Ummm, No: What rights you have depends on your local laws. Sounds to me like you should read up on your rights.
I think you should do a bit of reading yourself. Your local laws set the rules. But any "local" laws that I know give you very, very little actual rights. Most of the rights that you get come from a license that you receive. The only rights that the law gives you for example in the USA: "If the seller gives you the right to install software on your computer, then you also have the right to copy it into memory to run it". Note the _if_. You may not have the right to install on your computer. And "if you have the right to install the software on your computer, then you have the right to make a backup". Again, the "if".
And excuse me, but I haven't run into any DRM that attempts to prevent backups. Take an eBook with DRM, copy it onto a CD, delete the original, copy the backup back to your computer, and it works. You mention broadcasts: No DRM. You mention copying music onto an iPod: Today, no DRM. Before: DRM allowed it.
...but DRM is amazing! I mean, CDs last forever, Tapes last several generations... but DRM licenses die with you! You can sell the same thing to EVERY freaking generation!!!
Seriously, I'm afraid that my huge music collection is of very little interested to the people who I think would inherit it. However, if my heirs could sell my complete media collection on eBay to the highest bidder, and give the money to some charity, that would be a nice idea. Maybe I should put that into my well. Would be interesting if record companies could make any claims that would take money from a charity. Note: There would be no copying involved whatsoever!.
Doctorow is an outspoken critic of DRM in books. As a result, some people will buy his books for that reason. Being an outspoken critic is actually good for his business. But if _every_ author, without exception, refuses to publish their books without DRM, then there is no distinction in this, so nobody will buy anyone's books because of their attitude. So the question will be: Does DRM increase sales or not?
From personal experience: One company who's books I used to buy changed their books on iTunes from DRM-free to DRM, apparently because they wanted watermarking and the iTunes store doesn't support that (there's very primitive watermarking; my Apple ID is in every book, but that would be easily removed or changed). So I stopped buying them. DRM doesn't hinder me now; I can read these books on my iPad and my Mac, but it could be a problem in ten or 20 years time. On the other hand, typing some titles into Google showed clear evidence that these books were pirated on a massive scale, so I can understand what they are doing. (And I'm not going to pirate, and I'm not going to find some tool to remove the DRM, I'll either buy stuff or not).
And, what the hell do you think a strike is, anyway?
Posted here already, so I can't give you mod points. But really, this American attitude is quite idiotic. Wages are always negotiated. Sometimes one side is more powerful, sometimes it's not. Walmart left Germany with its tail between its legs, and what a loss is it for the country! (If anyone thinks Walmart makes low prices, Aldi and Lidl do that a lot better while actually providing quality products _and_ paying their employees decent wages). Nobody will shed a tear if Amazon does the same.
DRM is simply an artificial barrier to entry. A good investment requires a company with a good product and a high barrier to entry. In the 80's they had it good. It was too hard to copy movies and songs. Then it started becoming easier and easier and now it is almost as easy as a click and watch, or click and listen any content. So they are trying to stuff the rabbit back in the hat after it has procreated. It is game over.
Another bit of nonsense. The "barrier to entry" that you talk about is the difficulty and effort needed to create good content, and that barrier is in no way artificial. You are talking about creating barriers to the business for freeloaders who don't want to contribute anything but syphon off the profits. These barriers are entirely legal (in the form of copyright, in some countries in the form of laws against unfair competition). DRM isn't what stops Sony from copying and selling EMI's records, and it isn't what stops me from starting a record company copying and selling both Sony's and EMI's records. It's copyright law.
The reason we have piracy; when Copyright lasts longer than a single human lifetime, nothing ever produced during your lifetime will ever be released to enrich the public domain, therefor there is absolutely no benefit for an individual to participate in copyright.
That's a pathetic lie. Piracy happens because people are too cheap to pay for goods. Nobody pirates Kanye West or Adele (both in the top ten of pirated music) because they have to wait 90 years for copyright to run out. They pirate it because they want to listen to the music _now_ without paying.
Now if you can't get some work because it is under copyright but not for sale anywhere, that's one thing. But most works that get pirated are available to purchase, and the only difference is whether you want to pay or not.
Except that DRM is growing fast. OId story but more relevant than ever. More services using DRM, more restrictions, more control, more customers completely oblivious about it, and more customers who are actually fans of it (they are so happy to have online access that they cheer on companies that have DRM).
Please give examples where the use of DRM has increased. (I know one case, and that was with some eBooks, as a consequence of the iTunes store not supporting watermarking).
You say DRM "steals the digital rights of the end user". What rights you have depends on what rights the copyright holder wishes to give you when you hand over your money, so that has nothing to do with DRM. Unless there are rights that the copyright holder gave you that you cannot use because of DRM, and that would be in my opinion a very rare case.
What DRM does is two things: Prevent you from doing things that exceed your rights, and give the copyright holder a stronger legal position. Of course "Copyright Enforcement Management" is just as correct as "Digital Rights Management".
A year or so ago I bought my first 99 cent MP3 from the Amazon monster. They wanted me to download and install an MP3 downloader to get it. I figured I would have to jump through some hoops, maybe find some DRM stripper to use the music where I wanted it, but I went ahead and bought it as an experiment.
The only thing of importance that their downloader does is to move the.mp3 files into the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder. That's a folder that iTunes checks from time to time, and any music or other media in that folder gets added to iTunes - effectively a very simple and easy to use API to add music to iTunes.
And yes blame the legislators for allowing the widespread fraud of misleading people in to believing they purchased/bought a product when instead the seller only gave them a short term non-negotiable, unilaterally cancellable, license.
I don't know what Amazon's terms are. If you buy from Apple, you can keep downloaded movies for as long as you want, but movies can be removed from the store, in which case you lose the ability to download them again. Maybe it's the same with Amazon?
In the UK capital gains are calculated on a last in first out basis where the asset is fungible - shares, gold things like that.
The reason for that is that about £7,000 of capital gains per year are tax free. Without this rule, if you held shares for a long time and made gains, you could sell enough to make £7,000 profit just at the end of the tax year, and buy the shares back just after the new tax year, and slowly get rid of your taxable profits.
In the US, driving an expensive car is not a crime and you're innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, so the police have no right to inquire as to how you can afford an expensive car.
It's not the police that you worry about, it's the tax office. There is no "innocent until proven guilty" with your tax liability. Only if there is the question whether you committed criminal tax evasion. (To explain: If they think you had $1,000,000 income that you should pay tax for, there's no "innocent until proven guilty" that let's you avoid paying the tax. If they want to through you into jail for hiding your income, then you have "innocent until proven guilty").
In Germany, the car dealer will report it to the inland revenue. The car dealer will also want a paper from an insurance company that proves you have provisional insurance (valid for fourteen days). The insurance company will want you to sign an insurance contract within fourteen days, or show an insurance certificate from a different insurance, and if you provide neither, they will inform the police, who will stop you from driving a car without insurance. The inland revenue will have a quick look at the purchase price of the car and your declared income and ask themselves if there is a discrepancy and take appropriate action.
If you mine a bitcoin and sell it immediately, then the capital gain on it would be zero. You would only have a gain if you bought the bitcoins from somebody else. That is of course how many bitcoins are acquired.
Who else would be in a comparable situation? For example, an artist creating paintings. He or she starts with some pots full of colours and an empty canvas, puts the colour on the canvas, and sells the result. How is that treated tax wise? I think if you sell the result for money, that would be treated as taxable income.
So if I am mining bit coin, and it costs me more in electricity than I am getting in return from the bit coin I make, does that mean I get to write off my electric bill?
Are you asking seriously?
If you run it as a business, all profits are taxable, all costs are tax deductible. However, if you claim to run a business and lose money all the time, the tax office will say they believe this is a hobby. Same as someone with a farm raising race horses who loses money every year and probably does it not as a business but as a hobby.
So you don't get to deduct anything, but you keep all the invoices, and if eventually you make money, you can offset your profits with your losses from previous years.
If someone makes a bunch of profit on Bitcoins, how is Norway going to know if the person doesn't self report?
If you spend the money eventually, and it is enough money, they might figure out that there must be income, and then they can ask you what the income is. And you might be in trouble for not telling them without being asked. If you have income that is tax free, you better keep proof of that income.
I guess you really haven't use this. Surface is nothing but a steaming pile of turds. Totally locked down, no alternative browser, only IE, and very little software available. And definitely no open source programs allowed.
Windows Shadow Copies - predates Time Machine and is available in XP. It's called Restore Previous Versions and is part of System Restore.
What percentage of Windows user uses it? That's the real question, not who was there first or what solution is technically better, but what percentage of computer users own it? And Time Machine wins hands down.
Seconded, but with a twist. If you take the CPU out of a computer, what are you left with? Yes, my parents had tablets. It's like a computer, but better. At least for old people who can't use a computer but want to use some computer-like applications.
Being in the opposite situation (usually the one trying desperately to keep the grandchildrens' computers safe), the iPad is a beautiful invention.
German tragedies were in the 1930's and 1940's after civilian disarmament.
No causality, however. There were no millions of people who would have stood up with their guns if they only had them. Maybe there were, but there would have been more millions ready to shoot them if they had had arms as well.
Anyway the license plate scanners are not going to work. There was this news report about some precocious teens, taking a picture of the license plate of a teacher they did not like, printing it, pasting it over their own number plates and went through several red-light cameras and triggered a number of tickets for that poor teacher. So it ain't gonna work. Criminals are two steps ahead of the cops, they will easy mark some sap and pass the blame on them, use these cameras to create iron-clad alibi etc.
So apparantly it _didn't_ work, right? If there is a report about it in the papers?
Consider this: Going through a red light is an offense. Framing another person for something like that is a _very serious_ offense. To see how serious: A British Cabinet minister (Chris Huhne) first had to resign, then was convicted for "perverting the course of justice" because he convinced his wife for taking responsibility for a speeding ticket when he was caught driving too fast. That's with a person willingly taking the blame for a traffic offense. This one is about framing an innocent person of several traffic offences, something a lot more serious.
Had a terrorist put this under a seat cushion in a bus terminal, they could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands before it would eventually be tracked down.
The article says that you would get a lethal dose in 30 seconds. That means one person sitting on that seat cushion would die even on a short bus ride. That _might_ get someone's attention. Then you would call paramedics who would get ill. Perhaps the bus would drive again, with a second person dying. At that point someone _would_ notice.
People do tend to be less considerate of bystanders when making phone calls than when talking to someone who is actually in the room in my experience; you'll see someone who's having a perfectly reasonable conversation with somebody at dinner, then turn away to answer their phone and jump up an order of magnitude in loudness. I think it's the fact that one side of the conversation is private to the other people in the room; it triggers some sort of general "private talk" flag in the brain that makes you automatically and quite unconsciously begin talking as though there was nobody else there.
It's because the other person is far away, somehow people's brains think that they have to shout loud enough that the person on the other hand can hear them even without a phone. In reality, phones have some extraordinary good electronics that will pick up the quietest voice and make it well understandable to the receiver of the call.
But without reading the law in question, and I would have no idea where to start because it's not US law, what does that actually mean? Prior request for what? A prior request for anything? If I buy a Lamborghini Hat and then I am delivered a Lamborghini Aventador, does that count? I certainly haven't requested a car. Likewise, these people haven't requested a PS Vita.
You _could_ assume it was a mistake, and give them an opportunity to take the car back, at their own expense. Personally, I would drive the car back in person to their headquarters:-)
If you tried to keep the car claiming it was unsolicited, we would have to look at what happens in court. Assuming that you are the only one in the world getting a car instead of a hat, I think any judge would decide that the company is not sending out unsolicited cars to people.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, No: What rights you have depends on your local laws. Sounds to me like you should read up on your rights.
I think you should do a bit of reading yourself. Your local laws set the rules. But any "local" laws that I know give you very, very little actual rights. Most of the rights that you get come from a license that you receive. The only rights that the law gives you for example in the USA: "If the seller gives you the right to install software on your computer, then you also have the right to copy it into memory to run it". Note the _if_. You may not have the right to install on your computer. And "if you have the right to install the software on your computer, then you have the right to make a backup". Again, the "if".
And excuse me, but I haven't run into any DRM that attempts to prevent backups. Take an eBook with DRM, copy it onto a CD, delete the original, copy the backup back to your computer, and it works. You mention broadcasts: No DRM. You mention copying music onto an iPod: Today, no DRM. Before: DRM allowed it.
...but DRM is amazing! I mean, CDs last forever, Tapes last several generations... but DRM licenses die with you! You can sell the same thing to EVERY freaking generation!!!
Seriously, I'm afraid that my huge music collection is of very little interested to the people who I think would inherit it. However, if my heirs could sell my complete media collection on eBay to the highest bidder, and give the money to some charity, that would be a nice idea. Maybe I should put that into my well. Would be interesting if record companies could make any claims that would take money from a charity. Note: There would be no copying involved whatsoever!.
Doctorow is an outspoken critic of DRM in books. As a result, some people will buy his books for that reason. Being an outspoken critic is actually good for his business. But if _every_ author, without exception, refuses to publish their books without DRM, then there is no distinction in this, so nobody will buy anyone's books because of their attitude. So the question will be: Does DRM increase sales or not?
From personal experience: One company who's books I used to buy changed their books on iTunes from DRM-free to DRM, apparently because they wanted watermarking and the iTunes store doesn't support that (there's very primitive watermarking; my Apple ID is in every book, but that would be easily removed or changed). So I stopped buying them. DRM doesn't hinder me now; I can read these books on my iPad and my Mac, but it could be a problem in ten or 20 years time. On the other hand, typing some titles into Google showed clear evidence that these books were pirated on a massive scale, so I can understand what they are doing. (And I'm not going to pirate, and I'm not going to find some tool to remove the DRM, I'll either buy stuff or not).
And, what the hell do you think a strike is, anyway?
Posted here already, so I can't give you mod points. But really, this American attitude is quite idiotic. Wages are always negotiated. Sometimes one side is more powerful, sometimes it's not. Walmart left Germany with its tail between its legs, and what a loss is it for the country! (If anyone thinks Walmart makes low prices, Aldi and Lidl do that a lot better while actually providing quality products _and_ paying their employees decent wages). Nobody will shed a tear if Amazon does the same.
Seriously, if you don't want to pay appropriate wages, stay out of Germany. Nobody forces you to sell in Germany.
DRM is simply an artificial barrier to entry. A good investment requires a company with a good product and a high barrier to entry. In the 80's they had it good. It was too hard to copy movies and songs. Then it started becoming easier and easier and now it is almost as easy as a click and watch, or click and listen any content. So they are trying to stuff the rabbit back in the hat after it has procreated. It is game over.
Another bit of nonsense. The "barrier to entry" that you talk about is the difficulty and effort needed to create good content, and that barrier is in no way artificial. You are talking about creating barriers to the business for freeloaders who don't want to contribute anything but syphon off the profits. These barriers are entirely legal (in the form of copyright, in some countries in the form of laws against unfair competition). DRM isn't what stops Sony from copying and selling EMI's records, and it isn't what stops me from starting a record company copying and selling both Sony's and EMI's records. It's copyright law.
The reason we have piracy; when Copyright lasts longer than a single human lifetime, nothing ever produced during your lifetime will ever be released to enrich the public domain, therefor there is absolutely no benefit for an individual to participate in copyright.
That's a pathetic lie. Piracy happens because people are too cheap to pay for goods. Nobody pirates Kanye West or Adele (both in the top ten of pirated music) because they have to wait 90 years for copyright to run out. They pirate it because they want to listen to the music _now_ without paying.
Now if you can't get some work because it is under copyright but not for sale anywhere, that's one thing. But most works that get pirated are available to purchase, and the only difference is whether you want to pay or not.
Except that DRM is growing fast. OId story but more relevant than ever. More services using DRM, more restrictions, more control, more customers completely oblivious about it, and more customers who are actually fans of it (they are so happy to have online access that they cheer on companies that have DRM).
Please give examples where the use of DRM has increased. (I know one case, and that was with some eBooks, as a consequence of the iTunes store not supporting watermarking).
You say DRM "steals the digital rights of the end user". What rights you have depends on what rights the copyright holder wishes to give you when you hand over your money, so that has nothing to do with DRM. Unless there are rights that the copyright holder gave you that you cannot use because of DRM, and that would be in my opinion a very rare case.
What DRM does is two things: Prevent you from doing things that exceed your rights, and give the copyright holder a stronger legal position. Of course "Copyright Enforcement Management" is just as correct as "Digital Rights Management".
A year or so ago I bought my first 99 cent MP3 from the Amazon monster. They wanted me to download and install an MP3 downloader to get it. I figured I would have to jump through some hoops, maybe find some DRM stripper to use the music where I wanted it, but I went ahead and bought it as an experiment.
The only thing of importance that their downloader does is to move the .mp3 files into the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder. That's a folder that iTunes checks from time to time, and any music or other media in that folder gets added to iTunes - effectively a very simple and easy to use API to add music to iTunes.
And yes blame the legislators for allowing the widespread fraud of misleading people in to believing they purchased/bought a product when instead the seller only gave them a short term non-negotiable, unilaterally cancellable, license.
I don't know what Amazon's terms are. If you buy from Apple, you can keep downloaded movies for as long as you want, but movies can be removed from the store, in which case you lose the ability to download them again. Maybe it's the same with Amazon?
In the UK capital gains are calculated on a last in first out basis where the asset is fungible - shares, gold things like that.
The reason for that is that about £7,000 of capital gains per year are tax free. Without this rule, if you held shares for a long time and made gains, you could sell enough to make £7,000 profit just at the end of the tax year, and buy the shares back just after the new tax year, and slowly get rid of your taxable profits.
In the US, driving an expensive car is not a crime and you're innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, so the police have no right to inquire as to how you can afford an expensive car.
It's not the police that you worry about, it's the tax office. There is no "innocent until proven guilty" with your tax liability. Only if there is the question whether you committed criminal tax evasion. (To explain: If they think you had $1,000,000 income that you should pay tax for, there's no "innocent until proven guilty" that let's you avoid paying the tax. If they want to through you into jail for hiding your income, then you have "innocent until proven guilty").
In Germany, the car dealer will report it to the inland revenue. The car dealer will also want a paper from an insurance company that proves you have provisional insurance (valid for fourteen days). The insurance company will want you to sign an insurance contract within fourteen days, or show an insurance certificate from a different insurance, and if you provide neither, they will inform the police, who will stop you from driving a car without insurance. The inland revenue will have a quick look at the purchase price of the car and your declared income and ask themselves if there is a discrepancy and take appropriate action.
If you mine a bitcoin and sell it immediately, then the capital gain on it would be zero. You would only have a gain if you bought the bitcoins from somebody else. That is of course how many bitcoins are acquired.
Who else would be in a comparable situation? For example, an artist creating paintings. He or she starts with some pots full of colours and an empty canvas, puts the colour on the canvas, and sells the result. How is that treated tax wise? I think if you sell the result for money, that would be treated as taxable income.
So if I am mining bit coin, and it costs me more in electricity than I am getting in return from the bit coin I make, does that mean I get to write off my electric bill?
Are you asking seriously?
If you run it as a business, all profits are taxable, all costs are tax deductible. However, if you claim to run a business and lose money all the time, the tax office will say they believe this is a hobby. Same as someone with a farm raising race horses who loses money every year and probably does it not as a business but as a hobby.
So you don't get to deduct anything, but you keep all the invoices, and if eventually you make money, you can offset your profits with your losses from previous years.
If someone makes a bunch of profit on Bitcoins, how is Norway going to know if the person doesn't self report?
If you spend the money eventually, and it is enough money, they might figure out that there must be income, and then they can ask you what the income is. And you might be in trouble for not telling them without being asked. If you have income that is tax free, you better keep proof of that income.
I guess you really haven't use this. Surface is nothing but a steaming pile of turds. Totally locked down, no alternative browser, only IE, and very little software available. And definitely no open source programs allowed.
And that affects Mum and Dad how?
Windows Shadow Copies - predates Time Machine and is available in XP. It's called Restore Previous Versions and is part of System Restore.
What percentage of Windows user uses it? That's the real question, not who was there first or what solution is technically better, but what percentage of computer users own it? And Time Machine wins hands down.
Seconded, but with a twist. If you take the CPU out of a computer, what are you left with? Yes, my parents had tablets. It's like a computer, but better. At least for old people who can't use a computer but want to use some computer-like applications.
Being in the opposite situation (usually the one trying desperately to keep the grandchildrens' computers safe), the iPad is a beautiful invention.
German tragedies were in the 1930's and 1940's after civilian disarmament.
No causality, however. There were no millions of people who would have stood up with their guns if they only had them. Maybe there were, but there would have been more millions ready to shoot them if they had had arms as well.
Anyway the license plate scanners are not going to work. There was this news report about some precocious teens, taking a picture of the license plate of a teacher they did not like, printing it, pasting it over their own number plates and went through several red-light cameras and triggered a number of tickets for that poor teacher. So it ain't gonna work. Criminals are two steps ahead of the cops, they will easy mark some sap and pass the blame on them, use these cameras to create iron-clad alibi etc.
So apparantly it _didn't_ work, right? If there is a report about it in the papers?
Consider this: Going through a red light is an offense. Framing another person for something like that is a _very serious_ offense. To see how serious: A British Cabinet minister (Chris Huhne) first had to resign, then was convicted for "perverting the course of justice" because he convinced his wife for taking responsibility for a speeding ticket when he was caught driving too fast. That's with a person willingly taking the blame for a traffic offense. This one is about framing an innocent person of several traffic offences, something a lot more serious.
Had a terrorist put this under a seat cushion in a bus terminal, they could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands before it would eventually be tracked down.
The article says that you would get a lethal dose in 30 seconds. That means one person sitting on that seat cushion would die even on a short bus ride. That _might_ get someone's attention. Then you would call paramedics who would get ill. Perhaps the bus would drive again, with a second person dying. At that point someone _would_ notice.
People do tend to be less considerate of bystanders when making phone calls than when talking to someone who is actually in the room in my experience; you'll see someone who's having a perfectly reasonable conversation with somebody at dinner, then turn away to answer their phone and jump up an order of magnitude in loudness. I think it's the fact that one side of the conversation is private to the other people in the room; it triggers some sort of general "private talk" flag in the brain that makes you automatically and quite unconsciously begin talking as though there was nobody else there.
It's because the other person is far away, somehow people's brains think that they have to shout loud enough that the person on the other hand can hear them even without a phone. In reality, phones have some extraordinary good electronics that will pick up the quietest voice and make it well understandable to the receiver of the call.
But without reading the law in question, and I would have no idea where to start because it's not US law, what does that actually mean? Prior request for what? A prior request for anything? If I buy a Lamborghini Hat and then I am delivered a Lamborghini Aventador, does that count? I certainly haven't requested a car. Likewise, these people haven't requested a PS Vita.
You _could_ assume it was a mistake, and give them an opportunity to take the car back, at their own expense. Personally, I would drive the car back in person to their headquarters :-)
If you tried to keep the car claiming it was unsolicited, we would have to look at what happens in court. Assuming that you are the only one in the world getting a car instead of a hat, I think any judge would decide that the company is not sending out unsolicited cars to people.