Or Glaswegians. The underground line in Glasgow is called the Subway.

Start with the Victoria Line. The trains there could be converted to driver-less operation within a week. Trackside barriers are a red herring. If someone jumps onto the track, there is nothing the driver can do about it anyway.

There are a lot more than 8.3 million people during the day time when people travel in from other parts of South East England for work and shopping.

We need to have the government regulating school tests so that they are a consistent standard, and people can rely on them as a measure of the student's ability.

There are a lot of hybrid buses in use, not as a trial, in Reading, England - http://www.reading-buses.co.uk... . They currently run on three of the routes, 17, 21 and 26.

Except that if there is a major incident near one fire station, all the fire engines from that station will go to that fire, and at the same time, some fire engines from other stations will go to that station to provide cover for any other incidents that take place at the same time.

Well you can get computers that can take parallel ports, and run Windows 8.1. Maybe not at Staples, but they do exist. I'm using one at the moment, which I got from John Lewis. I upgraded it to Windows 7, but it did have Windows 8 when it came out of the box.

You can get PCIe / Parallel Port expansion boards.

My office could have X11/Linux on the desktop, given that the only application that we run on the desktop is Windows Remote Desktop.

But would you be able to directly address the pins on a parallel port from a virtual machine?

You can read it in more detail here - http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

And that factory isn't where they are saving the money.

They have a company called Apple Operations International. It is registered in Ireland, and all the staff that work for that company are based in Texas. Under Irish law, the company does not pay any tax because it doesn't do any business or employ any people in Ireland. Under US Federal and Texas State law, it doesn't pay any tax in the US or Texas because the company is registered in Ireland. That company makes a huge amount of money, two thirds of all the profits the Apple Group makes, and doesn't pay tax on it anywhere in the world. Not the very low 12.5% Irish tax rate, not a specially reduced rate. Absolutely no tax whatsoever.

Ireland doesn't actually get that many employees out of these deals, maybe one person to sign official documents, and another person to answer the phone / email and open the mail.

The legal basis is EU State Aid regulations, which prevent governments doing this sort of thing without permission from the EU.

alibaba.com targets the wholesale market; but there is also aliexpress.com which is for the consumer market and you can buy items individually there.