No, BA didn't get their Concorde for £1 each, they paid full price for the aircraft they ordered and nearly full price for the aircraft that were dropped by other airlines before they took delivery. And even if they did pay just £1 for each airframe, the purchase cost pales in comparison to the operating cost - getting the aircraft for a pittance would have little impact on profitability against the costs of actually running the aircraft.

British Airways operated Concorde profitably by charging enough money for the tickets - it was indeed one of the airlines main profit centres before it was grounded by the crash and subsequent retirement a few years later. When BA was privatised, one of the first things they did was drastically raise Concorde ticket prices and none of their regular passengers batted an eyelid.

In the UK this would be classed as a "Casual or Irregular Worker" under the following criteria:

Casual or irregular work

Someone is likely to be a worker if most of these apply:

they occasionally do work for a specific business

the business doesn’t have to offer them work and they don’t have to accept it - they only work when they want to

their contract with the business uses terms like ‘casual’, ‘freelance’, ‘zero hours’, ‘as required’ or something similar

they had to agree with the business’s terms and conditions to get work - either verbally or in writing

they are under the supervision or control of a manager or director

they can’t send someone else to do their work

the business deducts tax and National Insurance contributions from their wages

the business provides materials, tools or equipment they need to do the work

https://www.gov.uk/employment-...

Seems to fit what Uber want out of a worker...

The other categories identified by the UK Government are "employee", "shareholding employee", "self employed or contractor", "director" and "office holder".

If the government used a website you would still have to sign up for internet access.

If the government used a phone number you can call, you would still have to sign up for phone service.

This is no fucking different to legacy approaches.

So, the actual story here is that Apple has access to your encrypted files and can decrypt them at will, its just selling it as a nice convenience for you...

I guess that's the "law enforcement cannot access encrypted iPhones" issue solved.

Will the reflectors last as long as the plutonium tho? Although there is no weather on the moon, there is still dust thrown up from activity on the surface (meteorites etc) which will coat the reflectors and reduce their efficiency over time.

The alternative being the government spending money creating a replacement? How is that not worse?

There was another story in the UK news today that an industrial waste shredder killed a worker that crawled onto the conveyor belt for some reason - in both examples, the worker was inside the exclusion area without ensuring the area was safe and the machinery was isolated, and in both cases we are dealing with automated machinery that just simply carried on with its job, yet only in the Volkswagen case are "questions" being "debated".

Bollocks, the worker is to blame for not following the procedure for ensuring the machinery was safe to work on. And if the procedure had infact been followed and the machine violated that procedure (eg the worker set the machine to off and isolated it, but the machine started up anyway unexpectedly) then the company responsible for ensuring the machine follows the safety procedure is to blame.

What would exiting the Euro actually accomplish? Greek banks have been fundamentally reliant on the Emergency Liquidity Assistance funding since February this year, when the ECB stopped accepting bonds guaranteed by the Greek government as collateral for loans, following the direction that the general financial markets have been taking for some months previous to that. So the Bank of Greece would still need to borrow money from somewhere, and exiting the Euro doesn't make borrowing suddenly easier....

How is a jump from $250 per unit to between $610 and $1250 (an increase of between 244% and 500% against the dollar) any more stable than either the Euro (~15% fall over the Dollar during the past year or so), the GBP (~10% rise over the dollar during the past year or so).

Something doesn't make sense.

Or more aptly, those who apply and are the best fit for the job - there is no point in berating a company for woeful diversity hiring figures when all they did was concentrate on hiring the best candidate.

When it can be shown that Facebook turned down a better qualified minority candidate in order to hire a more poorly qualified white candidate, then there is an issue in hiring standards - if minority candidates are being failed by the education and social support systems to the point where we have a noticeable disparity in hireable candidates, well thats something we all need to fix properly rather than just tut at companies who would rather hire the better candidate regardless of race, colour or sex.

If you know anything about jet engines, then you would know that a simple set of ear protection earmuffs can kill a multi million dollar engine if ingested.

Why wasn't he sent to the US during the 2 years he was residing in the UK prior to scampering to the Ecuadorian embassy? Or even better, during the week or so that he was actually remanded into custody pending the extradition hearings during December 2010?

This aspect of the "all of this is just to get him to the US" claims is never explained.

Except that the Ecuadorian embassy is on the second floor of a shared building, with no direct access to the garage or other internal locations. The only way in and out of the embassy is via a shared stairwell, which is not covered under diplomatic privilege and therefore anyone using said staircase is subject to normal laws of the host country.

So how is he to get from the embassy to the car without being arrested?

Also, how would Assange get there? The moment he steps out of the front door of the Ecuadorian embassy, he will be arrested.

You should read the judgements handed down by the extradition court judges in their rulings - they assert that all the allegations against Assange in the European Arrest Warrant and extradition request does indeed qualify as rape under UK law. That Telegraph story is based on what Assanges lawyers said, not what is actual fact.

Read the original ruling here: http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2011/nov/02/julian-assange-extradition-full-judgment

In all the challenges made under "dual criminality" (ie, the fact that the offences must be comparable offences under the executing member state as well as the requesting member state), the judges ruled that "dual criminality" was satisfied under UK law and Assanges challenges were dismissed. The rulings in this regard runs from page 15 to page 32 in the rulings PDF.