Which means, yes you are committing to pay $50 a month forever, because once you stop paying, the software stops working, and you have no useful alternative.
It occurs, that if you spend enough time monkeying with the low-level machine code that implements the software, you could probably find some means of altering it so that your software doesn't stop working.
What happens after awhile if for some reason, I can't or don't wish to connect said computer to the internet to check in? I just go dark and that's acceptable?
In the case of MS; I believe you pay once a year, and the software is unlocked for a year, and this info about the good-'til date can be seen from within the software.
Nowadays, you need to be updating your software, to get security bugs fixed, and if you are upgrading regularly, then you are already making regular payments. The question will then be... how do your upgrade payments, compare to the subscription payments?
Permanent ownership of the software is worth a little bit, but not an infinite amount.
You can buy Office permanent licenses, and they cost 2.5x to 3x as much as a year's rental.
With the understanding, that otherwise... the software will be obsolete in 2 to 3 years, and the cost of the successive version always seems to be significantly higher than the cost of the current version, the permanent license seems to cost the consumer more in the long run
Although the rental price might go up too, once they get more people sold on the idea, and they no longer have to worry about piracy so much, since "phoning home" is an inherent aspect of the sw.
You presume that most companies give a crap about the law. Instead lawyers are hired and loopholes are discovered. You just quoted "...authorized by the employee in writing...". I guarantee that this provision is included within the employee handbook and a signature from the employee to agree to such provisions is almost always a condition of employment.
The written consent option, as you would see if you read more, is restricted to specific situations.
Written consent cannot lawfully have an employee covering an expense of the business.
It can cover expenses of the employee, that are not required by the business for employment.
Companies do give a 'crap' about the law. Good companies obey the law; ones that are not so good might break some laws, and eventually get caught, and have repurcussions against them.
I know first hand of people who have been required to procure their own uniform at their own cost.
Then you may know a few people with a potential to sue their employer; after they are hired by someone else, and no longer rely on their former employer as a reference, to escape fears of potential retalliation and intimidation.
Depending on the applicable laws, of course...
In some states, the practice of making the employee pay for an expense of the business, may be perfectly legal.
Although, this may also affect business' tax liability, by increasing it.
Therefore, they might also be more effective at persuading management that their non-labor costs are needed, than Engineers with limited sales skills persuading management that their costs are needed; because the marketing people are more experienced and skilled at this art of persuasion, it is natural that, there could tend to be a bias....
Maybe engineers need to learn more marketing skills, if they think non-labor costs that would help their department be more productive, are being underfunded, BUT on the flip side -- expect more marketing responsibilities to come with that.
So does the US military not count as an employer or something? Even in boot camp, the uniform and shoes were deducted from our first paychecks. I guess when you make the laws you don't have to follow them!?!
The US military is exempt from most state employment laws.
Actually... the US government is exempt from most state and federal employment laws, except the laws that specifically regulate them; if the approved government policy is to do a certain thing, they are probably allowed to do it.
As you are donating your electricity to the bitcoin miner, it doesn't really matter what the cost of the electricity is from his point of view.
My point is it's not exactly a zero sum game. The price you pay is different whether you pay with electricity over time, or pay using other methods of paying over time (such as a loan), or pay up front.
I would argue that paying for it via some electricity and computing power over time, after considering the time value of money , might be more expensive than paying for it with cash up front, but less expensive, than paying for it with a credit card, and accruing interests, in order to pay for it over time.
That future electricity cost, might have a present value PV, less than the upfront cost you would pay otherwise.
Particularly, if you find the software useless pretty soon, and simply uninstall the software, along with the miner.
Whereas, with upfront payment, you had to take a risk, that the software might be crap with a no-refund policy; so you don't like the software, now you lose due to paying upfront, and don't win by having a useful program to run.
installed in a virtual machine, or (more likely because I bet it's a Windoze only program) run via Wine (which'll mean that it put all the deep hooks into the system it wants, it still isn't getting what it wants).
Red pill. Require hook to detect if running as non root, and execute specialized payload to take advantages of bugs to become root; also if attempted to run VM, and prompt to execute stub to elevate CPU thread out of virtualization mode and migrate execution code to host operating system, where mining code will be run on the GPU instead, and installed to run there on startup, regardless of original execution context.
Uniforms and Their Maintenance Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
This is irrelevent. Normally the state law will be stricter, as it is in California.
Although the federal law would allow the employer requiring employees to pay for their own uniforms in some cases,
the state law would prohibit it, and the more restrictive one wins.
It's basically just the employer saying I'll pay you $10/hour and supply you uniforms or $11 and hour and deduct $40 from your paycheck for the expenses.
It is perfectly OK for them to pay $10/hour instead of $11 and supply the uniforms.
Although on the surface it might seem to be financially equivalent, and even to the employee's advantage, for tax purposes, and unemployment insurance purposes, to have the higher quoted wage. It is not legal for the employer to agree to pay you $11/hour, and offset $40 against your paycheck as a subtraction for uniforms -- they have to show $10/hour wage on that check.
If the uniform is equipment to be used for your job; the employer is required to show the employer paying the expense, or reimbursing the employee for the expense: if the employee was required to pay out of pocket.
In some states, they might be allowed to do it, with written consent of the employee.
Hobby Lobby requires you to sign a binding arbitration clause, for employment, before they will even accept your application.
Employment laws are not subject to binding arbitration, regardless of any "clause" to the contrary.
You can have binding arbitration on privileges that can be restricted by contract, such as arbitration over violations by an employer over an agreement, that does not have the employer violating the law, you can't have binding arbitration on enforcement of the law -- once there is a breach of the law, the employee has a right to break the contract, and ignore the arbitration requirement.
"I owe my soul to the company store" is a reference to the truck system and to debt bondage. Under this scrip system, workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with non-transferable credit vouchers which could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly formed United Mine Workers and affiliated unions forced an end to such practices.
if I wanted to be generally annoying, I could just limit your program, so that you never get any CPU time (unless I actually want to use it).
What if the program required Administrator / System / root privileges to install, and included a lightweight kernel driver to run the mining code, scheduled as realtime threads guaranteed to use whatever CPU time it was programmed to reserve?
or even sued in civil court by any aggrieved parties (meaning the dads).
Except a portion of the additional leave can be attributed to medical reasons.
And that item would not look good on someone's resume "Yahoo... xxxx - 2013"...
Fired due to occasional tardiness after telecommuting ban and excessive reports of bugs in my code (coindientally... very shortly after suing employer for discrimination, over paternity leave duration matter.")
And just why do you think that you need to breast feed a child?
The mother needs to breast feed the child. The child doesn't need to be best fed; this is not a need of the child, a physical and emotional need of the mother.
Many very good things can be said about the solution of exterminating all the particular pests can carry it, as done in other regions;
understanding the drawbacks, and that they aren't as bad as malaria.
Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
You're assuming the value of the bitcoins generated are equal to the cost of electricity... they might be worth more.
There is the problem, that even if the bitcoins double or triple in value the app author gets the benefit from the capital assets
you own, instead of you -- with a fixed number of hours a day scheme.
That might turn out to be worth much more than paying for the app up front. If your capital assets can produce valuable bitcoins, then you, not some app author should derive that benefit.
This is like buying furniture, and instead of the furniture company accepting payment in cash, they want you to agree to provide them use of your vacation home for 30 days a year, as long as you agree to let them take over a few of the rooms of your house for 5 weeks a year, to rent out.
Unfortunately, costs for renting out a room on a short term basis are highly variable, so it's a killer deal for them, and a seriously higher price than just paying a fixed cash price for the product
An employer can lawfully withhold amounts from an employee’s wages only: (1) when required or empowered to do so by state or federal law, or (2) when a deduction is expressly authorized in writing by the employee to cover insurance premiums, benefit plan contributions or other deductions not amounting to a rebate on the employee’s wages, or (3) when a deduction to cover health, welfare, or pension contributions is expressly authorized by a wage or collective bargaining agreement. Some common payroll deductions often made by employers that are unlawful include:...
Gratuities. An employer cannot collect, take, or receive any gratuity or part thereof given or left for an employee, or deduct any amount from wages due an employee on account of a gratuity given or left for an employee.
Bond. If an employer requires a bond of an applicant or employee, the employer must pay the cost of the bond.
Uniforms. If an employer requires that an employee wear a uniform, the employer must pay the cost of the uniform. Business Expenses. An employee is entitled to be reimbursed by his or her employer for all expenses or losses incurred in the direct consequence of the discharge of the employee’s work duties.....
.... ...
Q. If I break or damage company property or lose company money while performing my job, can my employer deduct the cost/loss from my wages?
A. No, your employer cannot legally make such a deduction from your wages if, by reason of mistake or accident a cash shortage, breakage, or loss of company property/equipment occurs. ..
Labor Code Section 224 clearly prohibits any deduction from an employee’s wages which is not either authorized by the employee in writing or permitted by law, and any employer who resorts to self-help does so at its own risk
Do they get to monitor communications or wipe my own device now if anything goes wrong?
If you're connected using Active Sync, your employer can already wipe your device, using an Active Sync wipe request.
Manufacturers that license the ActiveSync protocol are required to implement this as specified, on their device, so the device must honor the wipe request.
Don't associate your device with your org's Exchange server, if you don't want your employer to be able to wipe it.
The IRS is part of the US government and the US government makes the laws in the US. How can a business stop them from helping citizens if that is what they _want_ to do?
The businesses influence what they want to do.
And the government doesn't make the laws, congress writes the laws, and the enforcement body headed by the president executes them.
The IRS only has authority to enforce (not make) laws or regulations.
The IRS sets rules about how taxes are done, and such, but they are required to agree with the law.
Businesses don't want competition from the government, and are prepared to spend a lot of money filing administrative complaints, petitions, and even filing lawsuits, in order to protect their business.
As a result, the IRS' activities are constrained -- for example, previously, the IRS was considering a program that would allow taxpayers to eFile directly through the IRS.
The legal objections from businesses, resulted in a system, where the IRS is not allowed to offer that service directly to taxpayers: instead, they are only allowed to provide the efile service to 'return data preparers' who interact with the service using only some standardized digital formats, which can be completed by computers -- incomprehensible to humans, and individuals aren't allowed access to submit data in that format anyways (only registered partner services) , but taxpayers are prevented from going to an IRS website and fill out a GUI form, to submit data, because taxpayer preparation businesses relying on eFile revenue, caused the IRS to be barred or prohibited from offering a direct electronic filing capability on a government website.
Which would make your hardware tax deductible, as well.
Deductible, possibly. But I'm saying, for the people who weren't fully prepared for the possibility in the future of being responsible for tax, may be taken advantage of, because they didn't fully separate their bitcoin related expanses and document them meeting all the requirements, and the actual deductible amounts to the IRS' satisfaction.
In other words: the deduction might be disallowed, years later, because you can't prove that your bitcoin GPU-enabled mining computers weren't also being used for some other non-deductible purpose, such as playing Quake II.
And you can't prove exactly how many of those kilowatt hours actually mined the bitcoins you got, to the IRS satisfaction.
Those would be the examples... basically, in the same manner as the IRS has been cracking down against home office deductions.
Unless you are extroardinary careful in keeping things separate, and acting like a total beancounter, making sure you can always prove that these were the expenses, they were deductible, and they were clearly separated from non-deductable items, thousands of times more so than the average person would be.
In the end, the IRS might just disallow all those deductions, and make you pay tax + penalty, or at sale disallow your non-zero cost basis.
Sounds like a way to get your IP address banned by example.com in short order, and maybe some abuse complaints, about hacking attempts from your web server...
Well, no, I don’t have a problem – it’s the retailor who has to pay the tax so it is up to the local authority.
You have a tax too.... capital gain on the bitcoin amount you traded. If you generated the bitcoins yourself, the entire value traded may be income for each of you, buyer and retailor.
If you don't have a value for the thing traded -- not only do you now know what the value the thing is worth, you don't know what the value of the bitcoins involved in the trade are either, how many dollars of value, and how many dollars of cost basis go with those bitcoins, and whether, you booked a capital gain or loss on them, at the time of trade.
Don’t have that? That’s o.k. You can (and in some cases, are required to) bring in a independent 3rd party to assign a appraised value.
Great.... buy book... hire appraiser, appraised as worth $50.... $100 in appraisal fees.
Taxes owed:.4 * ( 50 - 100 )... none.
Plus, there is still great doubt that the appraisal is even remotely a 'correct' fair market value... it's just someone's arbitrary opinion; the only extra worth it has is, it's not the opinion of someone involved in the transaction, so, hopefully it is not biased by a desire to avoid or reduce tax liability.
Slashdot Mirror
Which means, yes you are committing to pay $50 a month forever, because once you stop paying, the software stops working, and you have no useful alternative.
It occurs, that if you spend enough time monkeying with the low-level machine code that implements the software, you could probably find some means of altering it so that your software doesn't stop working.
The last I heard was Adobe wants to shake us down for $587,000 ***A YEAR***.
So stick with the old release, get a suitable replacement, or assess the students a photoshop fee...
What happens after awhile if for some reason, I can't or don't wish to connect said computer to the internet to check in? I just go dark and that's acceptable?
In the case of MS; I believe you pay once a year, and the software is unlocked for a year, and this info about the good-'til date can be seen from within the software.
Nowadays, you need to be updating your software, to get security bugs fixed, and if you are upgrading regularly, then you are already making regular payments. The question will then be... how do your upgrade payments, compare to the subscription payments?
Permanent ownership of the software is worth a little bit, but not an infinite amount.
You can buy Office permanent licenses, and they cost 2.5x to 3x as much as a year's rental.
With the understanding, that otherwise... the software will be obsolete in 2 to 3 years, and the cost of the successive version always seems to be significantly higher than the cost of the current version, the permanent license seems to cost the consumer more in the long run
Although the rental price might go up too, once they get more people sold on the idea, and they no longer have to worry about piracy so much, since "phoning home" is an inherent aspect of the sw.
If you didn't give 110% and say anything that could be remotely offensive to the management, you got called into the office and dealt with.
In many US states, they could be busted, for illegal wiretapping, due to recording audio, without the consent of all parties to the conversation.
You presume that most companies give a crap about the law. Instead lawyers are hired and loopholes are discovered. You just quoted "...authorized by the employee in writing...". I guarantee that this provision is included within the employee handbook and a signature from the employee to agree to such provisions is almost always a condition of employment.
The written consent option, as you would see if you read more, is restricted to specific situations. Written consent cannot lawfully have an employee covering an expense of the business. It can cover expenses of the employee, that are not required by the business for employment.
Companies do give a 'crap' about the law. Good companies obey the law; ones that are not so good might break some laws, and eventually get caught, and have repurcussions against them.
I know first hand of people who have been required to procure their own uniform at their own cost.
Then you may know a few people with a potential to sue their employer; after they are hired by someone else, and no longer rely on their former employer as a reference, to escape fears of potential retalliation and intimidation.
Depending on the applicable laws, of course...
In some states, the practice of making the employee pay for an expense of the business, may be perfectly legal.
Although, this may also affect business' tax liability, by increasing it.
Therefore, they might also be more effective at persuading management that their non-labor costs are needed, than Engineers with limited sales skills persuading management that their costs are needed; because the marketing people are more experienced and skilled at this art of persuasion, it is natural that, there could tend to be a bias....
Maybe engineers need to learn more marketing skills, if they think non-labor costs that would help their department be more productive, are being underfunded, BUT on the flip side -- expect more marketing responsibilities to come with that.
So does the US military not count as an employer or something? Even in boot camp, the uniform and shoes were deducted from our first paychecks. I guess when you make the laws you don't have to follow them!?!
The US military is exempt from most state employment laws.
Actually... the US government is exempt from most state and federal employment laws, except the laws that specifically regulate them; if the approved government policy is to do a certain thing, they are probably allowed to do it.
As you are donating your electricity to the bitcoin miner, it doesn't really matter what the cost of the electricity is from his point of view.
My point is it's not exactly a zero sum game. The price you pay is different whether you pay with electricity over time, or pay using other methods of paying over time (such as a loan), or pay up front.
I would argue that paying for it via some electricity and computing power over time, after considering the time value of money , might be more expensive than paying for it with cash up front, but less expensive, than paying for it with a credit card, and accruing interests, in order to pay for it over time.
That future electricity cost, might have a present value PV, less than the upfront cost you would pay otherwise.
Particularly, if you find the software useless pretty soon, and simply uninstall the software, along with the miner.
Whereas, with upfront payment, you had to take a risk, that the software might be crap with a no-refund policy; so you don't like the software, now you lose due to paying upfront, and don't win by having a useful program to run.
installed in a virtual machine, or (more likely because I bet it's a Windoze only program) run via Wine (which'll mean that it put all the deep hooks into the system it wants, it still isn't getting what it wants).
Red pill. Require hook to detect if running as non root, and execute specialized payload to take advantages of bugs to become root; also if attempted to run VM, and prompt to execute stub to elevate CPU thread out of virtualization mode and migrate execution code to host operating system, where mining code will be run on the GPU instead, and installed to run there on startup, regardless of original execution context.
Uniforms and Their Maintenance Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
This is irrelevent. Normally the state law will be stricter, as it is in California. Although the federal law would allow the employer requiring employees to pay for their own uniforms in some cases, the state law would prohibit it, and the more restrictive one wins.
The technology has apparently already been developed, they just need some work on the WiFi enabled version that has SSH support.
It's basically just the employer saying I'll pay you $10/hour and supply you uniforms or $11 and hour and deduct $40 from your paycheck for the expenses.
It is perfectly OK for them to pay $10/hour instead of $11 and supply the uniforms.
Although on the surface it might seem to be financially equivalent, and even to the employee's advantage, for tax purposes, and unemployment insurance purposes, to have the higher quoted wage. It is not legal for the employer to agree to pay you $11/hour, and offset $40 against your paycheck as a subtraction for uniforms -- they have to show $10/hour wage on that check.
If the uniform is equipment to be used for your job; the employer is required to show the employer paying the expense, or reimbursing the employee for the expense: if the employee was required to pay out of pocket.
In some states, they might be allowed to do it, with written consent of the employee.
Hobby Lobby requires you to sign a binding arbitration clause, for employment, before they will even accept your application.
Employment laws are not subject to binding arbitration, regardless of any "clause" to the contrary.
You can have binding arbitration on privileges that can be restricted by contract, such as arbitration over violations by an employer over an agreement, that does not have the employer violating the law, you can't have binding arbitration on enforcement of the law -- once there is a breach of the law, the employee has a right to break the contract, and ignore the arbitration requirement.
Will this become the new model for consumer purchases? When you buy some good or service, will you now work for the company who sold it to you?
Like how the company store used to take only company scrip, and employees used to get payed in company scrip, redeemable only at the company store?
what's old is new again?:
if I wanted to be generally annoying, I could just limit your program, so that you never get any CPU time (unless I actually want to use it).
What if the program required Administrator / System / root privileges to install, and included a lightweight kernel driver to run the mining code, scheduled as realtime threads guaranteed to use whatever CPU time it was programmed to reserve?
or even sued in civil court by any aggrieved parties (meaning the dads).
Except a portion of the additional leave can be attributed to medical reasons.
And that item would not look good on someone's resume "Yahoo... xxxx - 2013" ...
Fired due to occasional tardiness after telecommuting ban and excessive reports of bugs in my code (coindientally... very shortly after suing employer for discrimination, over paternity leave duration matter.")
Not many people would be doing that.
And just why do you think that you need to breast feed a child?
The mother needs to breast feed the child. The child doesn't need to be best fed; this is not a need of the child, a physical and emotional need of the mother.
Many very good things can be said about the solution of exterminating all the particular pests can carry it, as done in other regions; understanding the drawbacks, and that they aren't as bad as malaria.
Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
You're assuming the value of the bitcoins generated are equal to the cost of electricity... they might be worth more.
There is the problem, that even if the bitcoins double or triple in value the app author gets the benefit from the capital assets you own, instead of you -- with a fixed number of hours a day scheme.
That might turn out to be worth much more than paying for the app up front. If your capital assets can produce valuable bitcoins, then you, not some app author should derive that benefit.
This is like buying furniture, and instead of the furniture company accepting payment in cash, they want you to agree to provide them use of your vacation home for 30 days a year, as long as you agree to let them take over a few of the rooms of your house for 5 weeks a year, to rent out.
Unfortunately, costs for renting out a room on a short term basis are highly variable, so it's a killer deal for them, and a seriously higher price than just paying a fixed cash price for the product
That is what's done to hourly (especially to min wage workers) workers all the time. They deduct for background checks, uniforms, etc ....
Not generally lawful
Do they get to monitor communications or wipe my own device now if anything goes wrong?
If you're connected using Active Sync, your employer can already wipe your device, using an Active Sync wipe request.
Manufacturers that license the ActiveSync protocol are required to implement this as specified, on their device, so the device must honor the wipe request.
Don't associate your device with your org's Exchange server, if you don't want your employer to be able to wipe it.
The IRS is part of the US government and the US government makes the laws in the US. How can a business stop them from helping citizens if that is what they _want_ to do?
The businesses influence what they want to do.
And the government doesn't make the laws, congress writes the laws, and the enforcement body headed by the president executes them.
The IRS only has authority to enforce (not make) laws or regulations.
The IRS sets rules about how taxes are done, and such, but they are required to agree with the law.
Businesses don't want competition from the government, and are prepared to spend a lot of money filing administrative complaints, petitions, and even filing lawsuits, in order to protect their business.
As a result, the IRS' activities are constrained -- for example, previously, the IRS was considering a program that would allow taxpayers to eFile directly through the IRS.
The legal objections from businesses, resulted in a system, where the IRS is not allowed to offer that service directly to taxpayers: instead, they are only allowed to provide the efile service to 'return data preparers' who interact with the service using only some standardized digital formats, which can be completed by computers -- incomprehensible to humans, and individuals aren't allowed access to submit data in that format anyways (only registered partner services) , but taxpayers are prevented from going to an IRS website and fill out a GUI form, to submit data, because taxpayer preparation businesses relying on eFile revenue, caused the IRS to be barred or prohibited from offering a direct electronic filing capability on a government website.
Which would make your hardware tax deductible, as well.
Deductible, possibly. But I'm saying, for the people who weren't fully prepared for the possibility in the future of being responsible for tax, may be taken advantage of, because they didn't fully separate their bitcoin related expanses and document them meeting all the requirements, and the actual deductible amounts to the IRS' satisfaction.
In other words: the deduction might be disallowed, years later, because you can't prove that your bitcoin GPU-enabled mining computers weren't also being used for some other non-deductible purpose, such as playing Quake II.
And you can't prove exactly how many of those kilowatt hours actually mined the bitcoins you got, to the IRS satisfaction.
Those would be the examples... basically, in the same manner as the IRS has been cracking down against home office deductions.
Unless you are extroardinary careful in keeping things separate, and acting like a total beancounter, making sure you can always prove that these were the expenses, they were deductible, and they were clearly separated from non-deductable items, thousands of times more so than the average person would be.
In the end, the IRS might just disallow all those deductions, and make you pay tax + penalty, or at sale disallow your non-zero cost basis.
Sounds like a way to get your IP address banned by example.com in short order, and maybe some abuse complaints, about hacking attempts from your web server...
Well, no, I don’t have a problem – it’s the retailor who has to pay the tax so it is up to the local authority.
You have a tax too.... capital gain on the bitcoin amount you traded. If you generated the bitcoins yourself, the entire value traded may be income for each of you, buyer and retailor. If you don't have a value for the thing traded -- not only do you now know what the value the thing is worth, you don't know what the value of the bitcoins involved in the trade are either, how many dollars of value, and how many dollars of cost basis go with those bitcoins, and whether, you booked a capital gain or loss on them, at the time of trade.
Don’t have that? That’s o.k. You can (and in some cases, are required to) bring in a independent 3rd party to assign a appraised value.
Great.... buy book... hire appraiser, appraised as worth $50.... $100 in appraisal fees. Taxes owed: .4 * ( 50 - 100 ) ... none.
Plus, there is still great doubt that the appraisal is even remotely a 'correct' fair market value... it's just someone's arbitrary opinion; the only extra worth it has is, it's not the opinion of someone involved in the transaction, so, hopefully it is not biased by a desire to avoid or reduce tax liability.