You seem to be envisioning one- or two-storey houses rather than six-storey blocks of flats. Here in Spain each flat has its own compressor(s) mounted on an outside wall of the flat, not a bunch of tubes going past all the other stories to the roof.

"Communism" means individuals can't own businesses. All businesses belong to "everybody," and the government runs them.

Not originally. Communism means that the workers own the business. Individuals can own businesses, but when they employ other people they have to give those people a share of the business.

He still owns enough shares to have some influence, surely?

It's not that it violates the theory but that it violates the symmetry. And yes, it's long been known that CP-symmetry violation occurs: that's why nowadays the main question in this area is whether CPT-symmetry holds.

What you say is true, but there's also a sense in which the announcement of results does have a bias to the northern hemisphere summer, although for reasons unrelated to one country's budget. In short: it's conference season.

Very few businesses that are involved in IT in any way have anything remotely close to decent security.

Basically, they need to reintroduce the US' Internet Czar, who should have meaningful authority and who should impose meaningful IT security standards. That small companies can't afford to hire security staff is irrelevant as they mostly either work in the cloud using SAAS, at which point their provider should be handling all the security. If you want to roll your own, then you should accept the burden of paying for adequate security. Minimum standards apply to just about everything else in life, and I'd rate getting IT security right just a little bit more important than getting cars to not roll over (you can usually survive a roll) or preventing toasters from spontaneously combusting (you can park electrical appliances away from flammable stuff).

You can avoid catastrophes with defective appliances but you can't avoid catastrophes with defective IT systems.

Unless of course you have a spare silver spoon and go to oxbridge.

People repeating that prejudice and discouraging applications are a bigger problem for Oxbridge access than lack of silver spoons.

The Lib Dems should maybe have gone for a confidence and supply arrangement rather than full coalition, but the point of coalition is that both parties have to compromise, and the junior party/-ies have to compromise more. Compare the 2010-2015 parliament to the 2015-2019 one and tell me that the Lib Dems didn't have a moderating effect.

Officer, not agent.

I never would have imagined, ever, that anyone would pay for the things described in the summary.

Some of them might have been legacy purchases. I have the Oxford English/Spanish Dictionary app on my phone: it's a portable offline version of a tool which I also have in physical form (and the book is technically portable but might not fit in all of my backpacks). You might think that there must be good online English/Spanish dictionaries, but when I bought the app for my first Android I had 50MB of 3G data per month in my contract and I kept data turned off 99% of the time.

Data are fungible. They can always, ALWAYS be rearranged.

Yes but. If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, the explanation is compatible with the old data being stored in an Oracle database and they decided to stop paying a company which has the reputation for using its income to disrupt its clients by auditing and suing them. If you don't migrate your data before you stop paying Larry, it wouldn't surprise me that you're locked out of it until you decide to fork up another year's subscription.

The whole point of the Michelin Star is that it's supposed to be hard to get, and set you apart from the rest of the crowd.

One star is supposed to mean "Worth a visit if you're passing by"; two stars is "Worth a detour", and three is "Worth a dedicated trip". A city of a million people should have more than one restaurant worth a visit. And if you take France as a reference, since that's where it originated, there are almost 10 Michelin-starred restaurants per million inhabitants (654 vs 68 million).

These countries already have that database. Spain launched its digital personal identity card a month or two ago. The only thing that's new is the obligation for social media companies to use it.

it's people who work at a small business looking at the social media YOU chose to make public

Or the social media that someone with a similar name chose to make public. Whether or not it's Orwellian for a company to process personal data about me which I didn't provide directly to that company, it's objectionable because receiving the data from the subject is the strongest guarantee that it's actually data about that subject, and searches based on nothing more than the name can be a strong guarantee of error.