I think you missed out a bit about giant shape-shifting lizards and Freemasons.

It is elected by the people. Every resident of the City has a vote. However given the fact that the number of residents is completely dwarfed by the numbers who commute in each day companies are also awarded votes depending on their number of employees. The company I work for dished these out to volunteers who appear on the Ward registers and can vote in elections. Obviously they could appoint stooges but I know one of the electors and he has never been put under any pressure to vote a particular way.

The City of London is not London. It's roughly equivalent to the old walled medieval City and is now mainly a financial district 'The Square Mile'.

It's very common in Britain for suspects to be arrested by one police force and questioned by another. Obviously cases are usually handled according to the location of the presumed crime but for something not specific to a particular location then theoretically any police force could handle it.

Of course the City of London is part of the UK. It has elections to its council as do all town councils. It has its own police force, as do many English counties.

I've always thought I had better than average colour perception and got zero (perfect) on this easily enough. I need a test designed for people with perfect colour vision.

Agreed but you missed out 3. Only the lawyers will get rich.

Debt depends what country you're in, not everyone lives in the US, and a medic can probably change countries very easily. As someone who's been through redundancy and employment I regret not becoming a doctor. Apart from the intrinsic karma you are guaranteed lucrative employment for life.

Because the Ecuadorian President decided to offer him sanctuary just to yank the US's chain. They couldn't care less about him. I see the situation developing in one three ways: (1) Assange gives himself up to the British authorities who will ship him to Sweden (2) Britain gets tired of the abuse of diplomatic privileges and tells the Ecuadorians to give him up or GTFO. At this point they could probably give Assange a diplomatic passport and take him back to Ecuador without him being arrested. (3) The Ecuadorians tire of their embassy guest and give him notice to find a new home. He could try his luck with Russia or, if he has any sense, go to Sweden. Of course Britain could just forcibly extract him any time they wanted. The SAS has a team permanently based in London and would enjoy a nice day out. However I'm sure this option has been categorically ruled out due to all the diplomatic fallout that would ensue.

You're being ridiculous here. The problem was not the language, it was the implementation. You can write crap code in any language.

Well apart from the quality of his work ... how can he even bear to look at all those hard-coded 'magic numbers' permeating the code, never mind the memory allocation issue.

Most of the Open Source code I've seen has been high quality and I assumed such a high-profile project as OpenSSL would be the same. Having dug out the code myself when this blew up I was shocked at how ropey it is. Magic numbers everywhere, memory handled in a cavalier way, no clear structure. Now I feel bad defending Open Source against FUD shills because I know they can whip out this example.

Yes I've always thought an interesting project would be to generate a magnetic field similar to the Earth's but a hundred times stronger and see if people could learn to detect its orientation.

Linux of course.

"Tax paid by the UK financial services industry rose from £63bn to £65bn last year, equivalent to 11.7 per cent of total tax receipts to the Exchequer" --- Financial Times, December 2013. Also the top 1% of earners paid 30% of all income tax. Banking is a regulated industry. The sort of dodges which sports stars and actors use to avoid paying millions in tax just aren't allowed. So the Square Mile isn't in fact the problem at all.