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I wonder what Apple is going to do in the UK, which requires marking of gold items with hallmarks.

Oh, the cost I stated above was for the redesign. I'm sure you can make your own mind up about how it was such a huge failure.

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/

Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?

Capita are another company that comes to mind. They have ripped off most public services in the UK with their poor products. Capita did a good job at ripping Birmingham City Council off with their new web site.

Baltis aren't Indian:

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/balti.bcc

It is pretty damn simple, some organisations decided to sell third level domains, some second level. This allows the same name to be used in different contexts. The .uk options that I know of are:

.co.uk COmmercial .org.uk ORGanisation .me.uk Personal site (clever name, eh?) .plc.uk Public Limited Company .ltd.uk LimiTeD liability Company .mod.uk Ministry Of Defense (Includes all armed forces) .police.uk Police, obviously .gov.uk Government .ac.uk ACademic institutions .sch.uk SCHool (this one is broken down more to schoolname.localeducationauthority.sch.uk, so my secondary school was barrbeacon.walsall.sch.uk) .nhs.uk National Health Service Why shouldn't there be a logical distinction between the hospitals in Birmingham and the government in Birmingham? It just makes sense to me, you wouldn't want birmingham-council.uk, birmingham-nhs.uk, as you wouldn't have a restrictive pattern to ensure uniformity. I once surprised somebody by going to a police website without googling...

"How did you know the URL?"
"Err.. it's the name of the force, followed by .police.uk..."

I work in a multilingual environment, mainly Asian[1] language speakers. Just in the team I work on we have native speakers of Punjabi, Hindi, English, Urdu, Indonesian, Mandarin and Zulu. Even when people are talking in, say, Urdu, a good proportion of the words they use will be English simply because there either isn't an Urdu word or the English word more precisely expresses what they want to say.

I don't speak Japanese myself but I have been told by a number of people who do that a major problem with the language is that it varies widely according to the relative ranks of the speakers. It is entirely possible that someone who lives in the Japanese court would be totally unable to communicate with someone who lived at the lower ends of society as, although they both speak Japanese, the forms they use are totally different. Apparently when the Emperor read the surrender announcment at the end of World War Two when he had finished (because he spoke only High 'Court' Japanese) the radio stations then had to bradcasst a translation into 'Common' Japanese so that people would know what he had said.

Stephen

[1] That's Asian in the UK English sense of the word not the US meaning.