While I agree with the underlying idea of doing something about the tax avoidance, this rule is probably violating the rules of the EU internal market (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market).

What the EU really needs is IMHO a tax harmonization that stops countries like Ireland from attracting corporate headquarters with extremely low tax rates.

Considering countries outside the EU, the measure described in TFA would make more sense. I'm still not 100% convinced, but it would be at least worth discussing.

Similar here,

although it is more likely to be a new programming approach to an existing project. So instead of a complete "private" computer setup it is more likely to be an unofficial change set that modifies only a few parts of the project. It may even live on the official TFS as a "shelf set" ;-)

The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.

If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU ;-)

In general (not necessarily relating to Kaveri as-is) 8 giB of fast, soldered memory as in the PS4 would make sense for a PC.

The current APUs are seriously bandwidth starved. In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins (except benchmarks that don't use the GPU much). Overclocking the memory helps the APU some, which is further evidence.

With PS4 style memory that problem could be solved, admittedly at the expense of being able to add more RAM. But looking back on my last three computer purchases, I always ended up doing a complete update instead of adding RAM to the existing PC. Because the CPU and GPU were also obsolete, and with a new CPU came a new mainboard with a different type of RAM.

I'm still building my own desktops, but I would agree that upgrading it is not necessary as often anymore. For various reasons:

  1) The innovation speed (and I'm using the word "innovation" loosely) has gone down. From hardware generation N to N+1, the gains are smaller than they used to be five years ago. Less incentive to get that shiny new CPU and graphics card...

  2) The hardware requirements of most software have grown only moderately in the last years. Even mediocre hardware can play movies in full HD and most games in passable graphics quality these days. Only hardcore gamers and some professionals need $2000 machines these days.

  3) As a subset of 2), Microsoft is finally doing one thing right: the hardware requirements of their OS are no longer growing massively with each release. I'd still call Windows 7 a bit greedy for RAM, but that is cheap enough and the performance is usually (given enough RAM) as good as XP's.

All things summed up, my PCs last longer and are cheaper these days. Good for me, not so good for the industry.

Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.

Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.

I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.

If expensive solutions count, why not a PC version of the PS4 board?
8Gbyte would be enough for an average gaming PC, and with DDR5 the bandwidth would be decent too :-)

I don't think they gave Rockstar the money without setting rules for how the patents are used. So we can assume that the founders at least did not mind Rockstar turning loose the lawyers on the competition.

Already preferring LibreOffice ;-)
Yes, it is not online but I consider that an advantage. Keeping your stuff in the cloud just increases the risk of losing it. Cloud vendors sometimes go offline...

Of course you can keep local backups, but if you maintain local storage anyway, why not add a local installation of an office suite?

But the companies behind Rockstar are known. From TFA:
"Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others".
So any patent retaliation from Google would be against those.

Depends on the vendor. I had pretty good quality from Osram and abysmal from Megaman (both CFL brands in Germany).
From Osram, 10 years or more of lifetime seems normal (small sample size here, but it points in that direction).
From Megaman, I bought four CFLs and three of those broke after a few months. Not a vendor that will get any more business from me...

But some are harder than others. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology) it took around 12 years and some notable scientists to go from theoretical concepts to a program that played halfway well.

BTW I'm using the time frame between Claude Shannon's paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" to Kotok-McCarthy here. If you want a tournament victory against a human as reference, that would be Mac hack in 1967 and 17 years of development.

If WOW was that hard to bot, Blizzard would not need to sue developers of bot software.

In general, the perpetrator would be the management of that 3rd party testing company.
In this case, the culprit is known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib#Fabricated_efficacy_studies
Also according to Wikipedia, he was actually convicted. One might consider the sentence too lenient, but it is not like no punishment was meted out..

That is what criminal law and the court system are for. If a drug company does a trial and makes a honest mistake in missing dangerous side effects, they might be liable for damages but that is all.

But if they fake a trial and people die from the drug, I think it counts as negligent homicide.

Well, why not FreePascal/Lazarus in place of Delphi?

From Germany, I currently see a price of â199.00 for Delphi® XE5 Starter, which is the cheapest version available (mostly for private use, very limited commercial license). Maybe South Africa could haggle the price down a bit more for school use, but generally Embarcadero is f**king expensive.

Free Pascal is, well, free. And IMHO good enough. It has obviously not much presence in the job market, but Delphi is also on its way out.

I'm working for a company that used Delphi 6 until recently, but new projects are migrating to .NET now. And we were one of the last holdouts anyway. I guess Delphi will still be used for a few years in maintenance tasks/minor upgrades, but its days are ultimately numbered here.