arethuza

The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?

Indeed they did - all the way back to 1672:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ship_Entreprenant

All depends which god we are disproving the existence of?

If I buy a yacht I'd name it "The Ends of Invention" - have been keeping that name handy for almost 40 years since I read CP in a oner in May 1988.

Amusing that the page for ships called HMS Enterprise linked to from the USS Enterprise page points out that the name came originally from the French!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Enterprise

I wasn't saying that I thought it should be adopted as a standard for others to follow - just that (somewhat weirdly) I personally find the code segments on that page quite easy to read.

I actually find it quite readable - YMMV.

Didn't the Roman Empire last nearly 1,500 years in one form or another?

"Berlin is the _least_ German Germany city, by far."

Isn't that a common complaint in the lot of countries - people complain about London in the UK in a very similar fashion?

"just need to spread it out sufficiently"

Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?

Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.

When I did a CS degree in the 1980s we had one lecturer who handed out copies of hand-written notes but then would talk about stuff that wasn't really in the notes - sort of verbal annotations.

Guess what he would ask about in the exams?

Scotland here - have heard people from London talking about moving here for the weather.. which isn't something I ever expected to hear!

Was 10C this morning when I went out to walk my dog, in a t-shirt and shorts!

Same for Scotland - there are 3 castles within 2 km of where I live, not including a couple of really old ruined hill-forts... which I don't think is an unusual density of these things for this part of the world.

Edit: And of course there is also the huge castle 13km away across the sea sitting on its volcanic plug and very visible from here.

I'm pretty sure that if the Argentinians hasn't invaded they would probably have the Falklands by now. As it is it I would think that it would be political suicide for any UK government to even contemplate any kind of deal.

The Forth Road Bridge stopped having tolls in 2008 and was effectively replaced more recently by a new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, that has never had tolls.

"Cometh the hour, cometh the bin".

The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn't matter where you let it off!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...

The steering wheel on my Scala has 8 buttons, two knobs (which can be clicked), 2 flappy paddles and 3 stalks...

Yeah I once saw a system designed about 2000 or so that pulled messages from an MQ queue and updated a database all within a single transaction managed by COM+. To be honest the distributed transaction side of it seemed more bother than it was worth...

I think that is changing though: https://www.business.gov.uk/campaign/employment-changes/

There are about 17,000 heat networks in the UK: https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/business/consultancy-and-st...

Only about 2% of the total heating used though...

Different legal systems have options for groups organizing to do a join litigation e.g. England and Wales have Group Litigation Orders.

I'm not a lawyer and not in England or Wales! ;-)

That sounds a bit like the UK concept of a Company Limited by Guarantee - which is used by a lot of charities.

Edit: I'm not a lawyer either!

If you buy and off the shelf company then you don't need any of that - they supply a pile of stuff (e.g. articles of association) and you don't need a solicitor to be involved.

Edit: And these days you don't even need two people - used to be that you needed two directors or director and company secretary.

When I co-founded a company in the UK in 1995 there were two £1 shares - one for each founder. Mind you it was an off the shelf company - but the process couldn't really be much simpler back then - and its probably a lot simpler now.

Did you mean the 1956 Suez Crisis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

UK debt to GDP ratio is quite a bit less than that of the US?

A lot of social housing in the UK (about 45%) isn't owned by councils so can't really be sold off by the state?

A rough calculation: £8,580 funding per child at state school, ~90,000 less in private schools and in state schools so about £770 million more required for state school funding and this measure is supposed to bring in about £1.7 billion a year...

So it looks like it would pay for itself?

Edit: We don't charge VAT on private healthcare - so charging it on private education looks a bit inconsistent to me.

Senior leaders in large companies I've worked at always had a fairly high turnover just because they all tend to be hyper competitive and engaged in their own Game of Thrones type competitions - which someone has to lose.