Sorry for the late reply, I hope you still read this!

I don't think the issue is the size of governence, more it must be decentralised. Power needs to be close to the people whom it effects with their needs and wants important to the decision making, only then is it effective.

We call our western societies democractic, but are they really? It is what differentiates us from those scary crazy dictatoriships, but we are not much different. I find it hard to imagine the will of the people being pro to everything Snowden has leaked. It has infact shown that the domestic population are the enemy of the state, no matter what way the media and politicians try to spin it. At the heart of anarchism and social libertarian ideals is direct democracy, where indiviudals vote on policies directly instead of electing people to do that for us. Our representational democracy system may sound great on paper but as we see in practice it doesn't really work. I don't see benevolent dicatoriship as ideal at all, that is centralisation of power which is everything libertarian ideals are against.

Moded parent funny, decided to reply now though..

It's worth mentioning that the word libertarian means something completely different in America as to the rest of the world. I'm European, I don't like using the word anarchist in describing my political opinions, because of the connotations of the word. I can happily use Libertarian-(Socialist) though. Libertarianism under capitalism is getting rid of one of the bad guys, and letting the other bad guy multiply ten times in size. Both are incompatible with each other.

For a moment there I thought TFA was not going to blindly name drop China or Russia. Don't worry folks, they did not forget!

Wearables just aren't ready yet for mainstream consumers. Tablets existed way before the iPad and worked relatively well, but had many shortcomings that prevented them from becoming synonyms with day to day life (battery life, desktop interface, too heavy and bulky, wifi infrastructure, to name a few) the iPad came at the right time and became a massive success. Google are being pretty smart I think, they could be selling it for 200$, lots of people would flock to buy it, but that would be stupid. They know it isn't ready, so keeping it within the hands of few, learning what isn't quite right with it and improving it version by version is the right play.

To put it bluntly, Microsoft's past is full of a lot of sleazy shit with their boot attempting to stamp all over the Linux ecosystem many times. To this day I still can't believe they threw over one hundred million dollars (at least, we only have leaked but confirmed information to go on) to SCO (a competitor!) just to hurt Linux. Balmer and Gates built a massive business on the back of their shenanigans, and kudos to them, the game is capitalism at the end of the day.

Is it the same company today? I'm not so sure. I'm sure some of the internal company culture is still there but they have a different vision and direction. Today they announced open sourcing the whole entire .net stack with OS X and Linux support. Any suggestion of that a few years ago and the internet would ridicule you in to crying in a corner.

We should still be wary, that's for sure. They are not the same evil beast they once were though.

Lavabit.

You would need to be a fucking moron to not believe there is not a warrant drafted for the FISC court already. Trust in any US web stakeholders for any users privacy is fallacy. Never mind when getting up to illegal shenanigans found on .onion like Silk Road.

He knows fine well Amazon could start generating profits whenever they want. It is a crazy business model they have but it continues to work well for them. Every year they have more fingers in a plethora of interconnected pies.

FBI: We got the evidence through illict methods, so here is a nice little story we made up that is designed to be difficult to argue against.

The Yes and Better Together campaigns have sensationalised both sides of the argument, it has been very unfortunate that unbiased and impartial facts and information have been so out of reach. While I have no doubt the owner of the startup TFA is talking to has a much greater depth of knowledge in his field than a mere CompSci student like myself and if he feels a no vote is best for his company, then who am I to argue but some of his points are borderline repeat drivile of 'the world is going to fall down' propoganda that have been relented on Scotland increasingly as the referendum has got closer. It worked well for Canada, so it was to be expected for the No side at least. That said..

His first argument about funding, who the hell even knows, he might be right, he might be wrong, it could be exactly the same. That really all depends on the policies of a government that would get voted in next year after a yes vote. Nobody has any idea what party that would be or what policies that party might have. Banks are going absolutely nowhere, two banks (RBS and Lloyds, who are both overwelmingly owned by the UK government is must be mentioned) have said they would move their registered address to London, and quite frankly this is a good thing. Their reckless gambling in part of the economic crash almost brought the UK economy in to chaos. We, the UK taxpayer woke up that day to be informed we bailed them out to the tune for trillions of pounds, and we better just deal with it. Of course it is in their best interests to be registered with a government who will tolerate such recklessness. The biggest threat to Scotland's membership of the EU is the UK wide referendum proposed in 2017. The current Scottish government has spent the last parliment drafting European Law in to Scots Law to make the process as easy as possible. Many of the arguments used to say rentry to the EU after a yes vote would take so long are based around examples like Turkey who are just a mile off meeting the many requirements set for EU entry.

Some countries with their own scessionist regions wanting independence have already stated that if Scotland votes for independence it will have no problem agreeing to her entry to the EU because the referendum is taken place in full agreement with the UK government. (He is referring to Catalonia in Spain)

Way to go for the most uninformed comment in this thread. They are stored under a mountain, nukes aren't exactly front lawn material. The cost of building a new complex to store them would be high and would take a considerable amount of time.

Scotland wants a formal currency union.
Rest of the UK needs their nukes and has no place to put them.

A deal would be done where Scotland keeps the nukes on her shores until a suitable replacement site can be built, this would take a least 10 years, it's been suggested privately already by some Tory minister (I'm sure it was The Guardian that ran the story at the time). That said, this is all moot since the vote isn't going to pass unfortunetly.

Modded parent funny, assuming sarcasm now I'm not so sure..

Unity (back in 2011 remember) is a very twisted example to go for, a piece of very immature software. Part of Ubuntu 11.10 which was an non LTS release. If any IT manager deploys that in the first place you've got much bigger problems than painful support calls.

I'd say publicity mission successfully.

RTFA. The patches are a mess, don't compile cleanly and the wireless driver is missing. Rendering it an expensive paperweight.