On the EU membership.. I would expect the concept of Scotland being a successor state would apply despite the posturing of certain EU members. Countries that break away from each other in this way (think Czech and Slovak Republics, the CIS) tend to retain the obligations and memberships of their predecessor states, which would mean that both the UK and the UK-sans-Scotland would both be EU members. It might end up as a legal fight in the courts to establish EU membership for Scotland though.

However, if they are not EU members and find themselves even temporarily outside the EEA (the European Economic Area that consists of the EU and EFTA countries) then that could effectively stop the free movement of people, goods and capital. It's possible that people from Scotland would need a visa to enter the UK unless a bilateral agreement could be make (such as the UK/Ireland agreement that exists outside the EU). This has the potential for being absolutely catastrophic.

The currency is also difficult, it has been argued that the Scots could have a once-side currency union with the pound sterling even if the UK did not agree. This sort of system already exists in the Isle of Man and Channel Islands, but those are not independent states as such (but nore are they part of the UK). However, there are only a quarter of a million people on those islands and Scotland has more than 20 times the population and 25 times the GDP, so it's a different league altogether.

But the clincher for me would be the sheer amount of paperwork involved if I were Scots. Am I Scottish or English or what? What about my family members? Where will my bank account be? My pension? My job? How do I get across the border? Even if everything goes smoothly, there is an immense amount of effort needed from citizens of the UK to straighten out all these details.

...because here in oulu.fi, last winter was crap. Should have been -30C, gorgeous blue skies and over a metre of snow, instead of which November lasted for three months and then some bastard hit Rewind.

The trees are absolutely laden with berries at the moment, and I'm told that;s a good sign.

You have to put distance and/or a lot more mass between the CME and whatever you want to protect than you have ready access to, unless you own a mine.

Working in the north of Finland, and down a mine is exactly where our backup tapes go. Not that I deleted some local backups and had cause to find out or anything... oops.

As for CME preparation: Charge the camera batteries, make a flask of coffee, and break out the winter gear so girlfriend doesn't get cold and want to go home.

Only five hundred, but he walked them...

DRM

Google Glass (or similar small, wearable camera, preferably hidden).

Once more AC is 100% correct and informative posting at 0.

I use that one all the time. If you have a problem with that, you can Suomi.

Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

Errr... the UK still has an reasonable approximation of a well-functioning court system. That the police say something is illegal isn't enough to get you thrown in jail.

It is under Tony Blair's Anti-Terror Laws. You only need to be suspected of something that could be vaguely related to terrorism to be locked up. No jury trial involved, just the police, some politicians and a few judges.

Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

Oracle Forms is dependent on Java.. but it seems very version-sensitive. Updating Java can often break forms, despite both being Oracle products.

Other than that, the only use I can see for Java on the desktop is to enable machines to get infected with malware.

And how much money did you (or your company pay) to be locked in to all that flaky software that changes every 18 months so you have to rewrite all your code?