My thinking was more along the lines of you enter your zip code and system gives you an all inclusive price including your local taxes. Rather than a large disclaimer.
AT&T got absorbed by Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC) in 2005. Which is pretty much the worst of the baby bells split off from the original Bell System. They adopted the AT&T name, in part because theirs has a rather bad reputation, but the underlying company is SBC along with the bits of AT&T that they kept. So it is really SBC that is buying up everything not the company formerly known as AT&T.
My recollection of the old Ma Bell isn't as rosy as yours. You used to have to rent the telephone from them. You were not allowed to work on the phone wiring in your own home. I can remember being charged a non-trivial amount to have a phone line in my parents home repaired. Because it wasn't allowed for me to do it and unless you bought their in home wiring insurance policy you had to pay Ma Bell to come do it. Before the break up I can remember it costing something like $2 a minute to call my grandmother in Illinois from Virginia. My dad used to stand there while we talked and time the call because he could only afford so much time per month. Before the break up my father wanted a new phone Ma Bell quoted him over $200. We didn't get it because it was so costly. A couple of years later after the break up that exact phone was sold under the AT&T brand name for $19.99.
The break up may have allowed many questionable practices but it also brought costs for the average person way down. The worst practices seem to be more related to the industry consolidating than to the initial breakup.
Generally the answer is that the fees in question are something being collected for a third party. Usually the Government. Taking a quick look at my mobile bill, this is in the US, for this month I see five fees. Communications Sales Tax, State & Local Sales Tax, Federal Universal Service Fund, Regulatory Surcharge and State 911 Fee. All of which are taxes. So in my view it is just like how you buy a bunch of stuff at the store and have to keep track of the sales tax that they are going to tack on at the counter. It would make life much easier if they forced the mobile providers to quote the prices inclusive of the taxes.
One of my professors in college told me that when he was a graduate student one of his professors got arrested. The guy and a group of his grad students had been cooking up significant amounts of drugs in one of the schools labs after hours. They were using them to throw big drug parties. According to my professor the primary goal of the whole operation was to help them pickup members of a certain sorority that liked to attend the parties. One of the students involved got arrested which lead back to the professor and brought the whole thing down.
Judging by the target audience my guess is they are afraid of a lot more subtle tampering techniques than using a dremel. I would fully expect that a professional, of the types they are worried about, could disassemble your phone modify it it and reassemble it without your being the wiser. Which is why they want it to be impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, to hide tampering and want it to self destruct.
For the rest of us it has proved absolutely nothing. For the record label it proves that you should figure out who you are suing and whether you have a case before you do it. Did it not occur to them that perhaps "one of the world's most famous copyright attorneys" might know a few things about what he can and cannot do? For that matter even if they thought they had a strong case I'd be leery of suing a guy like that over something in his area of expertise. If for no other reason than it probably means he can keep you in court for the next 50 years for little to no expense on his part while it bleeds you dry. This isn't like threatening some teenager with no resources because he has your song playing in the background of his video.
Actually I completely agree with your assessment of her behavior. It maybe what lead the people involved to select her as their target. After all you have a bar full of people you might steel from but one of those people actively offends you. Suddenly that person is #1 on the list of who we rob tonight. I don't have a terribly large amount of sympathy for her. She created this situation and made herself a target.
Of course it could be that the person offended by her behavior and Google glass was just a convenient distraction. Allowing some unrelated third party to commit the theft.
Assuming you are in any condition to use the device even if does survive the experience.
I read this article and my reaction is I doubt this was about Google glass at all. At least beyond it marking her as somebody with money. It sounds to me like a group in a bar saw an easy mark. They approached her and started a confrontation over the Google glass, got her to pursue the guy who took it but just happened to give it back after distracting her for a bit. While she is gone an accomplice robs her blind. Everyone is gone and she has no proof of anything beyond the confrontation. Assuming she even has that. Sounds to me like she was setup and played.
I wouldn't have an issue with them refusing move off of their existing infrastructure if they were willing to allow competition. Instead what they do is cut deals with the government, manipulate regulators and lobby the legislatures to make sure no new players come into the market. So in essence they are using their political clout to smother any real competition.
In my area we have two options for broad band Internet access. One is Comcast and the other is Verizon FIOS. They both offer pretty much the exact same services at pretty much the exact same cost. They both tend to increase network speeds within a few months of each other and when they do their pricing structure tends to move in exactly the same way. I priced it out recently and other than their "new subscriber" deals the two services are within $10 of each other pretty much no matter what service you price out. In fact their pricing and services are so similar I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that there isn't some form of collusion going on. We are never going to get faster, better or cheaper service as long as that state of affairs is allowed to persist. I don't think government is the answer here considering government is the primary mechanism they are using to enforce the current situation.
I agree that any attempt he makes to move to a secret address is pointless.
My guess is that there are a couple of things that really protect him. One is that in addition to being irritating his reporting is also probably useful to the people he reports on. So there is always a calculation that if we do Krebs in we shut him up but we also lose a source of information. Another is that as part of his reporting he deals with a lot of people and touches a lot of data. It is very likely that in his notes and materials are a lot of things that would be incriminating to quite a few people. If something where to happen to him all of that stuff would very likely end up in the hands of law enforcement. Not because he does anything to make that happen but because it would all be evidence in a murder investigation. I suspect the idea of all of that information being seized by law enforcement isn't something that they'd want to see.
From the article it states that the banks here had to find a way to make chip and pin work while still complying with "the Durbin amendment" that required all credit card transactions be able to work on at least two networks. So if the article is be believed one of the major hold ups was due to the US government adding requirements. Requirements that just don't apply in these other countries.
The other possibility is that somebody made the determination that substituting a cheaper speaker lets the shave a little off the cost of the laptop. Profit margins in the laptop business are razor thin now. I fully expect that if they can squeeze another nickle in profit by cutting the corner they'll do it.
I am curious how wide spread this trend of trying to deny warranty coverage based on software load is? I know a friend of mine made inquires about getting Win7 for a laptop he bought with Win8 on it. He was told by the support department of the manufacturer that if he did that it would void his warranty and they wouldn't cover any of the hardware. I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard but now I am starting to wonder based upon this. In his case my suggestion was get another hard drive and put whatever you want on it and then if you need warranty service put the original hard drive with their image back in. Followed by don't buy that brand again.
I find it hard to believe that the government of NZ is subjecting itself to ridicule, expense and possibly legal jeopardy to protest the actions of the US. They have diplomats to protest whatever they want to the highest levels of the US government anytime they like. No, I'd guess that they really are just that incompetent. That US, entertainment industry, pressure and bribes caused them to ride rough over NZ's laws. With their actions starting to come out into the open and be seen by the NZ public they are working to mitigate the damage and or cover it up. Whether that effort will work remains to be seen.
Whatever happens here I think the significance of Kim Dotcom's case is that it shows how these intelligence agencies are actively being abused by governments. You can bet that this isn't the only case that sort of thing is being done. This is just the one where they got caught.
Good point about the distinction between in depth coverage of some specific topic area that has value and general coverage. Especially since so much of the general coverage now days is repackaging the same AP articles in every news paper in America. I can't see a valid reason to pay for the online edition of my local paper when 90% of their content comes from the AP and is basically identical to what every other paper in America has. So to me the question is whether they generate sufficiently unique content that is of a high enough value to justify me expending money on it. So far I haven't found any sites like that. Doesn't mean that they don't exist I simply haven't found any site where I can't get essentially the same information for free someplace else.
People have known that Social Security needed to be fixed for as long as I can remember. I was actively being discussed at least as far back as the the early 80's. Had we fixed it back then the fixes would have been comparatively painless. The longer we wait to fix it the greater the impact on the people receiving it or expecting to receive it are going to be. One of the major problems is current recipients don't want any changes because they are afraid, perhaps rightly, that they will lose out. The sad truth is that they simply don't care whether the system exists longer than the lifespans of them and their friends. A large population of elderly people terrified that they'll lose their benefits, and who actively vote, is why Social Security isn't fixed and why it won't be fixed until there is absolutely no choice. Perhaps not even then.
I have to wonder whether that fair would have been considered all that elite. The upper class Romans were very prone to holding gladiatorial events where they pitted various wild animals against the gladiators. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the animals that lost ended up in the cook pots of the less affluent.
US Government has a history of simply ignoring the rules it enforces for everyone else. I mean in the last century the have infected people with diseases, exposed them to radiation, dosed them with illegal drugs and exposed them to chemical weapons. Very frequently without the participants knowledge or consent. Sad truth is no matter what they say you really have no idea what is being tested. The scary thing about their past tests is that in more than one case they have actually caused people serious illness, injury or death. They created the Institutional Review Boards (IRB) as part of trying to prevent this sort of thing. Still when it comes down to it you really have no assurance of what the heck they are testing or even that it won't harm you. For all we know they aren't really gathering any DNA or drug data at all here and the experiment is to see what percentage of drivers can be brow beaten into submitting vs. how many will stick to their guns and refuse.
Don't forget the other 3 or 4 trillion in US dollars they are holding as cash reserves. If China did something to bring down our economy their exposure would be far worse than the debt that they hold. It would impact their hard currency reserves and an unknown amount of additional US currency held by various Chinese companies and individuals.
If this was a governmental effort in China my guess is it would be more along the lines of something that would be held back in case there was a confrontation between the US and China. Rather than something that would just be randomly used. If it was some private individual or crime group who knows what their intentions would be. Unless they sell new computers how would they monetize this? Whole thing sounds kind of suspect to me.
We should question our elites and we should feel free to mock our politicians. Expecting them to pay the costs and provide the venue for us to do it is a bit much. Nobody is saying that they can't play the film in a private venue. They are only saying that the state owned and operated museum isn't going to do it.
State run institutions have a very treacherous tightrope to walk on things like this. If they play the movie and offend a bunch of office holders they could find their funding in jeopardy or invite office holders to start actively attacking the institution. I don't blame the administrators for wanting no part of this. Biting the hand that feeds you is a dangerous game.
That is true to a point. A good friend of mine is an accountant and has been doing taxes professionally for years. When you pay somebody like that you get a few things. One you get access to a professional grade piece of tax software. Which doesn't matter that much unless you have a more complex return, have prior years taxes that need to be done or some problem with the IRS that needs to be sorted out. The second thing you get is access to somebody, assuming you are using an accountant or an enrolled agent, who studies the tax code professionally. They simply have more time to learn the ins and outs than most people to because it is their job. If your an preparer is an enrolled agent you can usually get them to help you deal with the IRS should you get audited as well. Though they will likely charge you for this.
Still if you have a reasonably simple return Turbo Tax, or any of the other major brand tax software, should be fine. I personally won't be using their online versions though I do use Turbo Tax for my own taxes. On the other hand major part of my friend's business involves people who use Turbo Tax without a full understanding of their tax situation. Where something happens that isn't a simple matter and they try to do it themselves and get into trouble. The biggest problem there is you typically don't know you are in trouble for a couple of years. By the time you do know you are facing a tax bill, fines and subsequent year returns that are also messed up. At that point you are really going to need somebody to deal with it. So the trick to doing it yourself is being prepared to have a realistic assessment of your own knowledge level and be prepared to either study up or hire a professional when you get beyond what you can deal with.
They don't explain the nature of the tax dispute in any detail in the article. What they do say makes it sound like the source of the dispute is that people are ordering Apple products in Italy and the orders are being fulfilled by their subsidiary in Ireland. So the profits are getting booked in Ireland vs. Italy because that is the unit that made the sale. It goes on to say that there is a proposal by the government of Italy to force any company that advertises in and sells online in Italy to do its order fulfillment via "agencies with a tax presence in Italy". I am somewhat sympathetic to countries trying to capture tax revenues from business in their countries. I am far less sympathetic to the idea that they are going to place local presence requirements in order to do online business in Italy. If every country did that it would pretty much end international online sales for anything but the largest companies. Places like Apple and Amazon who can afford, and indeed probably already have, local presence or partners. It will totally screw smaller Internet based merchants that don't have such a presence.
Why even buy the department store at that point? Seems like you could setup shop in a fraction of the space, for far less rent, and do exactly what you described. They are already running local pickup services in some areas. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to create a custom fit / merchandise pickup location. There are several companies out there that offer services where you give them your measurements and they hem or modify your cloths before they ship them to you. My guess is that if Amazon got into that space they'd probably do it faster, better,and cheaper. If they add a quick and easy way to get your measurements professionally done that seems like a winner. Especially if you could save your measurements to your profile and just order whatever cloths you want and be pretty sure they'll fit when they arrive. If fitting rooms really are the department stores saving grace they may be doomed.
Even if we come up with the perfect system what are the odds of it being adopted? After all in most countries with voter fraud the powers that be are the ones who benefit. The very people we would have to convince to enact one of these schemes. Just look at the example of trying to require that people prove their identity before voting in the US. You can't do anything in this country without ID but somehow requiring that you prove your identity before voting is the end of the world. If you can't get agreement on something that simple what are the odds that they'll ever agree to the rest of this? Coming from a state where you have always, at least in my lifetime, had to prove your identity before voting the whole debate over this seems suspect. Still it illustrates the point that if one side thinks they get an advantage from a poorly run system they will defend that to the death. In my view that is going to be a far greater hurdle than the technology.
My suspicion about DC is that the troth they are all feeding from has been so deep for so long that to some degree they play nice together. Once that troth is unable to satisfy all of them it will get nasty.
Even then there are significant risks. After all if the government, army and police are all for sale it is highly unlikely that you are the only buyer. Which means you are going to end up with various other criminal enterprises who all have their own factions. Basically you end up with the situation in Northern Mexico at the moment. Where the biggest risk to criminals isn't officialdom but their competitors. All of whom have their own cadres of corrupt officials, police and military people on the payroll. So the risk doesn't so much go away in that scenario as change.
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My thinking was more along the lines of you enter your zip code and system gives you an all inclusive price including your local taxes. Rather than a large disclaimer.
AT&T got absorbed by Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC) in 2005. Which is pretty much the worst of the baby bells split off from the original Bell System. They adopted the AT&T name, in part because theirs has a rather bad reputation, but the underlying company is SBC along with the bits of AT&T that they kept. So it is really SBC that is buying up everything not the company formerly known as AT&T.
My recollection of the old Ma Bell isn't as rosy as yours. You used to have to rent the telephone from them. You were not allowed to work on the phone wiring in your own home. I can remember being charged a non-trivial amount to have a phone line in my parents home repaired. Because it wasn't allowed for me to do it and unless you bought their in home wiring insurance policy you had to pay Ma Bell to come do it. Before the break up I can remember it costing something like $2 a minute to call my grandmother in Illinois from Virginia. My dad used to stand there while we talked and time the call because he could only afford so much time per month. Before the break up my father wanted a new phone Ma Bell quoted him over $200. We didn't get it because it was so costly. A couple of years later after the break up that exact phone was sold under the AT&T brand name for $19.99.
The break up may have allowed many questionable practices but it also brought costs for the average person way down. The worst practices seem to be more related to the industry consolidating than to the initial breakup.
Generally the answer is that the fees in question are something being collected for a third party. Usually the Government. Taking a quick look at my mobile bill, this is in the US, for this month I see five fees. Communications Sales Tax, State & Local Sales Tax, Federal Universal Service Fund, Regulatory Surcharge and State 911 Fee. All of which are taxes. So in my view it is just like how you buy a bunch of stuff at the store and have to keep track of the sales tax that they are going to tack on at the counter. It would make life much easier if they forced the mobile providers to quote the prices inclusive of the taxes.
Are you sure it is just the students?
One of my professors in college told me that when he was a graduate student one of his professors got arrested. The guy and a group of his grad students had been cooking up significant amounts of drugs in one of the schools labs after hours. They were using them to throw big drug parties. According to my professor the primary goal of the whole operation was to help them pickup members of a certain sorority that liked to attend the parties. One of the students involved got arrested which lead back to the professor and brought the whole thing down.
Judging by the target audience my guess is they are afraid of a lot more subtle tampering techniques than using a dremel. I would fully expect that a professional, of the types they are worried about, could disassemble your phone modify it it and reassemble it without your being the wiser. Which is why they want it to be impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, to hide tampering and want it to self destruct.
For the rest of us it has proved absolutely nothing. For the record label it proves that you should figure out who you are suing and whether you have a case before you do it. Did it not occur to them that perhaps "one of the world's most famous copyright attorneys" might know a few things about what he can and cannot do? For that matter even if they thought they had a strong case I'd be leery of suing a guy like that over something in his area of expertise. If for no other reason than it probably means he can keep you in court for the next 50 years for little to no expense on his part while it bleeds you dry. This isn't like threatening some teenager with no resources because he has your song playing in the background of his video.
Actually I completely agree with your assessment of her behavior. It maybe what lead the people involved to select her as their target. After all you have a bar full of people you might steel from but one of those people actively offends you. Suddenly that person is #1 on the list of who we rob tonight. I don't have a terribly large amount of sympathy for her. She created this situation and made herself a target.
Of course it could be that the person offended by her behavior and Google glass was just a convenient distraction. Allowing some unrelated third party to commit the theft.
Assuming you are in any condition to use the device even if does survive the experience.
I read this article and my reaction is I doubt this was about Google glass at all. At least beyond it marking her as somebody with money. It sounds to me like a group in a bar saw an easy mark. They approached her and started a confrontation over the Google glass, got her to pursue the guy who took it but just happened to give it back after distracting her for a bit. While she is gone an accomplice robs her blind. Everyone is gone and she has no proof of anything beyond the confrontation. Assuming she even has that. Sounds to me like she was setup and played.
I wouldn't have an issue with them refusing move off of their existing infrastructure if they were willing to allow competition. Instead what they do is cut deals with the government, manipulate regulators and lobby the legislatures to make sure no new players come into the market. So in essence they are using their political clout to smother any real competition.
In my area we have two options for broad band Internet access. One is Comcast and the other is Verizon FIOS. They both offer pretty much the exact same services at pretty much the exact same cost. They both tend to increase network speeds within a few months of each other and when they do their pricing structure tends to move in exactly the same way. I priced it out recently and other than their "new subscriber" deals the two services are within $10 of each other pretty much no matter what service you price out. In fact their pricing and services are so similar I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that there isn't some form of collusion going on. We are never going to get faster, better or cheaper service as long as that state of affairs is allowed to persist. I don't think government is the answer here considering government is the primary mechanism they are using to enforce the current situation.
I agree that any attempt he makes to move to a secret address is pointless.
My guess is that there are a couple of things that really protect him. One is that in addition to being irritating his reporting is also probably useful to the people he reports on. So there is always a calculation that if we do Krebs in we shut him up but we also lose a source of information. Another is that as part of his reporting he deals with a lot of people and touches a lot of data. It is very likely that in his notes and materials are a lot of things that would be incriminating to quite a few people. If something where to happen to him all of that stuff would very likely end up in the hands of law enforcement. Not because he does anything to make that happen but because it would all be evidence in a murder investigation. I suspect the idea of all of that information being seized by law enforcement isn't something that they'd want to see.
From the article it states that the banks here had to find a way to make chip and pin work while still complying with "the Durbin amendment" that required all credit card transactions be able to work on at least two networks. So if the article is be believed one of the major hold ups was due to the US government adding requirements. Requirements that just don't apply in these other countries.
The other possibility is that somebody made the determination that substituting a cheaper speaker lets the shave a little off the cost of the laptop. Profit margins in the laptop business are razor thin now. I fully expect that if they can squeeze another nickle in profit by cutting the corner they'll do it.
I am curious how wide spread this trend of trying to deny warranty coverage based on software load is? I know a friend of mine made inquires about getting Win7 for a laptop he bought with Win8 on it. He was told by the support department of the manufacturer that if he did that it would void his warranty and they wouldn't cover any of the hardware. I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard but now I am starting to wonder based upon this. In his case my suggestion was get another hard drive and put whatever you want on it and then if you need warranty service put the original hard drive with their image back in. Followed by don't buy that brand again.
I find it hard to believe that the government of NZ is subjecting itself to ridicule, expense and possibly legal jeopardy to protest the actions of the US. They have diplomats to protest whatever they want to the highest levels of the US government anytime they like. No, I'd guess that they really are just that incompetent. That US, entertainment industry, pressure and bribes caused them to ride rough over NZ's laws. With their actions starting to come out into the open and be seen by the NZ public they are working to mitigate the damage and or cover it up. Whether that effort will work remains to be seen.
Whatever happens here I think the significance of Kim Dotcom's case is that it shows how these intelligence agencies are actively being abused by governments. You can bet that this isn't the only case that sort of thing is being done. This is just the one where they got caught.
Good point about the distinction between in depth coverage of some specific topic area that has value and general coverage. Especially since so much of the general coverage now days is repackaging the same AP articles in every news paper in America. I can't see a valid reason to pay for the online edition of my local paper when 90% of their content comes from the AP and is basically identical to what every other paper in America has. So to me the question is whether they generate sufficiently unique content that is of a high enough value to justify me expending money on it. So far I haven't found any sites like that. Doesn't mean that they don't exist I simply haven't found any site where I can't get essentially the same information for free someplace else.
People have known that Social Security needed to be fixed for as long as I can remember. I was actively being discussed at least as far back as the the early 80's. Had we fixed it back then the fixes would have been comparatively painless. The longer we wait to fix it the greater the impact on the people receiving it or expecting to receive it are going to be. One of the major problems is current recipients don't want any changes because they are afraid, perhaps rightly, that they will lose out. The sad truth is that they simply don't care whether the system exists longer than the lifespans of them and their friends. A large population of elderly people terrified that they'll lose their benefits, and who actively vote, is why Social Security isn't fixed and why it won't be fixed until there is absolutely no choice. Perhaps not even then.
I have to wonder whether that fair would have been considered all that elite. The upper class Romans were very prone to holding gladiatorial events where they pitted various wild animals against the gladiators. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the animals that lost ended up in the cook pots of the less affluent.
US Government has a history of simply ignoring the rules it enforces for everyone else. I mean in the last century the have infected people with diseases, exposed them to radiation, dosed them with illegal drugs and exposed them to chemical weapons. Very frequently without the participants knowledge or consent. Sad truth is no matter what they say you really have no idea what is being tested. The scary thing about their past tests is that in more than one case they have actually caused people serious illness, injury or death. They created the Institutional Review Boards (IRB) as part of trying to prevent this sort of thing. Still when it comes down to it you really have no assurance of what the heck they are testing or even that it won't harm you. For all we know they aren't really gathering any DNA or drug data at all here and the experiment is to see what percentage of drivers can be brow beaten into submitting vs. how many will stick to their guns and refuse.
Don't forget the other 3 or 4 trillion in US dollars they are holding as cash reserves. If China did something to bring down our economy their exposure would be far worse than the debt that they hold. It would impact their hard currency reserves and an unknown amount of additional US currency held by various Chinese companies and individuals.
If this was a governmental effort in China my guess is it would be more along the lines of something that would be held back in case there was a confrontation between the US and China. Rather than something that would just be randomly used. If it was some private individual or crime group who knows what their intentions would be. Unless they sell new computers how would they monetize this? Whole thing sounds kind of suspect to me.
We should question our elites and we should feel free to mock our politicians. Expecting them to pay the costs and provide the venue for us to do it is a bit much. Nobody is saying that they can't play the film in a private venue. They are only saying that the state owned and operated museum isn't going to do it.
State run institutions have a very treacherous tightrope to walk on things like this. If they play the movie and offend a bunch of office holders they could find their funding in jeopardy or invite office holders to start actively attacking the institution. I don't blame the administrators for wanting no part of this. Biting the hand that feeds you is a dangerous game.
That is true to a point. A good friend of mine is an accountant and has been doing taxes professionally for years. When you pay somebody like that you get a few things. One you get access to a professional grade piece of tax software. Which doesn't matter that much unless you have a more complex return, have prior years taxes that need to be done or some problem with the IRS that needs to be sorted out. The second thing you get is access to somebody, assuming you are using an accountant or an enrolled agent, who studies the tax code professionally. They simply have more time to learn the ins and outs than most people to because it is their job. If your an preparer is an enrolled agent you can usually get them to help you deal with the IRS should you get audited as well. Though they will likely charge you for this.
Still if you have a reasonably simple return Turbo Tax, or any of the other major brand tax software, should be fine. I personally won't be using their online versions though I do use Turbo Tax for my own taxes. On the other hand major part of my friend's business involves people who use Turbo Tax without a full understanding of their tax situation. Where something happens that isn't a simple matter and they try to do it themselves and get into trouble. The biggest problem there is you typically don't know you are in trouble for a couple of years. By the time you do know you are facing a tax bill, fines and subsequent year returns that are also messed up. At that point you are really going to need somebody to deal with it. So the trick to doing it yourself is being prepared to have a realistic assessment of your own knowledge level and be prepared to either study up or hire a professional when you get beyond what you can deal with.
They don't explain the nature of the tax dispute in any detail in the article. What they do say makes it sound like the source of the dispute is that people are ordering Apple products in Italy and the orders are being fulfilled by their subsidiary in Ireland. So the profits are getting booked in Ireland vs. Italy because that is the unit that made the sale. It goes on to say that there is a proposal by the government of Italy to force any company that advertises in and sells online in Italy to do its order fulfillment via "agencies with a tax presence in Italy". I am somewhat sympathetic to countries trying to capture tax revenues from business in their countries. I am far less sympathetic to the idea that they are going to place local presence requirements in order to do online business in Italy. If every country did that it would pretty much end international online sales for anything but the largest companies. Places like Apple and Amazon who can afford, and indeed probably already have, local presence or partners. It will totally screw smaller Internet based merchants that don't have such a presence.
Why even buy the department store at that point? Seems like you could setup shop in a fraction of the space, for far less rent, and do exactly what you described. They are already running local pickup services in some areas. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to create a custom fit / merchandise pickup location. There are several companies out there that offer services where you give them your measurements and they hem or modify your cloths before they ship them to you. My guess is that if Amazon got into that space they'd probably do it faster, better,and cheaper. If they add a quick and easy way to get your measurements professionally done that seems like a winner. Especially if you could save your measurements to your profile and just order whatever cloths you want and be pretty sure they'll fit when they arrive. If fitting rooms really are the department stores saving grace they may be doomed.
Even if we come up with the perfect system what are the odds of it being adopted? After all in most countries with voter fraud the powers that be are the ones who benefit. The very people we would have to convince to enact one of these schemes. Just look at the example of trying to require that people prove their identity before voting in the US. You can't do anything in this country without ID but somehow requiring that you prove your identity before voting is the end of the world. If you can't get agreement on something that simple what are the odds that they'll ever agree to the rest of this? Coming from a state where you have always, at least in my lifetime, had to prove your identity before voting the whole debate over this seems suspect. Still it illustrates the point that if one side thinks they get an advantage from a poorly run system they will defend that to the death. In my view that is going to be a far greater hurdle than the technology.
My suspicion about DC is that the troth they are all feeding from has been so deep for so long that to some degree they play nice together. Once that troth is unable to satisfy all of them it will get nasty.
Even then there are significant risks. After all if the government, army and police are all for sale it is highly unlikely that you are the only buyer. Which means you are going to end up with various other criminal enterprises who all have their own factions. Basically you end up with the situation in Northern Mexico at the moment. Where the biggest risk to criminals isn't officialdom but their competitors. All of whom have their own cadres of corrupt officials, police and military people on the payroll. So the risk doesn't so much go away in that scenario as change.