Questões de Concurso

Why Is Spain Really Taking Lionel Messi to Tax Court?
By Jonathan Mahler Sep 27, 2013

So Spain has decided to haul Lionel Messi into court for tax evasion, which strikes me as completely insane on pretty much every level. You may remember the story from a few months back: The greatest soccer player in the world and his father were accused of setting up  a bunch of shell companies in Belize and Uruguay to avoid paying taxes on royalties and other licensing income.

Messi - who makes an estimated $41 million a year, about half from sponsors - reached a settlement with Spain’s tax authorities earlier this summer, agreeing to pay the amount he apparently owed, plus interest. The matter was settled, or so it seemed. Messi could go back to dazzling the world with his athleticism and creativity.
Only it turns out that Spain wasn’t quite done with Messi. His adopted country - Messi is Argentine but became a Spanish citizen in 2005 - is now considering pressing criminal charges against him.
Cracking down on tax-evading footballers has become something of a trend in Europe, where players and clubs have been known to launder money through “image-rights companies” often set up in tax havens. When you need money - and Europe needs money - go to the people who have it, or something like that. Over the summer, dozens of Italian soccer clubs were raided as part of an investigation into a tax-fraud conspiracy. A number of English Premier League clubs were forced last year to pay millions of pounds in back taxes. No one likes a tax cheat, and there’s little doubt that widespread tax fraud has helped eat away at the social safety net in Spain and elsewhere, depriving schools, hospitals and other institutions of badly needed funds. But Europe is not going to find the answers to its financial problems in the pockets of some professional soccer players and clubs. Messi’s defense, delivered by his father, seems credible enough to me. “He is a footballer and that’s it, ” Messi’s father Jorge said of his soccer-prodigy son. “If there was an error, it was by our financial adviser. He created the company. My mistake was to have trusted the adviser.” Even if Messi is legally responsible for the intricate tax dodge he is accused of having participated in, it’s pretty hard to believe that he knew much about it.
More to the point, Lionel Messi is probably Spain’s most valuable global asset. What could possibly motivate the Spanish government to want to tarnish his reputation, especially after he’s paid off his alleged debt? After four years of Great-Depression level unemployment, have anxiety and despair curdled into vindictiveness?
Here’s another explanation: Maybe this whole case has less to do with money than it does with history. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the target of the Spanish government’s weird wrath happens to play for FC Barcelona, which is, after all, "mes que un club." It's a symbol of Catalan nationalism - and a bitter, longtime rival of Spain’s establishment team, Real Madrid.
Too conspiratorial? Prove it, Spain. Release Cristiano Ronaldo’s tax return.

(Adapted form http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-27/why-is-spain-really-taking-lionel-messi-to-tax-court-.html)

    As Information Systems (IS) development becomes more a function of purchasing packages or assembling components, with less emphasis on programming, student enrollment in IS courses at universities continues to decline.
    Sometimes it looks like the IT revolution has moved on and left many IS researchers [ADVERB].
    For example, according to Nokia, the next generation of computers will be in your pocket. About 1.3 billion mobile phones are sold each year, compared to only 300 million personal computers. An increasing number of these phones come with full-blown operating systems that let users access, organize, and use much more information than older handhelds. The mobile software market may soon exceed the current software market for computers, and a wide variety of information systems will rise on top of all the new software. However, only a relatively small percentage of IS research focuses on the mobile revolution.
    Actually, many IS programs in business colleges seem impervious to the wake-up call that information schools provide. Rather, they continue to offer curricula that reflect the past rather than look toward the future. Little wonder that students, whose degrees are based on a very limited number of traditional courses in one area of study, often fail to meet their employers' expectations. With little integration across disciplines to prepare students for the complex problems they will face, organizations find it necessary to further educate those whom they hire or go abroad to seek appropriate employees with a wider range of skills and knowledge.

(Adapted from http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/1009/rW_CO_ISInnovation.pdf)

Is Windows 7 Worth It?
Harry McCracken, PC World
Monday, October 19, 2009 10:00 AM PDT

    Reading about a new operating system can tell you only so much about it: After all, Windows Vista had far more features than XP, [CONJUNCTION] fell far short of it in the eyes of many users. To judge an OS accurately, you have to live with it. Over the past ten months, I've spent a substantial percentage of my computing life in Windows 7, starting with a preliminary version and culminating in recent weeks with the final Release to Manufacturing edition. I've run it on systems ranging from an underpowered Asus EeePC 1000HE netbook to a potent HP TouchSmart all-in-one. And I've used it to do real work, not lab routines. Usually, I've run the OS in multiboot configurations with Windows Vista and/or XP, so I've had a choice each time I turned the computer on: [MODAL] I opt for Windows 7 or an older version of the OS? The call has been easy to make, because Win 7 is so pleasant to use.
    So why wouldn't you want to run this operating system? Concern over its performance is one logical reason, especially since early versions of Windows Vista managed to turn PCs that ran XP with ease into lethargic underperformers. The PC World Test Center's speed benchmarks on five test PCs showed Windows 7 to be faster than Vista, but only by a little; I've found it to be reasonably quick on every computer I've used it on - even the Asus netbook, once I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM. (Our lab tried Win 7 on a Lenovo S10 netbook with 1GB of RAM and found it to be a shade slower than XP; for details see "Windows 7 Performance Tests.").
    Here's a rule of thumb that errs on the side of caution: If your PC's specs qualify it to run Vista, get Windows 7; if they don't, avoid it. Microsoft's official hardware configuration requirements for Windows 7 are nearly identical to those it recommends for Windows Vista: a 1-GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of free disk space, and a DirectX 9-compatible graphics device with a WDDM 1.0 or higher driver. That's for the 32-bit version of Windows 7; the 64-bit version of the OS requires a 64-bit CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk space.
    Fear of incompatible hardware and software is another understandable reason to be wary of Windows 7. One unfortunate law of operating-system upgrades - which applies equally to Macs and to Windows PCs - is that they will break some systems and applications, especially at first.
    Under the hood, Windows 7 isn't radically different from Vista. That's a plus, since it should greatly reduce the volume of difficulties relating to drivers and apps compared to Vista's bumpy rollout. I have performed a half-dozen Windows 7 upgrades, and most of them went off without a hitch. The gnarliest problem arose when I had to track down a graphics driver for Dell's XPS M1330 laptop on my own - Windows 7 installed a generic VGA driver that couldn't run the Aero user interface, and as a result failed to support new Windows 7 features such as thumbnail views in the Taskbar.
    The best way to reduce your odds of running into a showstopping problem with Windows 7 is to bide your time. When the new operating system arrives on October 22, sit back and let the earliest adopters discover the worst snafus. Within a few weeks, Microsoft and other software and hardware companies will have fixed most of them, and your chances of a happy migration to Win 7 will be much higher. If you want to be really conservative, hold off on moving to Win 7 until you're ready to buy a PC that's designed to run it well.
    Waiting a bit before making the leap makes sense; waiting forever does not. Microsoft took far too long to come up with a satisfactory replacement for Windows XP. But whether you choose to install Windows 7 on your current systems or get it on the next new PC you buy, you'll find that it's the unassuming, thoroughly practical upgrade you've been waiting for - flaws and all.

(Adapted from http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_revi...)