brand loyalty? aye right

Why should any customer have loyalty to a brand? It's simple: companies make things, customers choose which one suits them best (if any) based on price, features, whatever is most important to them. This idea of blind loyalty is ridiculous in the extreme.

Apple have been eejits of late- especially with their petulant child response to losing the English case. I have a Samsung phone and Galaxy S mini-tablet/music player. Fandroid? Nope, I just bought a Macbook Air. Because the MBA is the best product on the market for my specific needs.

Re: Right so...

Daniel Craig isn't actually a "muscle-bound hulk". He's naturally very lean-see the hotel scene in Layer Cake for instance. He then worked very hard and got into incredible shape to play Bond, putting on some muscle. The combination makes him look bigger.

Sean Connery was into body-building in the 50's. If you put both of them as Bond together, Connery would be much bigger looking.

There have been a few...

The SAS book tsunami of the mid-late 90's had a few along those lines. The unit in question was usually referred to as 14 Int/The Det and operated in NI. It later became the SRR that Lewis mentioned in the article. Andy McNab wrote about having to use an assumed name while attached to 14 Int in "Immediate Action". There was also "The Operators" by James Rennie.

The rationale was pretty simple: If the IRA caught and tortured a plain-clothes operator he or she wouldn't be able to give up any useful info on their colleagues (home addresses and the like). This was at a time when the various pyro-Paddies were targeting military personnel on and off duty on the mainland after all.

Re: Intelligence Test?

God, if we had intelligence tests for staff every single Amazon site would be empty. ;) The temp jobs will be advertised though an agency. They'll be ads in the local paper and Job Centre.

And as for the comment above re: G4S, if only Amazon HR could organise things as smoothly as G4S. They're the living embodiment of the old line from Dilbert: "You can't spell "who cares" without HR".

Re: Consistency and morality.

An Act of Parliament (Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987) was passed after the Yvonne Fletcher murder. That is the difference. If the same thing were to happen today, the Met would happily go door-kicking.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good session of mouth-foaming.

Re: TheProf- Too expensive

The Jersey VAT issue is irrelevant to games; most new games would have been over the £18 limit.

They were

Apologies if this has been posted already. From the linked article:

"The two men were on a week-long business trip for the BlackBerry maker, but they were arrested after the flight landed in Vancouver."

Eejits got what was coming to them. I feel sorry for all the passengers that pair of oxygen thieves inconvenienced.

You guess wrong

As my username suggests, I work in a big building with Amazon written on the side. Can I get stuff delivered to my work? Hell no. Around Christmas we'll have a couple of thousand staff on site- can you imagine the chaos if 10% of us got our Christmas shopping delivered?

This idea is great- hoping Tesco get involved as a locker location. It'd be a godsend to shift workers.

why not?

The RN and RAF search and rescue units exist to deal with military emergencies- plane crashes and so on. It makes sense for them to aid civvies when the crews would otherwise be doing training flights. A bit of extra live practice for the crews, civvies get help. We'd be paying the running costs of the whirlybirds anyway.

Beer, for the crew. Good job fellas.

numpty

Perhaps you should take your time instead AC; the FBI wanted OBL for the embassy bombings in 1998. Not the '93 WTC attack. Why? Because the FBI had investigated both embassy bombings and produced a strong enough case to indict OBL. Revealing the results of 9/11 investigations made no sense; it risked giving away information on an active manhunt.

But hey, you're a truther (or are you "just asking questions"), so facts and evidence aren't terribly important to you.

unintended consequences are a bitch...

AC, clearly thinking isn't your strong suit. Decisions have unintended consequences: in the 80s and 90s there was a wave of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" cases. Children were taken from their parents on the basis of extremely flimsy "evidence" of abuse. So what I hear you say? Better the social workers erred on the side of caution, "if it saves one child..."

Well here's the thing. At least one of those children was abused by a medical professional while IN CARE. That's right, a decision made in the child's best interests ultimately harmed them.

there are these really cool things called hyperlinks...

Or you could have a look at the Asda link in the article. And see the price is £299.

Your last point is untrue

"Why do you think paramedics, the Red Cross people etc ALWAYS go by pairs, at least? Witnesses."

Dunno about Red Cross, but there are plenty of paramedics/EMTs working solo in the UK. They work as First Responders, in cars or sometimes on motorbikes.

third time's the charm

I think you both meant *exercise*.

protip: if you're going to be a smartarse, make sure you are actually smart. Otherwise, you're just an arse.

you're talking mince

the weight plate will almost certainly be competition certified, which requires a very high level of accuracy.

So no, there's no way a 50Kg plate weighed 51.4Kg.

are you using your head to store old rags?

"Have you ever noticed that many fictional prostitution stories are about a "happy hooker", but most news stories about prostitution involve gangs, enforced-poverty, slavery, under-age sex, abuse, drug-taking or people-trafficing?"

Sounds like the status quo is doing a grand job of protecting people. Could it be that when aspects of an activity are illegal, criminals start running these activities? whodathunkit?

Fucknuts.

not that hard

With a name and a town it's relatively straightforward to get an address using the phone book or directory inquiries. Even if there's a few possibles, it doesn't take much to drive past and see which house is unoccupied. Hell, if the victims had posted their holiday plans on FB, there's a good chance they also posted pics of their home, car or other distinguishing information (the really nice coffee shop down the road, the park across the street they walk the dog in, the annoying railway line behind their garden.)

T-800 'coz he knows how to find a target using the phone book.

it actually makes some sense

In a real emergency, the crew would be rather busy. So a pre-recorded message would lighten their taskload. The canned message would also be clear and intelligible. Something that may not be true if it were performed by a captain battling simultaneously to keep the plane airborne and issuing commands on a flight deck with alarms sounding.

err, no

You don't think MI5 actually handed him a case with £900K, and let him keep it when he was arrested minutes later do you?

And they didn't "entice him... and he caved in". The Dutch spooks tipped them off, after he contacted them offering to sell information.