Actually the last polls showed a majority for staying in the EU. However, it's only the really vocal "get us out now!" people that you generally hear about because they are the ones making a noise. No-one really shouts "Let's keep the status quo because it's working reasonably well!". You can compare this with the Scottish Independence referendum where plenty of noise was generated by the Yes campaign but in the end the silent majority for No won the day.

They are part owner of the submarines, however the Scottish Government say that they don't want them. They want Scotland to be nuclear weapon free. So as part of the negotiations both the rUK and iScotland would work out who gets what, but iScotland won't get the nukes.

Instead what is likely to happen is that Sterling will be split into two: A British Pound and a Scottish Pound. Scotland will get its share of the Bank of England assets and the rest of the UK will get its share. Similarly the debt will be split so that Scotland takes their share of the debt and rest of UK takes its share. Currently the UK government is saying that it will back up all the debt to prevent the threat of independence causing a down rating of debt. It's highly likely that if independence goes ahead then they'll back track on that saying that the situation has changed and that borrowers will have their debt split between the two new nations. That or if Scotland say they don't want any of the debt then they won't get any of the assets either.

In the UK the term football (with no other clarification) means Association Football. US gridiron football is called "American Football". Rugby Football is called "Rugby".

Hatchet's contract with Amazon expired in March. Amazon tried to open negotiations with Hatchet in January for a renewal, but Hatchet declined to respond. Hatchet have continued to drag their feet on a new contract ever since. I understand that some of the issues with delayed shipments is because there is no contract and Amazon do not therefore stock Hatchet books until there is an order and so they have to rely on their supply chain to supply the title - i.e. Hatchet and wholesalers. This also explains why they don't discount or offer pre-orders, they have decided to only source the books when there is an order and they know they can fulfil it from their own suppliers.

Unfortunately the scam works the same way with advertisers as with viewers:

"So you want to show your advert on ESPN. Well I'm afraid we only sell that prime time ad slot in a bundle with ad slots on all these other channels."

And so the merry-go-round continues to spin.

The point is not that the energy company will be able to cut off your refrigerator's function at a whim, but that you will be able to configure your refrigerator to operate based on the price of electricity to maximise your profit. You could do this off a clock, but as the gpp mentioned, we'll have variable generation based on amount of wind and sunshine that will mean that you can take advantage of flucuating prices as supply and demand vary throughout the day.

Another option for your fridge/freezer if it is connected to the internet is that it will be able to monitor electricity prices and price futures and decide to cool to a lower temperature when it's cheaper and switch off when the price goes up. Similarly your air con or heating

You may not be able to get the full text of the copyrighted work, but Google can and has. Google are profiting from an unauthorised copy made of a copyrighted work. If google are allowed to do it, why can't I? I only want to make one copy of each book from the library. I don't intended to sell that unauthorised copy to anyone, heck I don't even intend to let anyone else see even snippets of it. What's the difference? Why are Google allowed to make copies for their own purposes but I am not? Is it because they are a rich company who can afford lawyers to override copyright laws?

Personally, I believe copyright terms are far too long, but if you're going to have them then you should respect them in all cases. It can't be one law for the rich and one law for everyone else. If the term of copyright is too long and causes all these problems with orphaned works, or works being lost to the public domain because there are no copies left when the copyright term expires, then the problem is with the copyright term and we shouldn't allow exceptions for rich companies to circumvent the problems with the law.

Decades only at current prices. Prices having been increasing significantly over the last few years and that trend does not seem likely to change any time soon. If for EUR 20K you can lock in your energy prices for the life of the system (also measured in decades), then you are very likely to make significant savings over that time.

For example, according to UK Department of Energy and Climate Change figures, electricity prices have risen by 63% since 2005, and by over 250% since 1987 (considering 25 years being the typical life of a solar PV installation).

Except that no-one is going to replace a perfectly good vehicle with an autonomous one unless there is a benefit to them. It will be that pepole just move to an autonomous one next time they replace their vehicle. More likely the trend will actually be more and more automation in "normal" vehicles each generation so that everntually the majority of vehicles are autonomous (or capable of being autonomous).

Alongside that will the people who actually see an economic benefit from an autonomous vehicle. If it means that they can spend more time with their family or doing things that are more productive during their commute/travel then they'll buy an autonomous vehicle.

So it's not just the saving from the purported reduction in accidents that makes the economic case for autonomous vehicles, it's the whole equation

The autonomous car would be able to quickly decide whether coming to halt in its current lane is safer or if manoeuvering into other spaces to avoid the child/dog is safer - and probably much more easerly than a human driver who can freeze in panic at an unexpected situation. Additionally the computer can potentially make the cold hearted decision that breaking but still hitting the obstacle, because there is not enough stopping distance, is ultimately the least bad thing to do - for example if there is heavy traffic in the on-coming lane and pedestrians besides the road.

It could also, for example, automatically sound the horn to alert people and perhaps enable the child/dog to notice and get out of the way. A human on the other hand is more likely to be still be evaluating the situation and reacting by slamming on the breaks and not have the foresight (or the co-ordination) to do this.

When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study

Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

You do know that the problem they are trying to solve is accessibility for blind people? Presenting images isn't going to help there.

You seem to have ignored the problem of generating the millions of natural language questions that would then require natural language processing to solve. It's easy to come up with one or two as a human, like the George Washington question above, but unless the majority of questions posed as a replacement for CAPTCHA are unique then all that will happen is that the spammers will use a human to solve the relatively few questions and store the result in a lookup table.

We can see how difficult it is for spam bots to generate to natural language posts so why do you think it would be easy for a computer to generate meaningful natural language questions?

So to paraphrase you: now every web site would need a Watson-class supercomputer to stay in business, being a site operator suddenly doesn't seem very lucrative anymore...