jan.24, 1961 after a B-52 bomber broke up in flight. One of the bombs acted like it had been armed and fired: its parachute opened and triggers engaged. Jones writes that the MK39 Mod 2 bomb had four safety mechanisms, one of which was designed to not work in the air. When the aircraft broke up, two others were rendered ineffective. So just one simple low voltage switch stood between the US and a major disaster!
Schlosser discovered the 1969 document through the Freedom of Information Act. And as if that one incident isn't frightening enough, he discovered at least 700 "significant" accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1968!!!
Mind you, though it would've been catastrophic on the immediate populous, should we really feel sorry for the USA's near-miss? After all, this was the country that detonated an H-bomb in space...just because it could! Yes, that's true too!

Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal...

The human touch will soon be removed from purchasing altogether.
Visa will no longer accept signed credit card receipts from next year - mandatory PIN numbers come in from Oct.2014, to curb credit card fraud. Visa reckons smart chips and PINs are much harder to replicate than magnetic strips and (heaven forbid!) signatures.
And by April next year, every Mastercard will have PayPass, its version of touch-and-go technology. Visa will allow banks to decide if their credit cards will use contact-less PayWave charging. But individual account holders will be unable to opt out of contact-less charging.
Tech experts reckon it's easy for account details to be stolen from cards in pockets and handbags, using reading technology on cellphones. The companies dispute this: Visa says its cards have to be within a few centimetres to be activated, transactions cannot be duplicated, and a fully functional credit card cannot be created from intercepted details from a hacking device. Visa and Mastercard also say they haven't seen any increase in fraud after contact-less technology was introduced.
Signatures aren't the only thing becoming obsolete: the personal chequebook is also predicted to go the way of the dodo, though not quite yet. Usage has plummeted in the past decade: while 160 million cheques were written in 2002, just 54 million were written last year. BNZ estimates chequebook use is falling by about 10% every year. For the time being at least, most banks still offer chequebooks, if requested by the customer.
Hmmm, wonder when CUSTOMERS will be removed from the equation entirely...!