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.

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

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.

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.

The street lamp network is already in place, usually fairly close to a pole anyway and that would also require some work to dig a channel to hook up to the power with the costs entirely borne by the local council. Plus there's regulations on how close (or separate) lamps are, so that isn't going to happen.

> We don't have much else on those poles

We don't have _anything_ else on those poles. Legally you can't even put a picture of a lost cat on one without permission from Openreach, but that tends to have a blind eye turned as it isn't commercial. Like a bunch of flowers tied to one where some idiot offed themselves as they binned their motor overcooking a bend.

Telephone poles in UK are only ever for use by BT (previously GPO) as they put them up and have never shared with anybody. Mainly because there wasn't anybody to share with; even when alternative landline networks came into being they still routed through the BT national network as they were small localised ones (such as Kingston Telecommunications) before the advent of cellular networks.

Also not mentioned: what will happen to all the poles that no longer have wires strung on them. Openreach aren't replacing directly with fibre, that's being routed in the ground from new distribution boxes, except possibly for really rural areas. For suburbia that's millions of useless and worthless ex pine trees soaked in creosote that will not only be a bitch to dig out (some have been there for over 50 years) but also are unrecyclable as well as shockingly polluting should they be burnt.

We're all going to get turned into hermit crabs.

He's the dumbest smart person he knows. Pity he doesn't know that, though.