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.

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.

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.

It's been done. Quite messy.

No, they aren't. A percolator cycles water through the grounds continuously. A moka pot forces water through the grounds once.

That's an Elon Musk smear, as in the Elon Musk who claimed in court that calling someone a paedophile is just a generic insult and not defamatory. It's not wise to believe or repeat anything he says.

Forcing the UK to join Schengen would either force Ireland to join it too or create problems with the Good Friday agreement. Maybe the current "border in the Irish Sea" would be adapted, but it's not unthinkable that an exception would be made. The EU is quite pragmatic when it needs to be.

"Freedom of movement" in the context of the EU doesn't mean open borders. It's really freedom of residence provided that you get a job, or are a student or retired.

You gave Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for Ukraine not keeping the nuclear weapons that were on its soil after the breakup of the USSR. There's an argument that the real mistake the US (and the UK and France) made was not getting involved in 2014 when Russia decided to unilaterally revoke Stalin's transfer of the Crimea to the Ukraine. The resulting lesson, which is also the lesson that the current war in Iran teaches, is that a state should do all it can to acquire nuclear weapons and then not give them up under any circumstances.

It's well documented that on entering a theme park most people turn right, but that is consistent with this research: turning right on entering a room means that you walk anticlockwise around it.

"Most of" allows exceptions. More than two thirds of EU residents live in countries which mandate SIM registration, and of the larger non-EU European countries Russia and Turkey do; the UK and Ukraine don't; without doing a full calculation, I suspect that the two thirds threshold is met for the whole of geographic Europe too.

I was responding to a claim that the entire existence of Europe is in danger, not that Russia might invade Estonia next. (Also, FWIW, the Russian population of Poland is the size of a large town or a very small city).