I suspect its been the line since Salmond’s been in charge. Perhaps the party’s motives would have been clearer if he rebranded – how about “New SNP”.

The SNP line has pretty much always been “we’re so fantastically European, we’ll join the Euro, we’ll be the second Celtic Tiger, isn’t it great?”

I find that hard to believe. The SNP existed before the common market and the EU, predates the Euro by several years and for most of its existence there was no concept of a “celtic tiger”.

Or England joins Schengen

Not sure England has that choice, but the UK minus Scotland might have a view.

Am I right in thinking that Scotland has 25% of Europe’s wind and tidal resource?

I can’t even begin to understand what that could possibly mean.

rio – 85+ % of the vote in Scotland goes to leftish parties. tories are an irrelevance on low teens last time and heading for single figures.

I would expect all Westminster parties to be an irrelevance in an independent Scotland. The political makeup would change. It would be unwise to assume it would all go Salmonds way.

seems pretty unlikely given the voting patterns in Scotland for the last 50 years

The SNP have had an increasing proportion of the vote since 1970 when they overtook the liberals. I would suggest that a significant part of their support is from people who support Scottish independence and have voted accordingly. If that issue is out of the way the political landscape changes and other parties’ negative associations with the Westminster parties are lost; I wouldn’t like to bet on what happens after that.

Anyone who either lives in Scotland for over a certain time or who has family ties here, parents, grand parents? Just a guess… Does it matter?

Interesting bit in on the BBC web site about the views of US citizens with “Scottish roots” on this –

25m Americans claim Scottish ancestry, according to some estimates

That might skew the vote a bit.

Also some interesting bits on there about the possible makeup of governments in Scotland; oh how I would laugh if an independent Scotland ended up with a right wing government instead of Salmonds “progressive” state.

If you remove the rent costs which they dont actually see a penny of.

So, if you have earned household income of £35000 and have to pay your own accommodation like most people you’re not poor, but if you have the equivalent in benefits but have to pay for your housing out of that you are poor? How does that work then?

The poorest in our society are probably on benefits. That’s not the point. Is someone receiving the equivalent of a taxed wage of £35000 poor? I suspect that makes the majority of the people posting on here poor.

the Condems have (hit) the poorest with a big shitty stick

And here’s me thinking that the average wage didn’t equate to poverty. My mistake. Do we go straight from poor to rich once we cross the £35000 taxed wage that the proposed cap corresponds to?

2 windsurfers, currently being used as shelves in the garage, one day I’ll have to cut them up and take them down the tip but I can’t bring myself to do it yet.

Pair of Salomon 1080s, gone a bit soft, see above.

Assorted diving kit, not used since I got asthma.

2 DVD players and 2 Freeview recorders in the loft.

Photographic processing kit and enlarger, also in the loft.

The potential need for roof repairs means I’ll have to empty the loft at some stage and sort a lot of this out. Mostly not worth ebaying though, and taking it down the tip recycling centre seems such a waste.

£300 pa for us. OFWAT shows an average annual bill of £339 for 2010 so the OP’s £47 pcm seems a bit excessive.

Conditions weren’t too bad at the weekend, mind you the worst bits were frozen solid. Plenty of rain forecast tomorrow though. I expect most areas will be passable with the right tyres.

Dunno how they get their info

Neither do I, but looking into this in more detail I see that Samknows shows an RFS date for unbundling still set as Nov 11, so if you do a search for “what’s available on my exchange” only BT shows up, but if you look at the exchange detail you see that it may be worth talking to other people. It also shows 21CN for later this year which is good news.

Samknows isn’t necessarily up to date – it lists our exchange as BT only but TalkTalk is actually there as well and gives much better performance. Not sure how you find this sort of thing out though – I only know because we’re on TalkTalk so they told us, and there’s no way I’m telling the people who’ve just started a petition to get BT to improve their service; I’m enjoying my 10x increase in peak time speeds too much :-)

It might be worth contacting some of the other suppliers just to see what they say, if nothing else it lets them know there’s a potential demand and may move your exchange up their waiting list.

Are you sure you need something that bright?

We’ve got one of the multi LED ones and it’s quite bright enough for most purposes although I wouldn’t want to read a book by it. If we were replacing it I’d probably have a look at one of these.

Floppy discs – just thrown out an unused box full of them.

Two stroke engines

Not sure the leaf blower would work too well with a 4-stroke.

Edit: beaten to it.

We recently went through this and looked at the same places as you, but it turned out that local plumbers merchants had much better quality stuff and would give discounts that brought it down to the same or lower prices than even the internet plumbing places. They also delivered free and would provide proper advice. So look up your local plumbers merchants on the internet and go round and visit.

There are also some excellent plumbing suppliers on the internet but you really need to know what you want with them – returning a bath or a basin because it doesn’t fit is non-trivial!

We’ve got one over 10 years old that’s still fine. As above, clean the filters. There’s also a sort of labyrinthine arrangement above the cyclone bit that gets full of crud eventually (particularly if you use it to suck up brick and plaster dust after the builders have been at work, ahem…); you can take them apart and wash them and it’ll be as good as new. Or get Dyson to sort it.

We pay about £50 for gas and £59 for electricity from BG, and despite much measuring, uplugging and switching things off I have absolutely no idea where all that electricity goes as we use gas for heating. I suspect most of the rest of the street has tapped into our meter :? .

The Institute of Advanced Motorists says:

At traffic lights.
Leave in D. If red, stop and apply hand brake.

Just leaving your foot on the brake pedal is not a good idea for several reasons, including the fact that if you’re shunted from behind you’re unlikely to keep your foot there and you’ll go into the car in front, or into oncoming traffic if you’re at the front. The dazzle is also an issue, particularly at night in the wet. I actually usually put it into neutral if I’m likely to be there any length of time, e.g. if the lights have just changed to red; maybe I shouldn’t.

So why neutral and handbrake vs putting it into park?

What’s wrong with the handbrake; why wouldn’t you want to use it? Putting it into park involves going through reverse on most cars, so you’re flashing your reversing lights at the person behind; not a good idea if you want them to understand what you’re doing.

otherwise the TSA will cut off the lock and zipper to gain access.

Shouldn’t be a problem if the OP’s going to Canada. Not necessarily a problem to the US either – I once got home, removed the non-TSA-approved padlock from my case, unzipped it and found the little note from the TSA inside saying they’d had a look at my stuff.

Either my employer and HMRC have got this wrong or shares are taxed as income when released from a share scheme. When I cash in shares from my share incentive scheme it’s paid through the normal payroll system and I have to pay income tax on it. Even the capital gain on any increase in value of the shares goes through PAYE so is taxed as income, as are any reinvested dividends. Even if I take the shares as shares I have to pay income tax on them. Do any of those who think its taxed as a capital gain actually have share incentive schemes or are you making this up?

Please say that’s not what you’re saying…

Ok, here goes. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that there has been one positive outcome, which is a raising of awareness of the condition. Or would you rather people remain ignorant of conditions like this? Keep it hidden so that no-one needs to be worried? The way conditions like this used to be dealt with?

the girl who runs this website for Tourettes sufferers was on the radio

So on the plus side that looks like a positive outcome – when did Tourettes sufferers last have a chance to raise awareness in national media?

Of course I haven’t even mentioned about the possibility of Chiltern trails being vandalised

The only useful bit of trail lost on the current proposed route is part of the Chiltern bridleway near Wendover. When its not in a tunnel the line runs mostly in the bottom of the valley away from where the decent riding is.

If they’re planning on putting a station near by, the line will be good for house prices, no?

There aren’t any stations, except London and Birmingham!

As far as I am aware there aren’t any villages that are cut in half by the line, but there certainly is planning blight along the route. There are also supposed to be some hefty compensation payments.

The argument’s been about capacity all along. Newspapers seem to have been pushing the 20min saving thing but that’s never been the justification.

whassat?

It’s a little dongle thing that allows recent ipods to charge from older dock equipment. Like the iPod connector in my car, for example, which dates way back to 2010.

Very nice 8G nano just turned up. Charging convertor reserved for collection at Maplin so the whole exercise has cost me £7.99. Can’t complain. :-)

There are too many issues that haven’t been worked out for anyone to give an informed view on whether Scottish independence would be a good thing for either side or even possible; taxation, defence, nationality (who’s Scottish?) and ownership of assets being just some. I can see Salmond being a canny operator and using this – get a vote, win, say independence can come when certain conditions are met/agreements made and remain pretty much with the status quo almost indefinately whilst claiming victory and blaming Wesminster for independence not actually happening. It also gets over the problem of his party having no reason to exist if Scotland becomes independent.

nd – that might work. The issue is apparently caused by the signalling down the dock connector that tells the iPod to charge which changed when they got rid of Firewire docks for some reason that’s not apparent to me (or many other people!).

Edit: found an even cheaper one – http://www.maplin.co.uk/ipod-charge-convertor-351735

Just got the email to say mine’s on its way – sent 04:05 on a Sunday morning, quite impressive really.

Great to get a new one, but on the other hand I only used this in the car and I gather they’ve changed the charging arrangements on the newer ones so that it won’t charge in my car (like my iPhone) so it’s a sort of win-lose.

Aylesbury-Marylebone main-line

Calling that bit a main-line is stretching things a bit! Chiltern Railways now refer to the Princes Risborough route as the main-line, the Aylesbury route is considered more of a branch line. Main existing Chiltern through-routes are the A41, M1 or A40/M40 corridors, the one they’ve chosen has always been more of a local route with a road and railway that meander along the contours rather than blasting through like HS2 will. If they can’t squeeze into one of the existing corridors then given that its mainly chalk I would have thought that a bit more tunneling would have removed most of the objections. On the other hand maybe the politicians don’t feel they need to as the local MP is not likely to lose his seat over this or raise many objections given his wet approach to constituency issues.

Not heard anything since the initial email confirmation. Given their postage charges for a helmet I’d expected it to have been delivered personally by an angel riding a unicorn by now.

The unspoilt countryside that HS2 will ruin, yesterday

The M40 Chiltern cutting at Stokenchurch was equally controversial when it was built. If they’d decided to take HS2 down the same route then there would probably be less opposition; they have decided instead to take it out of the Chilterns down a relatively unspoilt valley, damaging one of the few remaining bits of countryside in one of the most populated areas of the country. Still, at least they didn’t take it down the next valley which is even more unspoilt. Obviously that’s because they chose the optimum route and wasn’t influenced by Chequers being in that valley…

Arcteryx Alpha SV
Ouch!

My Arcteryx jacket will be doing its 8th season this year – most expensive ski jacket I’ve had but also the cheapest per week’s skiing. Not really suitable for snowboarding though – too stylish :-) . Remember folks – fashion is what goes out of fashion!

There are a lot of nimbys here in Bucks that are against it; I keep telling people that it’s a capacity issue and the journey saving times are irrelevant but their views are entrenched and I have to admit that if I lived somewhere like Wendover I’d be pretty annoyed by the proposed route. The “anti” organisations are IMHO taking completely the wrong tack, pushing the lack of business case. Railways haven’t had tangible business cases since the middle of the last century – they’re something you build for the general strategic good of the country, a bit like motorways. They’d be better off attacking the route; something parallel with the WCML would have seemed a lot more sensible to me.

My biggest issue with HS2 is that a bunch of my council tax has been given by the council to the anti-HS2 group without my say; as one who’s in favour of HS2 I want my money back!

Might be worth mentioning that a few weeks ago there was a virus on this site in one of the numerous ads. My AVG 2012 caught it but I believe a number of users with MSE were not so lucky.

Whichever AV you use you’ll get situations like that. MSE wins for me primarily because it’s the least intrusive the 99.99999% of the time when I haven’t got a virus.

I can’t believe so many people would just take Microsoft at face value

From a security perspective that was probably a reasonable view 10 years ago but not now. For those who still think like that Ubuntu is your friend, just don’t expect most of your software to work on it.

I sent mine off on 28 November and the repair status on Apple’s web page didn’t change until last week when it changed to show it having been received on 13 December. It now says “Product Replacement Pending”. Not holding my breath…

I’m told it’s typically caused by a combination of using liquid detergents which don’t have bleach in them and low temperatures that don’t kill off the bugs and things.

We do a wash on the hottest setting – 90C I think – with a powder detergent every few weeks to clear out the thing, usually with any dishcloths/microfibre cloths or whatever else needs sterilizing in it so it’s not a total waste of detergent and electricity.

Also worth checking the detergent dispenser draw is clean – nasty things tend to grow in there.