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.

I have an HP Microserver with the Xpenology software on it. It serves as a Time Machine for the Mac, it has some iSCSI targets which are mounted on the Windows Machines as backup drives, and Synology Cloudstation serves as a DropBox like service which means that my most important documents can be synced remotely.

On Windows, you want C:\Users and C:\ProgramData. ProgramData is a hidden folder.

I spelt it out in words because I was talking about English. Obviously French is completely different.

When saying either of those words, first the tongue moves down from the top of the mouth, then you say a vowel, and the difference between them is at the back of the mouth where you can't see. Then you have the "n" which is the same in both words.