Posts by Regis

French train tickets go USB

Contactless AND with USB

To people asking why should a contact-less card need a USB connector.

The reason is simple: you use the contact-less side of it to go through the gates at the station, like the Oyster card and you plug the card into the USB port your own PC at home to recharge it!

This is quite a good idea as most PC's have USB ports these days but very few have smart card readers (and even less RF-ID readers).

Dutch tax office deletes 730,000 tax returns

It's not that bad

For the Dutch Tax office this is obviously quite an embarrassement, but for the taxpayer whose tax return has been lost this is only a minor issue:

I am a Duch tax payer, and the way you file an online tax return in Holland is by downloading a little application.

Once you have filled-in everything, you type your password and send the data over.

The good thing is that the program used to do so automatically backs up the tax return on your computer. So all you have to do is run the program again and send the data once more, not that bad at all really.

The only people that would experience some annoyance would be those that deleted the data after they had send it (never a good idea in any case).