Are you nuts? Nixon was caught on tape conspiring to cover up the Watergate Break-in. Read "All the President's Men." Nixon suborned perjury before Congress, the idea off offering the plumbers a million bucks to stay silent, and then the idea of using a $350,000 campaign contribution to bribe the plumbers, cover-ups, plots to interfere with the FBI investigation, etc., etc. Read the tape transcripts. Nixon was in it up to his eyeballs and resigned rather than face certain impeachment, but only after working out a deal with Ford for a pardon.
He resigned because the tapes and the witnesses were enough to convict him of more than a few crimes.
The EU most certainly has authority over tax policy because of treaties between the European Economic Community and Ireland, and later with the EU and Ireland. The state aid has NOTHING to do with the price of iPhones. It's selectively providing a tax rate that was not offered to ALL businesses in Ireland. Ireland does not have the right to set tax policy that contravenes it's duties under the agreements between Ireland and the EU. Even of Ireland were to invoke Article 50 and do an Irexit, that wouldn't solve anything because Ireland would no longer have access to the EU market so Apple would have to move it's headquarters anyway, and no EU country is going to offer a tax rate of 0.0005%. Ireland and Apple engaged in Transfer Tax Pricing and overvalued Apple's IP that was held by Apple Ireland while simultaneously undervaluing those same assets in the US (Apple Ireland is owned by Apple). Also, Irish tax law states that a company is tax resident where its central management and control is located - and that's not Ireland. Control resided with Apple USA, The deal was fraudulent from the get-go.
The paper is flawed. It relies on suppositions, none of which have been proven in space. We've had light-out facilities for decades. Big deal. Look at the claims on page 13 that we can rapidly terraform Mars. No, we can't.
We could also rapidly terraform Mars [11]. First, autonomous robotic labor can capture icy bodies in the
outer solar system and transport them to enter the Martian atmosphere.
Not in your lifetime. Not in your grand-kid's lifetime. And given the current trends, we'll lose all capability to do that sort of stuff within a generation, same as we already lost the capability to put a man on the moon in the previous one.
our robots can do it now with minutes of lag between commands (Mars rovers)
The lag is a lot more than that, and that's why every move has to be done with extreme planning. And when Mars is on the other side of the sun, forget it. The lag between the between you sending the command and seeing the result is between 8 minutes and 48 minutes. Telepresence? VR? Ain't gonna happen with that much lag.
Because we don't have the tech, and we probably won't last long enough to develop it before the wheels start coming off everything. Business certainly isn't going to do it - that requires investing tens of trillions of dollars for something without a payoff within the lifetime of many of the people you'd want to pony up the money.
Oh, for crying out loud, I think the staff at the Wall Street Journal have a better idea than you of what's going on. I never paid to subscribe to any sites, so maybe they just like me...
I checked my passwords list in my browser, and I'm not signed in - I don't have a user name or password for them. I'm not subscribed. I guess they like me more than you... who knows... it's the Internet, it's supposed to be broken all the time.
Actually, you'd have a legal defense. If their taking it was a threat to your life, what's the problem? Besides, would you rather be a dead hero or a live ordinary chump?
In Canada you weren't even allowed to kill someone even to prevent another party from killing you. Killing person A under threat to your own life by person B (under duress) wasn't legal. That was screwed up. The Supreme Court fixed that in the 90's.
The real issue is being evaded. Edward Snowden hasn't committed treason because he hasn't given anything to any enemy of the US. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war, and they haven't done so since 1942. So Russia, China, even North Vietnam are not legally enemies - so there's no need for Snowden to prove his innocence - just to introduce the legal, constitutional definition of enemy.
The whole thing is stupid. Someone posts nasty stuff in response to you, you don't see it but everyone else does and since you left it there,looks like tacit approval. And you can't delete what you can't even see. Trolls are going to just love this
And the only one with a realistic chance of granting a pardon was cheated by the DNC, On this topic, Clinton is 100% indistinguishable from a republican.
Quote #1 is sourced - it's credited to the Wall Street Journal staff right at the top, on the same line as the date: 9:39 AM EST AUG 30, 2016
Quote #2 is about the illegal deal between Apple and Ireland. The EU has determined the deal is illegal. If Apple disagrees, they can take the EU to court. Until they do successfully overturn it, the ruling stands.
Quote #3 is STILL not behind a paywall. Maybe they just don't like you...
The "ruling" was in violation of existing tax law. That's the deal - and it wasn't offered to all businesses, which is the very definition of a sweetheart deal.
Also, you're wrong about the links and quotes. I just checked - the second link, you'll find the quote half-way down the page. Also, the third is definitely NOT paywalled - and works fine with adblock plus turned on. Your device/browser/whatever is f*cked up or you're holding it wrong:-)
You're right - they can't justify expanding into other fields, but at the same time, there's a clear danger that their bread and butter will be eaten by others. The iPhone continues to decline in market share, and there's nothing coming out of Apple that will be an innovative game changer. Self driving cars - they're too late, and they're laying of the staff that they hired for that. VR - again, too late. Laptops? Others are producing laptops just as thin. Tablets? Tablets have been in decline since 2014. The only market they haven't entered that would have higher profits would be to start selling iOS and OSX and or whatever they call it now as stand-alone products. And they're too chicken - lacking in courage - to make the leap, even as the hardware side starts making a big sucking noise.
Give a tax holiday to any business, next thing you know every business will keep their profits hidden until they get the same deal.
As far as R&D, they already get to write it off, and we've seen that they have pretty much reached the end of the line in terms of innovation. And much of the design of Apple products is already done overseas because the expertise has moved to Asia, so extra credits will only result in more money going overseas.
What would happen if manufacturers were given a license to sell phones running iOS as well as Android? Android sells more every year than the iPhone has sold since it was developed... this is the only way they will recapture share. Ditto for laptop and desktop computers. There will be some cannibalization of Apple hardware sales, but the increased visibility and profitability of operating system sales should more thanl make up for it. But again, lack of vision and courage:-(
The Irish government agreed a deal with Apple in 1991 to only tax a certain bracket of its earnings, giving it a dramatically lower tax rate than it would have to pay in the US. Apple got its lower tax rate, and Ireland kept Apple in the country. For a long time, that arrangement worked well. But as Apple's profits soared, the EU started to look more closely at the deal.
It's illegal for a government in the EU to strike a so-called "sweetheart deal" with a company. The European Commission classes those deals as illegal state aid, and it has decided that Ireland's deal with Apple is exactly that.
The commission said that two tax rulings issued by Ireland to Apple have “substantially and artificially lowered the tax paid by Apple in Ireland since 1991.”
The rulings endorsed a way to establish how much tax two of Apple’s Irish incorporated companies–Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe– should pay.
Almost all sales profits recorded by the two companies were internally attributed to a “head office,” which existed only on paper and could not have generated such profits, according to the commission.
The European Commission said tax arrangements that Ireland offered Apple in 1991 and 2007 allowed the company to pay annual tax rates of between 0.005% and 1% on its European profits for over a decade to 2014, by designating only a tiny portion of its profit as taxable in Ireland.
“The commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” said European antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
The sweetheart deals violated Ireland's treaties with the EEC and the EU. Ireland could leave the EU to prevent future tax claims, but then Apple would move the office to the continent.
Samsung would be quite happy for that to happen - a tariff on Apple imports in the North American and EU markets of a couple of hundred bucks a pop would be a game changer.
I wrote the robots are doing the space exploration, not mining. And yet, even back in the '60s the Surveyor spacecraft were prospecting on the moon, and did some soil analysis. Curiosity drilled 2-1/2" to extract and analyse a "core sample". Will this ever be scaled up to actual mining? Certainly better than the chance of humans doing so - we're becoming redundant in so many jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you nuts? Nixon was caught on tape conspiring to cover up the Watergate Break-in. Read "All the President's Men." Nixon suborned perjury before Congress, the idea off offering the plumbers a million bucks to stay silent, and then the idea of using a $350,000 campaign contribution to bribe the plumbers, cover-ups, plots to interfere with the FBI investigation, etc., etc. Read the tape transcripts. Nixon was in it up to his eyeballs and resigned rather than face certain impeachment, but only after working out a deal with Ford for a pardon.
He resigned because the tapes and the witnesses were enough to convict him of more than a few crimes.
The EU most certainly has authority over tax policy because of treaties between the European Economic Community and Ireland, and later with the EU and Ireland. The state aid has NOTHING to do with the price of iPhones. It's selectively providing a tax rate that was not offered to ALL businesses in Ireland. Ireland does not have the right to set tax policy that contravenes it's duties under the agreements between Ireland and the EU. Even of Ireland were to invoke Article 50 and do an Irexit, that wouldn't solve anything because Ireland would no longer have access to the EU market so Apple would have to move it's headquarters anyway, and no EU country is going to offer a tax rate of 0.0005%. Ireland and Apple engaged in Transfer Tax Pricing and overvalued Apple's IP that was held by Apple Ireland while simultaneously undervaluing those same assets in the US (Apple Ireland is owned by Apple). Also, Irish tax law states that a company is tax resident where its central management and control is located - and that's not Ireland. Control resided with Apple USA, The deal was fraudulent from the get-go.
We could also rapidly terraform Mars [11]. First, autonomous robotic labor can capture icy bodies in the outer solar system and transport them to enter the Martian atmosphere.
Not in your lifetime. Not in your grand-kid's lifetime. And given the current trends, we'll lose all capability to do that sort of stuff within a generation, same as we already lost the capability to put a man on the moon in the previous one.
our robots can do it now with minutes of lag between commands (Mars rovers)
The lag is a lot more than that, and that's why every move has to be done with extreme planning. And when Mars is on the other side of the sun, forget it. The lag between the between you sending the command and seeing the result is between 8 minutes and 48 minutes. Telepresence? VR? Ain't gonna happen with that much lag.
Because we don't have the tech, and we probably won't last long enough to develop it before the wheels start coming off everything. Business certainly isn't going to do it - that requires investing tens of trillions of dollars for something without a payoff within the lifetime of many of the people you'd want to pony up the money.
The NRA is bigger than Donald's hands. Credit for pointing that out goes to Ted Cruz.
Oh, for crying out loud, I think the staff at the Wall Street Journal have a better idea than you of what's going on. I never paid to subscribe to any sites, so maybe they just like me ...
I checked my passwords list in my browser, and I'm not signed in - I don't have a user name or password for them. I'm not subscribed. I guess they like me more than you ... who knows ... it's the Internet, it's supposed to be broken all the time.
Actually, you'd have a legal defense. If their taking it was a threat to your life, what's the problem? Besides, would you rather be a dead hero or a live ordinary chump?
In Canada you weren't even allowed to kill someone even to prevent another party from killing you. Killing person A under threat to your own life by person B (under duress) wasn't legal. That was screwed up. The Supreme Court fixed that in the 90's.
The real issue is being evaded. Edward Snowden hasn't committed treason because he hasn't given anything to any enemy of the US. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war, and they haven't done so since 1942. So Russia, China, even North Vietnam are not legally enemies - so there's no need for Snowden to prove his innocence - just to introduce the legal, constitutional definition of enemy.
The whole thing is stupid. Someone posts nasty stuff in response to you, you don't see it but everyone else does and since you left it there,looks like tacit approval. And you can't delete what you can't even see. Trolls are going to just love this
Hey, give them a break, in another 10 years they might invent Usenet Newsgroups.
And the only one with a realistic chance of granting a pardon was cheated by the DNC, On this topic, Clinton is 100% indistinguishable from a republican.
The NRA.
It's possible half of what he did was "good" and half was "bad". In the legal system, doing good doesn't usually counter-act the bad.
Sure it does. You're allowed to kill someone to save your or another person's life.
Or to use your example, you won't be charged with forcible entry or damage to property for kicking in a door to save a kid in a fire.
In both cases, the collateral damage is seen as worth it.
The ubiquitous spying was known long before snowden.
He doesn't even need a job. He'll make enough from book deals, tv appearances, guest editorials, and the rubber chicken circuit.
No, I don't. The burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim.
Quote #1 is sourced - it's credited to the Wall Street Journal staff right at the top, on the same line as the date: 9:39 AM EST AUG 30, 2016
Quote #2 is about the illegal deal between Apple and Ireland. The EU has determined the deal is illegal. If Apple disagrees, they can take the EU to court. Until they do successfully overturn it, the ruling stands.
Quote #3 is STILL not behind a paywall. Maybe they just don't like you ...
Also, you're wrong about the links and quotes. I just checked - the second link, you'll find the quote half-way down the page. Also, the third is definitely NOT paywalled - and works fine with adblock plus turned on. Your device/browser/whatever is f*cked up or you're holding it wrong :-)
You're right - they can't justify expanding into other fields, but at the same time, there's a clear danger that their bread and butter will be eaten by others. The iPhone continues to decline in market share, and there's nothing coming out of Apple that will be an innovative game changer. Self driving cars - they're too late, and they're laying of the staff that they hired for that. VR - again, too late. Laptops? Others are producing laptops just as thin. Tablets? Tablets have been in decline since 2014. The only market they haven't entered that would have higher profits would be to start selling iOS and OSX and or whatever they call it now as stand-alone products. And they're too chicken - lacking in courage - to make the leap, even as the hardware side starts making a big sucking noise.
Give a tax holiday to any business, next thing you know every business will keep their profits hidden until they get the same deal.
As far as R&D, they already get to write it off, and we've seen that they have pretty much reached the end of the line in terms of innovation. And much of the design of Apple products is already done overseas because the expertise has moved to Asia, so extra credits will only result in more money going overseas.
What would happen if manufacturers were given a license to sell phones running iOS as well as Android? Android sells more every year than the iPhone has sold since it was developed ... this is the only way they will recapture share. Ditto for laptop and desktop computers. There will be some cannibalization of Apple hardware sales, but the increased visibility and profitability of operating system sales should more thanl make up for it. But again, lack of vision and courage :-(
The Irish government agreed a deal with Apple in 1991 to only tax a certain bracket of its earnings, giving it a dramatically lower tax rate than it would have to pay in the US. Apple got its lower tax rate, and Ireland kept Apple in the country. For a long time, that arrangement worked well. But as Apple's profits soared, the EU started to look more closely at the deal.
It's illegal for a government in the EU to strike a so-called "sweetheart deal" with a company. The European Commission classes those deals as illegal state aid, and it has decided that Ireland's deal with Apple is exactly that.
and here
The commission said that two tax rulings issued by Ireland to Apple have “substantially and artificially lowered the tax paid by Apple in Ireland since 1991.”
The rulings endorsed a way to establish how much tax two of Apple’s Irish incorporated companies–Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe– should pay.
Almost all sales profits recorded by the two companies were internally attributed to a “head office,” which existed only on paper and could not have generated such profits, according to the commission.
and here
The European Commission said tax arrangements that Ireland offered Apple in 1991 and 2007 allowed the company to pay annual tax rates of between 0.005% and 1% on its European profits for over a decade to 2014, by designating only a tiny portion of its profit as taxable in Ireland.
“The commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” said European antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
The sweetheart deals violated Ireland's treaties with the EEC and the EU. Ireland could leave the EU to prevent future tax claims, but then Apple would move the office to the continent.
Samsung would be quite happy for that to happen - a tariff on Apple imports in the North American and EU markets of a couple of hundred bucks a pop would be a game changer.
The big problem with dynamic linking is that you can specify the library to load at runtime.
I wrote the robots are doing the space exploration, not mining. And yet, even back in the '60s the Surveyor spacecraft were prospecting on the moon, and did some soil analysis. Curiosity drilled 2-1/2" to extract and analyse a "core sample". Will this ever be scaled up to actual mining? Certainly better than the chance of humans doing so - we're becoming redundant in so many jobs.