I think this is a great example of government "efficiency", underlining the fact for all those people who love to carry on about how vital "government spending" is. I simply can't believe that contracts are awarded without any sort of penalty clause that covers errors like this, delays in completion dates, etc. Years ago this would be considered high treason and someone would swing. Now, thanks to corrupt and decadent government, nothing will happen. In fact, the contractor will probably get more contracts.

Want to bet? I'm sure Microsoft firmly believes that they are licensing the console to you.

The whole thing reeks of anti-trust.

Well, reading through all of these responses I see that we have managed to prove that 3D printers are basically useless toys.

I remember cutting square holes on the "other" side of single sided floppies, turning them into double sided floppies, lol. Hell I remember punchcards. Damn I'm old. I just built myself a system and for fun I have 64GB of RAM... a SSD hard drive, and a screaming i7 processor. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it. I remember fiddling with drivers to cram that extra kb or 2 out of that bit of memory between 640kb and 1024kb - the order in which the drivers were loaded was important! Hell, I remember buying a 256kb "expansion card" and being amazed! CGA - Amazed! EGA - Amazed! I'm so old, I think I'll go rest now zzzzzzzzzzz

Well obviously they would have no right to release code belonging to a 3rd party without that party's consent.

In that case, I agree. It's as if the US thought it was entitled to the money I make trading stocks on the US market. No. I've got my W-8 form filled out, I live overseas, I reside overseas, I'm hardly ever in the US. I don't pay US taxes. Curiously though I get automatically taxed on my dividends. Fair enough, it's not enough money to complain. I pay the taxes I owe in my country of residence. Now, some US citizen who suddenly decides he wants to do what I do needs to first renounce his US citizenship - because US citizens must pay income tax on their worldwide income even if they don't live in the US. Not doing this means breaking the law.

But I'm not a US citizen. The money I have belongs to an offshore entity, as do the profits. And that's that. If I spend more than 3 months in the US though I become liable for tax. Because thanks to Bill Clinton, that's what the law now says. So I don't.

It's ashamed that their lawyers won't get disbarred for it.

If they paid their taxes on the way out of the US, then there's no reason that the US can use to tax them again if the money was transferred to non-resident corps. Once the money is offshore, it's offshore. But you have to pay your taxes before you can take it out. And of course your offshore corp is not allowed to conduct any business in that country without being considered a resident for tax. It's one or the other. Either this is just another big political stink by greedy politicians who don't understand that the US can't tax the whole world, or someone at Apple screwed up somewhere. I guess we'll find out.

I remember our computer lab at school had one machine with 8" floppies. All the other machines - the ones we could use - were 5 1/4" though. Ahhh, brings back days of Adventure, Flight Simulator, and "Trek"! No wonder I never got anything done in high school!

Er, libraries and other proprietary stuff is usually made available in the shape of LIB files added in at link time, or DLL's. You don't get the source code for them anyway. So what's the problem?

From TFA: " It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars, while claiming to be tax resident nowhere."

Everything you quoted fails to account for the above, from TFA. If it's true, then Apple is evading tax and breaking the law. Everyone (person or corporation) is resident somewhere.

You can't not be a resident of any nation. You are automatically resident in the nation where your corporation was drawn up and "incorporated", and you can provide documentation to substantiate a change of residence for tax purposes. If you say, become resident of Costa Rica for tax purposes (Costa Rica currently has no income tax on income derived outside of Costa Rica), you don't have to pay tax on foreign income. If you earn one penny in Costa Rica, you have to pay tax on it. If you earn in the US, you pay tax on it before it leaves the country. You can't just "renounce" your residence and pretend that's a "Get out of Taxes Free" card. That's not tax avoidance, that's tax evasion.

I do believe that corporations have to be resident somewhere. Even if it's Panama or the Cayman Islands. You cannot claim that your corporation is not resident anywhere in the world.

Nope. CompuAdd. I remember now. Far cheaper than Dell, and much nicer machines. Hell even Gateway was cheaper than Dell.