The Guardian were probably too scared at the thought of an Apple lawsuit to publish the actual text.

The monarch has no say in it. Lords are selected by the ruling government and seats in the House of Lords are effectively for sale. Donate lots to a party and when they are in government you get made a lord.

When the authorities see the word "hydrogen" then that's immediately going to restrict where they can be flown. In the UK that's already not many places.

NASA gives the thermoelectric generators on the Voyagers 10 more years".

The thermoelectric generators on both Voyagers have a finite lifetime. I don't think it's very much longer until they are both inert lumps of metal. 10 years according to NASA.

It's actually on an adjacent planet rather than Earth, but Opportunity seems like it will just keep going.

xkcd joke about it.

Yeah, we have a similar problem in Europe where the TTIP (as in Transatlantic) would open up to a flood of US products that would fail current European regulations. Only the lawyers are going to get rich out of it.

Similar thing in UK. The right wing press will smear the leaders of parties that are not the Conservatives over their ex-girlfriends, the design of their kitchen and even questioning the patriotism of their parents. Nicola Sturgeon earned a "Most Dangerous Woman in the Country" headline in the Daily Mail (just the English edition, they all have Scottish editions with slightly different content because, well, money) despite the fact that she is not even a candidate in the upcoming General Election.

Well, living in another country I have no oar in this, but don't dynasties have a genetic component? Hillary is a Clinton by marriage but all the Bush's have shared genes.

Also off topic, I'm reminded of the fact that some people don't approve of green traffic lights and their local council requires a significant budget to replace them. Maybe they should try bluer shades of green since blue would be an acceptable colour to the local populace.

Amen. And for the record, nor is the UK where I live.

No, I'd say that both USA and UK have become Oligarchies in the last 30 years.

Are you going for a +5 Funny mod, because I laughed.

In my experience many Europeans who have it as a second language use it more adeptly than alleged native speakers. On first hearing a Swede on TeamSpeak, I was convinced he was English because there wasn't a hint of accent.

Wasn't it the Greeks that called them planets? Or near enough as makes no difference.

There are people who stand in UK elections on similar platforms but they are never of one of the two main parties that form governments.

I guess the US situation will be the same.

Perhaps it depends on the people. Terrorist bombings in London were not uncommon in the early 1990s and there were also a lot of bomb scares around the same time. I was in Victoria station in February 1991 when a bomb exploded. A strange experience, I had my back to the blast and the force of the shockwave, even some 40 meters away, was remarkable. Anyway, a few months later I got stuck in a bank during my lunch hour because a bomb scare caused the police to close Fleet Street while I was in it. Thing is these types of scares always turned out to be false alarms, they never caught one before the fact, so I was nothing but irritated about the fact that a policeman wouldn't let me leave the bank until the all clear had been called. I would have been quite relaxed to walk back along Fleet Street despite this bomb scare.