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And how about if the vote had been phrased as "do you wish to remain in the EU", with a 2/3rd requirement to meet the bar, meaning 1/3rd was sufficient to trigger Brexit? Would that have seemed fair?

Democracy evolved as a shortcut to avoid fights. Just count and you got a rough idea of which side has the most people and thus, is more likely to win if it came down to it. Once you start tipping the threshold in order to bias things towards your preferred decisions, you increase the risk of the losing side thinking ... wait a minute. We could win this. That's far worse than any other outcome.

The EU and its supporters constantly warp the system to try and make it hard for people to leave, hard for the people to reject their policies. It is fundamentally undemocratic.

To not only use UTF-8 as the internal string encoding but practically mandate it, if you want to remain safe.

UTF-8 is a fine transport format, but for raw runtime performance it's obviously going to be an issue if you ever need to iterate over characters, do substring matches, things like that because you can't do constant time "next char" or indexing.

UTF-16 doesn't let you do that either in the presence of combining characters, but they're pretty rare and for many operations it doesn't really matter.

Are you sure? I thought Algolia literally was Solr (which is ElasticSearch which is Lucene).

That seems like a really unfortunate design decision. I used to think that Java's use of UTF-16 for strings was just a problematic legacy thing, but compared to this it seems quite good. Strings are pretty high performance and there are no complex calculations to do indexing or bounds checks. And in Java 9 the JVM can switch between UTF-16 or Latin1 encodings on the fly, which both uses less RAM and speeds things up simultaneously. There are no memory safety issues caused by character encodings.

The direction of the nation is decided by less than a majority in every vote. So why would this one in particular require "special measures"?

I think what you're getting at here is you support the EU, so would prefer if attempts to leave it or defy it were harder to implement than normal decisions.

IPv6 is less common at work, more common at home.

But are you roaming in those places? For reasons I don't understand fully but are presumably billing related your IP traffic gets tunnelled back to your home ISP when roaming, or at least, it used to.

Isn't it "people an NSA analyst believes are Russian hackers"? I read the Intercept story but didn't see where it showed convincing evidence of that. It just says they showed no doubt.

The problem with insisting on roundness, which has been a focus of the education system for years, is that it generates tons of generic shapeless people who specialise in nothing and find themselves unable to obtain the best, high paying jobs.

In my family, myself and my brother have been successful by focusing on one or two skills and honing them. That was made much harder by the education system, which fought us the whole way, because it sees specialisation as some sort of problem when it is in fact the solution. In my brother's case the school tried to insist he went to university. He didn't, as he knew full well what he wanted to do and reckoned, correctly, he would do better without being a student. In my case the university insisted that I take non-CS classes despite that I was paying them for a CS course. The classes were interesting, but marked arbitrarily (i.e. one essay at the end and who knows how it's evaluated?). I nearly got kicked out of CS because of a single essay written on archaeology!

As I go through life, I constantly encounter people who thought they were "learning how to learn" or "learning how to think" when they went to university, only to discover after graduation that they had no particular skills and were seem as essentially worthless by the job market. It's tremendously depressing for them and creates constant, lifelong insecurity.

Critical thinking abilities are something you want on top but are not a substitute for actual, hard skills. And they are certainly not something a university can teach - please. All the stats and studies show that universities are incredibly ideologically homogenous and rapidly stamp out any political thought that deviates from their left wing consensus. Universities teach people that thinking and disagreement are dangerous, that opinions are "triggering", and speaking out loud leads to exclusion. They're the last place on earth I'd expect critical thinking skills to emerge unscathed.

There is also the opposite problem. The public aren't asking for it not to be done either. Internet surveillance isn't a hot button political topic either way. However, terrorism is. Hence the problem.

Thought crime already exists for a long time already. Planning to commit murder (thinking about it) is punished nearly as harshly as succeeding. Is it really so controversial?

You're comparing the UK to the USA there and assuming the USA is saner.

The origin of the USA's prohibition against self-incrimination was people who were tortured into confessions and other forms of undermining their own freedom. The original logic for this right does not apply to divulging encryption keys. It's not clear what higher purpose is being served by allowing people under investigation to halt those investigations by using encryption: it's not like they can be tortured into revealing incorrect information inside the encrypted files.