Risking a whoosh: South - penguins, North - polar bears. The northern ice extent has been receding dramatically over the past decades. Economically, it can be a boon, what with the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage opening up, but the hapless animals will eventually have to suck it up and go extinct.

Over the past ten years, I've seen exactly one broken CFL bulb and that was because I had installed it in the corridor and the temperatures hit –29C for two weeks straight. My point was not that the CFLs accumulate in landfills, but that they contain so little of mercury that even if you chance to break one in your household every month, it will take many, many of such months before the mercury contamination hits any significant levels, provided your home has no windows and you never ventilate it. As for the instructions – major overkill. Probably understandable considering the trigger happy suing culture of the US (I've come to conclude that based on second hand evidence, never been over the pond myself, or subject to a lawsuit there), but still.

There is 100 times less mercury in a CFL bulb than in an old-school termometer – 4 to 5 milligrams compared to 500 milligrams. It is about the size of the ball in a ball point pen. The mercury in that old-school thermometer poses no health risk if broken, there's too little of it. You'd need to purposely break many, many boxes of CFLs in a closed space for the mercury to even register.

Arr-VEE-dus You-SKAY-vee-chews. Not that difficult to repeat five times in a row even after a 10% Belgian quadrupel. What's the prize?

That pretty much depends on the size of your trash can, ha. Yours seems minuscule. And how large a percentage of said trash is packaging? You know, other plastic bags, plastic boxes, the plastic that they use to laminate the supermarket presliced ham etc? I began sorting it some years ago and I realised that about nine tenths of my trash was plastic packaging. Bags made of cloth for me from that point on.

OK, I'll bite. Not that I am necessarily big on collectivism and socialism, but there is nothing really inherently centralised in either. The Norwegian fishermen go fishing as a collective and it is not centralised in any shape or form, just to give an example. If you are pointing at the Soviet Union style collectivisation, then yes, that involved centralisation to an inhuman degree, but that was caused by various historic and socioeconomic factors, such as ‘that's how we've always done things in Russia’, ‘damn, the kulaks won't appreciate our kolkhozes without a central authority forcing it down their throats’, and so forth. There have been numerous examples of small scale collectivism and perhaps even socialism. You can very well have a principle of subsidiarity in place, enabling you to run a micro-scale socialist system in your parish, for example.

Oh, the meta-irony and ‘whoosh!’.

Congrats! By using ‘overpriced’ and ‘fanboi’ (which you misspelled) in adjacent paragraphs, you have won the Mac Discussion Bullshit Bingo.

No, it's more along the lines of, ‘you're making money off those comments, so better hire a moderator to rein in the crackpots and the compulsive hatemongers’. The news portal is quite infamous in the three Baltic states and is considered yellowish or quite yellow, depending on whom you ask, and although they have time and again said that they consider their comments section as added value to the articles themselves, their actions (or rather inaction) have shown that they do not give a damn about what goes on there. It is not censorship if hateful comments are moderated. The country is ranked 11th in the world press freedom index of 2013 (http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html), so don't worry too much over it.

Hello, Google Translate.

So you were trying to get yourself a wreck, then?

But for some odd reason, everybody keeps using it, understand it well and wonder why the overseas people keep using those antiquated units that make no sense. So, tit for tat. It's basically like this: everybody else knows how many units of fuel it takes to cover 100 units of distance. The Americans know how many units of distance they can cover with one unit of fuel. It is similar to knowing either how much you'll have to pay for a kilogramme/two pounds of meat or how much meat you can get for the money you have on you. Neither system is inherently better and it all boils down to what you're used to. I am used to l/100 km and the mpg system seems arse backwards to me, I need to convert them to l/100 km every time I see it used. Probably my loss, then.

So, watches like this with Google's operating system combined with Google's self driving cars... I want to call my KITT now, thank you.

It HAS been used five times, and nowhere in the summary does it say it has been mandatory and the only way. So, a nice strawman there, but try to rein in that hate a little better and use actual arguments. The e-voting system is an excellent option to improve participation, and if you do not like it, don't use it. There is no need to become a Bolshevik about it, as in "I don't like it for me, let's get rid of it for everybody".

Besides, throwing all this Centre Party's FUD around is just not a good way to participate in a conversation. (A little background for those not familiar with the issue: The Estonian Centre Party whose voting demographic, ie. the elderly and the less educated, is largely less tech-savvy than that of the, say, liberals or the greens, keeps publicly accusing the system of being rigged against them because they do not get enough e-votes, tailing other political parties.)

And the Scottish say that it has been shown that Shakespearean English sounded not unlike the Scottish variety of English today.