The US is anomalous in terms of its murder and violent crime rates, of course. There are other nations where the general population is also allowed or even required to have firearms that do not suffer the same level with violence, suggesting that the problem may be one of culture rather than tools.

Still, the statistical question is a fair one. Given that routine carrying of firearms by the general population would almost inevitably lead to some level of extra deaths, if only through accidents, and given that the number of people actually hurt or killed in terrorist-style attacks is tiny, it may still be the case that statistically it is a bad bet to routinely arm the general population of the UK as a response to that particular threat. I don't know what the actual numbers would be, but it's a fair question to ask.

(I am not offering any view on the merits or otherwise of arming the general population for any other reasons here. I'm talking specifically about whether generally arming everyone would be a good thing in response to this kind of attack.)

This may be true. Personally, I think the vast majority of people working for these organisations probably are just normal people trying to do an important job under difficult conditions.

However, I don't think you've undermined Xest's point: if a perpetrator of a violent act was already well known to the security services for both their views and their violent disposition, but for whatever reason the perpetrator had not been effectively monitored or contained despite that knowledge, why would we rationally expect that providing any further information would necessarily improve the situation?

You're being kind. The governments and media in much of the West have for some time been doing far more to scare the people through their own direct actions than any actual violence by radical groups has achieved.

I caught part of a review of today's papers on the BBC News last night. The comments by the two guest reviewers actually made me nauseous. One claimed to be concerned about the implications about extending surveillance powers further and that we should have some sort of debate, yet clearly thought we should just hand over whatever it takes to keep us safe. The other was just saying he didn't care who read his e-mails, didn't feel that being spied on limited his freedom of expression, and MI5 were welcome to spy on him, with no apparent consideration for the implications of that policy for anyone else who might not share his views. The host actually quipped -- in possibly the only balancing comment in the entire segment -- that the guest sounded like he was making the old argument about having nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, and the guest just laughed and said he didn't think so.

So it looks like there was at least one thing Lucas got right with episodes I-III: liberty really does die with thunderous applause.

Yes, that's exactly the point. Some people believe, erroneously, that putting material on a public web site voids the copyright. However, in order for the web to work, clearly there must be some form of implicit licence when you put material on a public site or no-one would be allowed to lawfully download it so they can view it. That argument does not hold for content that is hidden behind some sort of registration scheme or paywall, where typically there would be explicit terms for accessing the material that you must actively accept.

But do his computers still exist?

Perhaps not, though I suspect neither is collecting the level of extra tax revenues they think they're going to get from the recent EU VAT rules...

It seems to me that the most practical solution is to say if you're going to charge tax that is going to the tax authorities in another EU country, those authorities must use a standardised EU-wide tax rate for cross-border sales.

This does mean each nation would have to surrender some control over its tax levels, which is a threat to national governments and not likely to go down well. But then this whole policy is designed to undermine precisely that independence anyway, so I'm not sure that's really any worse. After all, it is quite strange that extra-national taxes are effectively levelled in the first place, something that in itself is only enforceable in practice because of EU-level agreements between the affected countries.

Clearly the same idea doesn't scale to a global level without completely killing off small to medium-sized businesses and doing horrible damage to global trade, so if the states of the EU want a special arrangement, maybe the burden should be on the EU to make it workable.

In general, neither do I. But if you decided to impose a new start-up fee of a billion pounds to operate as a small business and required five different company officers to sign the paperwork, the number of new start-ups you had would not be large the next year. It's about proportionality and reasonableness, and the new system is wildly disproportionate for a whole sector of the economy.

Indeed, though it's worth remembering that some of the new rules will be all but impossible for almost any business to comply with, unless it's literally large enough to be operating the entire site and payment infrastructure itself, and probably to have dedicated staff responsible for EU tax policy monitoring and compliance from now on.

Well, let me give you one data point. I have a business that is big enough to be worth continuing under these conditions, but only does a tiny amount of trade across EU borders (we're UK based and the US is by some way our biggest international market so far). It's larger than a microbusiness but still in its early days being run on the side by the founders rather than with any full-time staff.

We knew some time ago that the change to charge VAT in customers' local currencies was coming (no thanks to HMRC, I might add) and we planned for that in plenty of time, so from that point of view all we had to do was figure out what tax rates to put into our DB for different country codes. It seems like you think this is all that is required, and if it were then I would agree it wasn't an unreasonable change from a tax policy point of view.

What we didn't know was everything else that was going to follow from that change. For example, we had to implement geolocation and various reporting on top of it, in order to satisfy the two criteria rule.

That required significant programming skill and general awareness of what was possible, which to a non-programmer selling PDFs with a PayPal button would be rocket science. And of course it's only possible because we built our own site; as far as I can tell, most payment services and a lot of marketplace sites don't actually provide enough data to comply yet, and European governments have had to make temporary changes to the rules (basically saying that they'll ignore this one in practice) so there is breathing room to sort the mess out.

Even we are still vulnerable to problems if a customer changes their self-declared location to something that conflicts with their geolocated IP address, because now we're required to find and record a third data point to disambiguate, and what is that supposed to be? Again, not all payment services will disclose that kind of information, so you can't rely on that. You could hassle your customers for extra data, but it might not count because any amount of customer-volunteered information is only deemed to be a single data point for these purposes.

Even given a perfect system where no customer ever disagrees with their geolocated IP address, that geolocation is itself entirely dependent on the availability and accuracy of a suitable database, which no EU government is currently offering to businesses despite officially recommending using a geolocated IP address as one of the data points.

On top of that, there is an as-yet unanswered question about what happens for recurring payments, where typically the data is collected up-front and then later renewals are charged automatically without any customer involvement and therefore without collecting or validating any extra data points to go with that transaction.

All of that is because of one knock-on effect of these new rules, which is not inherent in the tax policy itself. And I haven't even mentioned a bunch of related issues like the data protection implications, the fact that a country code alone isn't actually enough to determine the tax rate in some cases, the consumer protection rules that require displaying the full tax-inclusive price a customer will pay before you necessarily have enough information to make that determination, and the additional burden of updating all your accounting and reporting practices to cope with the barely document MOSS procedures.

Bottom line: As an experienced programmer with full control of the site and reporting scripts, this has still probably taken me a week of effort altogether, maybe more by the time you include all the reading of background material to figure out what was required in the first place. That might have cost another small business hundreds or more likely thousands of pounds if they'd had to hire a freelancer for a short-term gig to do the same work, while those who don't run their own sites and instead operate via marketplaces are entirely reliant on the marketplace to get it right, which most don't yet, meaning the business has no chance at all of complying.

In short, if you're operating a European business that sells digital content on-line, you might not see the sky falling, but if you don't at least see thunder clouds then you're not looking hard enough. Whatever your opinion or mine about the reasonableness or otherwise of the compliance burden, the undeniable fact is that this is an administrative nightmare for many thousands of small businesses, and it's causing some of them to literally close down or at least block sales to the EU. If a change in tax policy has such a severe result, it seems clear that someone is doing something wrong, however noble and reasonable their original intentions.

Grandma's Homemade Socks aren't affected this year because they don't supply digital products on-line. If the current plans haven't changed by the time the VAT rules change again in 2016 to include physical products as well, you should probably start planning for another significant dent in the European economy.

Pizza delivery companies aren't microbusinesses. Microbusiness in this context usually refers to individuals who sell something on the side to make a little extra money on top of their day job.

There have been reasonable estimates already that in the UK alone there are more than a quarter of a million such businesses selling on-line and affected by the new rules. Representatives of the UK government and tax authorities have already admitted that they didn't appreciate how many such businesses there were or how much they would be affected by these new rules.

I don't really see what the number of other microbusinesses that may exist has to do with anything. We're talking about on-line sales affected by the new rules, as you noted yourself in the post I first replied to.

Look at the length of the document you just linked to. Seriously. Then consider how many other documents like that someone might have to read and understand to determine which tax rates apply and what else they need to do. Then consider how much effort would be required for compliance by someone who makes a few hundred Euros a year selling a PDF of face painting ideas for kids' birthday parties, and tell me whether it's still worth trading.

We simply don't know yet. It is clearly the case that any of the 28 states' tax authorities will have the legal right to audit. There appear to be some procedures under discussion that would try to make things more sensible in that any audit would be co-ordinated by your local tax authority, at least in some states. But again, you're talking about 28 different tax authorities that each work their own way and they can and do interpret VAT rules differently. It is certainly not as simple as "only your home tax authority can ever audit you". That would rather defeat the intended point of these changes, after all.

That is exactly what a lot of those very small businesses are doing.

It is mind-boggling that you seem to think killing off trade because of overweight administrative burdens is a good thing. The entire purpose of the EU, or rather the original organisations that have now become the EU, was to facilitate international trade.

And as of 1 January 2015, most of them are either ignorant of the law or breaking it one way or another.

There is no longer any such rule, at least for practical purposes, if you sell across the EU. And you can't reliably not sell across the EU if you sell on-line, because people can access your site from anywhere.

Technically, I think you still don't have to register for UK VAT if you instead register for the equivalent system in every other EU state where you sell and you're below the UK threshold, but unless your business really does sell exclusively to one or two other EU states somehow, that seems a highly unlikely strategy.

Also, it's just that the UK tends to be stricter about interpreting tax laws than certain other parts of the EU, where in some cases tax avoidance or outright fraud has historically been rampant anyway so this is just one more rule for merchants to ignore. However, in other parts of Europe where there is a similarly compliant culture already, there are similar concerns about the unworkability of these new rules.

Wrong. On some estimates so far, that group is actually a minority of the small and microbusinesses affected by these measures. It certainly isn't "most".

Wrong. You also have to understand, for example, the rules for issuing VAT invoices, which again differ widely among the 28 EU states.

Of course, even if you were right, "understanding what the tax rate for your product is" is no small thing now. Each state has its own quirks about different rates for different types of product. You can't even rely on the obvious indicator, the ISO country code that pretty much everyone's database uses, to reliably determine which tax rate applies in some cases.

Of course it's unlikely that someone is going to be shipped off to another country and tortured to death because they didn't collect 17 Euros of VAT. However, you are effectively now subject to audit by any of the 28 states' national tax authorities if you sell digital products within the EU, and if you've ever actually run a business and had your number come up for an audit, you'll know how much fun that is.

What is this "webshop software" you keep talking about?

Not everyone uses marketplace sites. The people most damaged by these new rules are mom-and-pop stores selling some small digital product with little more than a home page and a PayPal button.

Congratulations, you just killed an entire sector of the European economy, which can no longer afford to operate.

You don't run a successful economy by making the price of doing business, particularly for small businesses, more than they generate in total revenues. That is literally now the case for thousands of businesses, though no doubt many of them will continue to operate illegally anyway because they don't even know they're doing anything wrong.