Any idiot typing in their credit card number on an unencrypted connection? Well, they deserve what they get, basically. Even my dad is paranoid about the little yellow padlock and he's only just graduated to two-finger typing (two index fingers, mind you, but it's an improvement!). Hell, he phoned me up one day because he was buying something and the site had a GREEN padlock icon. Gosh. But he had the brains to stop, think, and check in before he typed ANYTHING in.
Pre-HTTPS, which is a long while ago, yes you could grab a lot over the network. Email is probably your biggest target - still a lot of unencrypted email sent around, people obviously haven't heard of SSL/TLS when it comes to SMTP. But anyone sending their credit card number by email - again, they deserve what they get, because at any stage it could end up transmitted or stored unencrypted.
Nowadays, if you can sniff anything, there should be alarm bells ringing. Hell, even the good guys who want to sniff SSL have to basically make all clients trust their fake-root certificate in order to do so. There's no way to sniff SSL/TLS traffic on clean device without being in possession of the target website's private keys, or getting HUGE warnings about how your connection might be unencrypted, basically.
That said, there's a lot worse you can do, for instance intercepting DNS via ARP spoofing and then redirecting to your own "google.com" with a self-signed certificate that you've got from somewhere trusted by the client, or similar. But it's a lot less of a viable real-world attack.
And most people who work from home or hotels have now been forced onto VPN's by their local data protection laws. Good luck sniffing anything on those, even what DNS server they are using.
But, sure, if you gave me a capable connection that sniffed the open Internet, you'd find some fool - and you'd maybe get some details out of an email or two, or passwords to websites, that you can then use for further attacks.
Fact is, though - pretty much you're safe as a casual browser, so long as you keep an eye out for proper security whenever something sensitive is requested. And the people with something worth losing are using VPN's. I know all my "hotel"/"pub"/"airport" access goes through my personal VPN, or not at all.
That's like saying that the OpenGL group is heavily supported by ATI and nVidia, and the suggestion to remove GPU's from computers in favour of a little man who draws the screen for you breaks their business model.
It doesn't mean that having the little man ISN'T a stupid idea, or that ATI/nVidia should be ignored for their opinion.
Assume for a second that Google *are* anti-DRM. Assume it has nothing to do with their business or (equally) is SOLELY because it affects their way to make money. Who are they going to support? Probably groups that are anti-DRM. Who listens to the EFF? People who want the opinion of an anti-DRM organisation.
Thus is Google support for EFF something that should be expected anyway, or is the EFF some huge front to push on Google's behalf? You can't really draw any conclusion from the facts given.
If two linked items seem unfairly biased or somehow malicious, try to reverse the positions and see what happens.
If we could replicate all the elements necessary to provide a convincing analog of reality (like in The Matrix, hinted at in the article), then surely there is nothing different for the brain to process.
I hereby posit a theory that asnosmic animals also don't activate the parts of their brain related to smell, nor those in a smell-free environment.
However, if we could create a virtual analog of smell that stimulated the smell's senses, chances are the brain patterns would be strikingly similar to "real" smell.
Like "virtual" servers - we don't have a 100% perfect analog, but we get closer all the time. However, the article summary appears to draw the conclusion that this means we'll never have The Matrix (or similar) because we'd always be able to tell we were in a virtual environment because there's no smell (for instance).
What we're basically saying is "a rat in a box but with fake images whizzing past it's eyes can smell that it's not in the 'real' world". Which is a bit obvious, and quite misleading to then extrapolate to large things. I imagine any amount of other senses will also give it away too (not least proprioception, temperature sensing, air pressure sensing, etc.).
What are we supposed to draw from the article? That virtual worlds won't be perfect until we do that? Or that we can't ever have a virtual world that's perfect (which seems nonsense even if it's not possible yet)? Or that scientists conduct experiments where the conclusion is a sure-gone conclusion before you even start and don't bother to compensate (e.g. introducing smells in synchronicity with the virtual world)?
Hang up the phone. Drive. 20 years ago you DID NOT HAVE THAT PHONE. What would you have done then? You'd have driven, and then called from your destination.
There is NOTHING that urgent that you have to do it in the car and can't pull over. Especially not a phone call. CERTAINLY not a text.
Drive the damn car, and enjoy the peace and quiet or some gentle music as you travel. Stop for people on crossings. Give that bike a bit of extra room to make his life easier. ANY and ALL "slowdowns" on your travel will have such a tiny, insignificant effect on your actual arrival time that it's just not worth worrying about. And any savings can be wiped out by the tiniest bit of roadworks or bad timing on the traffic light or whatever else.
Enjoy driving again. And throw away the god-damn phone.
Please also apply this if you are in the following categories:
- Waiting to pull out on a busy road and so distracted on your phone that other drivers DELIBERATELY do not let you out (or you don't even see the gap because you're too busy talking). - Have your sat-nav front-and-center of your driving position, splat-bang in the way of actually seeing real objects (they talk for a reason, and can be put on your dash for absolutely no cost whatsoever). - Eating at the wheel. If you're that hungry, you can't concentrate properly. If you're in a rush, you're going to kill someone and then you'll be later than ANYTHING else. If you're doing it because you need something for your hands to do: DRIVE. - Smoking at the wheel. I don't care about your personal habits, I'm not even advocating a rigid "two hands on wheel at all times", necessarily (hell, that even makes putting your indicators on or changing gear almost impossible). I just care about you not having a burning object in your hand that is dripping ash into your lap that you'll try to blow out of the window or throw the cigarette out, and you have to keep puffing on while trying to drive. STOP IT.
It's not hard. Barely takes ten minutes. We use one in work, tied to our domain.
Install Openfire on your servers (Windows/Linux). Set it up. Install Pidgin on your clients (or whatever you want to use). Set them up. Stick a SRV record in your DNS (optional, the above is fine for an internal system). Done.
Because I'd like to know what random group I should completely alienate on the basis of a single lifestyle choice they happen to share with a terrorist.
And, yes, I'm amazed that people are surprised that a "toxic to humans" substance is actually beneficial to plants. When was the last time you ate fertilizer / bug-spray / weedkiller straight out of the bottle and lived to tell the tale?
1) Your kids probably don't want it. How much of your grandfather's-era of music would you actually listen to? Not much. Sure, they'd like to keep a photo or two for "show-and-tell" but it won't mean much to them later, and 99.9% of what you want to give them, they won't be interested in. When people die, they have a lot of crap to go through, and most of it gets destroyed or sold - nobody keeps EVERYTHING. The first things to go are mass-market commercial items that can easily be replicated / recovered.
2) Your kids won't know what to do with it. It's become hard to play web video from 10-15 years ago (when was the last time you installed Quicktime / Realplayer?). Doesn't matter what you do, they probably won't be able to play it (DRM, etc.) - you can scream open-source all you like, the fact is that by the time they grow up, unless they are as geeky as you, they won't be able to play it.
3) Out of all the crap I could have "inherited", I kept only what was personal and important. There probably *WAS* value in the old 78's that I took to the charity shop, but to be honest, it wasn't sentimental value so who cares? There's no way I could listen to the music on them and tolerate the slow-droning that passed for music back then. And the stuff I did keep was daft, for a reason and - without exception - tangible. There's enough non-tangible stuff in my head from dead people without some "virtual" music that I could pick up in seconds if I really wanted it.
4) When they get older, they'll care less. They will be working and could buy your favourite music on the format of the day for nostalgia, if they wanted it. Chances are they won't dig out the old CD player except to blow the dust off and show the kids how music "used to be" (like previous generations would demonstrate their phonographs etc.). Fast forward a generation and all your Netflix accounts (assuming that company is even AROUND by then) won't mean anything to your family. That favourite movie that they always snuggled up to watch as children? Chances are they don't remember as adults or - if they do - they'd prefer it on a convenient modern format which they would buy themselves anyway.
5) The generation problem. I know things about my grandparents. I know next-to-nothing about my great-grandparents. I'd never seen them, they were dead before I was born. Hence, I don't really have more than a passing interest in them. I know zero about their parents and the further back you go, the less I know and the less I care. I probably *am* related to someone famous at some point - almost everybody is and even simple maths provides the answer - every famous person of ten generations ago probably has nearly a thousand people who can trace their ancestry directly to them today, and millions more whom can get there with third-cousins twice-removed or whatever.
Sure, it'd be cool to have a piece of documentation etc. for filling in a family tree but - thinking about it - my dad probably does have that kind of stuff about his own granddad. But why would he show it to me / pass it to me? I have no connection with the person it came from and it would mean almost nothing.
Now consider what it would mean to see a list of music that your grandfather liked, or your great-grandfather. Now consider how much it would be different to have that music in some online-only account that's tricky to get into (and almost certainly the details will be lost by then), impossible to play if you do, may not even exist any more, etc. It's not as much as you think.
And by then most of that stuff will be so old-hat it won't even be put onto TV / radio as it would have been repeated a billion times and gone through the "gold" nostalgia channels and be next-to-worthless, like asking me to watch something that my great-grandad saw at a music hall. Interesting. Once. For a minute. That's about it.
6) All this effort takes you away from your kids. They honestly won't give a shit beyond lip-service and keeping
The thing about value is that it's entirely relative. The value of a Bitcoin means nothing to you if you don't have any. The current value (low, but certainly nowhere near the lowest its ever been) means it's an ideal time to buy (if you don't mind the risk, which many don't). The high value - no matter how brief - probably made a lot of people very rich in real terms. People were happy to give them $266 for something that, today, is only "worth" $100.
The only problem is people who think a currency will ever stay still, not drop in value, or that putting $100,000 into an account for 25 years and not touching it while others gamble it away is a worthwhile venture. The people who play the market and buy low, sell high are making money with Bitcoin now, today. Thus, it has *value* in terms of its ability to make real cash using it, as any other commodity / currency.
Which would you rather have now? Zimbabwean dollars or Bitcoin? Which would you rather have had ten years ago? Which do you think you'd rather have in ten years time? It's all a guessing game and the people who point out that the price "plummeted" to a certain level etc. in horrified terms as if its the end of the world, but would rather point out the volatility rather than TAKING ADVANTAGE of that volatility and almost doubling their money - maybe they aren't cut out to tell me what financial products I should be using, or currencies I should be investing in.
I am buy no means an investor, a financeer, I've never owned a stock of shares in my life, etc. But even if can see that it doesn't matter what price Bitcoin had yesterday or what it will have tomorrow unless you're USING them. And if you are using them, it doesn't matter what price they had the day before you bought them or the day after you sold them.
If someone would like to give me $40 for the $20 worth of test Bitcoins that I put onto my Bitcoin wallet today, I don't really care what the value of the Bitcoin is, was or will be. That's a good deal. And while people were willing to spend $266 on something that you could have bought for $100 a few days before - surely that's a missed opportunity.
It's all about risk. But next time you write a Bitcoin comment, replace Bitcoin with Euro or Dollar or whatever else. Chances are that the same thing is happening with real-world currency. It doesn't mean that the world collapsed, that the Euro is dead, you can't buy bread, or that (if the Euro is dead) it was because of the software it was based on and not high-up investment companies lying about the value of junk they were selling to banks.
Technically, one of the best investments in the world was a Royal Mail First Class Stamp (to send letters). You could buy them 50 years ago and they would still be valid postage for a first class letter today - they cost pence back then and an equivalent is nearly 100 times that today. The only problem is buying them, predicting that, and then finding buyers for them now - none of which are to do with the actual price fluctuation.
Hell, the price of my fuel tank varies every single day I look, and even from just a few hundred yards of travel - up AND down. If I could find a legal way to make money from that, you know that I would.
Data Protection Act (1984) UK, subsequently revised several times to clarify its intent.
You can write to ANY company, entity or organisation (even a website) and DEMAND all information they are storing on you. They may charge you only a reasonable administrative cost. Even applies to CCTV of yourself (but, obviously, in that case you have to give them enough information to determine who you are on their CCTV systems and can't just expect them to trawl years of video looking for your left arm).
How can you know whether a company is distributing incorrect / damaging information about yourself without the right to demand to see that information, the right to change it where it is erroneous, and the ability to control what they are allowed to do with it.
I doubt it. And Duke3D would be closer but still quite bad. Either you and I have different definitions of playable, or the OP isn't the one full of crap
Hell, you'd be lucky to do 320x240 in Quake with that processor, and the min spec was a Pentium (that was widely advertised at the time, had been out for three years, and was widely condemned as being a "high" system requirement for a game at the time).
I have seen Doom run on a 25Mhz 386. It *was* playable. I know, because that's the only machine I EVER played Doom on. I'll give you that one.
But Duke? No, not really. Sure, you could make Quake/Duke better if you had a Voodoo or similar card and the versions of the software that supported that, but the chances are you couldn't emulate that on a RPi any quicker either.
The only ones that I remember being ubiquitous were CWSDPMI and DOS/4GW, mainly because they came bundled with compilers of the time. The only other one I recognise the name of is GO32, but that's a CWSDPMI predecessor by the looks of it.
And DOS/4GW was indeed bundled into DOOM.
I think the claims of the capabilities are stretching it a bit in terms of sheer processor power, the features needed in the virtual machine it runs, and the amount of usefulness there would be in emulating games at pathetic rates that even your smartphone can out-do.
"I'm sorry, your car doesn't have a standardised fuel cap. Is the fix to:
1) make your car have a standard fuel cap? 2) force everyone to use your new fuel cap ? 3) make pumps sense by the numberplate which model of car they are filling up and change the fuel cap to the right one each time?"
Whatever option you choose, 3) is really incredibly stupid and puts the onus on fuel stations to make the changes rather than the idiot that wanted to be different for no good reason. It might be *A* solution, but *THE* solution is to just look at the guy who can't fuel up their car with a "You pillock" look until they realise they've bought a turkey - and then let Ford / GM / whoever supply an adaptor to him rather than you having to carry 20 adaptors for all the different types of fuel cap there are.
All you've done is encourage Safari to be the exception to the rule, with a broken implementation that now doesn't have to be fixed (because you "fixed it" for them on your end).
By way of analogy, if - say - a browser can't upload more than a 2Gb file, then you're choosing to detect the browser that can't, chop the file up into little bits just for them, and pass it on. You're fixing their crappy browser for them, so you have to take all the burden for their mistakes. That's just not sensible compared to say "Sorry, you're browser is crap and can't handle downloads the size of your average DVD from 5 years ago. Maybe you should investigate alternatives."
The day that the first website was able to detect what client was being used to view it, we were in trouble.
Whether it was people trying to "fix" ancient Opera (and still some sites had such tests until very recently), people telling you what browser to use (i.e. not accepting Netscape / IE of certain versions - I still know of a UK bank that stops you logging in as certain browsers, but fake the user agent string and it works 100%), or just plain faffing about (i.e. iPlayer detecting the user-agent to see if it's "allowed" to download the iPad streams, etc.).
The day that you were able to tell what someone was running and make a decision based on that, we basically lost the point of a standard. If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard. We would also have killed off abominations like non-standard HTML tags and everything else.
If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem - you manage it and if it ever affects my usage of it, I'll be complaining and going elsewhere. If you have a browser that can't change the user-agent at will and still work, then that's a crap browser (purely because the user should be in control of the website they are displaying and not the other way around). Precisely because we're all too stupid to just make browsers and websites conform to a common standard.
Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else. The number of times it's stopped me doing something I wanted is vanishingly small (probably 4-5 incidents in all that time), and I've blamed the website every time - not Opera (because in every instance, faking the user-agent to something else has fixed the problem, so it's not the browser). It's cost several small companies my custom (not that they would be able to tell, or care).
Fact is, my life is too short to play games with accessing your website. If I can't, I move on. End of. I've even moved my bank accounts because of it (NatWest, in the UK, had a website that refused to work with anything but ancient versions of IE or Netscape - yes, it actually said Netscape even in the era of Firefox - and they refused to fix it "for security reasons", so I moved on. Presumably they've fixed it now, but I don't really care because the damage was done by not being able to log into it at my convenience).
You have a website because you want people to come to it and see your content. Hiding that content, because you don't know how to properly display it, is so counter-productive, I can't even begin to explain it. If the fancy shit you're pulling messed up my browser (which conforms to all the ACID tests and general compatibility with EVERY OTHER SITE on the planet), maybe you should take that fancy shit off?
My thoughts exactly, that's part of why I suspected from the start that a lot of people just don't get it.
VAT. The VA stands for Value Added. A company pays tax on the value it has added to a product, nothing more.
So if a company buys in parts from China, puts them into a device, and sells the device (onto another company, consumer, whoever), then it pays VAT on the things it bought and CHARGES VAT on the things it sold. The difference in VAT is the only thing it has to actually *PAY* to the government.
So if it changes prices, and the things that cost it £50 to build it then has to sell for £40, it actually GETS MONEY BACK from the government in the form of a VAT rebate. If it sells them for £50, it pays no VAT (effectively). If it sells them for £60 it pays the VAT on the £10 only (it pays VAT on £50 but it credited VAT on £60).
That's basically all there is to it. Every company in the EU knows how to deal with it and if they aren't "adding value", they don't pay VAT. It's basically a profit-based tax. No profit, no tax.
In terms of the end consumer, the only person who doesn't ever "add value", they pay a 20% sales tax, in effect. But because the company that produces it isn't subjected to lots of complicated and high taxes, and it isn't charged every time it goes through another company's hands, the price ends up about the same as anywhere else.
There is *nothing* stopping a company selling things cheaper with VAT. In fact, it positively encourages them to!
Yeah, cos what I said is that there's no medicinal use whatsoever for them, and nobody ever sees any benefit. "a LOT of their action is ENTIRELY placebo...".
You're comparing a tested, reasoned use of something that I didn't mention (ibuprofen), in a comparison against other drugs that has a significant, noticeable health benefit for yourself against people who carry 48-packs of the things in a handbag and take one every time they feel a little out of sorts (and get through a pack or more a week, in some cases).
For reference, my ex- was in severe chronic pain with a condition that made her knee-joints turn backwards, every joint in her body dislocate, and several years of the damage that causes - and made her immune to most forms of anaesthetic. She was prescribed something insane like 48 paracetamol a week, plus co-codamol (people don't realise that paracetamol is more often used alongside other drugs in medicinal use because it has little effect on other drugs), plus more serious drugs and numerous other painkillers, and the only reason they couldn't do more is that she chose not to start on the morphine-based drugs that are addiction-forming.
The fact is that THE VAST MAJORITY of headaches in people go away without treatment in the same time as the said "painkillers" act. The fact that you are not in that vast majority - the ones I'm complaining about - means that you are, by definition, not in the normal ranges of those drugs that you see hanging up in your local supermarket. You shouldn't be relying on them, especially not for severe headaches. All you've done is mask the problem by exactly the things I'm complaining about.
Honestly? You should go to a doctor, and have been to a doctor, and had the doctor tell you why ibuprofen works and not others. I hope you did.
If a headache puts you out of commission, tanking up on drugs from the supermarket isn't the solution except in the very short term. The question is not "why does the drug work" in your case, as much as "why do you get those severe headaches?".
That's entirely different to "Why do people with an everyday, bog-standard, minor headache tank up on things that they offer in the supermarket and are inferior to caffeine?"
Except the UK has VAT too, so there's your argument blown out of the water.
What is it that the US has against VAT? You have sales taxes etc. instead that perform the same purpose. Do you even understand how VAT works (i.e. it only really affects the end-consumer and not the manufacturer or any of the businesses involved in supplying the product)?
I think it's a blanket hatred of something that you don't understand and that you think you have no equivalent of. Clue: Almost all developed countries in the world have the same amount of taxation on the average person. The exceptions are those with blanket-taxation rates and simplified taxation systems that actually tend to lower overall taxation.
You can whine about the TV Licence "tax", road "tax", VAT, and everything else that you like, the fact is that pretty much everyone pays the same amount of tax in all countries.
And hence, the question of why the UK software prices differ from Europe's (literally 30 miles south of us) so vastly is just as important as why Australian prices differ from the US (in fact, more so). And none of it can be attributed to any one tax that's not present in the other country. In fact, almost all of it can be attributed to just one thing - the people buying it don't complain enough.
How many people carry "headache tablets"(i.e. paracetamol / aspirin) around with them? How many rely on things like Lemsip and other cold remedies?
Fact is, they make almost zero difference to how you feel or how long you'll have the headache/cold. (I make a specific exception for migraine, but then you should be having your proper migraine tablets and not headache tablets).
The amount of people who carry this stuff around with them all day, every day is scary. That's before you even get into what other medications they are taking, the antibacterial soaps, hand cleansers, etc. We are quite literally just setting our immune systems up for failure in the longer term.
I don't think for a second that I'm "healthy" in any way, but I avoid taking these things for ridiculous conditions. Not out of some moral belief, not out of some disregard for science, not out of some "green" agenda, but because I just don't think they help me at all. It's amazing how many people will offer you tablets if you mention you have a minor headache. The "solution" for them when they have the same problem is to dig into their own private pharmacy and take something.
Babies are smothered in talc, E45 cream and god-knows-what. Now think, have we been doing that for thousands of years? No. We've had equivalents at certain points in history but never on the quantity we have now. It's all a modern response. Yes, we believe it stops some kind of minor suffering but it's far from necessary and we have no way to tell what would have happened without it anyway until we withhold it. Chances are, for everything from headaches to runny noses, the symptoms would have cleared up at exactly the same time with or without this stuff.
I refuse headache tablets. Not because I want to be seen as a health freak, but because I don't think they are necessary. I believe a lot of their action is ENTIRELY placebo. Sure, they have active ingredients but we take them in the belief it will make things better even if the active ingredient is so incredibly watered down and not targeted to those particular symptoms that it makes no difference. It's a "medical" form of homeopathy.
The fact is, if you can buy it in a supermarket, it's unlikely to do much more than anything else you could buy in the supermarket (e.g. honey on a sore-throat, caffeine in coffee, etc.). If it did, they wouldn't be available like that and you'd have to go the pharmacy instead.
Try it for a year. Refuse tablets and similar treatments for minor conditions. See how many people whinge and moan at you for not taking them. See how much longer your condition lasts, or worse it is than anyone else (it won't be). It's a royal pain in the arse because of so many people saying you should take this or that or "I have something in my bag for that", though, I tell you.
Given that that's possibly the shortest Slashdot story ever, it manages to make only two assertions, both of which are confirmed as false (by the linked articles themselves, no less).
And I heard about this story about 6 hours ago on my way in to work and, honestly, didn't care then.
No longer "News for Nerds" Now "Inaccurate insights for imbeciles".
WHSmith don't have a single ebook in their store without DRM, and deal with lots of the big-names and publishers.
It's highly unlikely they wouldn't just have a standard contract that says they only publish DRM books (because that's ALL they do, and sell their own e-Reader devices because of precisely that). It's going to be someone agreeing to WHSmith's terms and not the other way around.
(Hint: In the UK, WHSmith's is much bigger than you might think. My father-in-law (a well-published author across a variety of subjects from school textbooks - including some used as standard texts - to children's books to books for adults on grammar) was once refused publishing of a book because "WHSmith don't have a category for that". Literally, every agent he tried gave him the same answer for that book (and only that book) and it never got published because of it.
Then somewhere along the line, someone still gave away that right, even if their own contract didn't allow them to do so.
It's a contract dispute. It's not WHSmith being evil, someone, somewhere would have agreed to terms that the author wouldn't have agreed to themselves.
I just posted on the original site but I doubt it will pass moderation so:
Not being funny, but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first? I mean, as far as I can see, this is a contract dispute. Someone, somewhere has a contract with you that says whether or not they can add DRM to your book. Youâ(TM)ve signed it, or not. It might say either way is permitted or nothing at all about DRM. But presumably that person has signed something with another person who has signed something and, eventually, thereâ(TM)s a line in there somewhere that says they can or canâ(TM)t do this. Whoever signed that line and didnâ(TM)t pass it back down the contracts is in breach of something. I highly doubt that WHSmith does not have a contract that says âoeWe will add DRMâ in some manner, itâ(TM)s just a question of who signed it and gave away more rights to the work than they were allowed to.
And given that itâ(TM)s your copyright (presumably), then bundling that content in any way you donâ(TM)t like is a copyright violation. Thatâ(TM)s NOT the format you provided it to them in, and no different to them selling it with a modified front cover, or with the words in Chapter 2 altered. So just contact your agent/publisher and get them to have a word â" there should be no walls of silence on that chain, because youâ(TM)re all contracted to do your jobs. Itâ(TM)s not like an end-consumer where you have to hope to get through to the right person at customer services.
Whatâ(TM)s happened is no different to not selling the electronic rights to someone and then finding that your publisher has published it electronically (actually happened to a friend of mine who writes childrenâ(TM)s books â" hell, theyâ(TM)ve even had a book that they sent to their agent published without their knowledge, and they only found out when they found it in a second-hand bookshop, complete with their name and cover!). And itâ(TM)s a contract dispute. And you either signed a contract that allowed it, or not. As such, you just get your agent/publisher to look into it, give it a month to sort out, and then just issue a nasty legal letter to pull it. Posting online about it and in forum posts just seems amateur and likely to backfire in terms of NDA clauses etc. in contracts along the way.
And I reckon youâ(TM)ll find that one of the contracts you signed either says they can do this or, somewhere along the way, someone has a gap between the contracts they receive and the contracts they sign that allows this to slip through until â" as youâ(TM)ve done â" someone objects.
Stop messing about with open letters, hearsay, and forum posts and ask your publisher for an explanation in a nice recorded-delivery letter from your local legal representative.
Slashdot Mirror
Any idiot typing in their credit card number on an unencrypted connection? Well, they deserve what they get, basically. Even my dad is paranoid about the little yellow padlock and he's only just graduated to two-finger typing (two index fingers, mind you, but it's an improvement!). Hell, he phoned me up one day because he was buying something and the site had a GREEN padlock icon. Gosh. But he had the brains to stop, think, and check in before he typed ANYTHING in.
Pre-HTTPS, which is a long while ago, yes you could grab a lot over the network. Email is probably your biggest target - still a lot of unencrypted email sent around, people obviously haven't heard of SSL/TLS when it comes to SMTP. But anyone sending their credit card number by email - again, they deserve what they get, because at any stage it could end up transmitted or stored unencrypted.
Nowadays, if you can sniff anything, there should be alarm bells ringing. Hell, even the good guys who want to sniff SSL have to basically make all clients trust their fake-root certificate in order to do so. There's no way to sniff SSL/TLS traffic on clean device without being in possession of the target website's private keys, or getting HUGE warnings about how your connection might be unencrypted, basically.
That said, there's a lot worse you can do, for instance intercepting DNS via ARP spoofing and then redirecting to your own "google.com" with a self-signed certificate that you've got from somewhere trusted by the client, or similar. But it's a lot less of a viable real-world attack.
And most people who work from home or hotels have now been forced onto VPN's by their local data protection laws. Good luck sniffing anything on those, even what DNS server they are using.
But, sure, if you gave me a capable connection that sniffed the open Internet, you'd find some fool - and you'd maybe get some details out of an email or two, or passwords to websites, that you can then use for further attacks.
Fact is, though - pretty much you're safe as a casual browser, so long as you keep an eye out for proper security whenever something sensitive is requested. And the people with something worth losing are using VPN's. I know all my "hotel"/"pub"/"airport" access goes through my personal VPN, or not at all.
That's like saying that the OpenGL group is heavily supported by ATI and nVidia, and the suggestion to remove GPU's from computers in favour of a little man who draws the screen for you breaks their business model.
It doesn't mean that having the little man ISN'T a stupid idea, or that ATI/nVidia should be ignored for their opinion.
Assume for a second that Google *are* anti-DRM. Assume it has nothing to do with their business or (equally) is SOLELY because it affects their way to make money. Who are they going to support? Probably groups that are anti-DRM. Who listens to the EFF? People who want the opinion of an anti-DRM organisation.
Thus is Google support for EFF something that should be expected anyway, or is the EFF some huge front to push on Google's behalf? You can't really draw any conclusion from the facts given.
If two linked items seem unfairly biased or somehow malicious, try to reverse the positions and see what happens.
Define "virtual world".
If we could replicate all the elements necessary to provide a convincing analog of reality (like in The Matrix, hinted at in the article), then surely there is nothing different for the brain to process.
I hereby posit a theory that asnosmic animals also don't activate the parts of their brain related to smell, nor those in a smell-free environment.
However, if we could create a virtual analog of smell that stimulated the smell's senses, chances are the brain patterns would be strikingly similar to "real" smell.
Like "virtual" servers - we don't have a 100% perfect analog, but we get closer all the time. However, the article summary appears to draw the conclusion that this means we'll never have The Matrix (or similar) because we'd always be able to tell we were in a virtual environment because there's no smell (for instance).
What we're basically saying is "a rat in a box but with fake images whizzing past it's eyes can smell that it's not in the 'real' world". Which is a bit obvious, and quite misleading to then extrapolate to large things. I imagine any amount of other senses will also give it away too (not least proprioception, temperature sensing, air pressure sensing, etc.).
What are we supposed to draw from the article? That virtual worlds won't be perfect until we do that? Or that we can't ever have a virtual world that's perfect (which seems nonsense even if it's not possible yet)? Or that scientists conduct experiments where the conclusion is a sure-gone conclusion before you even start and don't bother to compensate (e.g. introducing smells in synchronicity with the virtual world)?
Hang up the phone. Drive. 20 years ago you DID NOT HAVE THAT PHONE. What would you have done then? You'd have driven, and then called from your destination.
There is NOTHING that urgent that you have to do it in the car and can't pull over. Especially not a phone call. CERTAINLY not a text.
Drive the damn car, and enjoy the peace and quiet or some gentle music as you travel. Stop for people on crossings. Give that bike a bit of extra room to make his life easier. ANY and ALL "slowdowns" on your travel will have such a tiny, insignificant effect on your actual arrival time that it's just not worth worrying about. And any savings can be wiped out by the tiniest bit of roadworks or bad timing on the traffic light or whatever else.
Enjoy driving again. And throw away the god-damn phone.
Please also apply this if you are in the following categories:
- Waiting to pull out on a busy road and so distracted on your phone that other drivers DELIBERATELY do not let you out (or you don't even see the gap because you're too busy talking).
- Have your sat-nav front-and-center of your driving position, splat-bang in the way of actually seeing real objects (they talk for a reason, and can be put on your dash for absolutely no cost whatsoever).
- Eating at the wheel. If you're that hungry, you can't concentrate properly. If you're in a rush, you're going to kill someone and then you'll be later than ANYTHING else. If you're doing it because you need something for your hands to do: DRIVE.
- Smoking at the wheel. I don't care about your personal habits, I'm not even advocating a rigid "two hands on wheel at all times", necessarily (hell, that even makes putting your indicators on or changing gear almost impossible). I just care about you not having a burning object in your hand that is dripping ash into your lap that you'll try to blow out of the window or throw the cigarette out, and you have to keep puffing on while trying to drive. STOP IT.
Great suggestion for a localised programming language there, then.
It's not hard. Barely takes ten minutes. We use one in work, tied to our domain.
Install Openfire on your servers (Windows/Linux). Set it up. Install Pidgin on your clients (or whatever you want to use). Set them up.
Stick a SRV record in your DNS (optional, the above is fine for an internal system).
Done.
Are you a Christian, or an Athiest, or what?
Because I'd like to know what random group I should completely alienate on the basis of a single lifestyle choice they happen to share with a terrorist.
Up next: All brown-eyed people are murderers.
Idiot.
Dogs and chocolate, for example.
And, yes, I'm amazed that people are surprised that a "toxic to humans" substance is actually beneficial to plants. When was the last time you ate fertilizer / bug-spray / weedkiller straight out of the bottle and lived to tell the tale?
Nice. Because that's the worst thing to do to a Lithium-ion, for example.
Think bigger.
1) Your kids probably don't want it. How much of your grandfather's-era of music would you actually listen to? Not much. Sure, they'd like to keep a photo or two for "show-and-tell" but it won't mean much to them later, and 99.9% of what you want to give them, they won't be interested in. When people die, they have a lot of crap to go through, and most of it gets destroyed or sold - nobody keeps EVERYTHING. The first things to go are mass-market commercial items that can easily be replicated / recovered.
2) Your kids won't know what to do with it. It's become hard to play web video from 10-15 years ago (when was the last time you installed Quicktime / Realplayer?). Doesn't matter what you do, they probably won't be able to play it (DRM, etc.) - you can scream open-source all you like, the fact is that by the time they grow up, unless they are as geeky as you, they won't be able to play it.
3) Out of all the crap I could have "inherited", I kept only what was personal and important. There probably *WAS* value in the old 78's that I took to the charity shop, but to be honest, it wasn't sentimental value so who cares? There's no way I could listen to the music on them and tolerate the slow-droning that passed for music back then. And the stuff I did keep was daft, for a reason and - without exception - tangible. There's enough non-tangible stuff in my head from dead people without some "virtual" music that I could pick up in seconds if I really wanted it.
4) When they get older, they'll care less. They will be working and could buy your favourite music on the format of the day for nostalgia, if they wanted it. Chances are they won't dig out the old CD player except to blow the dust off and show the kids how music "used to be" (like previous generations would demonstrate their phonographs etc.). Fast forward a generation and all your Netflix accounts (assuming that company is even AROUND by then) won't mean anything to your family. That favourite movie that they always snuggled up to watch as children? Chances are they don't remember as adults or - if they do - they'd prefer it on a convenient modern format which they would buy themselves anyway.
5) The generation problem. I know things about my grandparents. I know next-to-nothing about my great-grandparents. I'd never seen them, they were dead before I was born. Hence, I don't really have more than a passing interest in them. I know zero about their parents and the further back you go, the less I know and the less I care. I probably *am* related to someone famous at some point - almost everybody is and even simple maths provides the answer - every famous person of ten generations ago probably has nearly a thousand people who can trace their ancestry directly to them today, and millions more whom can get there with third-cousins twice-removed or whatever.
Sure, it'd be cool to have a piece of documentation etc. for filling in a family tree but - thinking about it - my dad probably does have that kind of stuff about his own granddad. But why would he show it to me / pass it to me? I have no connection with the person it came from and it would mean almost nothing.
Now consider what it would mean to see a list of music that your grandfather liked, or your great-grandfather. Now consider how much it would be different to have that music in some online-only account that's tricky to get into (and almost certainly the details will be lost by then), impossible to play if you do, may not even exist any more, etc. It's not as much as you think.
And by then most of that stuff will be so old-hat it won't even be put onto TV / radio as it would have been repeated a billion times and gone through the "gold" nostalgia channels and be next-to-worthless, like asking me to watch something that my great-grandad saw at a music hall. Interesting. Once. For a minute. That's about it.
6) All this effort takes you away from your kids. They honestly won't give a shit beyond lip-service and keeping
Perfect time to buy then, it would seem?
The thing about value is that it's entirely relative. The value of a Bitcoin means nothing to you if you don't have any. The current value (low, but certainly nowhere near the lowest its ever been) means it's an ideal time to buy (if you don't mind the risk, which many don't). The high value - no matter how brief - probably made a lot of people very rich in real terms. People were happy to give them $266 for something that, today, is only "worth" $100.
The only problem is people who think a currency will ever stay still, not drop in value, or that putting $100,000 into an account for 25 years and not touching it while others gamble it away is a worthwhile venture. The people who play the market and buy low, sell high are making money with Bitcoin now, today. Thus, it has *value* in terms of its ability to make real cash using it, as any other commodity / currency.
Which would you rather have now? Zimbabwean dollars or Bitcoin? Which would you rather have had ten years ago? Which do you think you'd rather have in ten years time? It's all a guessing game and the people who point out that the price "plummeted" to a certain level etc. in horrified terms as if its the end of the world, but would rather point out the volatility rather than TAKING ADVANTAGE of that volatility and almost doubling their money - maybe they aren't cut out to tell me what financial products I should be using, or currencies I should be investing in.
I am buy no means an investor, a financeer, I've never owned a stock of shares in my life, etc. But even if can see that it doesn't matter what price Bitcoin had yesterday or what it will have tomorrow unless you're USING them. And if you are using them, it doesn't matter what price they had the day before you bought them or the day after you sold them.
If someone would like to give me $40 for the $20 worth of test Bitcoins that I put onto my Bitcoin wallet today, I don't really care what the value of the Bitcoin is, was or will be. That's a good deal. And while people were willing to spend $266 on something that you could have bought for $100 a few days before - surely that's a missed opportunity.
It's all about risk. But next time you write a Bitcoin comment, replace Bitcoin with Euro or Dollar or whatever else. Chances are that the same thing is happening with real-world currency. It doesn't mean that the world collapsed, that the Euro is dead, you can't buy bread, or that (if the Euro is dead) it was because of the software it was based on and not high-up investment companies lying about the value of junk they were selling to banks.
Technically, one of the best investments in the world was a Royal Mail First Class Stamp (to send letters). You could buy them 50 years ago and they would still be valid postage for a first class letter today - they cost pence back then and an equivalent is nearly 100 times that today. The only problem is buying them, predicting that, and then finding buyers for them now - none of which are to do with the actual price fluctuation.
Hell, the price of my fuel tank varies every single day I look, and even from just a few hundred yards of travel - up AND down. If I could find a legal way to make money from that, you know that I would.
Welcome to the 1980's, guys.
Data Protection Act (1984) UK, subsequently revised several times to clarify its intent.
You can write to ANY company, entity or organisation (even a website) and DEMAND all information they are storing on you. They may charge you only a reasonable administrative cost. Even applies to CCTV of yourself (but, obviously, in that case you have to give them enough information to determine who you are on their CCTV systems and can't just expect them to trawl years of video looking for your left arm).
How can you know whether a company is distributing incorrect / damaging information about yourself without the right to demand to see that information, the right to change it where it is erroneous, and the ability to control what they are allowed to do with it.
Really?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbcFvUOGA44
I doubt it. And Duke3D would be closer but still quite bad. Either you and I have different definitions of playable, or the OP isn't the one full of crap
Hell, you'd be lucky to do 320x240 in Quake with that processor, and the min spec was a Pentium (that was widely advertised at the time, had been out for three years, and was widely condemned as being a "high" system requirement for a game at the time).
I have seen Doom run on a 25Mhz 386. It *was* playable. I know, because that's the only machine I EVER played Doom on. I'll give you that one.
But Duke? No, not really. Sure, you could make Quake/Duke better if you had a Voodoo or similar card and the versions of the software that supported that, but the chances are you couldn't emulate that on a RPi any quicker either.
The only ones that I remember being ubiquitous were CWSDPMI and DOS/4GW, mainly because they came bundled with compilers of the time. The only other one I recognise the name of is GO32, but that's a CWSDPMI predecessor by the looks of it.
And DOS/4GW was indeed bundled into DOOM.
I think the claims of the capabilities are stretching it a bit in terms of sheer processor power, the features needed in the virtual machine it runs, and the amount of usefulness there would be in emulating games at pathetic rates that even your smartphone can out-do.
You mean like the one on the first entry here:
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=1_4_4__12&term=team+fortress+2
?
"I'm sorry, your car doesn't have a standardised fuel cap. Is the fix to:
1) make your car have a standard fuel cap?
2) force everyone to use your new fuel cap ?
3) make pumps sense by the numberplate which model of car they are filling up and change the fuel cap to the right one each time?"
Whatever option you choose, 3) is really incredibly stupid and puts the onus on fuel stations to make the changes rather than the idiot that wanted to be different for no good reason. It might be *A* solution, but *THE* solution is to just look at the guy who can't fuel up their car with a "You pillock" look until they realise they've bought a turkey - and then let Ford / GM / whoever supply an adaptor to him rather than you having to carry 20 adaptors for all the different types of fuel cap there are.
All you've done is encourage Safari to be the exception to the rule, with a broken implementation that now doesn't have to be fixed (because you "fixed it" for them on your end).
By way of analogy, if - say - a browser can't upload more than a 2Gb file, then you're choosing to detect the browser that can't, chop the file up into little bits just for them, and pass it on. You're fixing their crappy browser for them, so you have to take all the burden for their mistakes. That's just not sensible compared to say "Sorry, you're browser is crap and can't handle downloads the size of your average DVD from 5 years ago. Maybe you should investigate alternatives."
The day that the first website was able to detect what client was being used to view it, we were in trouble.
Whether it was people trying to "fix" ancient Opera (and still some sites had such tests until very recently), people telling you what browser to use (i.e. not accepting Netscape / IE of certain versions - I still know of a UK bank that stops you logging in as certain browsers, but fake the user agent string and it works 100%), or just plain faffing about (i.e. iPlayer detecting the user-agent to see if it's "allowed" to download the iPad streams, etc.).
The day that you were able to tell what someone was running and make a decision based on that, we basically lost the point of a standard. If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard. We would also have killed off abominations like non-standard HTML tags and everything else.
If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem - you manage it and if it ever affects my usage of it, I'll be complaining and going elsewhere. If you have a browser that can't change the user-agent at will and still work, then that's a crap browser (purely because the user should be in control of the website they are displaying and not the other way around). Precisely because we're all too stupid to just make browsers and websites conform to a common standard.
Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else. The number of times it's stopped me doing something I wanted is vanishingly small (probably 4-5 incidents in all that time), and I've blamed the website every time - not Opera (because in every instance, faking the user-agent to something else has fixed the problem, so it's not the browser). It's cost several small companies my custom (not that they would be able to tell, or care).
Fact is, my life is too short to play games with accessing your website. If I can't, I move on. End of. I've even moved my bank accounts because of it (NatWest, in the UK, had a website that refused to work with anything but ancient versions of IE or Netscape - yes, it actually said Netscape even in the era of Firefox - and they refused to fix it "for security reasons", so I moved on. Presumably they've fixed it now, but I don't really care because the damage was done by not being able to log into it at my convenience).
You have a website because you want people to come to it and see your content. Hiding that content, because you don't know how to properly display it, is so counter-productive, I can't even begin to explain it. If the fancy shit you're pulling messed up my browser (which conforms to all the ACID tests and general compatibility with EVERY OTHER SITE on the planet), maybe you should take that fancy shit off?
My thoughts exactly, that's part of why I suspected from the start that a lot of people just don't get it.
VAT. The VA stands for Value Added. A company pays tax on the value it has added to a product, nothing more.
So if a company buys in parts from China, puts them into a device, and sells the device (onto another company, consumer, whoever), then it pays VAT on the things it bought and CHARGES VAT on the things it sold. The difference in VAT is the only thing it has to actually *PAY* to the government.
So if it changes prices, and the things that cost it £50 to build it then has to sell for £40, it actually GETS MONEY BACK from the government in the form of a VAT rebate. If it sells them for £50, it pays no VAT (effectively). If it sells them for £60 it pays the VAT on the £10 only (it pays VAT on £50 but it credited VAT on £60).
That's basically all there is to it. Every company in the EU knows how to deal with it and if they aren't "adding value", they don't pay VAT. It's basically a profit-based tax. No profit, no tax.
In terms of the end consumer, the only person who doesn't ever "add value", they pay a 20% sales tax, in effect. But because the company that produces it isn't subjected to lots of complicated and high taxes, and it isn't charged every time it goes through another company's hands, the price ends up about the same as anywhere else.
There is *nothing* stopping a company selling things cheaper with VAT. In fact, it positively encourages them to!
Yeah, cos what I said is that there's no medicinal use whatsoever for them, and nobody ever sees any benefit. "a LOT of their action is ENTIRELY placebo...".
You're comparing a tested, reasoned use of something that I didn't mention (ibuprofen), in a comparison against other drugs that has a significant, noticeable health benefit for yourself against people who carry 48-packs of the things in a handbag and take one every time they feel a little out of sorts (and get through a pack or more a week, in some cases).
For reference, my ex- was in severe chronic pain with a condition that made her knee-joints turn backwards, every joint in her body dislocate, and several years of the damage that causes - and made her immune to most forms of anaesthetic. She was prescribed something insane like 48 paracetamol a week, plus co-codamol (people don't realise that paracetamol is more often used alongside other drugs in medicinal use because it has little effect on other drugs), plus more serious drugs and numerous other painkillers, and the only reason they couldn't do more is that she chose not to start on the morphine-based drugs that are addiction-forming.
The fact is that THE VAST MAJORITY of headaches in people go away without treatment in the same time as the said "painkillers" act. The fact that you are not in that vast majority - the ones I'm complaining about - means that you are, by definition, not in the normal ranges of those drugs that you see hanging up in your local supermarket. You shouldn't be relying on them, especially not for severe headaches. All you've done is mask the problem by exactly the things I'm complaining about.
Honestly? You should go to a doctor, and have been to a doctor, and had the doctor tell you why ibuprofen works and not others. I hope you did.
If a headache puts you out of commission, tanking up on drugs from the supermarket isn't the solution except in the very short term. The question is not "why does the drug work" in your case, as much as "why do you get those severe headaches?".
That's entirely different to "Why do people with an everyday, bog-standard, minor headache tank up on things that they offer in the supermarket and are inferior to caffeine?"
Except the UK has VAT too, so there's your argument blown out of the water.
What is it that the US has against VAT? You have sales taxes etc. instead that perform the same purpose. Do you even understand how VAT works (i.e. it only really affects the end-consumer and not the manufacturer or any of the businesses involved in supplying the product)?
I think it's a blanket hatred of something that you don't understand and that you think you have no equivalent of. Clue: Almost all developed countries in the world have the same amount of taxation on the average person. The exceptions are those with blanket-taxation rates and simplified taxation systems that actually tend to lower overall taxation.
You can whine about the TV Licence "tax", road "tax", VAT, and everything else that you like, the fact is that pretty much everyone pays the same amount of tax in all countries.
And hence, the question of why the UK software prices differ from Europe's (literally 30 miles south of us) so vastly is just as important as why Australian prices differ from the US (in fact, more so). And none of it can be attributed to any one tax that's not present in the other country. In fact, almost all of it can be attributed to just one thing - the people buying it don't complain enough.
It's not just stuff for GP's, either.
How many people carry "headache tablets"(i.e. paracetamol / aspirin) around with them? How many rely on things like Lemsip and other cold remedies?
Fact is, they make almost zero difference to how you feel or how long you'll have the headache/cold. (I make a specific exception for migraine, but then you should be having your proper migraine tablets and not headache tablets).
The amount of people who carry this stuff around with them all day, every day is scary. That's before you even get into what other medications they are taking, the antibacterial soaps, hand cleansers, etc. We are quite literally just setting our immune systems up for failure in the longer term.
I don't think for a second that I'm "healthy" in any way, but I avoid taking these things for ridiculous conditions. Not out of some moral belief, not out of some disregard for science, not out of some "green" agenda, but because I just don't think they help me at all. It's amazing how many people will offer you tablets if you mention you have a minor headache. The "solution" for them when they have the same problem is to dig into their own private pharmacy and take something.
Babies are smothered in talc, E45 cream and god-knows-what. Now think, have we been doing that for thousands of years? No. We've had equivalents at certain points in history but never on the quantity we have now. It's all a modern response. Yes, we believe it stops some kind of minor suffering but it's far from necessary and we have no way to tell what would have happened without it anyway until we withhold it. Chances are, for everything from headaches to runny noses, the symptoms would have cleared up at exactly the same time with or without this stuff.
I refuse headache tablets. Not because I want to be seen as a health freak, but because I don't think they are necessary. I believe a lot of their action is ENTIRELY placebo. Sure, they have active ingredients but we take them in the belief it will make things better even if the active ingredient is so incredibly watered down and not targeted to those particular symptoms that it makes no difference. It's a "medical" form of homeopathy.
The fact is, if you can buy it in a supermarket, it's unlikely to do much more than anything else you could buy in the supermarket (e.g. honey on a sore-throat, caffeine in coffee, etc.). If it did, they wouldn't be available like that and you'd have to go the pharmacy instead.
Try it for a year. Refuse tablets and similar treatments for minor conditions. See how many people whinge and moan at you for not taking them. See how much longer your condition lasts, or worse it is than anyone else (it won't be). It's a royal pain in the arse because of so many people saying you should take this or that or "I have something in my bag for that", though, I tell you.
Placebos? Most women carry them in their handbag.
Given that that's possibly the shortest Slashdot story ever, it manages to make only two assertions, both of which are confirmed as false (by the linked articles themselves, no less).
And I heard about this story about 6 hours ago on my way in to work and, honestly, didn't care then.
No longer "News for Nerds"
Now "Inaccurate insights for imbeciles".
WHSmith don't have a single ebook in their store without DRM, and deal with lots of the big-names and publishers.
It's highly unlikely they wouldn't just have a standard contract that says they only publish DRM books (because that's ALL they do, and sell their own e-Reader devices because of precisely that). It's going to be someone agreeing to WHSmith's terms and not the other way around.
(Hint: In the UK, WHSmith's is much bigger than you might think. My father-in-law (a well-published author across a variety of subjects from school textbooks - including some used as standard texts - to children's books to books for adults on grammar) was once refused publishing of a book because "WHSmith don't have a category for that". Literally, every agent he tried gave him the same answer for that book (and only that book) and it never got published because of it.
Then somewhere along the line, someone still gave away that right, even if their own contract didn't allow them to do so.
It's a contract dispute. It's not WHSmith being evil, someone, somewhere would have agreed to terms that the author wouldn't have agreed to themselves.
I just posted on the original site but I doubt it will pass moderation so:
Not being funny, but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first? I mean, as far as I can see, this is a contract dispute. Someone, somewhere has a contract with you that says whether or not they can add DRM to your book. Youâ(TM)ve signed it, or not. It might say either way is permitted or nothing at all about DRM. But presumably that person has signed something with another person who has signed something and, eventually, thereâ(TM)s a line in there somewhere that says they can or canâ(TM)t do this. Whoever signed that line and didnâ(TM)t pass it back down the contracts is in breach of something. I highly doubt that WHSmith does not have a contract that says âoeWe will add DRMâ in some manner, itâ(TM)s just a question of who signed it and gave away more rights to the work than they were allowed to.
And given that itâ(TM)s your copyright (presumably), then bundling that content in any way you donâ(TM)t like is a copyright violation. Thatâ(TM)s NOT the format you provided it to them in, and no different to them selling it with a modified front cover, or with the words in Chapter 2 altered. So just contact your agent/publisher and get them to have a word â" there should be no walls of silence on that chain, because youâ(TM)re all contracted to do your jobs. Itâ(TM)s not like an end-consumer where you have to hope to get through to the right person at customer services.
Whatâ(TM)s happened is no different to not selling the electronic rights to someone and then finding that your publisher has published it electronically (actually happened to a friend of mine who writes childrenâ(TM)s books â" hell, theyâ(TM)ve even had a book that they sent to their agent published without their knowledge, and they only found out when they found it in a second-hand bookshop, complete with their name and cover!). And itâ(TM)s a contract dispute. And you either signed a contract that allowed it, or not. As such, you just get your agent/publisher to look into it, give it a month to sort out, and then just issue a nasty legal letter to pull it. Posting online about it and in forum posts just seems amateur and likely to backfire in terms of NDA clauses etc. in contracts along the way.
And I reckon youâ(TM)ll find that one of the contracts you signed either says they can do this or, somewhere along the way, someone has a gap between the contracts they receive and the contracts they sign that allows this to slip through until â" as youâ(TM)ve done â" someone objects.
Stop messing about with open letters, hearsay, and forum posts and ask your publisher for an explanation in a nice recorded-delivery letter from your local legal representative.