Commodore USA were as dodgy as you like. Reproduction cases were nice and all that, but they were kitting them out with substandard miniature PC boards and shipping them with Linux, a Commodore-skinned desktop and a couple of emulators and calling the whole lot Commodore OS. Apparently they had problems overheating, gaming sucked on their underpowered boards and because they didn't ship with Windows, and they cost far more than your typical off-the-shelf Dell. They're a pretty sad chapter in the Commodore / Amiga epilogue, and shouldn't really be thought of as any way related to the original company.

This. For once, maybe look at how other civilised countries deal with guns. Ireland, for example, makes it extremely difficult for a civilian to own a gun, so nobody does. There are still murders carried out using illegally-held guns, and many people in Ireland would be of the opinion that there is a gun problem there. Yet, the number of gun-related deaths per capita is ten times lower in Ireland than the US. Could it be that the difficulty in obtaining firearms has some sort of effect on their availability to criminals? Crazy thought, I know.

Specially trained police officers having guns is very different to the average Joe with a chip on his shoulder and a social security number having guns. I'd have thought that was obvious, but gun fans always surprise me by being consistently oblivious to the obvious.

I often stayed behind at school to get time on the BBC Micro they had and try out all the BASIC I'd learned from library books. Eventually I got my very own computer, a second-hand Atari 800XL, and started re-learning everything again for that. On the surface it was similar (like most 8-bits I guess), but the Atari BASIC always felt a little bit behind the BASIC on the C64 and BBC at the time. Learned some assembly, how to smooth scroll, do funky rainbow effects and even wrote a primitive paint package that could load and save 16-colour bitmaps to tape. It eventually developed a problem with the SIO port, effectively rendering it useless, and then I moved onto the Amiga, which I still have today and run all the time, expanded with 20 years of funky hacks and add-ons.

I recently unearthed my cassette tapes of code for the Atari and recorded them as a WAV file so they could be converted to tape images for an emulator. Surprisingly, most of the recordings survived and worked first go. Scary seeing my code from so long ago again!

Or when a constitutional change requires it.

It's up to Britain to prevent immigrants it doesn't want, not France. And don't forget, Britain already had 100% control over immigration from outside Europe - leaving the EU won't change the number of immigrants from outside the EU one bit.

Because then it wouldn't be leet enough for them and they wouldn't be able to pick up chicks with their hax0r terminal skillz.

This is one of the things that annoys me too. I use Mint the whole time, and while it is lovely and user-friendly 95% of the time, I still find myself Googling for solutions to strange problems like not being able to save a custom resolution setting, only to find dozens of condescending forum posts on similar subjects pointing out that I obviously hadn't run [insert several cryptic terminal commands] before trying to do what I wanted to do.

Yes. So much this.

Ooh, no, I actually like PHP, but then again I learned ARexx many years ago and in a number of ways it's quite similar. Definitely agree on the JS front though, it feels like a dodgy experiment that got out of control and now we can't stop it.

I genuinely still get scary flashbacks when I see someone mention Matlab anywhere. *shudder*

You'll probably find then that the site content won't load until the ads have loaded. Some sites I've come across already do that, so if one ad is taking a long time to render, you have none of the actual text you want to read.

One of the reasons for using ad blockers is to prevent the ads from even being downloaded, thus speeding up page loading and reducing data usage for people who are restricted. If the ad is downloaded and just not shown to the user, it would be undetectable to the site but would also negate those two benefits entirely.

The pound lost ground against all currencies - it was the one that was devalued, the Euro (and most other currencies) stayed pretty much where they had been.

And plenty old enough to drink in Europe ;)

Under my desk at home I have 4 towers, all connected to a Dell U2410 via a KVM. Two of the towers are fairly standard "PCs", one running windows 7 for my photography, gaming and some development, the other running Linux Mint for most other day-to-day things. The next tower is an AmigaOne G4 running AmigaOS 4.1, which I use for listening to music and some development. And the last is a beast: An old Amiga 1200 installed in an old AT-style PC case. It has a 68060 CPU at 66MHz with 256MB of RAM, SCSI host for the drives, PCI bus expansion fully loaded with a Voodoo 3-3000, network card, sound card and TV tuner, and various other bits and pieces added over the past 20 years or so. It's fun to see the old girl outputting Workbench at 1920x1200 and still relatively useable :)

All of the towers have two internal hard drives for backup of critical stuff (yes, there are also backups separate from the machines...)