The common scam here in Ireland (and also UK) is that the likes of Google, Starbucks, Microsoft companies set up over here pay large "fees" to their parent company in the US in return for being allowed to be part of the parent company.

Its a loophole that the likes of Google in Europe are essentially being run as a franchise. You are allowed to write off your franchise 'fees' as being operating costs so you pay no tax on them. So Google Ireland Ltd. might pay several billion a year to Google US for their "google license". Its more complicated than that though, there are various intermediate companies involved on the Cayman Islands and what have you to further reduce the tax burden. All completely legal. We're being scammed

The common argument in favour over here is "but these companies are providing money to the economy, employing people, etc." but it isn't really fair. If I set up a company in Ireland I would have to pay lots of tax and have lots of regulation to comply with but these sh1tbags like GOOG get away with it because (a) They're big and can threaten to leave Ireland and (b) They can afford to pay their accountants to suss out the best tax avoidance scheme. So Google aren't really carrying their weight but even the govt is afraid to challenge them by changing the law.

Post was not meant to be serious. Ah well

The locals are too busy sitting on the tailgate of their shiny pickup truck (bought on credit) drinking tins of Fosters and acting the macho man to do anything about it.

Or else they are off chasing some blonde from Home & Away. Anyway censorship and freedom of speech are fairly low on the agenda

Might as well drive a car with an automatic gearbox. Tech like this makes the world a bit more boring

Agreed on manual transmission. Driving in the US of A is more boring than in other places

That's just pure boring. Isn't the whole point of such a car that you drive it yourself for your enjoyment?

I have Windoze 7 running in a VM for the very odd time I need it. Linux for everything else

I am probably one of the greatest Linux fanboys around and I run Linux on my desktop and laptop and server. I have also owned several Android mobile phones

But .. Sorry lads I think Android is a crap operating system. If I ended up with one of these laptops I'd like to be able to change OS like I could with an ordinary (non ARM) Windows-tax-paid laptop

I dunno lads. I've been thinking he was a bit of a gobshite for years with his "nothing to hide" and "mere humans shouldn't be allowed to drive cars" nonsense but it's worser he's getting now

I wouldn't let some ould foreign company known as Netflix decide on what worldwide standards are going to be and what sort of crap is going to be running on everyone's computer from now on.

DRM is giving up control of your own device, so it may work against you to try and make Netflix in this case more money

Thats it. People in the "west" doing nothing of value or interest while thinking highly of themselves while all the real work and all the production has moved to China years ago.

That's it, boys! Sell all that you own to the Chinese so you might have another decade of living the high life while doing nothing to earn it.

All that Western civilisation collectively worked on in the past 200 or so years has been given away to the Chinese for peanuts so we can sit on our collective asses and do nothing for about 20-30 years. Do you think that China will be paying us royalties once they figure out how to make a Core i7 processor themselves? F**k no, experience should tell you better.

I have run a tor exit node on my home DSL line for years. Never had a door kicked in. Only trouble I had was being blocked from boards.ie and geocaching.com

Google buying them would solve nothing, only make room for the next round of upstart trolls who can batter google and the rest of us with the same archaic laws

Of course they should be possible to unlock. Maybe a tamper proof seal on them while they're in service but eventually they'll be on the scrapheap somewhere. The embedded system might be useful to someone and we shouldn't waste good chips for legal reasons