Well, considering that you're NOT paying taxes in a tax haven, tax "heaven" seems reasonable.

Actually, it doesn't matter how long you reside outside of the US they still want their bite.

Well, as a normal US citizen (I'm an ex-pat so I have to deal with this crap) the US wants to tax you on your worldwide income. The only legal way to avoid that is to give up your US citizenship. Currently, I think the US is the only country that tries to tax you on your worldwide income so pretty much if you shift your citizenship to any other country you can then go reside in whatever low tax locale you can and only pay the local taxes. The US has come up with an "exit tax" though, so if you have a substantial amount of assets and want to give up your US citizenship they want you to pay for the privilege of leaving.

If it was only shielding non-US profits from US tax collection I'd be inclined to agree, but I think they're evading taxes in every country they're doing business in.

Luxembourg can afford to offer low tax rates because there's no cost to them. Amazon is using the infrastructure in other countries (e.g. roads, airports, etc.) to make money without paying for it. If they actually based their entire business in Luxembourg and then shipped worldwide I'd say it made sense. This is not competition on tax rates, this is just a scam.

I don't think it will work without a pretty wide-open connection to Amazon. All of those queries that we saw were not being satisfied by the local box. The shopping list was internet connected. That thing is not going in my house.

Essentially what Luxembourg is doing here is offering tax collection as a service. Luxembourg collects a small percentage but much more than they would get otherwise, since Amazon et al. don't do much business in Luxembourg and offers these large corporations a legal shield against other countries' taxes.

This would appear to be a bug in the international tax system.

How much does Amazon Australia spend on R&D? I'm betting they do make a profit and remit it back to the US parent which then spends on R&D. Quite fair for Australia to ask for a cut of the profit made in Australia.

Part of the bankruptcy will be to get as much cash back as possible. That's typically done by selling the assets and technologies of the company, along with things like brand names. The buyer does not assume any of the original company's financial responsibilities.

The common failure mode would be "electronics" and any type of electronic navigation would fall under that. Furthermore, if all a ship's electronics are offline their engines are probably not functioning either.

The traffic isn't transiting Comcast going to another network. It's going to a Comcast subscriber who wants to watch a movie. So, yes, the subscriber is requesting a movie and the data is being delivered to them. There's no other route to the subscriber than through their ISP.

Exactly - keep it in Fedora and Ubuntu for a while before migrating it to the systems that need stability.

Who knows what annoyance are lurking in there.

Well, when I was referring to the original comment, that was the one written by rioki, not you.

I got interested in computers at about the same age as you, but for me that was around 1978 in the US. At that time things like tabulators were ancient history.

We did have a test scoring machine that was semi-standalone when I was in high school but I think it had a microprocessor in it. You could program it with an answer key and then it would mark the Scantron (fill-in-the-bubble) forms based on the answer key. It had an RS-232 interface that it would output data from as well and I spent some time writing software to capture test results on an Apple II.

I agree that the comment that sparked this was talking about special purpose machines (tabulators, etc.) vs computers. I suspect that he went googling for computer history, though, and found the rather specialized definition of "general purpose computer" that the mainframe people created.

For those of us with a computer science, rather than an IT background, general purpose computer means Turing complete. And while doing scientific computing on a BCD machine may be like going to LeMans with your turnip truck, it's still doable and in an era when computers were rare for the average person, many would have been interested in doing it.

You're off by at least a decade, maybe two.

IBM mainframes were never really used that much in scientific applications. They cost too much. That's why minicomputers were so popular. Big business used IBM mainframes starting from the early 50's. COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was introduced in '59.

Computing follows the money. The money was initially in the military market, then the business market.