In a lot of countries, it's legal for kids to drink at 16

In the UK, it's legal for kids to drink at 5, and it's perfectly legal to give 5 year olds alcohol too. They can drink in a pub if having a meal at 16, at 18 there are no restrictions.

AC GP's link does not cherry pick. If you look at the relevant graph, teenage suicide has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years. The only age group that has seen significant rises in the last 15 years is the 45-64 year old category.

One of the problems is that being able to hack into anyone's accounts is not a preserve of the intelligence agencies. Other people do, and will do it all the time.

I like my Western, secular democracy too.

Which limits exactly should our government respect, and which should they not?

I gave Microsoft about £100 8 years ago for this PC I'm writing on's operating system. Now, you can claim I'm stupid and clueless enough to have paid that money if you like, but you'll have to show me how I would have played all the games that I have done since without having bought the operating system.

Make that 8 years ago.

What's wrong with Windows 7 that makes you want to upgrade?

I'm still running Vista, with (mostly) the same hardware I bought this system with literally 10 years ago. Directx11, stability measured by power cuts, simple to run.

I'm still waiting on my free upgrade from Vista.

However, I'm one of the few who liked Vista, and still run it (on the system I bought it with, a core 2 duo E6850, XFX 650i motherboard, and a brand new (old) gtx 470 graphics card I got off ebay for £29).

Of course going to mars is nothing like going to California. However, if you look at the success of very early north American settlement, it's possibly broadly similar, in that just about everyone died. People still wanted to go.

So have BT just not updated their blocks then?

It shows just how effective they were in the beginning.

What are you pissing through nowadays, then?

The dodo wasn't hunted to extinction, apparently it tasted pretty awful. Introduced pigs and dogs ate its eggs.

I'm in the UK and can access thepiratebay.se directly at the moment, using normal ISPs. I'm not sure if I should be worried.

And they wonder why all their colonies revolted

Which ones, exactly? Most British colonies got independence without revolt, or any kind of uprising.

I can just access thepiratebay.se directly at the moment. I've got 2 ISPs, BT and TalkTalk (both in the top 6). So yes, currently as a normal UK user I can access the pirate bay directly.

I am, however, slightly confused as to why this is. It was blocked a while back.

And thepiratebay.org isn't blocked either, it just forwards to thepiratebay.se .