freevee content on prime always had ads.
Only half true: A bunch of originally ad-free "included with Prime" content got moved to (or new seasons appeared on) FreeVee, with ads. Someone here has already mentioned Bosch - Legacy, Alex Rider was another one - pretty sure there was more.
...the Prime Video App requires an Amazon account - but not an Amazon Prime subscription (yes, you're probably meant to be confused).
We've had something like this *online* in the UK for years, a dead-tree "self assessment" form for decades and even before the modern "self assessment" anybody could still file their own tax return for free as long as they were capable of presenting it clearly. Plus, if you're a simple wage slave with savings interest and other income below the threshold, everything is taxed at source and you don't need to fill in a return at all.
Here's the thing, though: we are still all perfectly at liberty to pay an accountant to do our taxes if we think they'll do a better job - and, of course, if you have complex tax affairs that is probably the case.
From what I've heard, though, the US IRS makes the UK HMRC look like a cute fluffy kitten who just wants to be your friend... which is quite an achievement since the HMRC can be pretty awful (e.g. go google IR35).
It sounds like the app version of the game came first if it came out in 2016. Which means Mr. Wardle's version is the rip-off.
2016? It's Word Mastermind - which was a thing in the 1970s:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fboardgamegeek.com%2Fboar...
...except slightly easier since it actually tells you which letters are right/right-in-wrong-place.
Oh, right, he's got that that snappy "take responsibility for terrorizing the country" click-bait-ey quote.
Yeah, I thought that credibility left the building at that point...
I KNOW they don't profit and never said they did. But they do have to price their "books" 20%+ higher in because they are selling a licence (which incurs tax) and not a book which doesn't.
It's nothing to do with whether they're selling a license or a "copy". All sales of goods/services/licenses are/were subject to VAT unless they are specifically exempt - physical books are exempt,"electronically supplied publications" are not. If you sell digital "copies" of books (and have more than £70k - or whatever it is now - annual turnover) then you have to pay VAT on sales.
I get it - you want the government to use VAT as a lever to force sellers to drop restrictive licenses - but VAT legislation is a can of worms at the best of times so that would be like using a supernova to crack a nut. It's also something that probably couldn't have been done under EU law (whereas that 2-year-old directive allowed simply cutting the VAT) which still applies until next year (and even then, fantasy Brexit rhetoric aside, it would be complex and expensive to diverge from EU law just for teh lulz - especially ones that could affect digital commerce). That's also assuming we have a surprise general election and an even more surprising change in fortune for the Pirate Party - because none of the main parties have shown any interest in "fixing" copyright and licensing. Anyway, those license restrictions stand on on flimsy ground w.r.t. doctrine of first sale, "contracts of adhesion" and the sale of goods act anyway - if the government were so inclined they could end them with the stroke of a pen.
Meanwhile booksellers could also drop the price of eBooks vs. paper on the grounds that they don't have to be printed, bound, shipped around the country/world, carry a discount for retailers, not to mention all that mess about having to guesstimate how many copies to print, suffer lost sales if you under-estimate, have to pulp unsold copies if you over-estimate... I'm not holding my breath.
Yes, it's a directive - issued in 2018 - that's how the EU works: the commission proposes, the parliament votes and then it issues directives and national governments implement them.
If you're suffering from insomnia, here's the directive... if you read on you'll see that it's already been through the EU parliament and the EU Court of Justice and - if you google around a bit - you'll see that other states have already implemented it.
If Amazon want to be relieved of the VAT then they should be required to grant those rights.
Amazon don't profit from the VAT - the customer pays.
TFS is slightly confusing but the Government has removed VAT from books (...actually the EU allowed it in 2018 but Boris would like you to think it was thanks to Brexit...) It was announced last month and was scheduled to take effect in December but it has been brought forward
Several times UK and several other EU members who had zero rated VAT books grandfathered in for educational purposes asked for ebooks to be reclassified as books rather than digital services and were denied every time. So this is only possible due to brexit allowing it being done without asking for EU approval.
The EU allowed the removal of VAT on books in 2018... but I guess the UK government had to wait two years to implement it so they could con people into thinking that it was something to do with Brexit...
Where's the list of more than 2 viable parties that basically every other modern democracy has?
I'm in the UK so lets fix that:
Where's the list of viable parties that basically every other modern democracy has?
Here, once all the fixed-minded voters have chosen the only party they'll ever vote for, only one party really stands a chance of winning without a following wind, the second party's chances have been decimated by the rise of Scottish nationalists and the third party insists on campaigning based on what would happen if hell froze over and they won an absolute majority rather than what they would do in the more feasible case of holding the balance of power in a 'hung parliament' . Vote for any other party in England (there's a bit more to it in the other UK countries) and at best you're just affirming that you're not too lazy to walk to the polling station, at worst you're contributing to some unpredictable unintended consequence of vote-splitting.
Even in countries with better proportional representation, the devil is still in what deals are done to form a majority coalition.
To quote the late, great Douglas Adams: nobody capable of getting themselves elected should, under any circumstances, be allowed to do the job.
Device serial number #0000000001: password0000000001
Don't be silly - it will be the last 8 digits of the md5 hash* of the serial number - because that's like totally secure
(* I was going to say rot13 but it doesn't encode numbers... So much for not spoiling Lost...)
Or give every unit the password 'ZxN#4bp!Q' and print it on a sticker using a dot-matrix stye font, and hope nobody compares notes,..
Lets just hope the actual legislation is written by someone with half a clue and is a bit more detailed than the soundbite...
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
