Hey, people pay good money for non-radioactive materials!

One morning The RAF bombed Pforzeim. 17,600 died in the ensuing firestorm.

One evening. The USAF bombed during daylight and the RAF at night.

I got a phishing message in the last week from a WhatsApp business account claiming to be the hotel company that I'm going to be staying with in a couple of days. They wanted me to do some kind of confirmation process and warned that if I didn't do it within 24 hours I might lose the reservation. There were a couple of things that were odd, but it's not the first time that a hotel company has made me jump through hoops to do a pre-check-in. It was only when I saw that the link they sent me (which I opened in a private browsing session, of course) was to a page which had a booking.com header but wasn't a booking.com URL that I got suspicious, and they had a UI for card details with no clear explanation of what they wanted them for. At that point I opened the actual booking.com and sent a message to the hotel to double-check, and after sending that message I remembered reading a few months ago that booking.com had a data leak, but I bet the phishers who wrote to me have had some successes.

I think it's three separate purchases of gold and one handover to the scammer.

I was going to notify you that you have a cranky Scottsman here wanting a word with you, but then I double-checked, and for some reason a thousand Watts is a kilowatt. But then why is it abbreviated kW? WTF world? Please fix.
And no, I am not a train fancier. Well, any more than anybody else.

"No net zero?
OK, carbon negative it is, you heard the boss."

Wow, Caldera, there's a company I haven't heard about in a looooonnngg time.

Let's remember that they transformed into blatant patent troll and persistent lawsuit pest The SCO Group which Microsoft funded in a futile attempt to bludgeon Linux out of existence.

5) Everyone decided 'derp tariffs bad' so (2) will be filled by China, and poorer client states

I think you missed the recent news stories about the EU removing the de minimis customs duty exemption, which was decided in November and comes into force on the 1st of July.

The Spanish Wikipedia article does say that some comms took three days to restore, because after the power came back the configurations of some devices, I presume routers, had been lost. Specifically it cites newspaper articles about remote assistance buttons, but the journalists either didn't understand the technical details or didn't want to explain in detail. So the misunderstanding is probably that it took a few days for everything to get back to normal, even though the actual blackout lasted 18 hours or less. (It was about 10 hours for me, but I'm in a major city).

And the fact that this was in response to a blackout that lasted days

Either you're confusing it with a different blackout or this needs clarification. The power was back to 99% of users after about 18 hours, and although I can't access the primary sources I see citations that it was fully restored within 24 hours. Your main point still stands.

I still had 4G phone signal for an hour or two after the blackout. When the power hadn't come back after about half an hour I looked online and discovered that it was a national event rather than just my block of flats.

I hope Ford gave all those hapless engineers back pay for the whole time they were fired. (Hapless, because they took the offer to come back instead of finding an employer that properly valued their expertise and experience.)

It seems that the gestalt of the era is not just plain incompetence, but a complete disdain for competence. Fuck these bad managers and slipshod stewards.

Its original use dates to WWII and was more akin to "military R&D engineer/technician": the people who developed radar, for example; or Barnes Wallis of the bouncing bomb and Lancaster bomber.

The use has generalised over time and would certainly include madcap inventors like Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who is very much not an ivory tower dweller. I would guess that that's the sense which was contrasted with engineers in the documentary.

In the vernacular of The Register, which the headline comes from, it is used quite generally for scientists or engineers.

Always nice to meet someone who considers me a kid.

But sending this guy to jail as a scammer? Laughable. He gave people what they paid for.

The fraud charge sounds like it was defrauding the university rather than his clients. The CPS press release which all of the media reports seem to be based on doesn't break down the sentencing among the three charges of fraud by false representation, accessing a computer system without authorisation, and money laundering. The case doesn't appear to be available (yet?) at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk.