Verbal

Ah yes, the protesters would have welcomed that.

The worst aspect of this is the use of foreign mercenaries to carry out the massacres. It is an idea - if that's the word - borne of a cynicism I hadn't thought possible. i've never heard of foreign mercenaries being hired simply to shoot unarmed citizens. The only hope is that behind this tactic is a desperation that could lead to that buffoon's downfall.

Blair's friend. What do you expect? And yes - still shocking.

Scooby lives in the dreary suburbs of Washington. He WISHED he lived in NYC.

Oh thank god. When I saw the thread title, TDD's name as OP, I dreaded it was another one of those 'please rescue me from all women' pleas.

Did you hear that Grandad? You're allied with dune. Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

The scene early in the film between Hailee Steinfeld and the horse trader who thinks he can easily outwit a 14-year-old girl is a classic.

'Even' constituencies how exactly? If you mean simply by numbers, that rarely results in fairness, particularly in safe seats - the rotten boroughs of our age. Blocs of Labour or Tory or LibTurncoat votes often thwart not only the minority whose views are completely ignored in what is supposed to be a democracy - but even those for whom voting for the inevitably winning candidates is the norm. Many of those are not party fodder - far from it - but have shades of opinion about parties and candidates that are far better represented in an AV system. Only party apparatchiks like you would support FPTP surely - leaving aside the political infant by the name of d*ne.

Yes, that makes sense. A vote for AV will increase fairness, no matter how you look at it.

Don't be so gloomy. We'll live to fight another day.

Tax 'avoidance' is one thing. But a British-based company paying less than 1% in corporation tax is a disgrace no matter how you cut it. To then pay roughly the equivalent amount out in bonuses mostly to their top staff is just rubbing salt into the wound. In the US, the company would be hit by an IRS audit (painful and expensive). Here? Well let's see what Cameron does...

Now you're just typing drivel.

I'm genuinely surprised. This sort of stuff rarely gets to a day in court.

So how's the court case going?

It gets worse. Barclays tried to get a gagging order issued against the Guardian to stop them revealing the tax avoidance 'scheme'.

That last one's true, by the way. Try googling 'Foxbat' and 'Japan'.

The Americans tried figuring out how to protect the solid-state electronics in their military aircraft from being fried from the electro-magnetic forces unleashed in a nuclear blast. The Russians flew their planes with the 1930s technology of valves, which were immune. I speak as a secret member of the military-industrial complex.

I was hi-jacking the thread.

Then there's the utter crap uselessness of some space-military technology. In the early days of the Apollo programme, the Americans spent millions trying the develop a pen that would work in the weightlessness of space. The Russians took a pencil.

Taking your own timeline, the military would have come up with the technology equivalent to that necessary to produce the iPad in 1971. I don't think so.

Says the lumpenposter who now runs everything through a spellchecker before hitting 'post reply' out of sheer naked terror.

Finally. I thought you boneheads would never get there.

This is not even up to your usual dumbass standards.

While everyone is in this jobs-cutting frenzy, let's dump the royal family asap. You couldn't even give that inbred crowd reasonable-sounding job descriptions. Then renationalise or sell off the Duchys of Cornwall and Lancaster - whose combined value is in excess of £1bn.

Run that by me again.