In any case the EU is making moves to tax corporations a percentage based on how much business they do in each country. In a few years if Apple makes $Xbn in EU it will have to pay corporation tax on that profit no matter what, and if it doesn't Apple products will be banned and its shops boarded up.

Even multinational corporations can't win when the market is as big and as valuable as the EU, or even a single member state like the UK. We hold all the cards here, it's only corrupt politicians allowing them to get away with it.

So what you are saying is that governments should allow themselves to be held to ransom by international corporations?

Anyway, who gives a shit if they move on, they barely contribute anything to Ireland anyway.

Why? Okay, maybe you oppose taxation in general or whatever, but the undeniable reality is that you have to pay it. Every dollar a corporation avoids paying has to come out of someone else's pocket, i.e. yours.

Even if that is true, it does not mean much.

In Germany, the whole radical Right is infiltrated by the Verfassungsschutz (the german secret service for the interior affairs), so much, that legal means against an extreme right wing political party (the NPD) was impossible because there was no way to discern anymore which of the party's questionable actions were actually grown out of the party's radical members, and which of them were initiated by infiltrators trying to get street cred within the party.

But nevertheless, a chain of ten deadly terroristic attacks including one against two policemen remained unresolved and mysterious, until two members of the terroristic group committed suicide and the third one blew up their headquarters.

He left out the best method: Hand write everything in assembly language...

That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA. Turns out the DNA does indeed begin to fragment but you can still piece it together for a very long time after it begins to degrade. In this case that statement is it's probably right and 46 million years is too long and even if you could recover some Dino DNA (from any source) it will be fragmented beyond recovery with current technology. Even so, we should not stop trying to defy established notions of what is impossible. A Scientist at Yale University recently discovered that pigments do not degrade, they sometimes fossilise which is an amazing discovery since it means that if we find fossilised dinosaur skin, feathers or insect exoskeletons for that matter we can figure out what color long extinct animals were. It was almost a scientific axiom that we would never know what color dinosaurs were and it certainly blew me away when I found out that was wrong.

the powers that be aren't going to let us go to war. It's bad for business. Take that one terrorist attack ages ago in India that was traced back to Pakistan. The Indian people called for blood, the corps said no (since real war cuts into their profits) and everyone backed down.

Oh, for sure you're going to see a lot of human misery for the sake of the super rich being super rich. But large scale wars that wipe out the pleebs aren't going to happen again.

Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.

Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.

The same applies to some open source projects. If you're willing to throw the resources at a project; whether that be your own patches and improvements, or financial resources, you're likely to get what you want out of project.

I've seen some of this so-called "superior" closed source code, and some of it is insanely awful, poorly documented cruft.

Really? I don't recall one or two major acts of terrorism a year since 2000. In fact I only recall one (7/7), and maybe you could count the bungled attempt to bomb an airport but those guys were laughably dumb. So what are the other 20 odd major acts of terrorism that I somehow slept through?

Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...

Do some Google searches. People noticed that the video output on Lightning connectors is lower resolution than 1080p and horribly compressed. MicroUSB on the other hand supports MHL, which gives you 1080p60 uncompressed video and uncompressed digital audio.

He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.

I'm sure uucp is still around. My earliest "Internet" feed was new and mail and news feeds over UUCap. Bring back bang paths and modems!

Isn't this a feature pretty much taken for granted? My $80 Hauwei Ascend II has bluetooth for pete's sake... It's a $10 dollar chip (maybe $2.50 at the bulk Sony buys)... I get that margin's are slim but come on...