What really worries people in Japan is that previously undiscovered problems keep coming to light at existing plants, now that proper checks are being done. Any trust that existed has proven to have been misplaced.

To be fair, some of the issues could not have been discovered when the plants were built. Equipment to find fault lines like the ones discovered recently did not exist in the 1980s. That just makes it worse though, because it demonstrates how even now we are discovering new issues and improving our understanding of the environment.

When the consequences of an accident are so severe being 99% sure it's okay isn't enough to gamble on. Of around 450 commercial electricity producing reactors 6 have melted down catastrophically. That's a 1.33% failure rate, and doesn't include all the other serious problems at nuclear plants. It's no wonder nuclear plants can't get commercial insurance.

The problem is that no insurer will insure a nuclear plant, so governments have to take the liability on themselves. Essentially nuclear operators get subsidised free insurance, so where are normally a commercial insurer would require high standards the government has to and the government is vulnerable to lobbying (bribes) and other shenanigans.

The tax they did pay was on stuff they couldn't dodge, like employment taxes, sales tax and taxes on physical assets. There was a lot more tax that would have been due on their global profits that was dodged by wiping those profits out with massive fees paid to the Irish shell company. The profits were converted to those fees and moved to Ireland, where they are not taxed

That's what the Double Irish it, it's what they are already doing. Apple in the US pays massive fees to an Irish shell company for use of the name Apple, and thus makes very little profit in the US that can be taxed. The only tax they do pay in the US is on their US operations like income tax and sales tax. The Irish company pays no tax at all.

I wonder if say Apple would really relocate outside the US. I don't just mean incorporate some shell company like they have in Ireland, I mean really move their operation to avoid paying tax. At the very least the top management would have to go overseas, and would probably want to take their engineering teams with them. They would have to spend a few more billion on a new campus and abandon the one they just erected.

Just to clarify, I was suggesting what you are suggesting. Tax must be paid somewhere. No more Double Irish. The EU's solution is to make companies pay tax on the business they do in each country, even if they offshore the profits.

I thought it was the corporations stealing by leeching off society and then not paying the membership fees. If they don't want to pay any tax they are free to leave society and stop stealing our free education and training, healthcare, roads, police and judicial services etc.

It's well understood what they are doing, because the companies are quite open about it. Back in the 90s Apple invented something called the Double Irish, which is where they register is shell company with no employees or other interesting in Ireland and have all the other Apple corporations around the world pay their profits to it in exchange for using the Apple name. Starbucks, Google, Amazon and others all do the same. Since the local corporations don't make any profit (due to the "crippling" fees they pay to Apple Ireland) they pay next to no tax.

So why doesn't Apple Ireland pay tax on all the money it takes? Irish law states that corporations that are headquartered overseas pay corporation taxes where their headquarters are. So Ireland says they pay in the US, the US says they pay in Ireland... and thus they pay no tax on all that money.

Of course they are quite open about this and list the money held in Ireland as part of their balance sheets. Apple is currently taking low interest loans to pay shareholders based on the vast reserves it has in Ireland, rather than bring some of that money back and pay ~40% tax on it.

The EU is working on a fix where corporations pay tax based on how much business they do in each country. This seems to be the best that the US can come up with, given the political climate.

This is clearly aimed at companies abusing the "Double Irish" system. Seems like the rate should be set much higher, so that companies are punished and lose more than they would if they did the right thing and repatriated profits and paid the normal tax rates on them.

I never had the caps go on anything Asus or Gigabyte. It was always the ram corrupting :(.

might be boon for Linux. Then again I sucked it down for product activation. Linux still isn't much use for gaming. And it's still a nightmare to write and deploy closed source software on Linux...

EVGA are pretty famous for dying in 12-18 months. Most people buying them don't care since they're gonna upgrade anyway. MSI's reputation isn't much better, but I know a few people who have had good luck. That said even my brother's Gigabyte GTX 260 only lasted 2 years before the RAM burned out. Too much heat. I bought a 660 w/o thinking about it and I'm hoping it doesn't suffer the same fate (since it's more than enough card for my next 5 years of gaming). I just wish I could buy even a mid range card w/o worrying about the thing dying long before the end of it's useful life.

We were 90% dumb phones until Apple moved in. What they did was open up the APIs and only charge a 30% cut from the vendors (plus a token $100/year fee for developer access). The dev kits for existing "Smart" phones available in the US started at $20k and the split was usually 60/40. There were tonnes of fees along the way too. On top of that Apple pushed for better and better hardware with slimmer profit margins; relying on volume and add on services (e.g. iTunes) to make up the difference.

Apple didn't create it out of nothing, but they did crack the market wide open.

this happens at every call center. They're high stress jobs with low pay. This kind of thing happens. I knew a project where the entire case was 75% ID-10T tickets. You don't usually even get the chance to fire the people. They're doing this stuff because their lives are a mess, they can't reliable get to work on time, and they know they've only got a little time left before they get fired for their next tardy.

A better question is why the hell would anyone care? There is no way in hell this has any bearing on Comcast's merger plans.

Back in 2004 I visited my girlfriend in Japan. She had 100Mb symmetrical fibre and it cost her £23/month. They installed it early because they knew it would last decades and keep them competitive well into the multi-gigabit era. They don't mess about, and it allows them to offer advanced services that others can't.

BT always do them minimum required to stay semi competitive, since in many areas they have no competition anyway.