For lots of reasons but if you're the UK and you're honest with yourself and you are only allowed to pick exactly one reason that steel is absolutely critical?
> I highly doubt Nauru makes much money selling their ccTLD, they manage it directly on the island and each domain costs a whopping 500$/year.
Yeah, can't imagine anyone buying any of these domains. I mean yes, it's literally the exact word for "naked" in French, but nobody speaks French so there's definitely no chance they make any money
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
"Fortunately", that country forced its language onto a number of others who remain in the EU, and one of them conveniently has English as its EU language because another country also speaks its actual primary language.
(Fellow readers: this is not kneejerk Russia-bashing but a reference to the recorded fact that Sarkozy has received at least hundreds of thousands of euro from Russian government-linked entities, apparently in exchange for favours.)
Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation body" is untrue. And frankly also a straight-up insane thing to say, sorry.
Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.
You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.
They definitely do hardware R&D there [including on major recent launches] and a lot of product assembly. They also advertise production-line automation software gigs periodically for the plant in Little Island (the lesser-known site on the east side of the city which is neither of the offices everyone here knows about).
So basically what you're all saying is how it's technically impressive. Okay.
It is also completely and utterly worthless -- an inefficient and slow method of receiving not-very-many words which were written by nobody at all.
The one and only point listening to a discussion about anything is that at least one of the speakers is someone who has an opinion that you may find interesting or refutable. There are no opinions here for you to engage with. There is no expertise here for you to learn from. There is no writing here. There are no people here.
This case was about Apple in particular and it is very important to understand that this has never at any point been the law in Ireland as it was understood at the time.
Apple was treated differently to all other companies -- those companies were subject to the laws at the time which allowed multijurisdictional shenanigans as described in the OP link. There was never any legal basis for Revenue's different level of enforcement for Apple alone.
Everyone in Ireland [and almost everyone else] seems to be under the impression that this is what just happened with the CJEU ruling last week. But it's not.
Ireland, since the mid-1980s, has been offering Apple (and ONLY Apple) a bespoke tax arrangement which is not only unlawful state aid under EU rules but also straight-up illegal under Irish law as well. This "deal" was never codified in primary or secondary legislation in Ireland. The government of famously-not-crooked-in-any-way Charlie Haughey did this deal under the table, and all subsequent administrations have been behaving like it was legal. It never was.
isset($var) will return false if you have deliberately set $var === NULL
Otherwise more or less fine?
The whole OP here is a longwinded way of observing that several built-in PHP functions don't know anything about types. You can't use switch() as it's usually documented either, for example, because that ignores types too.
There are ways around all these things, of course. PHP that doesn't suck is kind of the norm these days. Just stay the hell away from Wordpress