Ground coffee goes stale in minutes. Good hand coffee grinders are available quite cheaply.

As for the mess, try an Aeropress. Very quick and easy to clean up.

More likely the (Spanish) EU commission president would look very unfavourably on Scottish membership, considering the boost that would give to the independence ambitions of Catalunya and the Basque country. And would it stop there? What about Sicily, Lombardy, Bavaria...? That's the thinking behind the reluctance to see the UK divided within the EU.

But they showed up in the wrong place, and clearly didn't know where to go

The roundabout of roundabouts is the M25. Also doubles as a car park.

You'd be surprised; a 10-foot wide sewer passes right through the Olympic park in London. I remember thinking that a small (non-lethal) bomb in the right place during last year's Games would raise a hell of a stink

My Chambers from 1983 lists 'catched' as obsolete or dialect; also 'catchen', which to my ear sounds better.

I think you will find there is a certain amount of irony in the name.

You know irony - like goldy and bronzy, but made of iron.

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