Really? You don't expect private enterprises to behave well, so you excuse them when they don't. You're going with that?

Apply that to criminals and the police. It's not the murderer's fault that woman is dead. You expect criminals to do bad things. It's the police's fault for not catching him. We hold the police to higher standards than criminals.

Nothing implausible? Sorry, but that's not enough to uphold an allegation. This isn't a "he says, she says" situation. This is a matter of accountancy. Either the accuser has evidence or wrong doing or he does not. And 6 moths later, it's clear that he does not.

It's a smear, pure and simple.

The correct term is "pedantry". :P

Oh, how I wish it were.

That's £17.12 per console. Including both console and games. What are they playing, Pong?

Can you believe these animals survived? Who knows what they'll try next, maybe a dog or chimp! One day, humans might even be able to go into space!

...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.

Biology is more of a day job. Computer history is one of my hobbies. That being said, though, biology does involve a lot of Java and XML.

Where?

Not about governments supplying services. The question is who's fault is it that multi-national companies aren't paying the tax they should. Which is on topic, both to the story and to the preceding post.

But it has fuck all to do with supplying services. It's legitimate to point out that they are avoiding the substantive topic.

The average wage in the UK is a lot lower and falling. The government is trying really, really hard to drive down wages at the moment. Businesses simply want to pay their staff less, and the government supports businesses. They call it "removing red tape" and "making it easier for businesses to employ people", which translated means "removing employee rights" and "making it easier for businesses to fire people or give them short term rolling contracts instead of a real job".

Really depends on what software you are writing. If it is a vertical app that a company relies on and you screw it up then it could cost you a lot in both reputation and lawsuits. If you create a suite of products where each is dependent on the other (e.g. CAD/CAM/CNC) one bad one can scupper the others.

The prosecution were attempting the censor the information by making it difficult to access. Censorship doesn't have to be absolute to be effective. Now the barrier to reading these documents went from £350 to £0 and the electronic format is easier to handle (searching etc.)

The point is that they don't. They find ways to avoid it, so we have to pay for it instead.

I used to play D&D with this guy who had pretty much memorized the rule book. The DM would say "lose 3 HP" and he would find some obscure interaction of multiple rules none of us had even considered that meant he only lost 1. Google is that guy, and the DM just needs to tell them to pay the hell up in the spirit of the rules.

I guess you haven't been following it as closely as you think you have because Vince Cable's excuse was that Google is not doing anything illegal.

The simple fact is that the Tory party does not want to close these loopholes because many of their friends make use of them. They make some noise about it, go on Radio 4 and Newsnight and announce it in the Commons, but are careful not to really do anything.

The problem with only paying what the law requires is that these companies then arrange their corporate structure to avoid paying almost anything, against he spirit of the law. It then becomes a game of cat and mouse, except that parliament moves so slowly the mouse always finds a new hole to dive down as soon as there is talk of closing the old one off. You can't easily legislate to make them pay more tax, although it looks like the EU might have found a way to do it if every country acts simultaneously.

Maybe the last line of any tax law should be "no funny games".

Oh, and don't forget Google did actually lie. They said there were no sales done in the UK, yet most of their staff list sales as part of their duties on their CVs and in their job titles.