Six digit user IDs, eh?

Newbies :)

Not as impressive as pi.ai (which also happens to be completely free).

The voice mode of that app is my go-to when I want to wow someone with how advanced AI is now.

No problems on PS5. Get a decent console :)

âoe No-till techniques currently work better with GMO crops and rely on herbicides such as glyphosateâ

No they donâ(TM)t, as is clearly obvious when you consider that no-till farming in the EU, where almost all GMOs and glyphosate are banned, is very much a thing.

Writing your own address at the top of a letter is the standard way of doing it.

And our prisons, while often horrific, arenâ(TM)t as bad as the ones in the US usually are.

No, you couldn't send texts between networks, at least in the UK. I remember only being able to text other people on Orange (my network). They were all GSM. This would have been in the late nineties.

In Britain we would call someone from Pakistan 'Asian'. Perhaps you should know this sort of thing before trying to argue with someone who knows what they are talking about?

Well as someone who lives in the UK/EU I've never once heard anyone in person or the media ever call anyone from the Middle East 'half-asian'.

Actually the NHS is one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877

Or at least it was, before this current Tory government started to destroy it and sell it all to their friends in the private healthcare sector. The more private sector involvement, the less efficient it is. That has always been and still is the case.

Spare money to buy shares (at *any* price) might be affordable for *you* - this does not mean it's affordable for most of the population, especially if you're talking about a meaningful investment. In any case, what does it actually mean to 'buy' shares in something you already owned?

No, I mean the utilities being sold-off were massively undervalued. What would it cost to build a nationwide telephone network? A lot less than was charged for BT. This was true of all of the privatisations. The taxpayers have paid a lot more to build-up those industries than the state received when they were privatised.

This is the mantra of the free-marketers, that the private sector is somehow more efficient. And yet in reality we've seen costs go up in almost every privatised utility or service (water, trains, energy, health), and we find ourselves in bizarre situations like where taxpayers put more into the trains now, under a privatised system, than they did under nationalised BR, even though we've got the highest-ever ticket prices.

The free market is not some magic bullet. It works where there is actual competition and fails in other areas. Look at what's happening to the NHS - we're going from what is recognised as the most efficient healthcare system in the world to one 'opened-up to competition', a process that requires three more layers of beureacratic organisations and thousands more managers throughout the NHS dealing with contracts, bids, tenders and rubbish like that. None of it serves to help people actually using the NHS, but it does help Tory funders in private healthcare companies.

For a great example of what the 'privatise everything' train of thought leads to, look at energy. We sold-off everything, including all of the institutional technical knowledge. Now we want to build nuclear we basically have to pay whatever price a French government-run company demands, which would certainly be more than if we just admitted our free-market ideology was flawed and got the state to build it for the benefit of the people, rather than some corporation. How is this sensible?

Privatising the water boards might have been a "fantastically good deal" if you had lots of money to invest in the shares, before immediately selling them. Lots of people did this of course, as they did with gas, rail and all of the other things built with the people's money and then sold for knock-down prices to foreign coroporations.

However, even the most ardent capitalist could never argue that privatising water was rational. What meaning is there to a market with no competition? If I want to have water piped to my house (and sewerage taken away) I *have* to pay Wessex Water, a Malaysian company, to do it. There's no choice. Yes, what they can charge is limited by some formula, but who cares? Nothing they do has any bearing on who I buy water from.

Before privatisation water supply in the UK was provided on a non-profit basis by democratically-elected representatives. Now it's done by companies granted a monopoly, millions flow out of the UK as a result. Wessex Water made over 72 million pounds profit after tax in 2012, and probably close to that since. And has this resulted in lower prices for consumers due to the oh-so-efficient private sector? No. In fact, prices have been rising faster than inflation since privatisation.

Hurrah for the free market and neoliberal ideology!

Man, the US sounds like a nightmare. I don't know why 'socialism' is such a dirty word there - your lives would be immeasurably improved if you adopted even a tiny bit of it.

25 days holiday is standard here in the UK, and you don't 'use those up' if you get sick. The very idea of a total allowable number of sick days is bizarre, frankly.

It must be noted that not all peadophiles are adults.

Also, what might be considered peadophilia in overly socially conservative countries such as the US might be perfectly legal in other countries. You do realise the age of consent varies throughout the world? It's 13 in Spain, for instance. I know it's 18 in some states in the US, which seems ludicrously late to a lot of Europeans, so *maybe* Stallman is talking about have sex with a 16 year old (which is fine), or someone who is under 16 having sex with someone else underage.

Having been to a number of counts, I can assure you that there is very little opportunity for these serial numbers to be linked to voters. There are many, many people around the papers at all stages, from the moment you vote to after the election is decided. Linking the numbers can only be done with an order by an Electoral Court if fraud is suspected. The papers are destroyed 12 months after the election.

Of course, in theory someone *could* get hold of the numbers and counterfoils, but I would argue that the risk of this when voting in person is way, way less than using postal votes. Postal votes are easily the largest source of fraudulent and intercepted votes in the UK.

Their civil liberties promises were just about as true as their 'no NHS reorganisation' ones.

They lied to get elected, and they lied big - about pretty much everything. They don't care about the deficit at all, they only care about making the UK suit their ideology, i.e. neoliberal free markets with the government morally judging everyone and deciding who is 'worthy'. Same old Tories.