Shock horror - military equipment looks the same!! Does that mean the Red Arrows are faked using Photoshop, they look the same from that distance, and they all move as one often so the tricksters have a brush with nine planes on it and just wave that around.

I haven't pixel-peeked but the water around each of them does appear to be different, a couple of them have different superstructures and that assault isn't that large. Had there been 300 craft all with identical water spray coming off them that may have been a clue.

Once again Turnover != Profit

Companies are taxed on their PROFIT and not their TURNOVER making statements such as "Dell's Dutch subsidiary Dell Global BV paid 0.1 per cent tax on over $2bn in revenues in 2011" and "pays tax rates of around 1.35 per cent on overseas revenues" meaningless soundbites.

Our company turns over about £5M, last year we paid around 1% of that in Corporation Tax. We also paid about £400k in VAT, £150k in Business Rates, £120k in National Insurance contributions plus all the personal tax of the employees and owners but this is not categorised as company tax. We paid 1% Corporation Tax not because we have an aggressive tax strategy but because as a company we are taxed on PROFIT. I don't understand why this kind of mis-informaiton is repeated so often by what one should expect to be intelligent people other than to whip up a frenzy with the readers.

That said, I do not think it's fair that larger companies with the facilities to create these tax efficient structures can compete head to head with companies burdened with higher local taxes. We need to fight to keep the money in our country circulating on our economy.

Slight pedant mode

The founder of Melbourne house was Alfred Milgrom not Alfred Migrom - note the L. I also don't remember him ever being called Alfred, it was always Fred.

Oh those were happy days :-))

Shaken vs Stirred

There is quite a difference in how the drink finishes whether you shake or stir it. When stirred the drink is perfectly clear, when shaken it has a sparkle to it caused, I understand, by tiny fragments of ice. Some of the high end cocktail bars I've been to prefer stirring – I usually ask for it how it comes and watch them make it. There probably is a difference in taste, but I'd say they are just a little different to each other.

Quinnine is available as a poweder that can be added to try and recreate the trueVesper. Not tried this personally.

I don't recommend you use the Martini brand, Dolin or Noilly Prat are readily available and are superb, costing very little more and as you use so little cost is not that important.

My recipie is to take a large 350ml martini glass and fill it with ice and leave to stand for a minute. Put three shots of spirit** in the shaker, add ¼ – ½ shot vermouth then pour in the ice from the glass. Put the lid on and shake like buggery until the shaker is ice cold a frosted. Carefully strain into the glass. Take 1” of thin lemon peel, twist over the glass and drop it in.

Enjoy and repeat until the world is too blurry to make another one.

** Gordons is great, as it Tanquary Ten. Some people like Plymoth, it's a bolder flavour.

OMG, my TV and monitors must be broken too then

During the 'warm up' time of a fraction of a second the picture isn't totally there - I must send them back.

Heaven help any worried users who used to have a valve based CRT many years ago, that must have been truly horrendous for them.

Speed != bad driving

One of the problems with technology like this is one that has raised its head a few times over the last few years can be shown with these two scenarios.

1) Doing 80mph on an empty straight motorway in good conditions

2) Doing 30mph in a 30mph area on a winding road through a crowded village centre.

There is no way these black boxes can monitor if the driver is being safe or not. Absolute road speed is a very poor indication of this and is a very lazy and intrusive way of raising driver standards.

re: publishers who think they are OWED £40, £50, £60 a game

The publisher does not get that money, it's very naive to think they do and is just said to stir up people who can't think how retail works.

If a game in the shop sells for £50, the the government get £8.33 of that straight away in VAT.

The shop then has to take its cut for running the store, buying the stock, dealing with returns etc.

The distributor that buys the game from the manufacturer has to cover their warehousing and stock costs.

The game publisher has to cover the development costs which on modern highly graphical games are very substantial. They also have to predict how many games are going to sell in the lead time it takes to manufacture more. If it flies off the shelf they are lambasted for not producing enough, if they produce too many they have to pay for all that stock.

As with most thing you buy, there are a lot of people in the chain taking a percentage cut so a small increase in the development cost can soon have a real impact on the selling price.

25 years ago a couple of people could develop a game in a few weeks. Most of the big selling games take large teams many months to produce.

Non astronauts?

What I didn't see in the report is the instance of this in people who haven't been into space. As people get older their eyes change.

Did they discount other factors such as the number of launches, possible differences in atmosphere depending on where they spent their time up there.

Plus, that looks an strange effect of low gravity, the flattening of the back of the eyeball.

A very current problem with me

A couple of days ago I got a letter from O2 saying that one of our phones had reached "the higher usage limit" and previously they would have restricted our service but we can now continue to use it without any disruption.

We have 12 phones on the account, I looked at the online management service and found that one user had clocked up over £1300 data charges in three days.

They have a Blackberry with inclusive data but the charges were for data from o2mobile.co.uk and not through Blackberry. I had a rant about surely it's data and it should be inclusive but they stood their ground.

It seems the use had their Blackberry connected to the PC and on the Blackberry app it offers to connect to the internet and that's what they did. No warnings that we were about to be reamed.

I'm escalating it with the account manager but we are getting nowhere yet.

The bill for that user is around £20 a month, surely it's irresponsible of them to allow this to happen.

Surely it's just a maintenances issue

Providing the owner knows that part of the maintenance of the car is to keep it charged then I don't see a problem. If you don’t' service your car and it breaks is that the manufacturers fault, if you don't do a maintenance wash on your washing machine and it starts to smell is that the manufactures fault?

If you hire a van it's in the agreement you need to check the oil every day. Most people don't and have no problems but if you don't check it and you have a problem it's YOUR responsibility.

Yes it's expensive but that doesn't mean you don't need to give it any attention. It's not a battery problem, it's a complacent owner problem.

Fantastic

That is just superb, well done that man.

Is that a UFO?

In the video at 1:01 to 1:03 just above the Earth you can see a UFO monitoring this latest foray into space. It's stunning what our planet looks like from there, such a different view from just an airliner.

( I know, I know, it's probably just the moon )

Smugness

The author wrote "I've been saying it will all end in tears for at least a decade. I can find a Usenet post of that vintage saying exactly that. Being right is quite wonderful,"

I'm always intrigued by people who say that as generally it means they made a mass of predictions and can drag them out individually in the future to show how right they were. I have no idea on the percentage of correct predictions the author has made but in the interest of fairness I think it should be considered.

Regarding Europe, perhaps Israel and Iran will kick off soon and then we won't have to worry about the state of the economy. If not, mine is a pint so I can sit back and watch us all sinking.

A lot of good points

When I was in the market I used to have a very neat and carefully crafted CV. It was very well honed, a few of us would regularly review each others CV's to make sure they read well. I had a 2-3 page detailed one plus a one page summary and both were available.

Having also been an employer I have seen a large number of horrific CV's and my view was if the person cared so little about their CV then what would they give to the company. I've had people turn up to management jobs in jeans and a sweatshirt. Truly shocking.

I had a young lad come for a warehouse job interview. He'd put on a suit, had looked up about the company and had made an effort. He's been with us two years and is a hard and conciousness worker.

It's not hard to spell check, or read it out aloud to your mum, just MAKE THE EFFORT, it's your future.

This is very odd.

"But how else are they going to credit themselves with how they took it? How do they justify it?"

I think she is saying that NASA stole it from the moon! I think they can justify it because they went there and got it.

Her attorney Peter Schlueter said there was "no such law that moon rocks belong to the federal government".

There probably doesn't need to be. I suspect her husband was technically guilty of employee theft.

Sounds a little harsh possibly, but that's how I see it.

Surely a joke?

Surely this has got to be some kind of an April Fools joke. As I understand it the problem is that they have set up a WiFi network using kit they have bought. Isn't that like using a car or bus to get to work.

I'm flabbergasted that anyone would think this is serious, it should be laughed out at the first instance (unless there is much more to it that I don't see and can't comprehend).

Give me my money for free

I'm always intrigued why people think that it should be free to “get my money”. This applies to old and new technologies. Someone has to take you cash, process it, install and maintain the network of cash machines and make sure the cash machine you want to withdraw it from has the cash available.

How many companies supply their services for free? When you put your stuff into storage do you expect Access to look after it for free because it’s your stuff? No, but you expect people to do that with your money and expect them to be responsible for it. As I recall the storage companies expect you to take out insurance for your goods, banks are, within limits, guaranteed.

I know banking is different as they can use your money to try (rather unsuccessfully recently) to make money so they can, amongst other things, not charge you for their services in most cases.

I don’t expect this view to be popular, but I think you need to stop and think about the free service you are getting – it has to be paid for somehow and as a business they have to balance income with expenditure.

I'll second that

I had a lot of problems in the early days with my cable installation. I ended up with a direct line to one of the managers. They had a really good team, you could talk to them and they actually knew what they were doing and were not patronising. Luckily I've not had any more problems but if I do, I am sorry to see them go. The 'problem' was they could not communicate directly with "Networks", the guys who worked on the cabling - and I don't mean their installation teams.

IMHO they would be better off getting rid of the dross I've spoken to on the odd occasion I've had to call them about the TV service.

Not just income tax

Don't forget that also into the big pot goes the NIC on PAYE, both the employers and employees contributions. Then there is corporation tax on the profits of a company, then there is the VAT, then there is the business rates which is currently about 45% of the rent of the business premises per year.

The easy targets are the many honest small businesses. They are big enough to be visible - the ones that never report or contribute are harder to find and also harder to investigate. The bigger ones are also in a better position to structure their finances.

Time to prepare for another eye watering investigation.

I've never particularly like the scheme

because it is very low paid and the fields they are offering apprenticeships in often aren’t what you would traditionally think apprenticeships are for. They used to be skills such as electricians and chippys where you could pick up the basics quite quickly but it took several years to become competent and productive, especially if you wanted any form of independence in your work.

We were persuaded to take on two young lads on this scheme a couple of years ago. We didn't really need any more warehouse staff but decided that it was worth looking at. The lads were not only inexperienced in work, but also in how to behave at work and it took them a while to fit into the culture of a working environment, very different from school which is all they were accustomed to.

We weren't particularly comfortable with the level of pay, but that was the scheme. After a year the lads had developed personally and also were becoming productive for the business and are now both full time employees and earning a fair level of pay for their age and experience. Without this scheme we would not have employed them, we may have taken on someone with more experience at a later date.

I'm sure there will be employers who will abuse the scheme to get cheap drone labour, please don't tar everyone with that brush. I think the scheme is not perfect, but it does help get some people through the door into employment.

WTF

Why would anyone even think about trying to get a refund on the price. They agreed the price when they bought it, if the weren't happy paying that price then they shouldn't have done so. The possibly took a gamble an so need to be prepared to lose that 'bet' and not moan about it.

I also don't understand how HP could be involved in the refunds. Amazon presumably paid HP for their stocks so they would need to sell it at a certain price to cover their costs. If HP for some reason got involved in refunds then they would, in all probability, end up paying the customer more than they got from Amazon for it, and that is without looking at the VAT issues. The only way a manufacturer refund like that could possibly work is if the retailer only paid for the goods when the sold and their cost price was based on the selling price – that is actually a possibility for Ama

Ahh, the hypocrisy

If this wasn't so serious it would be funny, man goes to the government he stole it from to attempt to 'take action' over loss of control of said stolen information.

Having the redacted ones release was one thing, the unredacted information can cause problems in so many more ways, some not immediately obvious.