In Scotland it's arguably the other way around. The UK benefits from Scottish oil and renewable energy. Scotland would be better off keeping it for itself. Unfortunately a lot of the oil wealth has already been squandered.

Scotland also leans much further to the left than England, but ends up with very right wing English governments and policies. Devolution of power has helped a bit but ultimately only independence will fully protect them.

Can you name something Salmond won't get? It all seems fairly certain that he can get things like a currency union, EU membership, rid of Trident etc.

There will be plenty of time to sort out EU membership before Scotland becomes independent. The date isn't even nailed down, it's just expected to be within a couple of years of the vote.

As for paperwork, it's hardly unprecedented. As you point out quite a few other states have split. Everyone just has to decide which side they want to be on before the deadline in a couple of years, and indicate that choice. Since there will almost certainly be a currency union anyway it isn't likely to matter if you have accounts "over the border". The actual border will be open and free to cross, just as it is now.

The problem for Scotland is they get screwed by the government based in London on a regular basis. It's always worse with the current lot in power (Tories). The only way they can be sure that will never happen again is by becoming independent.

Anyway, they will still be in Europe, so still part of a big group, and still able to trade with the rest of the UK more or less as before.

People forget about their wind resources too. By 2020 they will be 100% renewable; that is, 200% capacity available with half of it being renewable, mostly wind. They will be exporting a lot of clean energy at a time when the rest of the UK can't seem to convince investors to build new capacity.

The UK can't refuse to have a currency union in practice. It might go as far as the European courts or other international bodies, but the currency is basically as much theirs as it is the rest of the UK's.

If the vote is yes then the rest of the UK will negotiate a union because it's in their best interests. Otherwise investors are going to start pulling out of the UK fast because if Scotland doesn't keep Sterling the rest of the UK's debt will increase massively in proportion. Sterling would also lose many of the assets it is valued against, like North Sea oil.

It'll never quite stop being weird that Commander Keen, cartoony platformer, is what the guys behind Doom and Quake were working on in their early days....

The mistake they make in the UK is to state things with too much certainty. In most countries they say "20% chance of rain", and when it rains people say "bad luck". In the UK they say "no rain tomorrow" and when it rains people say "they don't have clue".

Lately they have been trying to soften their language by saying "it probably won't rain", but that doesn't really help as it just makes them sound unsure and even more clueless. Apparently they think British people are too stupid to understand complex mathematics like "20 percent".

It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.

I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.

In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...

It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.

If Apple can reset your password and your imessages can still be recovered, they can read them.

Apple say that the data is encrypted with a key derived from your password. Okay, that says they could be telling the truth, in so far as they don't store the key.

However, in practice it's meaningless. They could easily make the client send the password to them in plaintext for target accounts (weren't Hushmail suspected of doing that years ago?) For most users they could just brute force the password. We have to take their word for it that the password storage is properly secured, e.g. hashed with a unique salt value.

When the FBI comes knocking with a National Security Letter all bets are off.

Data stored by Apple certainly does generate revenue them. It's a service that requires or at least strongly encourages you to buy expensive Apple hardware. They don't provide it out of generosity.

To be fair they might be screwed by an inability to licence stuff. A lot of services outside the US have poor catalogues. Even Netflix can't compete with BitTorrent.