I SO hope you are very sarcastic here.

While that is true, the same is true for the information released that suggested North-Korea is/was/would-be behind the hack.

Microsoft's move from MSN to Skype isn't helping either. You are forced to merge MSN and Skype accounts or decide to only use 1 (where having seperate ones was easy for people like me who seperated business and personal accounts).. .

Yeah although Word 97 is 12 years old by now and you having to upgrade to some newer version is all plain forced upgrading by Microsoft. Even Word 2003 is 9 years old, meaning you have done at least one or two reinstalls since you got it (cause the hardware that originally ran it is outdated).

Don't get me wrong, I like Opera, but for those of us in Chrome: triple-click, right click, select "go to http://etc/ etc"

It all comes down to weather or not the browser accepts it, and for now it looks like CaCERT is not valided yet. I tried https://www.cacert.org/ and Chrome shows that nice fancy red screen that tells me I am about to do something extremely dangerous, although if you read it it only tells me that they can't validate the owner, encryption is all fine .. .I wish they would make that more clear.

Reading the posts above this one, where everyone is making a distinction between a bank and paypal, in Europe the situation is different then in the US, PayPal IS a bank here (so no need to make a distinction between the two), from the website:

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (R.C.S. Luxembourg B 118 349) is duly licensed as a Luxembourg credit institution in the sense of Article 2 of the law of 5 April 1993 on the financial sector as amended (the “Law”) and is under the prudential supervision of the Luxembourg supervisory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier .
link: https://cms.paypal.com/nl/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/ServiceDescription_full&locale.x=en_US

Very true words, however, other companies doing business in these regions also have to comply to the (tax)laws. Do you think that due to the fact that since Amazon chooses to ship worldwide and therefor making their own order process far more complex than "Joe's Books" who only serves his own state and maybe the ones next to it they should be exempt? My example of their recommendation systems was merely to indicate that they are capable of doing very complex things with the techniques available. I understand it would be a lot of work, but the rules they would have to comply to are available (there are just many).

I read quite a few (not all) comments on this page, but what I cannot understand is why people feel that Amazons defense ("it's too complicated") is valid, when you consider that we are talking about the company who can do magic with their recommendations on a sale-level; people who bought this also bought that, 57% people on this page bought this item, the others went here, combo deals with books you viewed before, etc. You'd think they would be able to come up with a system for the taxes ... wanting to is something completely different.

I can perfectly understand that it's not as simple as the EU system (e.g. I pay 19% VAT), however, it's not fair to claim that on a $9.99 book they have to pay 0.12 here and 0.53 there instantly, since that is most probably not the case in the first place. Amazon has to collect the amounts and send them off every X (month/quarter), same as they do with VAT they collect.

It would be wonderfull if your reply was a little near the truth, but it isn't. Europe is bigger then the United Kingdom, and in many European countries the gouvernment has the monopoly on offline & online gambling. They claim they can protect the players better to all the downsides that accompany (think addiction) gambling. Oh and did I mention they like the revenues that are part of this whole casino and poker business? Even though a lot of gambling companies are registered within the United Kingdom (and are therefor part of Europe, which means they should be able to do business in Europe as they are in the UK) they actually ban players from certain countries because allowing them to play will result in huge fines...

And the 'addiction thing'? You should read some reports and recent lawsuits.. Addiction problems are in the main reasons the countries are bypassing the EU laws (which are indeed more lose on the gambling part). It's not like in the US, but it is certainly not like in the UK here in mainland Europe. . . . (yet)