BadlyDrawnRhino

Wonder if they’ll be recommending content from all sides of the political spectrum, or just the right-wing content…

The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.

That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they’ve made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.

As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven’t really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that’s important to you you should stop doing so.

The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there’s no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren’t really going to be donating otherwise and you’re not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.

Thanks for this, I’m going to try this out on my way home. My main use for Gmaps is to determine the quickest way to and from work during peak hour, so keen to see how Magic Earth’s traffic data compares.

Trebuchets aren’t really a tool for defence. They have tremendous range and aren’t exactly speedy to load, aim, and launch.

Unless you meant defence in the same way that a country’s military operations are known as “defence forces” regardless of intent, in which case carry on.

Not available in Aus either, and other Kobo bundles have been. Probably a publisher issue.

I’ve been able to strip the Kobo DRM out of a couple of book bundles using Calibre. Haven’t bought this one yet, but I’d assume there wouldn’t be a problem.

That’s an oversimplification. All works are derivative to some extent. There’s a huge difference between taking inspiration from something, to taking the characters and setting from something. Particularly if you’re intending to make a profit.

If an author makes something that a large number of people enjoy, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off it for the rest of their life? Why exactly should an individual give up the rights to their creation simply so that someone else can use their characters and their worlds?

To be clear, I’m talking solely on an individual level. I think the system we have where a corporation can own an idea is very broken. I’m also talking about this from a perspective of the world we currently live in. In an ideal world where money wasn’t the endgame for survival, ideas would flow more freely and nobody would need to care. But that’s not the world we live in.

I think an argument could be made to set it to the date of death of the author. I agree with the other guy that it should only apply to commercial works though.

I also don’t think that the copyright should be transferable. The trading of ideas is an absurd concept to me. But then us humans do a lot of absurd things so I guess it’s just par for the course.

On top of the tracking within the ads themselves, you also have all of the general usage data that Google sells. They’re double-dipping.