Great, so with the world pumping 35,000 Million tons of CO2 a year in the air, with the US taking about 14% of this, just the US excretes about 10x the amount of volcanos each year. California contains about 10% of the population of the population, but they are actually on a good road to minimize their footprint. So Texas it is. Let's nuke Texas instead of putting a cork in all volcanos. Easier and the world would be a much better place.

Get on with the times and make your talking points current. Your facts are currently in 2014. This is the drill: temperature has gone up in 16 years, it has gone up in 17 years, it hasn't gone up in 18 years, it has gone up in 19 years, it has gone up in 20 years....

So please quote 18 years as your refutation for climate warming, dammit.

Is "not collecting stamps" a hobby?

We don't speak Dutch, we speak 'Nederlands' ... or 'Hollands'. So yes, granted, our minds are pot-addled nevertheless... but Dutch is an invention of the English (or the Brits, I always forget).

As it seems to be perfectly legit in the US for companies to sell data on their servers to anyone that wants to pay money for it, why are they now in trouble? They got robbed, why blame them?

Compared to WWI and WWII there have been hardly any major wars in history. Techies take the credit for that too?

Not sure what you're getting at with your final statement:

If the US had been structured like the EU, we'd have had much more than one civil war.

The US funds their 'Greek states' by funneling federal money over to them and reducing their sovereignity even further in the process. 'Schengen' is there in the US -- do you need a passport/visa to cross state lines? Who takes care of immigration in the US? And finally, the only civil war the US had was about leaving the union, a thing we're now going through with Brexit. No war in sight.

I'm not really clear on what you're arguing for here. Should the EU be structured more like the US, reduce sovereignity, and start building up the military to force Great Britain in line? Or should the US get rid of the dollar so that every state can devalue their own currency when they're in trouble? Please explain what the right structure of the EU would be, one that the US can follow without civil wars.

That's exactly what they're not allowed to do under the EU treaty. Not by handing over the money, not by reducing tax.

Unfair moderation of the parent. I'm Dutch, and completely agree with the sentiment expressed. Dijsselbloem is a hypocrite, as he, as Minister of Finance of the Netherlands has done absolutely nothing to prevent this type of back-dealing with large companies by his department. Ireland is probably the greatest offender of using taxation to screw over the other EU nations, but the Netherlands is a close second.

Change for the sake of change is not improvement. It's just ... change.

The only argument so far I heard about the headphone thing is indeed that the jack is old. So it needs to go. A feature-by-feature comparison shows however that this is not necessarily progress. Bluetooth means that you need to recharge your headphones, or that you need an adapter. These are net negatives. The positive is that the phone can be thinner. In my view that's an overall negative.

Why do you want to an unsigned 8-bit type to contain an 8-bit flag? That's not natural! And what if you only have 3 things you need to flag? Shouldn't the language also give you a 3-bit flag type? In other words, if you need to manipulate bits, you are no longer working on the level of integers, and signedness really doesn't matter anymore. There are 8 bits, and when each bit has its own meaning in your network protocol, why do you care what the meaning of the 8th bit used to be? It's now EVIL_BIT, no longer 'positive', or '128'. Java gives you access to those bits in the usual formats: 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits.

Yeah, same with Matrix, Complex, Polynomial, Rational, or any mathematical object that defines a Group, Ring or Field. Java is a mathematical wasteland.

Great perspective. So who was running this Apple company between 2003 and 2013 again? Not Tim Crook, right? I think it rhymed with Robs.

If all of this holds up, Ireland will no longer be a tax haven for international corporations, and they will suffer from that in the future as Apple, Google, etc. will relocate. So yes, this punishes Ireland.

The same people that want to remain 'sovereign' have completely forgotten to vote a majority into parliament that agrees with them. So now the UK government does exactly what you blame Junker on: they don't care what their MP's say, they are going to do it regardless and state that they have the power to do it. In contrast with Junker, who has no power without the backing of the council of ministers and can be easily obstructed by the European parliament, they can actually do it.

There's a good reason to have a representative democracy, and not a direct democracy. In a representative democracy the ones that are voted in are on the hook for figuring out how to implement decisions. In a direct democracy, as we're witnessing in the UK, the people vote one way, and everyone is now scratching their head to figure out what it means and how to do it. The preferred way seems to involve working around the democratic institutions.

So here we have the situation where a direct democracy is at odds with the representative democracy. You are saying that the former takes precedence? Ready to disband parliament and do legislation through referendum? Good luck with that.