Sounds like they need to start their own, competing union.... Maybe some other EU countries will abandon the EU and join their union instead, since this new union wouldn't be all about supporting existing powerful players.

What's the alternative? Invade with guns blazing? That didn't work so well for Iraq; it led directly to ISIL. It hasn't worked out well for Afghanistan either. We already tried deposing an Iraqi government we didn't like and setting up a friendly government, and it got us here. How is doing the exact same thing going to work this time?

As for DeBeers, that didn't work because we (western nations) haven't actually done anything to DeBeers to stop the diamond trade. There's a DeBeers store not far from me in Manhattan NYC, even though they should be banned since they violate lots of anti-trust statutes. If we aren't actually going to hold corporations accountable to our laws, then we deserve whatever happens to us as a result.

If we would get off our asses and build SkyTran so we didn't need cars, we wouldn't be very worried about oil, but we're too stupid and shortsighted to free ourselves from our oil dependency, so as far as I'm concerned, we deserve whatever happens to us as a result.

No, not really. Anyway, why would Cameron care about looking like a tyrant to the Scots? The Tories basically have no presence in Scotland anyway, and nothing to lose. Nevertheless, there are myriad ways he could have set up the referendum to as to make it very hard for the SNP to win; requiring a 75% vote in favour for example, or allowing Scots currently resident in England to vote - or even allowing the whole UK to vote. Why he decided to set up a referendum extremely favourable to the independence campaigners is anyone's guess.

I think you need to distinguish between terrorism and reign of terror. Hit-and-run bombings like the IRA or ETA rarely succeed in people giving in to terror. Taking actual control of areas, waving the flags and killing off all that oppose you has a much better historical record, ask anyone from Pol Pot to Hitler and Lenin and Mao. In case you haven't noticed, they're using their brutal savagery primarily to quell resistance and internal dissent. The story they're selling is that they're too fucking crazy to pick a fight with and so far they seem more than willing to put that reputation to the test and post it on YouTube.

I mean, would you like to be in a resistance movement inside IS territory? Do they care that they can't find you? Heck no, they'll just round up a few civilians and shoot them in retaliation for your sabotage/assassination/sedition. Far more civilized occupants have used that tactic, all those millions of people they control are in practice hostages. You're fighting an enemy willing to overreact to any provocation, give them a push and you won't get a shove back they'll beat you to a bloody pulp. And given their history so far, I don't think they have a problem with human shields. You can not excise them without massive civilian casualties. Sadly I give them much better odds than you predict.

So what? North Korea has been around quite a bit longer than I have, and doesn't show any signs that it'll disappear anytime soon. It's been happily subjugating people since the 1950s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. You don't need a proper civil government that runs smoothly to have a successful country.

Not the same. We only armed the locals after invading and destroying their infrastructure and military, disbanding the army, and then trying to create a puppet government that didn't have any popular support, and didn't have a competent army because all the experienced people were sent packing after we defeated Saddam. Of course they dropped everything and ran: they didn't have anything to fight for or believe in.

The Kurds aren't like this at all: they're well organized and motivated, despite all our efforts to the contrary.

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

I don't think people understand the Unix philosophy. They think it's about limiting yourself to pipelines, but it's not. It's about writing simple robust programs that interact through a common, relatively high level interface, such as a pipeline. But that interface doesn't have to be a pipeline. It could be HTTP Requests and Responses.

The idea of increasing concurrency in a web application through small, asynchronous event handlers has a distinctly Unix flavor. After all the event handlers tend to run top to bottom and typically produce an output stream from an input stream (although it may simply modify one or the other or do something orthogonal to either like logging). The use of a standardized, high level interface allows you to keep the modules weakly coupled, and that's the real point of the Unix philosophy.

FYI, North Korea has made three underground nuclear detonations in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Very few doubt that they now got a few nukes in the kiloton range - basically 1940s tech - and the means to deliver them to Seoul - a mere 35 miles away from the NK border. China doesn't care. They got a loyal ally, they could crush him at any moment and it'd only create hostility between Koreans and Chinese. And the country is not worth the trouble. I guess if China ever went on the offensive they'd gobble up NK - and probably SK too - but only if they're on the warpath anyway.

What they should do is use the ocean version of "pumped storage": build a giant vertical cylinder in the ocean, and when you have surplus electricity you pump water OUT of the chamber. Then when usage peaks and you need more electricity, you let water run back in and turn turbines to generate it.

It's probably a hell of a lot cheaper than batteries. Pumped storage has been an up-and-coming technology for 20 years now. I worked on one project in which they hollowed out an entire stone mountain, creating huge chambers to store water for a pumped-storage system.

Sounds like a good idea: Israel is in sore need of allies in the region, so maybe if they became allies of the Kurds it could work to their mutual benefit.

I see, this makes perfect sense now. IMO, it'd be better if all these break-away regions broke away and became new countries. That's why they're in the EU, after all: the union facilitates free trade and a strong shared currency (in theory at least), so things would be better if all these regions broke away and then joined the EU as new member states, instead of their people constantly being angry that they're in an involuntary union with some other country they don't like so much.

BTW, which regions in Italy want to break away? I hadn't heard about that, though I'm familiar with Catalan and the Basque region wanting to break away from Spain.

Of course China would be against any self-determination; they're all about forcing people into a single union under an authoritarian government which only benefits one group.

When I was a child, we had a nice wood boat. A ChrisCraft. The finish was getting pretty weather-worn so my father took it to a guy who refinished boats to get it done. He specified brass screws, just like the original. The refinisher said, "Everybody uses stainless steel these days. They're just as good." My father reluctantly let him use the stainless steel screws.

The boat was moored by strong chains to a dock in the ocean. (You had to leave lots of play in the chains so the boat could ride up and down with the tide.) A few weeks later, by family got a call from the SeaBees. They had found the boat, dangling underwater by the chains holding it to the dock pilings.

The seawater had eaten the stainless steel screws right up. It only took a few weeks.

Small waves and ripples carry a lot of energy. Even the small waves that are not, on average, enough to budge a houseboat at all, can charge batteries and power lights, pumps, TVs, etc.