There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.

We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.

Systemd will forward to syslogd if you want it to so you can still use your standard tools to view the logs if you want.

If gimp pulls in systemd libs then a bug should be filed there. There is no technical requirement it needs to be that way according to the gnome folks.

This is what I mean by reading things for yourself. I've been reading about his plans but you are mistaking the systemd init system with the overall collections of things he is working on. It's not as if the high speed DHCP daemon he has just written will end up in PID 1. His proposals so far is that there will be more optional daemons that either work better and at some point in the future I wouldn't be shocked if there were to be a debate over whether his addons should replace existing daemons but we aren't there yet.

You do not have to install gnome3 on Debian, I don't. As for systemd, I suggest looking through Debian's extensive documentation detailing why they chose systemd over the alternatives. At any rate the time to argue systemd was last year when Debian had a very lengthily consultation process. I also suggest looking up the systemd documentation for yourself considering the huge amount of FUD being spread about it and I find it telling that neither the Debian fork website nor the boycott systemd websites don't actually name any of their supporters.

Nope - I haven't given up on my US citizenship yet.

And personal tax is a myth for the same reason because I just ask for a higher salary to offset my tax burden. By that logic you can't tax ANYTHING because the cost will get shifted somewhere else.

What makes you think that companies don't want and lobby for this complex tax code that is full of loopholes they can explot?

Don't like it? Move.

What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.

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.