I'm not sure how difficult free pay as you go sims cards are to get in other countries, but they're easily available in the UK. Pop a "disposable" sim card into your phone, create a fake Google account and verify it with that number and then throw the sim card away.

Which is why the whole nymwars saga was a pointless waste of time. If anything, the only thing their policy achieved was to stunt the growth of G+.

YouTube seems to have finally stopped asking me to start using my real name, but it did ask me why I didn't want to use my real name.

You could get the DVB-T version of the HD Homerun and hook that up to the inconveniently placed aerial and then stream Freeview over your network, either direct to a device or to a MythTV box. One thing to note is that as it's only capable of DVB-T reception it doesn't actually get any of the Freeview HD channels.

Which is irrelevant for the discussion at hand. I would assume that most countries invaded by a theoretical combined US, Russian and Chinese army in a quest to create a single planet wide totalitarian government would never have had warlike intentions either.

Have you actually read the complete thread?

But there are two big problems with a USSAC Empire -

1) Of countries most likely to stab each other in the back, the US, Russia and China top the list.

2) Both the US and Russia/USSR more or less failed at containing Afghanistan. If they can't contain a forsaken country like that, I don't see what hope they have of conquering the entire planet, even in the highly unlikely event that they pooled their resources. They could probably get away with pushing Europe around, but I think the rest of the planet would give them a lot of trouble.

But where is a military large enough to crush all dissent planet wide going to come from? How would it be paid for?

Also, unlike Tibet with China, some of those factions have nukes (and lots of them). There's not much point in having dominion over a dead planet.

But you won't get a single planetary government - some faction (or even multiple factions) will break out and try to screw over the rest.

They can't even manage to get regional government working - they don't have an ice cubes chance in hell at getting world government up and running.

England (and the rest of the UK) is not in the Eurozone. We're in the EU, but we do not use the euro.

My understanding is that Germany tends to take employee involvement more seriously (so you get works councils and the like) but people are generally on lower wages.

Doing what? OK, London is expensive as hell but at least there's stuff to do.

It's fairly easy, especially if you get a company formation company to handle most of the work. Basically, fill in a form on a web site, pay around 30 quid (last time I checked) and in a couple hours you'll have a limited company.

Pretty much everyone signs away their working time directive rights away in order to get employed.

They're working on it. Be patient.

You won't get an entire planet of high taxes - some countries will have low taxes to try and screw over other countries.

My previous employer had a non compete clause, but then they were an American company (though they waived it when they moved our dev jobs out of the UK and made us redundant). My current employer (which is British) doesn't, and I don't remember any British company that I worked for having one.