robeasthope
Defence spending has always been driven by domestic pressures - anyone remember the 'scandal' when Airbus (with a better plane) secured a contract for US transport airlift?
FYI it's not all bad: the UK automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) CCTV network run by the police (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK) is currently being legislated by the Coalition to bring it under statutory regulation - considering the revelations about police conduct over undercover cops it can't come to soon either.
P.S. Bless the UK gov, a full surveillance state can't happen because it's rubbish at IT: 'The current restraints on police use of ANPR data have been dictated by pragmatism rather than a concern for civil liberties. Giving every police officer free access to the system would overload the system, "make it unstable, slow it down", said John Dean, National ANPR co-ordinator for the Association of Chief Police Officers.'
Might be an idea to add an option to separate out the journeys into bus/tube/OG lines since the TfL Route Planner sometimes give strange routes when all mixed together?
Edit: Silly typo's
For static hand coded images media queries will suffice but once you start dynamically serving images it gets tricky fast, especially when faced with users that don't know/care about HD images issues.
Combined with some code to scale images to the correct size on the fly (with caching, etc) I think it could be pretty useful.
While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.
You sound pretty depressed - remember the best functional description of depression is an inability to create detailed mental images of the future - Your entire psyche is focussed on trying to solve all the things you've got going on (which is natural because want to fix this) but be careful about it distorting your perspective.
Slow down your thinking and try not to freak out - like others have said you are young and that gives you time to learn new skills. .
If things get bad or you just want to talk email the Samaritans in the UK - http://tinyurl.com/bfghx6q - it's all anonymous and they won't care or even know about the US connection unless you tell them (If anybody knows the US equivalent or one local to the area, post it below). There are literally hundreds of people out there that want and can help with these situation but you've got to seek them out - Western society is terrible dealing with mental health issues but once you fire up the bat signal decent people come running. Good luck