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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • The text is only fucked the the way that The Onion sticks are fucked: this is only labeled satire because of the tone of the article. The content is as true as “real” news.

    The actual “fucked” content is that the author was correct, and that the wealthy benefit from hunger and the threat of starvation to maintain access to abundant cheap labour.








  • In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

    Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

    Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

    So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

    (IANAL, this is not legal advice.)



  • I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

    Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

    You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

    I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.


  • To add to what the other poster said:

    I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that noise cancellation works by inverting sounds waves to deaden the sound. So, like, if you add sin(x) and –sin(x) you get 0.

    This system is actively adding inverted sound waves to cancel most sounds. What makes this system unique is that it samples the voice and uses the unique “voice print” to selectively not invert the sound waves from the targeted voice.

    Or that’s what I’m getting from reading this, as a layman.





  • Similar for me, recently. When I’m really into reading, I can read more than a book a day. $15+ for an audiobook that I’ll crush in a day just isn’t possible for me. That could easily balloon to $5000/year for me and another $3000/yr for my daughter, and $2000/year for my wife. (I’ve read a 6-book series, a 3-book series, and almost half a 4-book series in the last week… And didn’t sleep, lol!)

    We can’t afford a used car in audiobook costs each year.

    I actually mostly switched to text-to-speech with Kindle Unlimited so authors get paid for most of my reading, but audiobooks I still pirate when I read them. By my napkin math, authors get about 20-30 times what I pay in KU fees based on our voracious reading.