Dak

Commas only take a space after them, not before. This, is, correct This , is , wrong When talking about the subjects, you can write Chemistry or chemistry; History or history; etc. However, 'English' is always a proper noun, so it always takes a capital Also, if you trail off at the end it's 3 dots, not 4: ... I got great marks in all the subjects: English, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history... or I got great marks in all the subjects: English, Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology, History...

eh? I'd not grass: then we both go free after a year. If he grasses and I don't, and I'm a criminal bad-ass enough to warrant 10 years, then I suspect that my mates will kill him; hence, he won't grass me, so I don't have to worry about that. Also, I'd not grass because otherwize his mates would probably kill me

its split up amongst legislature and tradition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom buggered if i know what's actually in our constitution, tho... but right now on the telly they're talking about Labour having a constitutional right, as the incumbent party, to have the first bash at trying to form a coalition. Dunno if it's written down somewhere or wether that's just how the house of commons works, but apparently that's part of the constitution.

well, abnormal. usually it's a strait-forward labour v. conservative, one-of-them-will-win election. This one looks set to not give a majority, and everyone thought lib-dem might do well (srsly, wtf happened there?). still, everyone's wondering how it'll pan out and which coalition or whatever will rule, wether GB will be kicked out, wether lib-dem will be able to winkle any reforms for their support, etc.

afaict: if the conservatives had got a majority, then the labour PM would have to resign, and the conservative majority would form a government (e.g., pick a PM, etc). without a majority, Labour, being the ones currently in, can have a go at either forming an alliance (which itself has a majority) in order to form a government, elsewize argue that they'll be able to form a minority government (which i think means that the lack of majority isn't so severe that they'll loose votes: they'll always be able to yoink a few rebel MPs from other parties, or ally with smaller parties on an issue-by-issue basis). failing that I think the biggest party (conservatives) get a chance to do all of that. Failing that, I think the queen can pick a minority government, but if not or if that doesn't work, I think there has to be another election strait away. dissapointed by the lib-dem performance... the flaws with our 'democratic' system seem to stop us choosing to fix them. again.

Marble's expensive, and minimizing the amount of material used might make them cheaper than slabs. That kinda fails at being easily recognizable from a distance as a memorial otoh, i'll admit that if I see a honking great big cross I don't know wether it's supposed to be a memorial or a statement along the lines of 'we're all christian :-p', so that kinda fails too. But it is at least traditional.

I'm interested, iNow: what secular grave-marker or memorial would you use?

A worker-bee's niece would be more genetically related to her than her own offspring, due to a clever genetic trick that they use. So even the seemingly utmost in altruism and self-sacrifice -- forgoing the chance to pass on your genes in favour of creating more sisters (which would seem to be evolutionarily selected against) -- is in fact selfish, and represents the worker bee's best chance to pass her genes on.

I think atheists have kind of 'yoinked' a lot of christian paraphernalia; from christmas, to being wed in a church, to using a cross for grave-markers and memorials. otoh, YMMV I kinda consider the cross-as-sybol-of-death to be both christian and secular, odd tho that is.

the difference between rich and poor naturally increases for no reason, which is a flaw in the capitalist system imo. Progressive tax fixes that. It still allows those who contribute the most to be rich, but it puts a burden on them to continue contributing if they wish to get richer, rather than creating a family-line of essentially upper-class-by-birth 'favored' people who's great-great-great grand-daddy did something useful, whilst they themselves simply allow others to manage the money that is theirs by birth.

In the UK it's a requirement that you have a driver's licence, but you don't need it with you when you're driving: the police can issue you with a 'provider', which is a written order to report to a police station with your license and insurance details within 7 days. Other than that, they check the car's reg-plates to make sure it's registered and then check if it's been reported stolen. afaict, over here we can carry our docs for those reasons and then just refuse to show them to an officer upon demand. Or lie and say we don't have them.

http://freedom.libdems.org.uk/the-freedom-bill/19-the-childrens-database/ can't find their opinion on the DigEco bill, but they seem to want to scrap the other's you mention. personally, those are the bits that concern me the most: at the risk of Goodwining this thread, some of Labour's plans indicate a nazi-level of authoritarianism coming up at some point in the future if we're not careful...

How'd he be violating the law? Is it a requirement that you carry a driver's licence with you when driving?

The problem with racial profiling (which personally I think can be gotten around in better ways than simply banning it) is that if you focus on mainly investigating, say, black people for theft, then black people will obviously be caught stealing stuff more often, and then the statistics will justify picking on the darkies (thus perpetuating the situation). I don't see how that could apply to illegal immigration: non-natives are the sole demographic that commit the crime of illegal immigration, so there's no chance of unfairness here. (the slippery slope that i'd be worried about, comming from the UK, is that suspected immigrants will merely be the first group to suffer ID spot-checks and thus the obligation to always carry ID).

Problem with this is that there's still wasted votes, but rather than 'your vote for Lib-Dem is being ignored' you get 'your vote for Lib-Dem is being transfered to the Labour party'. iow, parties will still rule with minority support, but this fact will be obfuscated somewhat. Single Transferrable Vote at least lets you choose where your vote goes, but you still end up with a minority party ruling because the smaller parties have their votes transferred to the bigger parties, who themselves will be too big to lose a round and have their votes transferred. Both of them solve the psychological impact of wasted votes (i.e., removes the incentive to only vote Lab' or Con') but are still both unproportional. Is there any reason we can't just pile all the votes up, and if you get x% of the votes, your party gets x% of the power?

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=YFO64T8H

lol, whoops, been too long since I've done this it would appear You're right, there's a 1:2:1 chance BUT we can rule out the double-recessive (as you say), making it 2:1... Sorry OP

Not really. Gordon Brown, for example, was chancellor for the exchequer (basically minister for the economy) with only a PhD in history.

The shadow cabinate? Yeah, e.g. if there's a problem with the transport network, it's the shadow minister for trandport's job to pretend that if his party was in charge he'd have been able to fix the problem perfectly without raising taxes. the leader of the opposition is essentially shadow prime-minister. Dunno if your country uses the term, but the cabinate is the highest ministers, all appointed by the PM (cabinate ministers don't even need to be elected MPs iirc, nor all from the same party: e.g., gordon brown could appoint a conservative MP to the cabinate).

They seem to have forgotten Wales...

iirc, lots of us brits asked you not to elect that 'retard cowboy' again... I guess you could just ask us to vote Lib-Dem? Go make some uTube videos, try to get your famous people to ask us on the telly, try to make our news? write your MP if he's independant, ask him to ask us, or just ask us on webforums? I dunno? Didn't they (old Labour) create the NHS, welfare, and other lefty stuff designed to be for the working-class (i.e., the labourers)? The thing that's new about new labour is that they don't care about commoners anymore?

Seriously, it's because we're british. The way the system works is that it says to you 'vote for anyone other than these two parties, we'll throw your vote away'. Makes it seem rational to not vote for anyone other than labour/conservative (republican/democrat, whatever): you could throw your vote away, or you could at least choose the lesser of two evils. However, if enough people ignore the threat and vote for a third party, they'll get in anyway. 'but not everyone does ignore the threat so it doesn't work, and the third party still won't get in' (foreigners): 'oh yeah. guess i'll stop throwing my vote away' --> 2 party state (hyper-rationality, aka Being British): 'true, but that's why the system works like it does, so it's your duty to disregard that otherwize perfectly valid argument and vote Lib-Dem anyway' --> 2.5 party state, looking like the third party might actually win this time. It's not neccesarily who'd get the Lib-Dem support, there could be a Labour-Conservative co-alition or a hung parliament http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8427233.stm Hopefully tho, Lib-Dem will co-align with whoever gives them some electoral reforms, and have a better chance of winning next election as a result of having done well this time. No, I'd certainly not vote Labour. If we had a non-screwy electoral system, there'd be many more parties, and I'd vote for whichever I felt was best (severely unlikely to be Labour or Conservative). If for some reason I couldn't vote Lib-Dem, I'd spoil my ballot in protest. Note that afaict Severian, being Scottish, can't do that, as I think they use hole-punch machines to vote up there, meaning you can't spoil your ballots (or, spoiled ballots get put down to something like 'hanging chads' or another mechanical error; basically, they're logged as something other than a protest ballot, in which case i'd simply not vote).

Me too, tho it's mainly because the system is blatantly designed to force us to only ever choose Labour or Conservative, legitimizing them and our political system; so, British people being British, millions of us diligently vote Lib-Dem every election in a kind of 'up yours' to The System (tho never enough of us; this might be the first chance to actually change that). Why does their recent surge in popularity change things? Are you not going to vote for them now?

Iterative voting would fix the problem of over-funding, as you could re-allocate your funds when it happens till there's a stable level of funding that everyone's happy with (in theory). As for the 'someone else will fund the roads', maybe you could use pledging? e.g., I pledge to fund x% of my tax to roads iif at least £y is raised in tax and other people's pledges, thus forcing other people to actually contribute to roads if they want to see them maintained?

I'm not disagreeing, but not doing it by tax is also problematic as you hit tradgedy of the commons. I mean, why should I donate money to cancer research when other people will, so the research will be there if i ever need it anyway? Unless too many people do this, in which case it wont (and, anyway, it's just not fair if some people foot the bill whilst others don't). non-voluntary charity via taxation side-steps this problem, and you'll still have enough left over that you can choose to give the odd fiver to whatever charity you choose. otoh, maybe x% of your money could be siezed by the government, and then we could have an iterative directly democratic process to allocate it, i.e.: * everyone gets x% of their money siezed * everyone votes where the tax should be allocated * results of vote are: -- fire brigade got waaaaaaaaaaay more than they can spend -- military and road-maintenance have quite a bit more than they said is neccesary -- everyone overlooked feeding-homeless children charities -- several projects, including cancer-research, are requesting more * You get, say, 10% of your tax de-allocated (over-allocation to fire-brigade) and maybe choose to withdraw a further 1% each from the military and roads, and dump 11% onto feed-the-poor and 1% to cancer research * results of votes come back, people constantly re-adjust based on what others voted untill there's no longer any change * these results dictate the budget. what % of your wage goes on tax, and wether it's flat or progressive, could be done by representative or direct democracy; and I think you've bypassed tradgedy of the commons without the problems you describe. Maybe some people would try to avoid funding fire brigade assuming others will do so... so maybe 'spreadables' should be done by the gov (no offence, but I don't want to let you manage your own life when it comes to spreadable things, because the longer you have herpies and the less you want to give to the firebrigade, the more likely I am to catch herpies and have my house burn down)... Maybe, as we'd link the concept of 'being a bigot' with 'costing a lot of money' in people minds, people would be more likely to chip into the 'stopping violent crimes' fund, and less into the 'stopping drugs' fund?