also, HS2 will be paid out the national infrastructure budget - which means that Scotland has to pay 8.9% of the bill (which includes the debt interest) even though it will never get within 200 miles of our cities. The new train lines in Scotland however, are all paid out of Scotland's own budget with no consequential to the rest of the UK. This is why #indyref has happened.

Nuclear WEAPONS. Now, I do agree that lobbing a power station at ones enemy, it might be seen as a weapon; but the general plan is that Scotland wants to be in a position to have 100% of power production capability by 2020. Keeping Nuclear power stations on a bit in case that goal is not reached 100% of the time seems sensible so long as no new nuclear power stations are built.

The Channel 4 expose is just muck-raking pre-referendum. If you really want to dig around the deals being done with regard nuclear power generation then look at the huge deal done with EDF in England that will make electricity production hugely expensive whilst the rUK retains clean up costs...

It's hardly fucking insightful to watch a state broadcaster, owned and run by the same state that has a vested interest interested in one outcome of the referendum.

It's a ruse by Salmond. He is goading the UK into saying "no" to a shared currency so that Scotland can't, by law, pick up a share of the national debt. George Osboune (the chancellor of the exchequer) is so lame that he walked right into it. Salmond will just use Sterlingisation, suffer short term interest rate rise and then sit on a hugely asset (rather than liability) backed economy. My personal view is that Scotland should share the currency and pay off it's part of the national debt. BoE will have to write a cheque for 4bn of Sco issued notes and many 100's of bn for quantative easing to "buy out" Scotlands share of the UK GBP.

Have you read Scotland's Future or the Wee Blue Book. Both are free and cover the currency question.

Scotland has only been invaded by, erm, one country, many times as it happens, in the last 1000 years.

that is not true. It was chosen in the 60's (opened in the mid 70's) because of it's geography - deep water, protected harbour and faces west to the Atlantic. Only 520 jobs rely on the nuclear deterrent side of the operation.

While important for the Coul peninsula, the proposals are to base Scotland new navy at Faslane and so these jobs would be transferred.

It should be noted that the BBC is an interested party in the referendum (the first "B" gives it away). There have been protests outside the BBC offices in Glasgow because of their support for the union (even though Scottish public have to mandatory pay for the BBC if they watch TV). The BBC takes a very pro-union stance (or vote "no" stance if you prefer) so please take that into account when reading or watching BBC coverage of #indyref

BBC Scotland viewers get an assault of fear stories from Better Together campaign every day on the BBC with little or no attempt to provide the other side of the story. The BBC tried to coverup and bully an academic study into bias that proved that BBC Scotland were not following their own guidance on #indyref coverage.

It should be noted that the nuclear armoury is based only 15 miles from Scotland's most populous area, the city of Glasgow -- which in the politics of the union is totally fine so long as it's nowhere near English cities. The system has had multiple failures and there have been attempted coverups of accidents at Coulport (where the weapons are stored). The Royal Navy also stores the decrepit and rusting nuclear submarines at Rosyth, a mere 10 miles from Edinburgh, our capital city. Again the thought of storing these at Southampton or Portsmouth would not be considered because it's too close to English who don't want rusting nuclear vessels in their backyard.

Senior MOD officials have been on the back foot in this debate even though most UK military assets have already been removed from Scotland (airbases have been shut and army decimated). Rather like in a divorce where one party tries to remove as many assets as possible before a possible split. The problem with the nuclear armoury is that none of the other areas of the UK want it and it would be political suicide for an English MP to accept into their area.

Scotland, if the vote is YES next month, would be a small country and it would not be right to have nuclear arms. Scotland wants to set an example by not having them on our soil. Scotland has only been invaded by one country in the last 1000 years, it's a country to our south. Scots like the English (this is not an anti-English referendum) - we just don't like the arseholes in Westminster telling us what to do (neither does large areas of England as it happens)

To learn more about the Scottish independence, see The Wee Blue Book

or... a young Iranian guy wants to see his mum in germany and seeks diplomatic asylum.

This aircraft had modern rolls royce trent engines - these come with an online 24x7x365 service back to Derby in the UK where all engines that are flying around the world are monitored in close-to real time using an independent comms facility to that of the rest of the aircraft. They will know if the engines powered up/down and what their status was at the last moments before contact was lost. I imagine the Malaysian Authorities are keeping a lot of the data under-wraps at the moment and I would assume that a lot more is known about the aircraft than is being released to the public right now.

I can only guess at your daughters age, but at some point she'll go online - either at your nicely protected home network or indeed at her school or friends rubbishly protected network. The issue with Windows XP past April 2014 is that any serious security problems will be NEVERDAY (a cute phrase that sounds like 0-day) where security issues will never be fixed. It won't take long to browse through the flash games site before a browser injected malware will find its way on to the machine.

The problem with techies is that we think too much about the network, the AV, the machine - but less about the user and how they will use the machine in a way that we couldn't possibly predict. So the real ecomonic argument is not about GBP300 for a netbook, but the opportunity cost of the stress and hassle when your daughter loses all of her homework, photos etc because some cryptolocker malware wants 1bn Bitcoin (market rates will go down as well as up) in order to unlock the data.

if it were me, I'd factor in a replacement at her next birthday.

mod up parent - that would have been useful. I tried to use the Dell Install-DVD-creator software after the first proper boot of the system (I always whine at family members who don't bother to do this) and after trying it 3 times and with a small pile of DVD's in the bin, I gave up. It was always failed the creation of the last DVD in the set

What's interesting is that the Windows 8.0 install took about 8 hours to get everything working (wifi was nasty) and then a further couple of hours to try and get v8.1 and resolve the wierd driver updating problem (Dell updated a minor SATA driver that was newer than Windows 8.0 believed possible which left Windows believing it was not fully up to date and therefore not ready to go to 8.1) .

The Fedora 20 install a few days later only took a few hours of my time and worked out-of-the-box.

Would love to try it, but after Dell updates and Windows Update had a fist fight on the new christmas present laptop for mum-in-law it meant that neither update system could complete all the updates thus leaving the OS in a position that it would not offer 8.1 in the store. Coupled with no obvious way to back out of the problem (no install DVD, and install-creator fucked up 3 times) - I gave up and she got Linux. It's not all Microsoft's fault - Dell's tools simply didn't work, however, there shouldn't be competing methods that you can't obviously switch off for doing things like this.

The funny thing is she doesn't even know she has Linux. She used to use Thunderbird, Firefox and libreoffice on Windows XP and so it just looks the same for her.

The EMV (ISO/IEC 7816-3) standard allows for a change PIN function that will take a 6 digit PIN. Some banks around the world operate with a 6-digit PIN.

This article explains the difference between the Scottish NHS and other parts of the UK. This is becoming a political hot potato in the run up to the 2014 Referendum for Scottish independence from the UK because whilst the English NHS is suffering huge setbacks after much of the service was privatised, Scotland's NHS was more tightly controlled by the devolved Scottish Government and less was outsourced to private consortia.

Even though Scottish tax payers pay the same as those south of the border; they receive much better treatment, free prescription drugs and many other benefits.

at my local OWASP chapter meeting some months ago, we did a show of hands about how many people had reported via the pay-for-security-bug middlemen organisations rather than contacting the vendor/website directly. About 30% put their hands up. I was quite astounded although, having been threatened legally myself when I was called in a bug found on an eComm website then I would no longer go directly to the owner of the system unless I had a contract in place already. The money is apparently quite good; so long as you don't care who is using the bug...