Actually prices from amazon in Europe follow the convention where they are shown inclusive of any VAT (unlike the US where prices are exclusive and sales tax is added afterwards). For goods VAT is charged at the rate for the country of destination. For eCommerce the wrinkle is that they are charged at the rate for the country of supply (i.e. where the supplier is based)... for most companies they choose Luxembourg as the VAT rate is lower than elsewhere... this changes next year as it will be VAT for the country of destination, and so Luxembourg is about to take a 1 billion EUR hit and is having a slight panic over the revenue loss and is having to tighten its belt (which is unusual and causing all sorts of issues, and somebody is probably kicking themselves over only taking 1% instead of more). So the VAT does go to the country of destination... except for eCommerce (county of supply, changing to country of supply next year).

The UK may be geographically on the European continent, but politically and mentally is in its own space.

I got my mom a iMac... installed Office for Mac on it... and the support calls from her dropped to almost zero... the only problem now is that she'll somehow screw up Safari and the toolbar needs to be reset every now and then. Given her past history of screwing up a Windows machine within a year of getting it, and having 'friends' who 'help' install software that she 'needs' on it, moving to OS X was a big win, despite the initial ' this is so new' pushback that occurred for about two weeks.

And somebody mod parent up... that is actually a quote from the Malcolm Tucker character... as played by Peter Capaldi... and in that role he's infamous for his swearing. Viewers of a gentle-persuasion should not watch it.

Indeed. Whenever I watch The Thick of It, Tucker's character always has me in stitches when he goes off on a sweary rant.

Its not that difficult to find him... for starters he's on Wikipedia. Why don't you go lookup "The Thick of It" too, as he played Malcolm Tucker, a most memorable character.

That's all very well and good, but do you think the average web surfer even knows what you're talking about? Any solution needs to be baked into the bog-standard browsers instead of asking users to do VM magic.

Nah, its more to do with fact that broadcasters (and advertisers, etc.) fail to realize that people in one country might actually like to watch TV from another country.

I'd posit that in 99.999% of the time, unless a consumer is living within 60 minutes of another country where stuff is cheaper, they won't bother crossing the border.

In theory yes... you need to be in the footprint of the satellite, and some of the operators have deliberately adjusted their footprint so it doesn't fall too heavily outside the country their targeting... so, great if you live close by, and if not, you might be lucky if you have a huge dish and a decent LNB.

It has nothing to do with being a UK citizen but with being UK resident.

Wrong. There is an option. BBC iPlayer Global (http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/outside_the_uk/iplayer_outsideuk_app) app for iOS is available for those outside the UK. Sure, the choice of programming is not as extensive, but its cheap(ish) and at the moment there is a summer offer so a one year sub costs EUR 49. Personally speaking I'd wish more broadcasters would open up... just because I don't live in your country I would actually like to watch your programming, and, heck, I'd even pay for it (if it wasn't too extortionate).

That 100 million is connections per month... not users. Plus, don't forget that Minitel was heavily used by the French as it was in a lot of homes and readily available. And from a technical viewpoint it was quite sophisticated for its time.

Whilst that may be true, I've found these days people are so wrapped in cotton wool, that when you tell them the truth (your idea sucks, you screwed up, etc), they just can't accept being told it...

That's because the worst offenders are the uni IT people.