Explains Bruce Banner's pants.

There's also "non-compete" clauses which aren't actually enforceable. You can't tell someone who works at a travel agency they can't quit and go work at a rival travel agency except after n months, for example.

Alleged breaches of employment contract are dealt with by tribunal, not a court, so it doesn't matter if a hundred lawyers turn up with 2000 boxes of documents from the company in an attempt to bankrupt via anticipated awarded costs.

We do things a bit different in UK than US when it comes to employment.

Things that are commercial in confidence of course remain so or infrastructure detail beyond "yeah, we used Microsoft Exchange". Who a company has done business with is not, however. Or things like "team dynamic" which is a popular interview question.

Also, an employment contract that has a non-disclosure clause in it is only valid for its duration. Someone who has left the employ is no longer party to that contract, nor has to abide by any clauses of it. Google can't impose a "you don't talk about Fight Club" clause in perpetuity, no matter how much it might like to.

...in subsequent court filings that the state's consumer protection laws don't apply to people in New Mexico who weren't using the platform at the time.

I hope that argument was treated with all the derision it deserved. If anything, protection laws should apply more stringently for those who weren't using the platform but had their data harvested covertly with no means of denying our otherwise opting out of its unlawful collection.

Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters

1. 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
2. Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
3. The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
     "Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."

We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.

Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.

It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.

Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)

Explains the "hot hail" as used by Ming the Merciless.

Come on - we've seen the advertising Miami put out to the rest of the world. There is no transformation necessary.

Also, the problem isn't that Africa is too small. Mercator at the equator means it is accurately sized. It's all the land masses at higher latitudes that are too big, but that's attributed to racism instead of the costive apes from the Dark Continent learning basic mathematics and geometry. Bet they want reparations while they're at it.

It is the God-sold (not "-given" ; TANSTAAFL) duty of all US people to pay homage to the God of consumption at all times. What do you think that million bucks in the back pocket of "No-tab Kegsbreath" was for?

Those boxes are the distribution boxes on the "final pole" (from a cable that _has_ been run underground or a couple of wires from a preceding pole that extends) to split to individual residential properties and can have up to 16 wires off them. Depends how it was built out when the houses were built; mine has 2 connecting wires and 10 distribution ones as well as 2 more to the next pole as my road was extended with more properties after the initial installation.

Assumes poles are embedded in soil. Apart from rural areas, they are embedded in the asphalt of the pavement (sidewalk), requiring infill, tamping, patching, etc.. Times several million.

For added fun, Openreach will claim it's the local council's responsibility to maintain the streets when a pole is removed and local councils will claim it's Openreach's responsibility to make good the mess that results. Either way the argument would take years to resolve involviing courts of all flavours while the street remains a disaster area.