The EU is actually really useful for the UK - or at least it was until Tony B.Liar gave away a whole load of our hard-bargained for advantages to make cheap polititical capital for himself.

Says the AC...

It's clearly aimed at luring voters away from UKIP who are getting increasingly frustrated at EU interference in every level of UK life but are uneasy about voting for the "swivel-eyed loons".
As you said, another populist soundbite that will be quickly forgotten. The only advantage to teaching kids Metric was that learning to do all the conversions helped practice mental arithmatic but in an age where everyone has a calculator on their smartphone that's really not so important anymore.

I grant you that I indeed could have worded that better. You are entirely correct that phones of today do more power intensive tasks than they did back then, causing greater drain on the batteries. But that does in no way invalidate the point I were trying to make; that there are very good arguments for being able to easily swap batteries and that apart from the "ooh... shiny" factor there are absolutely none for non-swappable ones as the only real benefit is that manufacturers can shave off a couple of tenths of millimetres of thickness and easier create a seamless design. Neither of which have any usability benefit with the possible exception of hipsters with jeans so tight they do need that extra tenth of an millimeter to fit it into the pocket.

I didn't realise the EU court had moved from Strasbourg to Ireland...

I see that BS line trotted out by companies all the time - "If you don't give us favourable treatment we'll go play with our ball somewhere else". I say that government should call their bluff - the next company that tries it just gets their licence to trade pulled and their shares suspended. See how quick the other companies back down.

You are confusing Apple with their customers.

That explains why my Marantz amplifier from 1980 (which I still use) came with a circuit diagram that I will consult in a near future to fix a low frequency hum that started occurring a few weeks ago after 34 years of flawless sound reproduction. oh wait...

In the mid-late 90's it were not uncommon that mobiles were sold with an extra battery and charging station that charged both the battery in the phone and the spare one I know this might sound a bit like dark magic to some iPhone users but I assure you that it isn't, more than once did I favor one with this over another that required me to buy these extras separately. I could easily swap batteries if needed, and this were in the days when one charge actually would last for days in difference from today where users look for apps and tweaks to conserve battery power just to make it last from morning 'till evening. One would expect that with smartphones and their relatively poor ability to hold a charge this would be even more important today. But, apparently many people just go "Ooh... shiny" then spend a great deal of their time whining over how they cannot make their charge last even one working day. A battery that require special tools to replace is hardly a convenient solution to this, one that you can replace by snapping off a lid is.

I'm just surprised they didn't do a system where there's a code on the side of the can good for something like an hour's access. Would drive sales nicely.

Apple may not have designed it to thwart lawful search warrants but they certainly market it that way.

"This was the Tory plan all along. They saw the financial crisis as a huge opportunity to undo some of the damage that 13 years of the Tony'n'Gordon show did to the UK" - TFTFY. And no, I'm not a Tory voter - I hate them almost as much as I hate nuLabour. Politics nowadays is like saying "Here's a pint of sick, a pint of piss and a pint of dysenteric shit. Which one are you going to drink?"

45% x 85%(the turnout) x 95% (voter registration) = 36% - that's only just over 1/3rd of the population voted for independance. Lrn 2 Math.

It was about 30 years since the last referendum on independance. In 30 years time Salmond will be long dead and the North Sea oil will have run out. Unless Scotland magically comes up with some other means of funding itself then independance will be a death sentence for them.

"I wanted to see crows eat that fascist Cameron" - TFTFY