Actually astronomers tell us that the laws of physics don't work on a galactic scale unless we "invent" colossal amount of dark matter and energy, that make up most of the universe but for some strange reason there is absolutely zero of the stuff in our solar system or it's locality.
In addition to that there are options for the EmDrive that don't involve it breaking the conservation of momentum. Right now they look like pretty wacky science fiction but if the EmDrive does indeed work the at least one of them is going to rapidly become accepted scientific fact.
Remember boys and girls you can have all the theories in the world with as much experimental proof as you like, but a *SINGLE* confirmed/repeatable observation can blow it all out the water.
Right now unlike other junk science the EmDrive is proving stubbornly resistance to being proved wrong due to experimental observation...
Apple Ireland has never evaded taxes in Germany or any other EU country. Any company registered in one EU state is perfectly entitled to operate in all other EU states and book their profit in the country that they are resident.
The problem is for Apple is they negotiated a special rate with Ireland so that they paid the 12.5% on the profits made in Ireland but nothing on the profits made in the rest of the EU.
As this deal was not generally available the EU has correctly ruled that it broke the state aid rules, and are requiring Ireland to collect the take from the 10 years prior to the investigation starting; that was 2013, so from 2003 to present day at the standard 12.5% rate for all the profits that Apple made in the EU not just those in Ireland.
Ireland and Apple are of course going to appeal to the European Court of Justice (the highest court in the EU that rules on these things) and when they inevitably loose Apple will have to pay up, or face sanctions.
Repatriating money to the USA will not help Apple not pay the bill. Whether the US government allows the bill as writeoff is down to them, but Apple sold products through Apple Ireland, and booked the profit there, they have to pay the appropriate rate of tax on those profits which is 12.5%.
Oh and transfer pricing is already illegal in the EU so charging 95% licensing fees will get you into hot water as well.
The prudent thing for the Irish government to do is bitch about having to collect it, but when they do use the money to pay down the national debt. Should shave about 5% off the total, which is currently 203 billion Euro.
No it's saying that Ireland was in a club that agreed a certain set of rules and that Ireland ignored/broke those rules and should it wish to remain a member of the club it needs to abide by the rules.
As such the rate Apple where paying was not the legal rate, and Ireland need to collect the last 10 years from when the investigation started (2013) at the legal rate.
The problem for Apple and Ireland is that the "legal rate" was in fact not legal because Ireland don't have absolute freedom in their tax law. By becoming a member of the EU they agreed to be bound in certain ways, and they have found not to be following those rules.
Problem with that scheme and even I know this despite never having visited California or ever resident in North America is that the morons that built BART decided to use Indian gauge, rather than standard gauge. It has been discussed at great length before on slashdot, but basically adds substantial cost to BART.
If you are going to do a unit conversion then learn about significant digits. So 0.0020 furlongs is the actual conversion for people that actually know about units and measurement.
This is only the start, expect Ireland to be fined for giving illegal state aid over the coming months probably to something close to the tune of what they have collected in back taxes.
There are I believe minimum tax rates set by the EU, but the problem in this case is that Apple had a special deal with the Irish government that was not available to all companies in Ireland. If the deal that Apple has/had with the Irish government had been the same for all companies in Ireland it would have been fine.
That's the whole point. Because that profits made abroad not being taxed was only offered to certain companies; aka ones Ireland was attracting to their shores it has been ruled illegal state aid.
The Irish government are a member of a club that has rules, and they where breaking the rules of that club. Ireland could just leave the club if they wished, but then the illegal deal they gave Apple would not have been possible. While in the club they need to abide by the rules of the club. That club of course being the EEC/EU.
Thing is he probably believes the shit he wrote as well as voting leave. The level of ignorance and lack of understanding amoung Brexiters is truly staggering.
Ireland could only make that attractive deal with Apple because they where in the EU. The deal is that Apple don't have to pay tax on profits generated in the EU outside Ireland in exchange for setting your headquarters up in Ireland. If you are outside the EU you can't offer that tax deal because "tax passporting" aka a firm in the EU only has to pay tax on the profits in the EU in theq country it is head quartered would not be possible.
So while Apple was compliant with the tax laws of Ireland, Ireland by giving a special deal to Apple was breaking EU state aid rules and the EU commission has every right in the world to poke their noses in.
Apple is wrong, the guidance of Dublin is all well and good, but that does not get you out of EU state aid rules, and they should have checked.
The state aid rules applied to the EEC as well. Basically the EU is a re-branded EEC with slightly different rules and more members. Ireland joined the EEC *before* Apple even existed as a company, 1973 vs 1976.
The EU has enough clout that they easily enough force Apple to pay. They can either seize assets to the value of the back taxes and/or prohibit Apple from doing further business in the EU, which would even with a 14billion Euro back tax bill be economic suicide for Apple to pull out of the EU.
Now while Ireland might be upset that the jobs are going, they are not going from the EU because Apple will still need an operation inside the EU to trade there, and the EU Commission does not favour the jobs being in Ireland over anywhere else inside the EU.
So as far as I am concerned both Apple and Ireland can go pound sand.
Funnelling the sales through Ireland was not illegal.
What was illegal was Ireland giving Apple a special tax deal where they only needed to pay tax on profits generated in Ireland, so all the profits from sales in the rest of the EU where tax free. EU has now decided that this is against the state aid rules. Had every firm in Ireland had the same tax deal it would not have been illegal.
So while Mr. Cook is claiming that they complied with Irish law and may well be right, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they broke EU laws.
Yes but 6500 jobs plus the tax from profits in Ireland is better than nothing. That back tax which the EU want paying would not have been paid to the Irish government had they not given Apple the special tax deal. So the deal that Ireland cut Apple was good for Ireland. Problem for Ireland and Apple is the deal has been ruled illegal under EU state aid laws.
Freeze assets worth 14 billion Euro that are present in the EU, and/or prohibit them from doing further business in the EU till they comply. Walking away from a market the size of the EU is a tough call even with back taxes being asked for.
Apple got a special tax deal from the Irish government in exchange for locating their European headquarters in Ireland. This has been ruled illegal state aid which was illegal at the time.
A number of other companies such as Microsoft, Dell and Google have similar arrangements and they are now all under investigation.
Because the requirements to be a pilot in a commercial airliner are orders of magnitude harder than to drive a car. To be a commercial airliner pilot you will have to log thousands of hours of flying time and be regularly re-evaluated.
On the other hand plenty of states in the USA will allow children under 16 a full drivers license, and every state in the USA will allow a learners permit from 16 at the latest.
Wrong under EU tax law a company registered in the EU only has to pay tax on it's profits generated in the whole of the EU in the country where it is registered.
So if Apple Ireland sells a iPhone in the UK or Germany the profit it makes on that is taxable in Ireland.
The problem is that Ireland cut Apple a special deal that says Apple only has to pay taxes on the profit made in Ireland. That's great for Ireland because it attracts Apple to locate it's headquarters in Ireland and that provides jobs, and they still get all the tax they otherwise would have.
On the other hand the rest of the EU is royally pissed off, and have decided that it amounts to illegal state aid, hence the fine. I believe in no particular order Microsoft, Dell and Google also do the same, so expect to see requirements for large back tax bills for these firms too in the not too distant future.
This is quite separate from the sell brandnames at inflated prices tax dodge that the likes of Starbucks operate.
It's also separate from the Amazon we don't actually make profits because we reinvested it all to grow the company so no tax to pay scheme that Amazon have historically operated. This is not a tax dodge in my view but Amazon have been almost unique it operating it for such a long period of time that it has been unfairly branded as a tax dodge.
Except Apple are registering all the EU sales in Ireland making vast profits on that but only paying taxes on the profits for devices sold in Ireland. This works because Ireland is a small country in the EU.
The rest of the EU is upset about that and has decided that is illegal state aid and back taxes are owed, and I suspect Ireland will then be fined the amount of the back taxes so they don't get to profit from it.
It's not just Apple, other firms do the same, so Microsoft, Dell, and Google to name a few are likely to face large tax bills in the future once this has played out for doing exactly the same.
Don't know auto-mounter is a piece of shit when it comes to having your entries in an LDAP directory due to some moronic hard coded limit for the time the LDAP server has to respond that is too low in my opinion and at the very least not configurable.
How can you tell that I have been stung badly by this and am now bitter as a result:)
The problem with the vision is that there are really good reasons to use separate transceivers. Is that a SX, LX or EX transceiver you have there? Or perhaps it is a BX one because you are sort of fibres and this allows you to effectively double the number without laying extra fibre. Perhaps I am really short of fibre and decide to replace all my SFP's with CWDM matched pairs and employ a passive multiplexer.
So unless silicon photonics is going to offer at least LX transceivers for SX prices it is not going to have the impact that Intel are hoping for.
Nobody has used FDDI for a long time now. Well at least not in a new deployment.
Super computers also don't necessarily need fibre optics either. Mellanox will happily sell you a 3m EDR passive copper cable and a 5m one for 100GbE. We used them where ever possible because they are cheaper and use less power that the active fibre optic ones.
The main advantage in theory of silicon photonics is that it should be in theory cheaper because it uses bog standard silicon wafers and not the specialist and hence more expensive InP or GaAs ones currently used to make the laser diodes used in SFP's.
That said a 10Gbps SFP+ transceiver is under 100USD for a multimode version these days. You pay more for single mode versions say 200USD for a 10km product. However you would need a pretty big data centre before using those as as with OM4 cable you are good for 300m with multimode.
Consequently I remain highly sceptical that silicon photonics will have a major impact in driving down the prices of using fibre optics for communication. Basically 100Gbps optics cost lots because the market is small in comparison. So for example a 10km single mode SFP for 1Gbps is under 50USD, and as I point out above 10Gbps optics are now cheap enough that anyone who needs them (remembering you need more than 100m to actually need to use optics at 10Gbps) will have no problem paying for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually astronomers tell us that the laws of physics don't work on a galactic scale unless we "invent" colossal amount of dark matter and energy, that make up most of the universe but for some strange reason there is absolutely zero of the stuff in our solar system or it's locality.
In addition to that there are options for the EmDrive that don't involve it breaking the conservation of momentum. Right now they look like pretty wacky science fiction but if the EmDrive does indeed work the at least one of them is going to rapidly become accepted scientific fact.
Remember boys and girls you can have all the theories in the world with as much experimental proof as you like, but a *SINGLE* confirmed/repeatable observation can blow it all out the water.
Right now unlike other junk science the EmDrive is proving stubbornly resistance to being proved wrong due to experimental observation...
Apple Ireland has never evaded taxes in Germany or any other EU country. Any company registered in one EU state is perfectly entitled to operate in all other EU states and book their profit in the country that they are resident.
The problem is for Apple is they negotiated a special rate with Ireland so that they paid the 12.5% on the profits made in Ireland but nothing on the profits made in the rest of the EU.
As this deal was not generally available the EU has correctly ruled that it broke the state aid rules, and are requiring Ireland to collect the take from the 10 years prior to the investigation starting; that was 2013, so from 2003 to present day at the standard 12.5% rate for all the profits that Apple made in the EU not just those in Ireland.
Ireland and Apple are of course going to appeal to the European Court of Justice (the highest court in the EU that rules on these things) and when they inevitably loose Apple will have to pay up, or face sanctions.
Repatriating money to the USA will not help Apple not pay the bill. Whether the US government allows the bill as writeoff is down to them, but Apple sold products through Apple Ireland, and booked the profit there, they have to pay the appropriate rate of tax on those profits which is 12.5%.
Oh and transfer pricing is already illegal in the EU so charging 95% licensing fees will get you into hot water as well.
The prudent thing for the Irish government to do is bitch about having to collect it, but when they do use the money to pay down the national debt. Should shave about 5% off the total, which is currently 203 billion Euro.
It nullifies conflicting Irish law. The same as any state law in any member of the EU is nullified if it conflicts with EU law.
No it's saying that Ireland was in a club that agreed a certain set of rules and that Ireland ignored/broke those rules and should it wish to remain a member of the club it needs to abide by the rules.
As such the rate Apple where paying was not the legal rate, and Ireland need to collect the last 10 years from when the investigation started (2013) at the legal rate.
The problem for Apple and Ireland is that the "legal rate" was in fact not legal because Ireland don't have absolute freedom in their tax law. By becoming a member of the EU they agreed to be bound in certain ways, and they have found not to be following those rules.
Problem with that scheme and even I know this despite never having visited California or ever resident in North America is that the morons that built BART decided to use Indian gauge, rather than standard gauge. It has been discussed at great length before on slashdot, but basically adds substantial cost to BART.
If you are going to do a unit conversion then learn about significant digits. So 0.0020 furlongs is the actual conversion for people that actually know about units and measurement.
This is only the start, expect Ireland to be fined for giving illegal state aid over the coming months probably to something close to the tune of what they have collected in back taxes.
There are I believe minimum tax rates set by the EU, but the problem in this case is that Apple had a special deal with the Irish government that was not available to all companies in Ireland. If the deal that Apple has/had with the Irish government had been the same for all companies in Ireland it would have been fine.
That's the whole point. Because that profits made abroad not being taxed was only offered to certain companies; aka ones Ireland was attracting to their shores it has been ruled illegal state aid.
The Irish government are a member of a club that has rules, and they where breaking the rules of that club. Ireland could just leave the club if they wished, but then the illegal deal they gave Apple would not have been possible. While in the club they need to abide by the rules of the club. That club of course being the EEC/EU.
Thing is he probably believes the shit he wrote as well as voting leave. The level of ignorance and lack of understanding amoung Brexiters is truly staggering.
More Brexiter nonsense and ignorance.
Ireland could only make that attractive deal with Apple because they where in the EU. The deal is that Apple don't have to pay tax on profits generated in the EU outside Ireland in exchange for setting your headquarters up in Ireland. If you are outside the EU you can't offer that tax deal because "tax passporting" aka a firm in the EU only has to pay tax on the profits in the EU in theq country it is head quartered would not be possible.
So while Apple was compliant with the tax laws of Ireland, Ireland by giving a special deal to Apple was breaking EU state aid rules and the EU commission has every right in the world to poke their noses in.
Apple is wrong, the guidance of Dublin is all well and good, but that does not get you out of EU state aid rules, and they should have checked.
The state aid rules applied to the EEC as well. Basically the EU is a re-branded EEC with slightly different rules and more members. Ireland joined the EEC *before* Apple even existed as a company, 1973 vs 1976.
The EU has enough clout that they easily enough force Apple to pay. They can either seize assets to the value of the back taxes and/or prohibit Apple from doing further business in the EU, which would even with a 14billion Euro back tax bill be economic suicide for Apple to pull out of the EU.
Now while Ireland might be upset that the jobs are going, they are not going from the EU because Apple will still need an operation inside the EU to trade there, and the EU Commission does not favour the jobs being in Ireland over anywhere else inside the EU.
So as far as I am concerned both Apple and Ireland can go pound sand.
Funnelling the sales through Ireland was not illegal.
What was illegal was Ireland giving Apple a special tax deal where they only needed to pay tax on profits generated in Ireland, so all the profits from sales in the rest of the EU where tax free. EU has now decided that this is against the state aid rules. Had every firm in Ireland had the same tax deal it would not have been illegal.
So while Mr. Cook is claiming that they complied with Irish law and may well be right, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they broke EU laws.
Yes but 6500 jobs plus the tax from profits in Ireland is better than nothing. That back tax which the EU want paying would not have been paid to the Irish government had they not given Apple the special tax deal. So the deal that Ireland cut Apple was good for Ireland. Problem for Ireland and Apple is the deal has been ruled illegal under EU state aid laws.
Freeze assets worth 14 billion Euro that are present in the EU, and/or prohibit them from doing further business in the EU till they comply. Walking away from a market the size of the EU is a tough call even with back taxes being asked for.
Apple got a special tax deal from the Irish government in exchange for locating their European headquarters in Ireland. This has been ruled illegal state aid which was illegal at the time.
A number of other companies such as Microsoft, Dell and Google have similar arrangements and they are now all under investigation.
Because the requirements to be a pilot in a commercial airliner are orders of magnitude harder than to drive a car. To be a commercial airliner pilot you will have to log thousands of hours of flying time and be regularly re-evaluated.
On the other hand plenty of states in the USA will allow children under 16 a full drivers license, and every state in the USA will allow a learners permit from 16 at the latest.
Apples and oranges comparison.
Wrong under EU tax law a company registered in the EU only has to pay tax on it's profits generated in the whole of the EU in the country where it is registered.
So if Apple Ireland sells a iPhone in the UK or Germany the profit it makes on that is taxable in Ireland.
The problem is that Ireland cut Apple a special deal that says Apple only has to pay taxes on the profit made in Ireland. That's great for Ireland because it attracts Apple to locate it's headquarters in Ireland and that provides jobs, and they still get all the tax they otherwise would have.
On the other hand the rest of the EU is royally pissed off, and have decided that it amounts to illegal state aid, hence the fine. I believe in no particular order Microsoft, Dell and Google also do the same, so expect to see requirements for large back tax bills for these firms too in the not too distant future.
This is quite separate from the sell brandnames at inflated prices tax dodge that the likes of Starbucks operate.
It's also separate from the Amazon we don't actually make profits because we reinvested it all to grow the company so no tax to pay scheme that Amazon have historically operated. This is not a tax dodge in my view but Amazon have been almost unique it operating it for such a long period of time that it has been unfairly branded as a tax dodge.
Except Apple are registering all the EU sales in Ireland making vast profits on that but only paying taxes on the profits for devices sold in Ireland. This works because Ireland is a small country in the EU.
The rest of the EU is upset about that and has decided that is illegal state aid and back taxes are owed, and I suspect Ireland will then be fined the amount of the back taxes so they don't get to profit from it.
It's not just Apple, other firms do the same, so Microsoft, Dell, and Google to name a few are likely to face large tax bills in the future once this has played out for doing exactly the same.
I am quite sure satellites "fly" over the white house every day, it's just a matter of height.
Don't know auto-mounter is a piece of shit when it comes to having your entries in an LDAP directory due to some moronic hard coded limit for the time the LDAP server has to respond that is too low in my opinion and at the very least not configurable.
How can you tell that I have been stung badly by this and am now bitter as a result :)
The problem with the vision is that there are really good reasons to use separate transceivers. Is that a SX, LX or EX transceiver you have there? Or perhaps it is a BX one because you are sort of fibres and this allows you to effectively double the number without laying extra fibre. Perhaps I am really short of fibre and decide to replace all my SFP's with CWDM matched pairs and employ a passive multiplexer.
So unless silicon photonics is going to offer at least LX transceivers for SX prices it is not going to have the impact that Intel are hoping for.
Nobody has used FDDI for a long time now. Well at least not in a new deployment.
Super computers also don't necessarily need fibre optics either. Mellanox will happily sell you a 3m EDR passive copper cable and a 5m one for 100GbE. We used them where ever possible because they are cheaper and use less power that the active fibre optic ones.
The main advantage in theory of silicon photonics is that it should be in theory cheaper because it uses bog standard silicon wafers and not the specialist and hence more expensive InP or GaAs ones currently used to make the laser diodes used in SFP's.
That said a 10Gbps SFP+ transceiver is under 100USD for a multimode version these days. You pay more for single mode versions say 200USD for a 10km product. However you would need a pretty big data centre before using those as as with OM4 cable you are good for 300m with multimode.
Consequently I remain highly sceptical that silicon photonics will have a major impact in driving down the prices of using fibre optics for communication. Basically 100Gbps optics cost lots because the market is small in comparison. So for example a 10km single mode SFP for 1Gbps is under 50USD, and as I point out above 10Gbps optics are now cheap enough that anyone who needs them (remembering you need more than 100m to actually need to use optics at 10Gbps) will have no problem paying for them.