Yesterday a friend ordered a sofa from a well known online retailer in the UK, then chose to finance it 12 months 0% APR. The retailer site sent him to a very well known bank's website, pre-filing part of the finance form with things they had already like forename and surname. Except he's Spanish and the site wrote his middle name and both surnames in the non-editable surname field.

Once he finishes filing the form with all the addresses he lived in the last 3 years he clicks on "continue" and is greeted with a "surname is in the wrong format" message.

Remember, that filed is non-editable and it's pre-filled by the retailer's website; so he effectively can't do nothing at all about it.

Conclusions?

1) This is living proof that diversity is a business advantage (they lost at least one £1200 sale).

2) The Internet is stupidly broken.

3) People working in IT is as clever or as stupid as anyone else.

A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us.

Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)

The threat is "baiting someone into nuclear war" and not "having tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and being ready to use them to kill millions of people"? Give me an effing break mate :)

That premise does not necessarily lead to that conclusion. Ask the USSR.

Savings are finite, sadly.

It already meets all the requirements to be a member, EU law is ingrained in Catalan law, it has the ability to negotiate and state structures. It just needs to be an independent country.

It would be better to be in the EU, but meanwhile that happens some bilateral trade deals with the EU should be relatively easy to accomplish.

If you're referring to recognition as a country, that's a separate and huge discussion. If Catalonia is not recognised it can't take its part of Spanish debt with it (might be up to 20% of the total) while being a rebel region not paying taxes and maybe under military occupation. How is Spain, which is still in critical condition with a debt of the size of its GDP, going to fare? This month Spain had to get a loan to pay pensions. This month!

So if Spain loses 20% of its GDP while keeping all the debt, how is it going to survive? And if Spain can't pay and falls, what's going to happen to the EU? You thought Brexit was bad? This is much worse!

A situation were the outcome of a YES vote is negotiated and Catalonia pays his dues is a win-win for every stakeholder: Catalans, Catalonia, Spaniards, Spain and the EU. Striking trade deals after that is pure pragmatism.

Just go through old papers about Slovenia or even the Baltics. It's all about realpolitik at the end and Catalonia has to be able to show its value to the world.