Hear, hear. And it's not just Starbucks; in the UK the two other major chains, Costa and Nero, are little different.

As far as many coffee lovers are concerned, the real reason not to drink Kopi Luwak is the same as the reason not to eat foie gras or white veal: animal welfare. If you pick up the beans that have been 'selected' by civets in the wild, that's one thing; but to cage the civets like battery hens and feed them any old coffee beans in the hope of achieving premium prices is rather different.

Like the GOP?

I don't buy it. Yes, a laptop with full disk encryption takes a bit of time to boot (mine, a Dell Latitude D630, has just taken 3 minutes including the initial decryption dialogue) but a desktop system will boot faster. If 7 minute boot times where I work were common, our help desk would be inundated with angry calls every morning and the IT director besieged by demands for the service to be fixed.

I'm not sure about that £6000 figure - which was the cost, by the way, not just maintenance - but numbers like that tripping from the tongues of senior managers who may or may not be in touch with the real details are always suspect in my view.

I can't think of any way that an attacker would use this for nefarious purposes

Kilo is not Latin, it's Greek.

But Google UK has had a hard time recently in the press and public opinion (along with Amazon and *$$) for paying little or no tax

Not exactly. Arius and his followers called themselves Christians and were close to becoming the dominant force in the Christian Church during the 4th century, yet held that Jesus was the greatest of the creations. Unitarians today call themselves Christians and reject the doctrine of the Trinity.

A Crhistian, in the historical derivation of the term, was originally simply a follower of Christ.

You seem to be confusing the pattern for Christian prayer outlined by Jesus, and repeated parrot-fashion by some Christians as the "Lord's Prayer", with the Apostles' Creed, which was indeed formed to firm up what was and what was not orthodox faith. Other creeds also came into being in the early centuries of the christian era, which were also designed to exclude certain non-orthodox beliefs.

Christian the LDS may label itself, but its members would probably not subscribe to, for example, the Athanasian Creed with its Trinitarian statements - but then nor would Tim Berners-Lee.

A fellow-pupil of mine at school had an easy answer:

"A newton is the force of an apple hitting someone on the head".

I don't think he passed his physics exam

It's partly the desire to turn the clock back to the glory days of the Empire, when Johnny Foreigner knew his place and Imperial measures were the best.

Is it part of UKIP policy to abolish metric measures in Britain once they have taken us out of Europe? If not, I bet it soon will be.

Not exactly. The police force's overall budget will not be increased, so the taxpayer won't fork out any more, and the money will have to be found from elsewhere, such as the overtime budget for beat officers. It will thus hurt the force a little, and perhaps hurt the public because of the decreased level of service provided.

How can we ensure that the people responsible are the ones who actually carry the can in cases like this?

No, I'm the Messiah, and so is my wife

the embassy was not stormed. I remember well the standoff, which ended when diplomatic relations were broken off and the embassy staff were allowed to leave unmolested. There was popular uproar because one of them was the murderer of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who could not be detained because he still had diplomatic immunity.

Happily, he no longer has that immunity, and the new Libyan government is cooperating with the investigation into the murder, albeit 28 years too late.