The Stay campaign seems far worse when it comes to scaremongering. Every day they are saying billions will be wiped of this or that, but in actual fact they really have no clue at all. There are plenty of intelligent arguments going both ways, but we have heard precisely zero of them from either campaign. Instead its just been unsubstantiated scaremongering. On top of this, the people who want to leave are being marginalized as racists, even though in the past, many of the leading left-wing politicians wanted to leave the EU, claiming it to be capitalistic and undemocratic.

And we only had coal because when trees first appeared, there happened to be nothing around that could digest them, so they just piled up, got buried and eventually became coal. However, it's not a complete show stopper since you can make charcoal from wood which does burn hot enough for melting iron.

It did for the horses. We are the horses now.

I think you may be confusing socialism with communism. Communism and totalitarianism have often gone hand in hand, not socialism and totalitarianism. I've noticed in political debates in the US that the term "Socialism" is often used in such a negative way that it seems that they really mean Communism. It's quite bizarre.

The American dream is the idea that anyone with humble beginnings can rise up and become a success, perhaps a billionaire or president etc. There is however a name for this phenomenon. It's called social mobility and is quite measurable. The US has an absolutely terrible social mobility. Ironically, if you want the "American Dream" you will need to move to a more socialist country like Denmark, or perhaps more conveniently, right next door to Canada.

From what I've read, Boston Dynamics may have been misrepresenting the success of their robots via editing. A bit like someone filming themselves throwing a basketball over their shoulder and then uploading the 1 successful attempt out of 200 attempts. A soon as their bipedal robot was put to a live test at the Darpa competition, it seemed to be falling all over the place even on flat ground. This is sure to have rung alarm bells at google.

This article springs to mind. http://www.popularmechanics.co...

We really need to see long unedited videos of any new robots in action to have any confidence in their reliability.

They probably don't use computers for it, but the Swiss public can overturn new legislation by instigating a referendum. I believe it requires something in the region of 50 thousand signatures to kick off a referendum. This is a good compromise between purely representative democracy (which is often not very representative at all) and absolute direct democracy . Let the government do its job making dull but necessary new laws etc, but if they get out of line with some new law etc, we should have a constitutional and effective way of striking it down that doesn't involve mass protest and teargas.

In Britain, referendums are rarely granted by the government and in a number of cases they have promised them and then actually backtracked. They don't like handing power over to the public. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be for the public to simply overrule the government over something like TPP?

The question is, how do we get there?

A password you also leave imprinted on anything you touch.

How did I manage to get a typo in such a short post? :)

...is Snowden's only hope is he returns to face the music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I worked for a company with large amounts of VB6 code, certainly over a million dollars worth of developer time. The company simply could not afford to do a rewrite. I still can barely believe that Microsoft would screw so many businesses by doing that.

I vividly remember everyone gathering around as I used the project conversion wizard to convert from VB6 to VB.NET. I knew it wouldn't really work due to fundamental differences in the languages, but I felt we had to go through the motions. We sat there and watched the estimated time of completion climb and climb and climb. Eventually I think it just crashed.

At the time we had a big meeting and I tried to convince the company that we should move away from Microsoft technologies to avoid similar pain in the future. However, such is the "Gravitational Pull" of Microsoft products, we ended up sticking with them.

Of course, if there had been a compatible rival product (some kind of Borland VB) then it would have been much harder for Microsoft to abandon the language. This could be an issue if they try to abandon .NET due to the existence of Mono.

Even if a solar panel in Geosynchronous orbit generated 100x more energy than an equivalent panel on earth (which seems unlikely), it makes no economic sense to put it there since you could put several hundred panels on the Earth's surface for a small fraction of the cost. In fact you could fill an entire football field full of panels for a fraction of the cost of the space based solution. Just through sheer numbers they would generate more than the space-based panel even on a cloudy day.

Simple repairs are also orders of magnitude cheaper for the ground-based solution.

Entrants must design a robot than can autonomously navigate to Amazon's vast cash mountain, located somewhere in Luxembourg, and seize the hundreds of millions they really owe in taxes.

In slow motion you can see that the bullet barely travels any distance at all. - Quote from the video

What we in fact see is that the object that "barely travels any distance at all" is the spent shell casing. This is completely fine as the aim is not to magically embed the spent shell casing into the target. That is what the projectile part is for. The projectile is likely to have whizzed off as expected, albeit not with great accuracy.

As for the general usefulness of plastic firearms, even if they can only fire a few shots, there are clear advantages.
1. You can obtain a firearm without it being registered to you or exposing yourself to criminal firearms dealers/police sting operations.
2. They are less detectable.
3. You can melt and/or burn the murder weapon with ease.

The tone of the video is a bit odd. It's comes across like a video trying to convince kids not to play with fireworks. It's not as if we all have loads of ammunition laying about here in the UK just waiting for a 3D Printed gun to come along so we can finally have some fun. Making something that can fire a bullet (at least here in the UK) is not the main obstacle to a working firearm. The main obstacle here is obtaining the ammunition.

I had a friend who was violently mugged here in the UK, and the police weren't even interested in taking a statement. They just told him to go to the hospital if he felt dizzy (the robbers hit him over the head).

When a UK journalist gets mugged though, he gets star treatment

I could point out that the BBC is really just Britain's Russia Today, and go into details why, but it would be a distraction from the more fundamental issue.

Most news organisations operate in the same non-objective way whether they are government controlled or completely commercial. They report more favourably on their host country (and allies) than on enemies. For example, the BBC will report on Iranian police violence against protesters very harshly. It will be implied that the police violence is extreme and unwarranted and the unarmed and peaceful nature of the protesters will be emphasised (with protester violence even being ignored). In contrast, the same kind of violence perpetrated by UK police will be reported very differently. It will either be under-reported ("Police scuffled with protesters") or the focus will be on protester violence.

All you have to do to see this for yourself is do a search and replace on country/city names in articles. Suddenly that article damning Russia for the Seige of Grozny will be an article damning the US for the Seige of Fallujah. You will notice that sentences like "What right does the US have to order the citizens to leave." are quite jarring and do not seem like the kind of thing the news would normally say in this situation. This is your clue that something is very wrong with mainstream media reporting.