Yes. Unfortunately a lot of the bins in supermarkets (and offices) got taken out (including the one in my local supermarket) at the same time as the perspex screens and one-way systems got put in place this year. I have an growing pile of batteries at home waiting for when they come back.

I would think it's simpler than that. Most governments have rules saying that it you run a business involved in money exchange or transmission then it's subject to KYC and AML rules. These are the same rules that the bitcoin exchanges are subject to. If you don't implement those controls, then you've broken the law.

The book was clever in that it was arranged so that it was like several smaller books had each placed inside the middle page of the next. I haven't seen the film but having read the book I thought it would translate poorly since in addition to the complex interweaving a lot of it is also internal monologue of the characters. Reviews seemed to bear this out. But definitely recommend the book!

I think at the time it was released Equilibrium got pigeonholed as a ripoff of The Matrix. Very unfair, but that's why I think it continues to be less well known.

Yes, that's true - coinage (and that includes eg commemorative £5 coins) has legal tender status throughout the UK although for smaller coins it's only for limited amounts. Bank of England notes in denominations below £5 used to have legal tender status in Scotland when they existed too. Northern Irish notes are also not legal tender anywhere in the UK, including NI.

Legally,companies in the UK are well within their rights to refuse to sell to you for cash if they want (legal tender exists in England and Wales though not Scotland but only applies to debts which already exist - and its a valid contractual term to specify a method of payment so they can simply refuse the transaction). Not sure the supermarket would be ready for the publicity of doing this though as it's some of the most vulnerable in society who'd be excluded.

Hmm, that's not my experience. In my experience at my local UK supermarket (a Sainsburys), if the queue ahead of you for the human checkout is 2 or fewer and you have age restricted items (which includes energy drinks now!), the human queue is faster because they use people who are restocking shelves etc to double up on self checkout duty so often it ends up being the same human checkout operator who then has to come over to authorise your purchases because noone else is nearby. They fixed the 'unexpected item' problem (which was always a huge pain if you wanted to use your own non plastic bag because it simply didn't work then) by removing the scales and just trusting people so that's progress I suppose.

Outlook/Exchange is still the undisputed king in this area, and given the level of integration into Office and various enterprise mobility products, I don't see its hold in the enterprise being broken any time soon, more's the shame. If they want to be successful, they'll need to work out how they deal with that problem because realistically the only people who will be paying for this in large numbers are the enterprise market. That means it will need to work in a complementary way, either as a plugin for Outlook or an alternative Exchange client (which will be a harder sell).

Unfortunately for them, an Enterprise Office 365 subscription runs to $20/seat/month for the entire suite (if you don't need PSTN/PABX integration for Skype). They are not going to get anything close to $30/seat/month. In fact I suspect they may even struggle to get subscription pricing through that market.

It wouldn't be that hard to provide alternative versions of the small number of "important" packages which depend on either libpam-systemd or systemd itself (I'm talking about things like gdm3, gnome-settings-daemon, lightdm, network-manager and policykit here). There aren't many of them (there are also a few packages which are uninteresting and have a hard depend which I'd be less fussed about.)

Slightly further up the difficulty scale is libsystemd0; it might perhaps be possible to replace that with a safe do-nothing shim if you really cared about it (eg because you want to reduce the potential security attack surface).

Ultimately, I think Debian should have worked harder to support multiple init systems. A requirement for packages above a certain importance level to support sysvinit in addition to systemd and to provide installable alternatives which don't create dependencies on systemd packages (other than perhaps libsystemd0) would have assuaged most people's concerns for very little effort.

Although that's true it's effectively impossible to avoid installing libsystemd0 (if you care about that). In current Debian stable it's also very hard on a desktop system to avoid installing the systemd package even if you use sysvinit as your init system (it gets brought in via policykit-1 which depends on libpam-systemd and which is depended on indirectly by the big desktop metapackages). In testing and unstable you can manage to only have elogind instead of systemd.

This isn't something which is free because of a regulation in the UK (and existing regulations wouldn't stop banks from effectively charging for it eg by charging a monthly account fee). Before online payments, we had personal cheques which were also free. Banks here have traditionally make their money in transaction banking from a combination of paying lower rates of deposit interest, cross-selling lending business and charging businesses for accepting payments (cash handling, accepting cheques, accepting debit/credit cards etc). Personal transaction banking has been effectively free for a very very long time (pretty well as long as we've had mass consumer banking). The banks have made various attempts to change this (cash machine charges, "packaged accounts", etc) but competition is fierce in this segment and continues to ensure basic personal banking service is free.

Cash is totally platform neutral and pretty well accepted.

The problem the US have with Huawei is about more than whether they have been spying or not - it's about the fact that the US as a nation have lost control of the technology because the Chinese are the only credible firms producing 5G equipment. That means that they can control or break the standards in subtle ways, and then deliberately make it much harder or impossible for US (or other non-Chinese) firms to compete on a level playing field (by making only Chinese equipment truly cross-compatible). I don't know if this is actually happening but it is a legitimate concern - it's like the difference between Microsoft's OOXML vs ODF - the OOXML standard is technically open but it's close to impossible to truly implement something which is properly cross-compatible with MS Office.

A level playing field with open and transparent standards is something we should all be concerned to maintain because the next logical stage will be for the firms benefiting from the closed standard is to leverage that "lockin" to raise prices.

Which is why rewriting basic system utilities from scratch, repeatedly, instead of relying on the battle-hardened code which has already had its fair share of vulnerabilities exploited and patched over a long lifespan, is likely to increase the attack surface.

systemd's apparent need to replace/rewrite basic system utilities which have worked for decades (in some cases) and don't need changing IS part of the problem.

You mean, here?