The advantages of being in the EU

[Brian Ellis]

I've just resubscribed my Norton anti-virus for another year. The price has gone up 21%. Why? because Symantec have an office in Ireland and they are now charging the Irish VAT rate (exorbitant). Why the heck don't they set up their European HQ in Switzerland? It would then be VAT=0% for the whole of the EU and about 8% for Swiss residents.

Next year, I'll commit a fraud and tell them I'm living in Switzerland or Zimbabwe or somewhere not in the EU and save 21%

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[DukeP]

The 21% is actually too much.

EU agreed to have a common 17% tax for foreign internetbased transaction. Although local taxoffices CAN make seperate agreements with suppliers (Which the danish did with amazon. Grr.).

I payed the 17% tax for my Horizons account (now cancelled).
Luckily not everyone adheres to this principle - my COH account is not subject to tax.


~~DukeP~~

[UtwigMU]

Brian - Antiviruses:

1 if you use common sense in your mail and internet practice, the proababilty of getting one is very low. If you don't open suspicious attachments, have firewall, use Firefox and Thunderbird or Opera, have machine patched and have accounts passworded and you don't download and install suspicious stuff, you most likely won't get viruses. Most viruses rely on social engineering (extracting and renaming attchment and executing it by stupid users) anyway.

2 Norton is a performance hog with default settings and it costs. The performance hit is noticable even on the dual Athlons.

3 There is a free* Avast Antivirus, which I started using recently which offers decent functionality. It protects e-mail, p2p downloads, Outlook, instant messaging and opened files. It even has skinable interface. Furthermore, it works even with Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client which is very beta so far.

It's quite frequently updated (2 program updates in a month) and the virus database is updated once or twice a week. The tech support apparently answers forum questions next day. They also offer advanced (for pay) server and network products...

* It's free for a year for program and virus updates uppon registration through e-mail for noncomercial use. After one year, one has to reregister.


So stop beating yourself with a stick on the back and quit paying Symantec tax.

[Brian Ellis]

UMU

1. I agree, 100%. I do have a firewall, use Mozilla products. In addition, my ISP does have a kinda sorta virus filtering, but it lets half-a-dozen or so through every week. I also have POPFile and PestPatrol active. There therefore is still a very small risk of my opening an infected attachment from a known and trusted source (I probably open, on an average, two or three such work-related attachments per day. None have been infected to date, but there is always a first time). I therefore prefer to have the comfort of an av software.

2. It is a performance hog only if you don't know how to set it up. I've mine set up so that it consumes 0% of CPU resources, except when e-mail is actually being scanned, when the total CPU usage of all the security systems plus Thunderbird goes up to ~16% peak and the PF usage also remains steady.
3. I'm quite happy with NAV and paying them $19/year is nothing for peace of mind. The beauty of NAV is knowing they have the fastest response time to new viruses. From the moment of a new one being announced to Symantec to the moment of my computer being automatically updated averages less than 8 hours, usually about 4.

I don't particularly object to ~$4 tax, the point of my post was that I was taken aback at being charged 21%.

DukeP: have you chapter and verse about the 17%, please?

[RedRed]

I think that Semantic have the problem here - are you not meant to be charged VAT @ the rate you would pay it in your own country? Surely its a bug in their e-commerce site?

I would not be surprised if they pocket the difference

RedRed

[DukeP]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
UMU

...DukeP: have you chapter and verse about the 17%, please?

To comply with changes in the law in the European Union, Sony Online Entertainment game Subscribers who are residents of EU countries will be charged VAT equal to 17.5% of the subscription fees. These changes require that digital services be taxed at the point of consumption , i.e. in your country of residence. The countries currently covered by this policy are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.

Link @ Sony entertainment This was my original source - Sony announced that all EU residences had to pay this tax.

The message I got was due my SWG account - and it was a bit broader. I dont have that on me, so this search is as close as i get.

~~DukeP~~

[Sasq]

I agree with Brian here, I love my NAV, while there are AV programs that consume less resources then NAV, the update speed is priceless.

Just sometimes you get what you pay for...

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by RedRed
I think that Semantic have the problem here - are you not meant to be charged VAT @ the rate you would pay it in your own country? Surely its a bug in their e-commerce site?

Definitely not! If you buy merchandise, the VAT is always charged at the rate of the country of origin.

[DukeP]

I guess thats the new part of the EU legislation, put into place last june 1, 2003.

The VAT for online transactions are based on point of consumption - which off course is also the only way to deal with peoples access to buying without paying {local} tax.

A lot of business people have argumented that the ability to shop over the indernet, at places with little or no VAT undermined their ability to compete fairly (which it does).

The correct way to deal with this, would off course be to remove all VAT. Then we could buy on the free market.

But removing VAT = increasing direct taxes = further diaspora of highpaid populations to less taxed regions (A lot of people is leaving Denmark for Spain - because of the lower taxes/ better weather (yeah right!)).

Off course, removing Tax would solve THIS problem, leaving us at...???



~~DukeP~~