Umm, so, every BP employee should be helping to clean up the spill? Do you have any idea how disastrous and what a logistical nightmare 60,000 people trying to do that job would be? I'm questioning your intelligence here in case you didn't notice.

Hey I did that, we weren't allowed calculators so brought my Granddad's old slide rule for a joke and was allowed to use it. Thankfully I knew how to use it and it wasn't just there as a funny looking ruler :)

In the days gone by when I was really into retro gaming I had no trouble finding designs, work-logs and ideas for building my own joysticks for MAME gaming. They usually used a hacked keyboard controller or cheap joypad board built into a wooden case with arcade quality buttons. Search engines seem to still return plenty of results for "mame controller" or "arcade controller".

Not hard to do, considering 90% of Finland doesn't lock their mail boxes. My bank restricts my password length to 6 characters I think, so even with a random 4 digit code from a list of 100 it's still not that safe. Too much reliance on hard-copy data and not enough on a person's common sense. Changing your main password whenever you get your new set of codes, is probably a wise option. Now, I have a couple of bank accounts in the UK, and they tend to follow the pattern of huge password, security questions (which most people with common sense don't actually answer as the real thing. All this tied up with a password safe thing itself with a password that is easy to remember :) No system is without flaws, and the human side is where the faults will mostly occur. Just use your head and you'll be safe.

My bank gives me my username and a short password, which I change somewhat often. Along with a nice little card with numbers on it that they ask for whenever I log in. They used to go sequentially, but now they choose a number at random. All in all I don't really like it that much, but it's better than a single password and name for everything.

It's cross platform with the same format for the password file on all platforms. A nice feature if you use more than one system.

They only want more babies so they have more soldiers to get killed in some foreign land.

I can't disagree with you on this. Everything else they have released thus far has been raw, for the people to make their mind up about. This had spin. Not what I want from an organisation I donate to occasionally.

Lets not forget that in total the EU has twice as many active military personnel and about the 1.5 times the number of vehicles as the US. The EU is about twice as big as the US in terms of populations; so per 1000 people their military capability is almost equal in size. If the need is there, the EU (and lets not forget other European countries) will be able to perform their own actions anywhere in the world. They just don't because they have someone to do that for them.

By the way, the US gets half of it's oil from OPEC countries and the Gulf. If they "descended into sectarian violence and the oil supplies ran dry", the US would suffer. Also, don't forget that the US gets at least a quarter of it's oil from countries that would be affected by the OPEC and Gulf countries turning off the oil supplies. Guess who turns their flow to the US off next?

So, best to just keep letting the US do their business and Europe can get on with their lives safe in the knowledge that if the Middle East did decide to stop selling oil to us, we're all fucked.

That's pretty much it. Am I right/fairly alone in thinking that's the way it should be?

And lots of seasick seamen.

That would make for a hell of an extreme sport.

Or perhaps Crazy Pierre?
But seriously, are there really still holes in a submarine's passive sonar any more?

Glad to hear some Finns can be honest and approach that time in history objectively, makes a huge difference to what you normally hear from Finns (mostly young surprisingly) about that period of history. I don't even mention that little post independence squabble called civil war any more in polite pubtime debate.
Sure, Finland is a great nation, it's moved on a lot from it's past, but it's past should not be glossed over or forgotten or rewritten (like the sort of thing that would happen during Breshnev's time).
Have a good night.