ruairinewman

Part of the problem is that there is no uniform provision across the EU for VAT exemption for books. Some countries charge VAT on paper books, or on e-books, or on both.

This is definitely a retrograde step, especially in countries such as the Republic of Ireland, where paper books are generally ascribed a 0% VAT rate. That doesn't protect us in regard to e-books however, as the specific legislative text refers to "printed matter", and defines some criteria that prevent e-books from taking advantage of this provision. There is also a clause in the relevant legislation that deals more specifically with "printed matter" that is purchased and downloaded via the internet, and states that it is "considered to be a service" and therefore liable to VAT at the standard rate.

Ref: http://www.revenue.ie/en/tax/vat/leaflets/printing-and-print...

I've written the usual letters to government ministers and to members of the European Parliament, but have been completely ignored in all cases, not unexpectedly. Unfortunately, I feel that this is going to be another measure pushed through the EP without any public consultation.

Surely this process means that HIV is just as capable of evolving into something even more lethal over time, given the right environment? Given the relatively closed environment of a country like North Korea (for example) where diversity is restricted, its evolutionary path may take a different route than that observed by the University of Oxford research team?

I don't know. I used to work for AWS, and this sounds very link an internal tool that is used to manage the entire Amazon retail infrastructure. That being the case, this is going to be a lot more powerful and useful for online infrastructure (in AWS, obviously) than anything else out there. Even if it's not all that initially, I suspect the extra functionality will come sooner rather than later.

It's somewhat annoying I know, but I'm not going to go into more detail as I'm not sure about the legality of my position should I do so.

Edit: On review of their website, I had missed the announcements for Amazon CodePipeline and Amazon CodeDeploy, which between them provide all the missing functionality I hinted at above. And so yes, it looks like this is the internal tool I was referring to.