Well, looks like I'm about to encrypt my phone, I don't even have any data that I care if they see.

The Queen doesn't have constitutional functions. The British political system is slightly retarded.
Officially the Queen is the executive, she signs into law bills passed by parliament but she doesn't actually have any say. Parliament has all the power.
If a president was to be elected then they would surely have a large amount of legitmacy and so should have some power? This would require a major change in parliament; the house of lords would probably have to go as it would be hard for them to claim legitimacy.

How do you go about removing the monarchy at this point? Most of our governance system would need changing. A lot of people dislike the monarchy but there has never been a choice to not have it. There is also the fact (and I hate this arguement) that the monarchy charactorises Britain, I have even heard arguements that they bring in revenue through tourism but I have not seen much evidence for this.

The monarchy has at least been stripped of almost all power. The Queen isn't really even a figurehead, just a tradition.

>$20 billion per year business, with average recipients charged $750,000 for a transplant
No? It's free, at least while the NHS still exists. I'm happy to give my organs whether I'm brain dead or really dead. I'm not that important and saving a life is one of the most amazing things I can think of to do in my life.

My dad was saying that Tokyo is depressing, apparently there are power shortages so most of the signs and escalators are turned off and the city is dark. How are they supposed to make up their energy requirements if they stop using nuclear?

I though the original plan was to run Debian and it probably still will be one of the man distros on the Pi. Debian releases should be supported for a lot longer.

I think I read somewhere that it is fairly near a ledge so I imagine it would be unsafe for divers to be regularly going inside it.
I guess they could secure it to the rocks it's on though.

I think that is hyperbolic at best. How will this generation be lost? I used to spend all my time on my gameboy but I am not 'lost', most of my applicable skills come from messing about on computers in my spare time.

That said flying kites is awesome.

>a tracking station in Perth, Australia, picked up a signal from the ailing spacecraft.

I guess it gets put there automatically if a story gets tagged with 'austrailia'

An interesting distro I have come across recently is Mint Debian. They do the same thing normal Mint does but skip Ubuntu. I think they use Debian unstable as a base. I think it is fairly new now but it looks promising.