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The invisible beauty of flowers - in pictures Guardian: Artist Susumu Nishinaga has used a scanning electron microscope to delve deep into the fabric of petal, leaves and pollen

Rate your AV receiver's autosetup program CNET News: Take the Audiophiliac challenge and see if you can get better sound with a DIY, manual setup. [Read more]

Digital Health For Dummies Forbes: A day doesn't go by when I'm asked about digital health.

Tax avoidance: how to change corporate behaviour Guardian: It is up to consumers and voters to change the lousy behaviour of big banks, energy giants and internet multinationals. They will not change by themselvesLast week, I was waiting in the queue at the butcher while an elderly lady was being served. Clearly, she was not that well-off and chose the cheapest cuts of meat. When she was done, the butcher asked the assistant serving her how much the bill came to. Told that it was £11, he whispered: Make it £8.It was a small example of generosity made all the better by the butcher taking care that his customer was unaware of what he was doing. It was also a far cry from the world of big business in a week that saw dawn raids on Shell and BP for alleged price-fixing and Google accused by the Labour MP Margaret Hodge of doing evil.Stung by the attack from the chairwoman of the Commons public accounts committee, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, mounted a defence in the Observer. Tax is a mightily complex matter for multinational companies, he said. The global system could do with reform. It was up to politicians to set the rules, but they had to recognise the dangers if profit became a dirty word.All credit to Hodge for flushing Schmidt out. He likes to portray himself as the new sort of boss of a new sort of company, the ones that boast of their non-hierarchical structures, their dress-down policies and their chill-out zones. But the row about tax has shown that the people running these new-wave behemoths are not hippy capitalists, they are robber barons in chinos.Nor should we expect otherwise. The dominant form of corporate organisation in the west is the joint stock company, the purpose of which is to deliver profits for its shareholders. Almost all these companies pay lip-service to corporate social responsibility. The companies selling booze say they are firmly committed to tackling problem drinking. The betting shop chains say they want to see responsible gambling. The fast food companies and the soft drinks industry sponsor sporting events in the hope that nobody notices how they are contributing to obesity. But they are in business to maximise profits for their shareholders. Period.The intellectual justification for the profit-maximising company can be traced all the way back to Adam Smith, who famously said in the Wealth of Nations: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker or the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. The pursuit of profit, in other words, creates wealth from which we all benefit.The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an earlier work by Smith, contained a rather different message, namely that there are good human qualities such as generosity and the desire to be seen worthy of the approval of others. Many problems, Smith thought, would be solved if only people could hold up a mirror and see themselves in the light in which others see us.Corporate social responsibility is supposed to address this point. Businesses like to be held in high esteem by their customers, but many of them have missed the crucial part of Smith's message: curbing the instinct to behave badly was not seen as being driven by commercial ends but by natural instincts. The real world is somewhat different. More than 30 clothing retailers have signed the Bangladesh Safety Accord for regular independent safety inspections of garment factories, but only after the deaths of 1,127 workers in the collapse of the Rana Plaza works exposed them to reputational risk.Smith, at a guess, would have been horrified ? if not entirely surprised ? to find that the European commission had launched dawn raids on Shell and BP amid allegations of price-fixing; that the European head of Google was being accused of doing evil by Hodge; and that Britain's big banks had been fingered for a string of offences from the mis-selling of protection payment insurance to money laundering.Nor would Smith have expected Google, Amazon or Starbucks to voluntarily pay more tax than they were legally obliged to for the simple reason that he distrusted enterprises which wielded monopoly or oligopoly power. His objection to a company such as Amazon would have been that it is using its market power to eliminate competition and would be in a position, once all the other booksellers had been driven out of business, to charge higher prices.The fact is, of course, that the world has moved on since Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. There are examples of businesses that operate in the light in which others see us, but as a general rule of thumb they tend to be small, local, non-transnational, non-PLC and open to the full blast of competition.But perfect competition does not exist. The corporate world is not dominated by small shopkeepers who worry what their customers might think about them, but by large corporations generating revenues that get channelled upwards to executives and shareholders.Companies will only change for one of three reasons: they are forced to do so legally; they are forced to do so by their customers; or because they spontaneously decide that they want to operate in accord with Smith's moral sentiments.Changes to the international tax system will be on the agenda when the G8 meets in Northern Ireland for its annual summit next month, and there has probably never been a better time to crack down on tax havens, aggressive tax planning and transfer-pricing schemes. In part this is because of the egregious nature of the corporate scandals and in part because governments are badly in need of tax receipts in a time of weak growth. Tax threatens to become to the 2010s what debt relief was to the 1990s: the focus of a global campaign for reform.In the end, though, the success of any campaign will depend on how the public behaves. If we don't like the current state of affairs, we can do one of two things. We can put pressure on governments to break up monopolies and inject more competition. We can call for a new business model, based on for benefit organisations, to challenge the domination of the joint stock company. We can force them to introduce sales taxes to avoid profits migrating offshore. Alternatively, we can vote with our feet, and stop patronising the companies that exploit loopholes in the tax system, even though that might mean higher prices and less choice. If we are not prepared to do one of these two things, we will have to lump it.After the events of the past few years, it would be naive to expect the initiative to come from the boardroom. Corporate social responsibility has been a smokescreen behind which companies can screw their customers while pretending they are putting something back. The activities of the banks and the energy companies illustrate the point. Capitalism is not about being cuddly or sponsoring exhibitions at the Tate Modern; it is about making profits, the higher the better.Corporate governanceCorporate social responsibilityTaxTax and spendingTax avoidanceEnergy industryOilRoyal Dutch ShellOil and gas companiesBPAmazon.comInternetE-commerceGoogleEric SchmidtMargaret HodgeEconomic policyEconomicsLarry Elliottguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How design colors the mind CBS News: The psychology of design and color has been applied to analysts' offices, jails, even locker rooms to surprising effect

Why Enterprise Is Avoiding Windows 8 Forbes: Despite Microsoft shipping more than 100 million Windows 8 licenses, Redmond's newest operating system is not making much headway in the enterprise world, with IT decision makers deciding to give it the cold shoulder.

Speed Dating? Watch Your Mouth ABC News: Do you know how long it takes for a guy and a gal to 'click' in the first stage of building a bond that may lead to a lasting relationship? Seconds, according to numerous studies.

Toyota Auris Hybrid: car review Guardian: Motoring can be a dirty business, but Toyota's new Auris Hybrid is doing all it can to keep it cleanPrice from £21,745MPG up to 74.3Top speed up to 112mphIt's almost a year since the mother of all traffic jams entered the record books ? Beijing's 60-mile, 12-day monster. It spawned its own micro economy with food sellers and laundry workers plying the lines of trapped drivers, while the rich abandoned their cars and paid others to sit in their static vehicles.The jam put into context the paltry three-hour tailback I was stuck in over the bank holiday. We lay on the grass embankment and chatted to our new neighbours about the Ohio kidnappings, the Padstow boat tragedy ? and about the sheer waste of resources a standstill jam causes.Even when flowing sweetly, Britain's roads are voracious. According to Roadclock.com, on any average day, more than 350,000 tonnes of carbon are emitted, 85,000 tyres will be replaced and 100m litres of fuel will be consumed ? netting £1,000 per second in duty for the tax man. Start factoring in congestion, rush-hour snarl ups, weekend gridlock, marital friction (Why on earth did you come this way?) and you start to feel the nauseating strain a jam puts on us.Which is why, in some small way, I was glad the car I was stuck in was Toyota's Auris Hybrid ? an eco car that does almost 75 miles to a gallon with just a nostril caressing whiff of emissions ? 85g/km. The ethically pure Auris is as clean as Jay Rayner's dinner plate?The notion of a green car will, of course, always be oxymoronic. Like false truths, turkey ham or Arsenal trophies, some pairings seem poles apart. But manufacturers are working hard at pulling the opposing ends together. And with its Auris hybrid, Toyota is doing better than most. Thanks to aerodynamic improvements, weight saving, engine readjustments and technological cunning, this Toyota has beaten off the likes of Volkswagen's Golf Bluemotion and BMW's i3 electric supermini to claim the title of Green Car of the Year 2013.Hybrids, electrics and alternatively fuelled cars have all been hailed as the solution to our motoring ails, but they tend to be over expensive, over complicated and, frankly, over-rated. They're ordinary cars that have been forced into a new template in a vain attempt to capture the green pound. They feel heavy, fragile and unreliable. But they're getting there, and this new Auris is another step forward.With its 1,798cc, four-cylinder petrol engine plus two electric motor generators, this flagship model is fun, responsive, clever, laughingly easy to control and strikingly good looking. It's a hybrid car I'd happily own. Not because it feels like the latest and best of the current crop, but because it feels like the first of the next.Over the years, Toyota has built some stultifying cars. But with the likes of the GT86 and now this, the Japanese giant seems determined to regain its place in the world. The new Auris will continue to be made in the UK, at the Burnaston factory in Derbyshire, where the outgoing model is already a top seller for Toyota ? one rolls off the production line every 66 seconds.Compact yet roomy, classy yet affordable, drivable yet green? the Auris is perfect for anyone wanting to occupy slightly less space on our crowded roads.Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/martinlove for all his reviews in one placeMotoringMartin Loveguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A look back at NASA's planet-pinpointing space 'scope CNET News: The space agency says the Kepler space telescope is having equipment issues. With the mission threatened, we look back at Kepler's mind-expanding search for Earth-like exoplanets. [Read more]

PayPal was no friend in need Guardian: We thought we were protected by paying through PayPal ? but it won't return money taken by bogus MMA car insurance brokersMy son took out a £1,300 car insurance policy ? or so he thought ? with the insurer MMA. I encouraged him to play safe and use my PayPal account for the transaction. After a couple of months, he discovered that the car was not insured. MMA claimed he had been a victim of fraudulent brokers, who had set up bogus policies in MMA's name, and that police were investigating similar cases. Since he can't afford new insurance he has had to sell his car. I contacted PayPal, who said they couldn't help as I was outside their 45-day period for claiming a refund. I always thought PayPal was the best method, but now I wish I'd used my credit card. It will take me a long time to save £1,300 again. LB, Hyde, Cheshire? I bought a balloon trip voucher as a Christmas present for my son and his girlfriend and paid the £181.99 through PayPal. Two days before the booked flight the company, Go Ballooning, went into administration. PayPal insists the claim is not valid because it was made outside of its 45-day refund window, even though the voucher is valid for one year and the company only operated flights between April and October. Is there any way I can reclaim my money? JW, Hertford, HertfordshireThe safest way to pay, boasts PayPal. Baloney! If both of you had paid directly for your purchases by credit card you would have been protected by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, which does not impose a deadline for refund claims when a contract is breached. And Mastercard, Visa and American Express allow up to 120 days for debit card customers to lodge a claim.Moreover, unlike the bank card schemes, PayPal protection only covers goods, not services, so even if circumstances had allowed you to lodge a complaint in time you would not have been covered.PayPal, after pondering its own logic for six weeks, says its safety claims are based on the fact that users don't have to disclose their card details to individual traders. It insists its 45-day rule was calculated to allow buyers enough time to identify a problem and lodge a complaint without incommoding sellers with too lengthy a dispute period. However, PayPal, as a one-off goodwill gesture, has offered JW a full refund. MMA says that you, LB, are the victim of ghost broking in which customers are deceived into buying non-existent insurance. Sadly, in your case, no refund is forthcoming.If you need help email Anna Tims at your.problems@observer.co.uk or write to Your Problems, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Include an address and phone number. We regret Anna cannot reply to letters individually.Consumer rightsScamsCar insuranceCredit cardsConsumer affairsPayPalAnna Timsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Verizon Galaxy S4 starts shipping early CNET News: Samsung's new flagship phone is on its way to Big Red customers a few weeks ahead of the original schedule. [Read more]

Arduino and Wi-Fi, together in the immediate future Ars Technica: A couple of new boards are making your DIY projects wireless.

16-year-old finds a new way to detect cancer CBS News: Jack Andraka's innovative mind led him to create a new approach in finding pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer

One tax law for us and another for Amazon | Nick Cohen Guardian: Britain's reluctance to pursue multinationals risks turning us into another ItalyOn the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon's largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a slave camp. But whatever arguments they have with Amazon's management, one point should be beyond dispute ? Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer. If workers steal ? and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not ? Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon's buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.Amazon.co.uk is a UK company. It has to be. An online retailer cannot relocate offshore. It needs local distribution centres to service local markets, otherwise the costs of moving its stock would be ruinously expensive.Yet Amazon pays just £3.2m tax on sales of £4.2bn because the Revenue allows it to get away with arguing that it should be taxed in Luxembourg. The same lack of connection between corporate tax status and commercial reality applies to Starbucks, Google, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and every other company the British state allows to dodge tax.The traditional defence that companies just take advantage of legal loopholes and you would do the same in their position falls apart in a country where the tax regime defies the evidence of our eyes. Leaving all other considerations aside, you will never be in their position.If you want to understand any society, look at its tax system. If one man or a clique can tax at will, you can conclude the society is a dictatorship or oligarchy. If you have reasonably progressive and universal taxes, you can assume it is a modern democracy. Britain has elements of democratic taxation. The same rules on occasion apply to everyone. But other parts of the system resemble the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France. Only in our case the privileged estates the government exempts from taxation are the corporations rather than the aristocracy and the church.For a generation, politicians have extended exemptions by selling Britain as a country where big businesses would be lightly taxed. When I put it like this, I make the policy sound too cool and rational. The process was far more emotional than that. Tycoons enchanted politicians. They convinced them that their interest and the national interest were as one. So deep was the ideological capture of the top of the British state that corporations have not on the whole had to corrupt ministers.No one has accused Gordon Brown of taking bribes, to quote the most egregious example. But in his abject period as chancellor, Brown ensured that his friends in private equity were taxed at a lower rate than their cleaners. One might have thought that the crash of 2008 would have discredited the notion that all will be well if we let capitalism run riot. Not a bit of it. George Osborne invites multinationals to advise him on how to tax multinationals. At their behest, he allows companies to move money to tax havens and then deducts the costs of their shady transactions from their British tax liabilities. The result of two decades of special treatment for vested interests can be summarised in one statistic. Between 1999 and 2011, British companies' profits increased by 58% but revenues from corporation tax increased by just 5%.To understand the scale of the avoidance, it is not enough to look at the permissive laws, however. Richard Brooks's The Great Tax Robbery is close to being this year's indispensable book because, as a former tax inspector turned Private Eye journalist, he has the material to show how the wealthy are exempt from what few laws apply to them.Dear Saddam, ran a spoof letter doing the rounds of the Revenue in the run-up to the Iraq war, we are trialling a new weapons inspection regime modelled on the Inland Revenue's approach to large corporate taxation. All you have to do is tell us you don't have any and we'll go away.One inspector said in his bitter farewell speech that he once thought that the Revenue's advertising slogan tax doesn't have to be taxing was a bad pun. Now I realise that for big business it meant what was said on the tin.British politicians and a series of negligent and doltish managers ordered the Revenue to back away from big business. In his justifiably notorious speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2005, everyone remembers Gordon Brown promising light-touch regulation for a financial services industry that was already careering towards bankruptcy. We forget that he went on to say that he would apply a light touch to the administration of tax for big business as well.The Revenue itself promises corporations that, rather than doing its job and collecting monies owed, it will follow a customer-focused supportive and enabling approach. Or as Dave Hartnett, the former permanent secretary for tax, who cut sweetheart deals with Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, explained it in 2010, Britain had a non-confrontational approach.I have written before that the willingness of New Labour, the Tories and the Revenue's senior managers to pursue the working and middle classes while exempting powerful corporations would turn the British into Italians. We would start to believe that tax evasion was respectable. We would view a state that hit the ordinary man and woman while sparing big business as immoral and illegitimate. That moment is drawing closer. The old complaint that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest does not do justice to the debasement of public authority in Britain. When it comes to tax, too often there is no law for the rich whatsoever.Amazon.comTax and spendingGoogleGoldman SachsStarbucksVodafoneNick Cohenguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Amazon's tax arrangements are nothing short of a work of art. Bravo! Guardian: Amazon has come in for plenty of stick for paying so little tax in the UK. But its actions display such impish wit that it's hard not to revel in the majesty of a terrible thing well doneThere's something fishy about Google's motto, Don't be evil. I'm not saying it's controversial but it makes you think, Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda? It's suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they're not ? which my colleague Charlie Brooker said on 10 O'Clock Live was, rather like someone who's just moved in next door saying, 'Hi, I'm Geoff, your non-dogging neighbour.'But we mustn't assume that the maxim was an attempt by executives to draw a line under some diabolical brainstorm, in which the internet giant pulled itself back from the brink of green-lighting a scheme to grind our bones to make its bread. It could just as easily have come out of a discussion of the possibility of doing good. Always do good, Try to do some good or Be good might have been previous drafts of the motto before they concluded that goodness was as impractical as malevolence was distasteful and decided on Don't be evil as more realistic in a modern business environment. Settling for one notch below altruism is all the slogan really means.Still, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. And there's no earthly reason why Google should do any good to anyone but itself ? which is presumably why it pays so little tax. Although that's not how Matt Brittin, Google's head of sales in northern Europe, explained the situation to the House of Commons public accounts committee on Thursday. No one in the UK can execute transactions, he said. He wasn't bemoaning a lack of competence in British workers but proudly talking MPs through a tax dodge. Even though there are sales staff in Britain, No money changes hands. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Since the vast majority of Google's £3.2bn of UK sales are routed through Ireland, the company paid only £6m of corporation tax. I'm not saying that's necessarily evil, but it's certainly not good.Amazon, in contrast, has never ruled out evil as part of its business plan, aspiring only to Work hard. Have fun. Make history. It sounds like an Apprentice contestant's Twitter profile. Last week it emerged that, despite £4.2bn of UK sales, the company paid only £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012. In the same year it received £2.5m in government grants. Which makes it a net benefits scrounger. And, in terms of sheer rapacious acquisitive nerve, I'd say that has made a little bit of history.Is there any point in my being angry about this? Everyone else already is. It feels like the interesting thing would be to come out in favour of it. After all, as the company's spokesman proudly announced: Amazon pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction that it operates within. So maybe it's fine. Better than that, maybe it's crazy and interesting. It's a challenging artwork, but instead of oil paint or wood or clay or the excrement of the artist, it's constructed out of pure injustice. A huge, malevolent sculpture of unfairness, ground-breaking and thought-provoking, reminding us of the iniquities of the natural world ? a corporate metaphor for the worms that will one day eat all of our corpses.Like any really important work of art, it's bound to upset a few people. Just as Banksy causes collateral damage to the neatness of walls, so Amazon's masterpiece is a defacement of the public purse. But it's not just some hooligan's tag, like Google's artless Irish scam. This shows an impish wit and a dark insight. What elevates Amazon's activity is the fact that it applied for government grants. The elegance of that corporate choice is like the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa's smile, the ruthlessness of Mike Tyson's punch and the adaptability of the malaria virus combined. There is no point in criticising anyone or anything that can do that. They can only be admired or destroyed.The more you think about it, the more brilliant it is. At first glance, the deftness of securing government funding, which was intended to sustain and encourage marginal businesses, is rather pleasing. The thought of the thousands of small enterprises that could have been nourished and helped to survive by the cash Amazon has swallowed in one tax-cancelling mouthful is challenging and absorbing. It's the monster that's made a myriad food parcels into its canapé.But it gets even better. If, for a second, you make the mistake of thinking that giving Amazon handouts might nevertheless help the UK ? by incentivising the company to create jobs in Britain even if, for tax purposes, it exists only in Luxembourg ? then think again. Because Amazon is the great job-killer. For every job it creates, more than one is destroyed on the high street. It's the great annihilator of work and yet it's receiving a job-creation government subsidy. It doesn't just absorb money that would be better spent creating employment elsewhere, it deploys it to decimate the chances of that employment.I understand that the changes in work and business patterns being caused by the internet are inevitable and irreversible. To try to stop them would be railing against the tide. Still, it's amazing that Amazon, in an act of dazzling contempt, has persuaded the treasury actually to pump water into the rising sea.I don't really think that these problems can be fixed. It's the role of politicians to say that something must be done ? with a sense of purpose if in power, and outrage if in opposition. But their jobs are too tenuous and short-lived, the international tax system too complex and the corporations too tenacious to stop this sort of thing happening. Loopholes will crop up by accident and, where they don't, the intense and remorseless lobbying of the already astronomically wealthy will ensure that more are created.We can work ourselves up in impotent fury or ? and this is a calmer way to live ? just sit back and enjoy the majesty of a terrible thing done well. Amazon's tax and grant arrangements are the beautiful ivory candlestick revealed by the silhouettes of British taxpayers' incredulous faces. The politicians and public provide the backdrop of incompetence and rage in front of which huge companies can display their work of corporate perfection. As the mushroom cloud showed us decades ago, evil can be beautiful.Amazon.comTax avoidanceE-commerceTax and spendingHMRCDavid Mitchellguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Metro: Last Light ? review Guardian: A post-apocalyptic Moscow metro system is a great setting for some serious gunplayThe original Metro 2033 was a sleeper hit, earning praise for its sharp blend of tense, post-apocalyptic terror and superb action long after its release. No surprise though, as the Metro games are far deeper than even hardened players might expect from a first-person shooter.Based on the novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro: Last Light follows Artyom, a young man trying to survive in the ruins of Moscow's subway system, a network serving as humanity's refuge after a nuclear war.The world Glukhovsky created is presented in fine form here, visually through a claustrophobic web of crumbling tunnels and a ruined surface populated by mutated abominations, and narratively with a story that examines fascism and communism, prejudice and the pursuit of power.As a result, the gameplay almost becomes a slave to the story but despite this, Last Light is a delight. The survival horror and FPS elements complement each other as well here as they did in the original, with the urge to blast every flickering shadow tempered only by the scarcity of resources.A superb effort, written and presented with a skill that proves games can be both as complex and rewarding as any other art form.Shoot 'em upsGamesMatt Kamenguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fast and Furious 6 ? review Guardian: Reading on mobile? See the trailer hereIn the sixth film in this profitable sex, speed and demolition franchise, Dwayne Johnson (formerly known as the Rock) as an Interpol officer uses moral blackmail and promises of amnesties to lure a crowd of freewheeling, fast-driving international criminals from their romantic lairs in sunny climes to defeat a renegade SAS man who has accumulated top-secret military equipment to hold the world to ransom. This is an excuse for mayhem on a spectacular scale mostly in Britain and Spain as a band of petrolheads led by the appropriately named Vin Diesel use mechanical torsion to defeat malevolent extortion.The endless chases, stunts and fights are as spectacular and preposterous as the occasional verbal exchanges are sentimental and childish. An illegal road race through the night streets of London's West End is particularly brilliantly staged. The Rock forces the Metropolitan Police's security to release restricted documents merely by squeezing a top cop's hand to pulp, thus applying enhanced interrogation to the special relationship. The end credits promise that Jason Statham will be joining the team in the next episode.Action and adventureThrillerCrimeMotoringPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move ? review Guardian: The fifth instalment of the series brings path-building puzzles galore, if you can stand the fiddly bitsNintendo has created something of a stealth franchise with the Mario vs Donkey Kong series ? this is, almost unbelievably, the fifth entry. Minis on the Move shifts attention away from puzzle-platforming to the path-building brainteaser.Essentially an inverted tower-defence game, clearing each stage means guiding toy versions of Mario and friends past such perils as spike pits and wandering enemies. Early levels are deceptively simple until a steady trickle of new gameplay mechanics, including rotating squares and sliding panels, increase difficulty considerably.Persistence will mostly win out, though fiddly and unresponsive tile-swapping sections will test the patience of even the most devoted Mario fans. A charming, largely enjoyable puzzler, well suited to the portable form.Puzzle gamesGamesMatt Kamenguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Video: Reboots that need the boot, part 2?SimCity Ars Technica: The 2013 SimCity reboot is heartbreakingly awful.

Fury at corporate tax avoidance leads to call for a global response Guardian: Anger over the financial affairs of multinationals such as Google, Amazon and Starbucks is gathering momentum in Westminster. Now the UK is poised to lead the debate about international tax reform at next month's G8 summitHuge orange and green cranes hover over a vast building site at King's Cross, London. Over the next three years, 2.4 acres of this site will be transformed into a million square feet of an 11-storey headquarters for the internet giant Google, no doubt chock-a-block with colourful Big Brother-house-style sofas and surreal chill-out zones that mark out its other 70 offices in 40 countries.The property deal is estimated to have cost around £1bn and was heralded by the site's development consortium as the most significant property transaction of recent years.This is a big investment by Google, we're committing further to the UK where computing and the web were invented. It's good news for Google, for London and for the UK, said Matt Brittin, vice-president for northern and central Europe, when the purchase was announced in January.Like Amazon, Google is seeing increasing success in the UK where one in every $10 of sales is now generated. Yet both firms claim they are merely touching down on UK soil, without a permanent establishment and therefore are not paying tax on profits from billions of pounds worth of sales made here.On Wednesday, Google won the advertiser of the year trophy at the 54th annual Clio Awards ? the Oscars for advertising professionals. Accepting the award in New York, Robert Wong, chief creative officer of Google Creative Lab, said: At the highest order, our job is to remind the world what it is they love about Google.That popularity has hit a serious snag. The next day the company was branded evil by Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, while this weekend Ed Miliband called it irresponsible. If everyone approached their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached theirs we wouldn't have a health service, we wouldn't have an education system, he said.Along with Amazon and, before that, Starbucks, Topshop, Boots, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and Greene King, Google is the latest to have become the target of grassroots hostility towards their aggressive tax avoidance policies. The actions of these corporations are not illegal, nor underhand, but especially when we're all supposed to be in austerity together, jarring horribly with public opinion.Something doesn't smell right, as the Guardian's editorial said this weekend, after it ran an account of the extent of Amazon's dealings in the UK, far wider than what its tax lawyers are implying.The debate is now raging over whether these companies are the happy beneficiaries of a tax system knitted with loopholes, or the malicious purveyors of smoke-and-mirror accounting. HM Revenue and Customs claims the former ? public opinion is rolling towards the latter. Lin Homer, chief executive of HMRC, claimed the public don't understand. Asked why she was not taking a tougher line with internet giants, she told the public accounts committee: We see, but understand more fully, some of the information that might seem to the general public to be surprising.But campaigners say tax collectors and leading politicians have been caught out; too engrossed in austerity plans, they are scrabbling to keep up with people who point out that there are other ways to balance the books.Without a doubt, they are behind the curve, said Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant, economist and founder of Tax Justice Network. They have all been caught by surprise because this has come from civil society, a campaign that has been going on for almost a decade but has only been picked up by politicians after the banking crisis when they suddenly realised they were desperately short of cash.He said HMRC had been ducking tax avoidance completely. He said it had powers to tackle any suspect tax returns of foreign-based companies. If the breach is blatant, then they can act. What we haven't got is politicians who will stand up to this. It's a critical point. If the state will not stand up for its right to tax big corporations then we are in deep trouble.UK Uncut began campaigning on the issue in 2010 and it was its legal challenge that revealed how HMRC waived a £20m bill for Goldman Sachs, as well as a £6bn bill to Vodafone. Journalists, tax experts and campaigners have been investigating and exposing the tax scams being perpetrated by big businesses for far longer ? pointing out glaring loopholes in Britain's tax system.When Matt Brittin of Google told the public accounts committee in November 2012 that Google did not have a sales presence in the UK, it was the news agency Reuters that quickly uncovered evidence to the contrary, resulting in Brittin being recalled in front of the committee on Thursday, where his company's behaviour was described as devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical by Margaret Hodge.You are a company that says you 'do no evil'. And I think that you do do evil, said Hodge, referring to Google's motto, Don't be evil.Amazon may also be recalled, after numerous whistleblowers from among its employees approached journalists to contest official accounts of its trading practices within Britain.For the moment the government's line is that this is a global problem that cannot be solved unilaterally. On Monday, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, will meet David Cameron, a meeting No 10 insists is not about tax, but to do with Schmidt's role on the prime minister's business advisory group.Labour leader Ed Miliband, who is due to give a speech to Google employees on Wednesday, has backed a country by country international scheme on tax declaration but says that he is concerned that no firm proposals have so far been put forward for the G8. You have to have much greater transparency. Tax offices have to know country by country how much profit people are making, how much tax they are paying. Unless you know that you won't get to the bottom of what is happening. You have to deal with tax avoidance schemes. You have to deal with tax havens.We are saying there has to be a big, big push on this. It has to be done internationally and if it is not done internationally, Britain should act on its own.All eyes will be on what, if anything, can be agreed at next month's G8 meeting in Scotland, where, as host of the event, David Cameron has pledged to put tax avoidance at the top of the agenda as he insists it is an issue for international co-operation rather than unilateral action.And it would not be just the wealthy who would be watching the progress of the talks, said Melanie Ward, head of advocacy at ActionAid UK.At the G20 summit in 2009, Gordon Brown led the beginnings of a global crackdown on tax havens and, for the first time, put an emphasis on helping poor countries to deal with the losses to tax havens that cost them three times as much as they receive in aid each year. But in the intervening years, tax dodging died away as a big UK issue, she said.It's shot back up the agenda with rising public anger over the antics of Starbucks, Google, Amazon and reports of sweetheart deals between the government and Goldman Sachs. The UK should close tax loopholes, but the truth is that the UK is responsible for one in five of the world's tax havens in the form of many of the crown dependencies and overseas territories. These tax havens are a leech, sucking resources from the UK and poor countries alike, so action needs to start with pulling them into line.Ultimately, this is a global problem and the solutions are global. That's why David Cameron must lead the G8 to deliver an unprecedented assault on tax dodging when it meets next month. This means calling time on tax havens and ensuring that poor countries are at the heart of any new deal to share tax information between countries.There is a serious risk that a deal will be agreed between rich countries and tax havens that would leave poor countries out in the cold. This would be entirely unacceptable. Tax dodging is hurting ordinary people, wherever in the world they live.Richard Murphy said the moral case for international action had already been won. We now just have to beat off the accountants and businesses who oppose democratic accountability to the state to get it, he said.Tax avoidanceTax and spendingGoogleCorporate governanceAmazon.comStarbucksTracy McVeighguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Is Tumblr the new Geocities? Forbes: Imagine a company backed by Fred Wilson, one of the top venture capitalists on the Internet. The company is largely reliant on user-generated content and has had difficulties generating revenue in line with its stratospheric valuation. All of a sudden, Yahoo appears and offers a billion dollar plus valuation to acquire the company.

Schmidt defends Google in 'immoral' tax row Guardian: Google executive chairman says company accounts comply with international lawGoogle executive chairman Eric Schmidt has defended his company's financial affairs after a Commons committee branded the internet giant devious and unethical for sheltering its multibillion-pound profits from UK taxes.Writing in the Observer, Schmidt said his company's accounts were complicated but complied with international taxation treaties that allowed it to pay most of its tax in the United States.Schmidt said that he understood why Google's apparent sidestepping on UK taxation had generated controversy and called for a reform of international tax law.At a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic, Schmidt wrote. And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate.His remarks follow Google's mauling at the hands of the Commons Public Accounts Committee on Thursday. Members reacted in disbelief after it emerged that they paid just £3.4m of tax on £3.2bn of sales taken from UK customers last year as their sales were technically closed in low-tax Ireland.Schmidt insisted that corporation tax should be paid on a company's profits rather than its revenues and said because his was a multinational corporation whose engineers were chiefly based in the United States, Google's taxes should be channelled there. This, he said, obeyed rules laid out by politicians.We pay more taxes in the US than in any other country ? around $2bn in corporate income taxes to the US government in 2012, he wrote. It's the same for UK-based technology or pharmaceutical companies, which pay the majority of their corporation tax in the UK, as that is where most of the activity that generates their profits takes place.Schmidt said that the debate over international taxation showed it could benefit from reform. He added that because Google was able to generated large revenues, it was also able to plough money back into the UK economy.While profit has become something of a dirty word, it's important to remember that many corporations reinvest their profits in research and product development, which in turn tends to lead to job creation, further economic growth and, ultimately, more tax. For example, Google has just announced plans to invest more than £1bn in new offices in London's King's Cross. It's been estimated that this investment will generate some £80m a year in new employment taxes and £50m in stamp duty. This is in addition to the significant amounts we already pay in UK tax through corporate, local and employment taxes.Schmidt's comments came as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said he believed some multinationals, including Google were not fulfilling their social responsibilites.Miliband told the Observer: Now, what is the politicians' responsibility: change the law. But it is also to talk about the kind of society we want to create and what the responsibilities of a company like Google are.I don't think they are living up to their responsibilities at the moment and I will be very clear about that on Wednesday.It is part of a culture of irresponsibility. If everyone approached their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached their tax affairs we wouldn't have a health service, we wouldn't have an education system.GoogleEric SchmidtTax and spendingTax avoidanceBarry Neildguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap? Guardian: Quantum mechanics research could hold the key to a new generation of super-fast computersOur imagination is stretched to the utmost, wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there. Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics ? or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title ? is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, that one particular subatomic particle, the neutrino, can pass right through the Earth without stopping. They believe that a subatomic particle can be in two different states at the same time. And that two particles can be entangled in such a way that they can co-ordinate their properties regardless of the distance in space and time that separates them (an idea that even Einstein found spooky). And that whenever we look at subatomic particles they are altered by the act of inspection so that, in a sense, we can never see them as they are.For a long time, the world looked upon quantum physicists with a kind of bemused affection. Sure, they might be wacky, but boy, were they smart! And western governments stumped up large quantities of dosh to enable them to build the experimental kit they needed for their investigations. A huge underground doughnut was excavated in the suburbs of Geneva, for example, and filled with unconscionable amounts of heavy machinery in the hope that it would enable the quark-hunters to find the Higgs boson, or at any rate its shadowy tracks.All of this was in furtherance of the purest of pure science ? curiosity-driven research. The idea that this stuff might have any practical application seemed, well, preposterous to most of us. But here and there, there were people who thought otherwise (among them, as it happens, Richard Feynman). In particular, these visionaries wondered about the potential of harnessing the strange properties of subatomic particles for computational purposes. After all, if a particle can be in two different states at the same time (in contrast to a humdrum digital bit, which can only be a one or a zero), then maybe we could use that for speeded-up computing. And so on.Thus was born the idea of the quantum computer. At its heart is the idea of a quantum bit or qubit. The bits that conventional computers use are implemented by transistors that can either be on (1) or off (0). Qubits, in contrast, can be both on and off at the same time, which implies that they could be used to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, therefore, quantum computers should run much faster than conventional, silicon-based ones, at least in calculations where parallel processing is helpful.For as long as I have been paying attention to this stuff, the academic literature has been full of arguments about quantum computing. Some people thought that while it might be possible in theory, in practice it would prove impracticable. But while these disputes raged, a Canadian company called D-Wave ? whose backers include Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the investment arm of the CIA (I am not making this up) ? was quietly getting on with building and marketing a quantum computer. In 2011, D-Wave sold its first machine ? a 128-qubit computer ? to military contractor Lockheed Martin. And last week it was announced that D-Wave had sold a more powerful machine to a consortium led by Google and Nasa and a number of leading US universities.What's interesting about this is not so much its confirmation that the technology may indeed be a practical proposition, though that's significant in itself. More important is that it signals the possibility that we might be heading for a major step change in processing power. In one experiment, for example, it was found that the D-Wave machine was 3,600 times faster than a conventional computer in certain kinds of applications. Given that the increases in processing power enabled by Moore's law (which applies only to silicon and says that computing power doubles roughly every two years) are already causing us to revise our assumptions about what computers can and cannot do, we may have some more revisions to do. All of which goes to prove the truth of the adage: pure research is just research that hasn't yet been applied.Particle physicsComputingPhysicsInternetJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Android has become a hedge against Microsoft and Windows CNET News: HP, in a way, is putting Microsoft and Windows on notice with its new Android offerings. [Read more]

At Google we aspire to do the right thing. So we welcome a debate on international tax reform | Eric Schmidt Guardian: The chairman of Google responds to criticism that companies such as his are not paying their fair share of taxesAt a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic. And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate. In the interests of moving the argument forward ? away from accusation and toward action ? here are three principles we hope most people can agree upon.First, corporation tax should be paid on a company's profits, not its revenues. When a company only operates in one country, it's obvious where its profits are generated and thus where its taxes should be paid. But for multinational companies with a global presence, it's much more complicated. To pay the right amount in taxation, you need to determine where the profit is actually created. So most developed countries, including the UK, have worked together to create a set of tax treaties. These are based on the principle that corporate taxes are levied in the country where a company conducts the economic activity, and takes the risk, that generates its profits ? not where products are consumed.Most of Google's engineers are based in the US and that's where much of our product development takes place. So we pay more taxes in the US than in any other country ? around $2bn in corporate income taxes to the US government in 2012. It's the same for UK-based technology or pharmaceutical companies, which pay the majority of their corporation tax in the UK, as that is where most of the activity that generates their profits takes place. Equally important, this system ensures that the same profits are not taxed twice, or even more than that, across different countries, something that would reduce any company's ability to invest in future research or new jobs.Second, politicians ? not companies ? set the rules. As the head of Revenue and Customs said in the House of Commons last week: We are duty-bound to collect and investigate under regulations set out by lawmakers, not on what you'd [ie politicians] like us to collect. When legislators are doing the lobbying and companies are articulating the law as it stands, it's a confusing spectacle for everyone.Third, given the intensity of the debate, not just in the UK but also in America and elsewhere, international tax law could almost certainly benefit from reform. It's why the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will be publishing a hotly awaited paper in July on how to make these rules simpler and more transparent. Change won't be easy because it will require the renegotiation of international tax treaties, not just action by individual nation states. And many of those countries will doubtless have competing interests.For example, it's tempting for every government to assume that they will benefit if and when the current structure changes. But in reality, it's probably only a significant increase in corporation taxes globally that would make every country a winner ? and the consequences of that would likely be less innovation, less growth and less job creation.That said, the UK government has the perfect opportunity to take the lead in shaping this complex debate at the G8 summit next month. We hope George Osborne seizes the initiative and makes meaningful tax reform one of the top items on the agenda.Finally, while profit has become something of a dirty word, it's important to remember that many corporations reinvest their profits in research and product development, which in turn tends to lead to job creation, further economic growth and, ultimately, more tax. For example, Google has just announced plans to invest more than £1bn in new offices in London's King's Cross. It's been estimated that this investment will generate some £80m a year in new employment taxes and £50m in stamp duty. This is in addition to the significant amounts we already pay in UK tax through corporate, local and employment taxes.Our hope is to move the debate forward, with everyone engaged constructively in developing a clearer, simpler system ? one in which companies that abide by the law know that the politicians who devised the rules are willing to defend and commend them.Eric Schmidt is executive chairman, GoogleGoogleTax avoidanceTax and spendingEric Schmidtguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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