Clearly, something needs to change. But if they're not careful they might provoke a reaction from their existing userbase that's even more negative that the response to these outages.

It must make it so much harder to budget and to confidently plan for the future.

Is it worth it? Do people feel they're getting something in return for all that additional stress, or is it just that fixing it seems like too big a task to realistically be able to carry out?

I've seen some fairly convincing evidence to suggest that different people have been able to register fnamelname@googlemail.com and fname.lname@gmail.com and, for them, the usual rule that you can add a '.' anywhere before the @ doesn't hold true.

I don't think I've actually heard the sex thing being used anywhere in the UK, except perhaps when discussing Pulp Fiction. Even in kink contexts!

Does the American nuclear power industry not do the equivalent of blameless postmortems? That seems... suboptimal.

I settled on configuring it to only show the mute button, somewhere in the middle of the row where I was least likely to touch unintentionally (iirc, you had to have at least one button, and mute seemed like the least-dangerous option)

And then you had to have some paid-for app that let you use Caps Lock as Escape (which was annoying because I'd been remapping it to Control for a couple of decades, so had to unlearn that).

The default setup had really horrible ergonomics for me, with that no-feedback, out-of-position Escape key and the screen dimmer positioned exactly where my hands tended to rest. Ugh!

Pretty much all BEV buses have it (even the ones from before it became mandatory, since they plenty of power to spare anyway), which already covers more than 40% of the fleet, and the remaining hybrid buses are in the process of being phased out over the next few years. Sadly, the 'Boris bus' New Routemasters with their famously-inadequate forced air cooling are likely to be the last to go because they can't be sold on for less-intensive use elsewhere.

No-one else should really be being surprised by the changes to our weather patterns, since they're all roughly in line with the modelled effects of the changing climate. Air to air heat pumps (which work as AC) are now included in the various grant schemes, £30bn is being spent to upgrade the national grid by 2029, and the shift to zero carbon energy sources is well under way.

The water situation is more problematic, but in the short term the current El Nino increases the likelihood of having a wet winter so at least the reservoirs ought to have a chance to fully refill this year.

Unpicking the exact chains of causation is likely going to be extremely complex, but the general picture continues to look good.

By doing this, the US is effectively pushing them into China's arms.

Helping people from Ukraine and Hong Kong is overwhelmingly popular. Loss of freedom of movement is much less so, but was an inevitable result of the Brexit vote. And the surge of Xenophobia in the past couple of years has come despite a huge drop in immigration.

It's almost as if it were being driven by demagoguery rather than anything to do with policy choices or delivery.

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4080

12.5-20% was the typical range when I last dealt with them in the mid-late 2010s (usually varying with the seniority of the role). Perhaps things have changed to reflect the additional value they provide in bypassing the torrent of spam that's currently plaguing the recruitment process - but 25% still feels higher than I'd expect.

I agree that you can use this as an argument when negotiating a signing bonus if you're a direct candidate. Won't always work because the hiring manager usually isn't the person who's deciding whether or not to use a recruiter/headhunter (and their fee probably comes from a separate budget), but it's worth a try. I did exactly that when last changing jobs, and managed to get an additional 10%.

But given the remoteness of the Pacific and all the other sources of variation in European weather, it's a fairly weak signal with lots of uncertainty (and there's no clear signal at all for summer weather).

Doesn't really matter, I suppose - names are pretty arbitrary anyway and I can't imagine the sort of pain that would be involved in trying to force-canonicalise Jack->John, Leo->Leonard, Theo->Theodore (or Theobald?). Even the French don't do that any more!

(Mind you, the UK is still worse - Jack is #19 but John isn't even on the list)

Prior to that, people might have talked about the pound as if it were a reserve currency in the same way the USD is today but, as you say, actual foreign reserves were based on gold.

(And even if it were a fibre connection, those usually have dedicated Cable Landing Stations which are mostly concerned with separating the power & data cables and dealing with the power & cooling. Datacentres tend to be further inland)

Local councils are responsible for arranging invitations for those not currently registered with GPs, so it ought to be more or less universal - though there are inevitably a few people who'll slip through the net.

It's pretty basic, but the evidence suggests it's been reasonably effective at dealing with the "he didn't see a doctor for 40 years and then just dropped dead from a heart attack" stereotype.

https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/nhs-health-check/

In the UK, for example, the number of petrol stations has fallen by around 75% in the past 50 years and drivers now have to travel twice as far on average to fill up.

I'd expect the remaining sites in city centres to have entirely vanished by 2035. Out of town, they'll last a little longer but the distribution component of petrol prices will rise as the fixed costs are born by dwindling numbers of ICE drivers.

By the mid 2040s, there'll only be a tiny market driven largely by enthusiasts who don't care much about price. Perhaps we'll see delivery services springing up, similar to those for home heating oil, but the traditional large petrol station will be all but dead.