A "simple measure" that happens to wreak havoc on an already convoluted tax system does not a simple tax system make. Really now, your argument sucks so much that it ought to spontaneously implode.

Let's put it into a... building analogy. I say I'd like a "simple" building, without all sorts of baroque or gothic or whatnot ornaments. And you point to the obvious and simple fact that not having doors would count as simple and that you tried it and got your furniture stolen. No sympathy from me and no, your argument is not a valid counter. Reasons why left as an exercise.

As far as I'm concerned the idea already exposed someone's complete failure to grok what it was about. And that is a good thing, for then we can do something about it.

Apparently companies don't pay taxes (ref) in the sense that anything they do pay someone else gets to pay -- the employees, the customers, the shareholders, you name it.

Even without that caveat I'd be strongly in favour of a simple tax code, one that simply isn't complicated enough to have much in the way of loopholes. Perhaps a flat-fee on income, or a VAT if that really is a cheaper* tax overall to levy, tied to the yearly budget in a straight-forward way so that politician stupidity gives fairly direct feedback in your wallet, and then hopefully influences your voting.

Assuming that indeed, companies would shove off any taxes paid anyway, well, let them not pay taxes, let the people who receive income from the company do. The upside of that is that since more tax is coming from employees, it's now harder to hide taxables on other sides of borders.

The problem with that sort of thing, though, is that simplicity is a two-edged sword: The politicians no longer can hide their shenanigans either. Look at the debt rate. Eventually that's going to have to be paid back from taxes. And suddenly you're keenly aware of that fact.

* Where "cheaper" means less inefficiencies due to collecting and side effects.

Real merchants don't "deserve" your personal details any more or less than appstore merchants. There may be a need to take your address for shipment, and in that case a phone number, email adress, or even additional shipment instructions may be useful. But they ought not be required without good reason.

Note that credit cards muddle the picture by virtue of being a credit facility: You haven't actually paid yet so you are in debt and those obligations add identification requirements. Though strictly speaking all the merchant is supposed to do is pass it on to the credit facility for turning into money, and passing it in the clear is rather outdated, and well-known to be dangerous. Without credit as in payment by cash there and then, much of the need to identify you personally goes away.

That this information is useful for profiling and all sorts of marketeering and so it's nice to gather, well, plenty furrin places you're not even allowed to do that. I'd say the practice to pass on information that really isn't needed is a dangerous habit that needs reconsideration.

N'mind that it may possibly be useful to send emails in case of updates or whatnot. Passing that information automatically without need is a flaw, yes. Even if done by design.

is what the legal status of their "recommendations" is and whether you ought to sue them.

The tried-and-true andwer to that is: Ask a lawyer. I'm quite sure it can and does swing either way depending on local laws and any number of details you haven't provided.

Not sure what you're asking, but I'd consider answering along the lines of not being aware of how your business, software, is --or even possibly could be-- in any way or form infringing on their patents, how any and all hardware that may possibly be subject to the patent is store-bought and therefore assumed to be properly accounted for by the manufacturer, how it is up to them to establish how what you're doing is in fact infringing, and that you're happy to assist them further for a nicely outrageous hourly rate, paid in advance, because patent law is not your core business.

Otherwise, do we really have to start buying our stuff with patent litigation indemnity guarantees or something? This sort of thing just smells abusive. Isn't there an abusive litigation law somewhere?

Or maybe you could offer to license their complete current-and-future patent portfolio for an one-off payment of some small number, like two dollarcents. Be prepared to back up how that is a reasonable number given how, well, you figure something out.

Or perhaps you could counter-sue for frivolous lititgation and wasting your time for the time it's cost you so far which ought to be a small enough number still to fit in small claims court--the one nearest to you, of course. If you choose to talk first, I'd probably at least warn them that your time isn't free and that continuing to argue will incur consulting charges.

But of course you need to talk to some lawyer type, no going around that. But you can try and find one that doesn't immediately cost an arm and a leg, like a student-run free service or something set up by the eff or something.

It's for your own good, too. Lookit, the press release says so.

In a few short years you might even get that, courtesy the Japanese getting older and their aversion to getting non-Japanese to help them out in their old age. It's why you get all those whacky robots from pet dogs to something already close to robot nurses.

Ironically they don't actually need introspective fridges with see-through display doors and built-in speakers (that are problems to clean, and might break, too) for that. If the robot is smart enough to move about on its own it's smart enough to remember what's where or even just to remember to take a quick inventory before ordering (or executing, there's an idea) the scheduled shopping.

So the robots take over our lives. Of course, this is where we mumble "yeah, skynet" and then leave things as they are. But things don't have to walk to become our networked adversaries. They don't even have to mean it. All that's needed is an over-abundance of trying to be "helpful" in just the wrong way. Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it".

While I sort-of share the sentiment of wanting to not have to do the chores myself, with various defensive strategies in place they're not that much of a problem. What would be a problem is losing control, even the feeling of losing control. And you get that by having all sorts of things try to out-smart you behind your back.

You know, The Wrong Trousers style. Or maybe not even that.

Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must, but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do, that talks to me through my phone or whatever device I want to whenever I say so, and so on. I don't want vendor-supplied half-well over-eagerly done patented "easyness". I want those things to do my bidding, and for that they have to talk to me the way I want them to.

On that same note, I wouldn't want things to be too integrated--that just drives up the repair bill through sheer proprietaryness, meaning it won't happen and now half my kitchen doesn't talk to the other half any longer.

Keep it simple. Keep things independent if they don't need to interdepend. Make a speaker that sticks to the fridge with magnets, or take a few old but still functional ones and mount'em somewhere high and out of the way. Though the old trick of mounting a radio under the cabinets over the counter seems good enough still, too. Make one of those with a bluetooth interface and you're golden.

In short, all that integrating just because we can is no good for us. Even when automating.

Whadayamean, "mis"read?

Oh, in the literal sense.

Then again, this is Paul Venezia, a hack columnist who forgot an "off" somewhere.

That's not entirely true since not all stores carry all brands and they're not always all that helpful helping you select; you're supposed to have done your homework. Also, various brands try to do is to create a "community" by offering cheaper or near-free calls within the brand, to tempt you to stick around because your friends do too.

Further, some brands can only be ordered "online" which is a bit of a bummer if you want to keep your name off of it. Some countries actually require you to register your name to the sim, even with a copy of your passport, but then again some are sloppy enough that this is circumventable also (and not a crim does it catch extra, just drives costs up a bit, and makes copies of passports to use for registration more viable as a tradeable commodity). Another caveat is that some of those "online" brands don't offer topping-up vouchers but require a (local) bank account number and permission to dip to ensure you always have enough credit on the card. Handy, innit?

But it isn't really a good question for ask slashdot, no. Since it differs by country it comes down to gathering the price lists and comparing. That or use handy dandy price comparison sites, again per country. The sites offering ex pat-tailored info are usually out of date. Around here, the MVNOs and operator sub-brands pop up and perish like, well, something that isn't expect to last half a decade.

The only generic information to be had is that there are a few that offer roaming for a fixed, predictable price across europe or even the world that's a lot higher than a local PAYG but a lot less than the usual roaming charges, and that cost very little to keep around when not in use. Oh, and that voice and text plans are hairy but not as much trouble as sorting out PAYG data. It's just a spot of work, is all.

On that note, do work out the frequency bands the equipment supports; if it's not "everything" you run some risk of ending up with a dud sim as not all operators are available on all frequency bands in use in a country. For MVNOs you usually have to work out whose network they're using, mapping back to the "parent"'s frequency usability. Again, it's a bit of homework, but generally doable.

I'd call it "mistaking succesful damage control for correct functioning". Apparently the system isn't entirely dysfunctional as patents can be revoken and it is possible to prevail against a patent troll, depending. But that doesn't imply the system as a whole is functional.

The fact that these patents were issued in the first place and that patent troll companies can exist on settlements and the occasional lawsuit already ought to be proof enough that the system is at least partly dysfunctional and therefore not fully functional. I would even argue it is dysfunctional enough to warrant immediate takedown of the entire system, and a rethink of what we originally wanted with the system.

If you can't see that, then maybe you're not really informed and if you're trying to inform the public while in such an uninformed state you're likely to spread misinformation. As such, shame on ars technica for wishful thinking. They ought to have known better.

The thing that's even more often overlooked is the cost to the customer.

To the customer, the very clear, limited, and well-understood risks of handling cash easily outweigh the purported "safety", mainly through obscuring the added complexity and resulting brittleness not to mention increased exposure of electronic alternatives, that for some reason also share the property they're very much not anonymous. But since you only see that trail of time+payer+payee+place+amount much later, ah, it's not a problem, right?

Or maybe it's just that the risk of getting relieved of a day's worth of cash is worth whatever you can get away with pushing off on the customer in terms of fees and privacy risks and whatnot. As long as the customer doesn't notice, it's not a problem, right?

I don't know the size of the costs to each, but if you're going to investigate, do paint a full picture of each, including such things as having to sit on payment records for N years and the risk of losing them (a lost backup tape will do) and resulting fines and tarnished reputation due to having to announce you lost people's details and things like that. Those are usually overlooked, for some reason.

Credit card companies want to have their fees hidden, rather they'd have everyone else too pay for the fees they charge retailers of their lucky convenience-furnished customers. And that they no longer can? Honesty in retail, surely a big speedbump, yes.

A speedbump on the road to a cash-free economy [...]

And that's an issue, because everyone wants cash-free, Shirley. Because, uhm, cash doesn't carry your name and isn't subject to chargebacks, hallmarks of, er, what exactly?

This much ought to be painfully clear, yet government-and-industry keeps drumming the "imminent grave danger" drum like they were sitting on Iraqian WMDs or something.

Which ought to give rise to the next question: Why?

Well, we already know the answer for that, and we coulda seen it coming decades away. Back when it was coined the "military-industrial complex", these days it has a large sideshow in transport security, and the next wave of innovation is in cyber.

There's a few problems with this, of course. The American[tm] image elsewhere, though no American[tm] can be arsed to care about that, for there's nuttin' but yokels in them rest of the world, amirite or amirite? Nevermind that it regularly backfires (contras, and, oh hey, taliban, to name just a few); moving on, what else?

Well, this security thing is a large driver of big data and invasive tracking and whatnot, and starting with the civilian version is great because having to separately "militarise" the tech means a bigger market and fatter margins. Yum, fat margins. Ah, yes there's a cost but facebook, end of privacy discussion, and if not just say "terrorists" or "paedophiles" until detractors shut up, in fact use anytime to keep the pressure on. So, moving on, what else?

Well, it's overhead. As in, while fat government contracts lead to paychecks, they don't create wealth; they're overhead and slowly suck the economy dry. Ah, what the hell, the fed will QE us out.

Alright, no problems there. Carry on.

I probably should be in this business too, eh?

Some unspecified slice of a £25 million pie.

I think the UK government is too eager by a large factor to be "digital by default" (also a buzzword of theirs) and in fact is willing to, well, lose control over most of their vital governmental services over it. And of course that involves shelling out yet more dosh to random corporations that look hip and big enough. So expect cost overruns shortly. The corporations on the government's shortlist generally aren't bereft of payment, no.

That merely lists the main ingredients for what appears to be the gold standard for political discourse in the country. Including that last bit. Yes.