You are crazy. Here is an example of the democratic process working, yet you desperately have to search for some conspiracy theory to continue your irrational hatred of the USA.

No. It's an example of a republic not working. What history books tend to call "decline and fall" when it's happened in the past. It is what happens when governments completely lose sight of, and concern with, and respect for, the principles that brought them into being.

This is real life, not a Tom Clancy novel.

Oh, we know. In Clancy's works the US TLAs are the good guys. That's not been the case for decades now.

It's deep, but it's dry. And it has a sharp rock floor at about the 100 foot level.

Except I don't see how that applies in this case. Stay or leave -- it's not the bank's call. But if politicians are putting leaving the EU on the table, even as an empty gesture, then naturally the bank has to start thinking about contingency plans. That's just common sense, even if you think the very idea of leaving the EU is mad.

It's also common sense to keep that on the DL to prevent misguided overreaction to what is after all still a hypothetical scenario. The Bank of England a central bank and so people must be constantly scrutinizing it hoping to glean inside information on future monetary policy. That's to say nothing of having to deal with the conspiracy theory nutters.

<Morbo>Touch screens do not work that way! Good night!</Morbo>

1) How will replacing the voting system result in faster or more informed decisions by the voters? That's like suggesting making high tech toilets will get people to make better choices about what they eat.

2) What on earth do we need -faster- decisions for? Because having to wait a few hours a few times a decade is the major problem with our system of government?

Better how? Fewer people would know how it works. Therefore Few people should trust it. Doesn't sound "better" to me. Election systems need to be simple enough that everyone can understand them, everyone can see that hasn't been tampered with.

A show of hands is simple but not anoymous.

Physical ballots placed into a physical box. Then removed and counted in full view of everyone is also simple, and you gain anonymity. And a child can understand it and validate it. There is zero reason for an election to ever be more complicated than this.

Precisely. And since, in terms of economic strength, everybody in the expanded EU most certainly isn't equal (please note that this is not intended as any sort of insult, merely a statement of fact) the free movement principle does not work well.

In particular, what has really happened in certain cases, for example with Poland and England, is that most of the movement has been one way. This puts strain on English services, but it's important to recognise that it also means many of the people who would be best placed to help Poland develop its own economy are among the most likely to find working in richer European countries more attractive and/or lucrative, creating a "brain drain" effect back home. In the long term, both nations could end up worse off because of the imbalance.

In principle, freedom of movement is a good idea, for both business and pleasure purposes. But on the business side, it does require reasonably balanced parties so the traffic at least roughly cancels out. This was the case in the early days when there were far fewer nations in the shared European machine, but with the expansion to nearly 30 actual or aspiring member states with much more diverse economic conditions, the same logic no longer holds.

Those boards don't work on water, unless you got POWAH!

Which of course was itself neither caused nor amplified by the underlying financial strains within the EU and particularly the Eurozone, right?

The emails that have been released are those that Clinton decided should not be deleted, so unless she made a mistake, there shouldn't be anything incriminating...

That would be nearly impossible to pull off because one is sending email to at least one other person, and unless you are certain the receiver kept nothing nowhere, you are at risk of being exposed.

Anyhow, it appears that much was usually done by phone instead of email. I suspect she wouldn't put anything urgent or controversial in email.

I was a backer. Were you? Or do you feel compelling to complain on behalf of other people?

I got the main thing I backed it for - a dev kit.

Facebook buying them means an investment in learning to program for the Rift is probably 1000x more useful than it would have been otherwise.

I understand people are wary of Facebook, and for good reason. But I have seen huge upsides with pretty much no downside since Facebook bought the company.

"as little as 32 MB of RAM, for example"

I'm getting old.

My first full PC had 2MB of RAM.

My first computer had only 48Kb of RAM.

Hell, I have an "computer" next me to capable of connecting to the Internet (even to act as HTTP server, DHCP client, NTP client, etc.), controlling relays, performing some computations, etc. It has 32Kb of Flash, 2Kb of SRAM and 1Kb of EEPROM. It's called an Arduino UNO.

By comparison, then, 32Mb is over 1000 times more than needed for IoT crap.

Marriage pre-dates religion.

And we'll force them to comply with the law. If they want to "marry" people (I know churches in the UK generally DO NOT, that's for the marriage registrar, not the church), they have to comply with the law.

In the same way that just because a religion believes it can stone adulterous women still can't do that if the law says it's not allowed.

However, as noted above, churches do NOT marry people. They perform a religious ceremony that some people call a wedding. That's very different to an actual "marriage".

Hint: Most people who disagree with religion or who do not want some religious arse telling them whether or not they can marry, they won't be going to that church or wanting that dickhead to ruin their day anyway.

However, that said, recently an Irish company was sued for failing to produce a cake promoting gay marriage. They lost. The argument was that they were a business and a business can't be religious or discriminatory - even if the owners are. That's the shape of the future for you.

Hey, did you know that Mother's Day was supposed to be to celebrate your Mother Church and nothing to do with your biological mother? Things change. And slowly religion stops being relevant.

First reaction to your post: Ahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha!

Second reaction:

"never define marriage as anything but between a man and women."... or a man and several women. Or a man, several women and a "boy". Whose purpose was... buggery, basically. You really need to pick up a history book sometime.

And even if "every" civilisation in history had condemned this - THEY ARE FUCKING HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS. Until a couple of hundred years ago (yes), people were still shitting in the corner of the room in some countries, and shirt-tails were to wipe your arse on.

Welcome to modern civilisation. Where we look at shit and don't necessarily just do it "because my ancestors did". It's not perfect either, but hopefully our kids will look at our own cock-ups and say "Fuck doing that, just because my predecessors did, it's obviously fucking moronic."

It has plenty to do with the Common Market.

It has very little to do with the rest of the stuff the EU added on top of that Common Market.

There is no reason why in the long term that should not be the case. It worked before, something similar works today with the EFTA nations, and it is still in everyone's interests for a separated UK and the nations still in the EU to remain effective trading partners.

Where did that "and privileges" come from? What privileges are these, and why do you keep adding extra one-sided straw men to the discussion when no-one else is suggesting them?

If EU skeptics have come to power elsewhere, why does the EU have any right to try to prevent them from leaving? You could hardly blame, for example, the Greek, for having second thoughts. Though of course the general population in Greece seems to be consistently in favour of trying to make the Euro work rather than going back to their old currency anyway, so this is just another straw man.

And the same number of people are actually suggesting each of those deals here: zero. You seem to be making up random straw men for reasons I don't understand, and I don't see how that is furthering any useful debate here.

I was a major Amiga evangelist back then. But unfortunately, Commodore didn't really know what it had and screwed it all up. They kept trying to shoehorn it into being a "business" computer or something like that, instead of playing up on it's strengths over DOS and the dreadful Macs at the time.

And ultimately, what made the Amiga great was also it's downfall, as it's special chips (Agnes, Paula, Denise etc) couldn't really scale to a new architecture.