Apple’s Tim Cook Flatout Rejects US Senate Caining

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has defended his company’s tax avoidance  tactics, Cook faced a grilling by US lawmakers accusing the tech-behemoth of sham subsidiaries and convoluted strategies to shift profits offshore, however Cook strenuously denied the company used gimmicks to avoid paying taxes. Cook told a US Senate committee Apple paid all the taxes it owed, complying with not only the law, but the spirit of the law.

Cook said last year Apple paid $US6 billion to the US coffers, a tax rate of about 30 percent.

The high level US Senate committee investigating corporate offshore tax avoidance has accused Apple of shifting billions of dollars in profits to avoid paying US taxes on a massive scale. It found Apple avoided paying $9 billion in tax in 2012. Earlier, Panel chairman Senator Carl Levin accused Apple of “exploiting an absurdity” in its tax payments.

Mr Cook told the hearing that Apple lives up to its tax obligations and more, but some lawmakers expressed outrage over findings of the panel’s probe that the tech-behemoth avoided taxes by using a web of foreign subsidiaries, some without any tax jurisdiction :: Read the full article »»»»

Cool or Fool?

The phrase “the phones are running hot” has the potential for a double meaning in the smartphone age, with increasingly processor-intensive apps being used on mobile devices. Desktop computers make use of water cooling to keep their CPUs from overheating, so why can’t smartphones? Why not, indeed. NEC has done just that with the Medias X N-06E, the world’s first water-cooled smartphone.

At the heart of the Medias X N-06E is a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro running at 1.7 GHz that has its heat drawn away to the sides of the phone by a water-filled heatpipe. Of course, this chip can be found in a range of devices, including the LG Optimus G Pro and HTC One, neither of which seem to be experiencing overheating issues.

While the chip supports clocking up to 1.9 GHz, NEC is sticking to 1.7 GHz for the water-cooled phone, so it’s unlikely users will see any real performance boost. The only real benefits we can see would be the potential to possibly extend the life of the chip or keep the phone cooler in your hot little hand :: Read the full GIZMAG article »»»»

KOGAN FRENZY! HP 7″ Slate Tablet EXTREMELY LIMITED STOCK

Carry your world in the palm of your hand! Only $189 Extremely limited stock available! View Deal Runs Android Jelly Bean OS 4.1, the best version of Android yet. Comes with Beats Audio for the best sounding audio available on a tablet! There is extremely limited stock – according to Kogan – get in quick! CLUE! check the Kogan Blog: www.kogan.com/au/blog/

Australian Scientists 3D-Print NEW Organs …US Student 3D-Prints a Gun

It’s proof perhaps that we live in an ironic world, Australian researchers are on the cusp of creating new human organs via 3D-printing. While a US student fires the first bullet from a home-made 3D Printed polymer gun.

On the up-side, Australian scientists say they have found a way to grow human body parts using 3D printing technology. The technology isn’t the only cleverness here, 3D printers are now so portable that they might be installed in hospitals.

The University of Wollongong’s Centre for Electromaterials Science is opening a research unit at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital where 3D printing will be used to reproduce tissue material.

In the US, the State Department has successfully demanded the removal of the 3D printed gun’s schematics from Defcad, a file-sharing site run by Defense Distributed, the group at the centre of the 3D-printed gun controversy.

However, those worried about the ability to download 3D-printed gun blueprints, fret not: The Pirate Bay is apparently on the case, the 3D Printed guns schematics are available for download :: Read the full article »»»»

IBMs World’s Smallest Movie, It’s Atomic!

Researchers from tech-behemoth IBM have unveiled – confirmed by Guinness World Records –  the world’s smallest movie, made with atoms. Named A Boy And His Atom, the movie used thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action.

The movie depicts a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and goes on a journey that includes dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. Set to a playful musical track, the movie represents a unique way to convey science outside the research community.

It takes around 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data on a computer, a bit being the basic unit of information in computing. Recently, IBM Research announced it can store that same bit of information in just 12 atoms.  In order to make the movie atoms were moved with a scanning tunnelling microscope. The microscope weighs two tonnes, operates at minus 268 degrees Celsius and magnifies the atomic surface more than 100 million times :: Read the full article »»»»