Yeah; that’s not much time, and I’m not a lawyer, but this seems a complicated legal question. I just assumed any tool that circumvents any sort of digital lock would be hosting in countries that DGAF about US laws. Even better if they have a .onion address to avoid any network blocking attempts, like z-library.
It works in Canada without a SIM. I know because my son did it on his “wifi-only” tablet.
Do you need a phone plan at all for emergency calling? It’s required for all carriers to take 911 calls in Canada.
Eh, for most things, sure. I’m right with you for most media, but there’s a lot to be said for confining content when it’s part of the cultural zeitgeist. Ain’t nobody talking about Game of Thrones now, and it’s only 6 years old, not even a decade.
With any sort of piracy setup, almost all mainstream media is incredibly easy to get within a few hours of release, and most “Long Tail” content can be found pretty easily, too. If it’s so obscure that you still can’t find it, then that’s likely a good indication that you’re solidly pushing into indie content that hardly earns any income, so they could really benefit from us paying for their content.
We do try to make sure indie content creators get paid, though. For example, Kindle Unlimited is pretty amazing for us. My wife and I share an account, and we read so voraciously that authors get paid out about 10× what we pay for the service. Maths out roughly like this: ~30 books/month, on average, at ~1¢/page (actual pages, not Kindle standardized e-reader pages, which are only half a page), at ~250-300 pages/book is $75-90/mo, and we pay for 2 years in advance at I think $7ish/mo.
But I’m totally with you on games. I spend lots on videogames, but almost entirely for indie game bundles at $1-2/game, typically. I have literally thousands of games I’d love to play going back decades, so I don’t need the latest releases unless it’s a game I’m super excited for.
I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(
That’s a sweet setup.
I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.
Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?
Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.
oh, shit:
The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf
You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.
No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.
Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.
It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?
Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.
Thanks for the reply!
A few thoughts:
I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)
And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.
But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.
Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.
Hit the nail on the head.
Millions and millions of print books are destroyed all the time, and very rarely is anything of value lost. Libraries, thrift stores, and used book stores get inundated thousands of books donated to them, most of which nobody wants. Unless you, personally, are going to take on sorting, transporting, and storing dozens of duplicate copies of books in poor condition, and have some purpose for them (presumably?), then get off your high horse about the destruction of bulk-purchased used books.
Individual copies of mass-published books are not precious. Only rare books are important for preservation. And, even then, digital copies are much more practical for long-term storage than physical books. Anna’s Archive’s preservation project as a shadow library is only possible because data storage is very cheap, infinitely replicable, and practically free to transport.
Nope. Ebooks are a license, so the First Sale Doctrine does not apply. Buying ebooks is nearly useless, legally.
The podcast is called “Better Offline” for anyone else searching.
I really like the 3 episodes I’ve listened to so far. Thanks for the rec!
Not sure if I’m learning much from it, but it’s nice to hear someone explaining what’s wrong with AI hype and stock-market-driven capitalism clearly.
If Firefox continues to work, does that mean that it can be used as a workaround, potentially? I guess it depends on how the DRM works, if something like running it in a Firefox tab would work.
And surely blocking Firefox would be a bad move for Google since that would clearly be using monopolistic power in one market to gain advantage in another, right?
Depends on the item and your goals.
If you’re a “car person” who always wants to have the latest model, then maybe leasing a car makes sense. Every 3 years, you get a new car.
Phones are similar; there are some plans where you are expected to return the phone every 1-2 years. If you really want the newest model all the time, then that might be a good plan for you.
But for a printer, that only makes sense if you’re a business with medium print volumes and no IT budget. For home use, that’s insane when a cheap last printer will last decades. We have a B&W laser from 2 decades ago and a used colour laser we got for free/very cheap (the power button is broken but it otherwise works great). I’m guessing we pay about 1-2% of an HP subsription.
MAM has, effectively, no ratio requirements at all since it’s so easy to get points. There’s some system to reward seeding low-seed torrents and large-file-size torrents, and to stay in good standing you only need to seed for 72h. Hell, they give out freeleech tokens like candy, too.
If you start by downloading some low-seed books to keep the swarm alive, you’ll have enough points to buy VIP status indefinitely. And because of that system, basically everything on the site is available and downloads in seconds. It takes me longer to transfer audiobook files to a phone than it takes to download.
By definition, it is. 85-115 is the 1 standard deviation range for IQ and encompasses ⅔ of the population (roughly). So, 115 is “average” or “high average”.
115-130 is above average, while 70-85 is below average (“mild intellectual delay” used to be the term I think? Not sure if that’s still current). 145+ was “genius” and 160+ was “super genius”, back in the day; I assume those terms aren’t used anymore, but I haven’t looked into it. IIRC, about 97% of the population is 70-130 IQ.
My brother is a “genius”; I am not. (I was never told my exact score on the IQ test found for me as a child, but I know the range, and in both our cases came from a psychologist).
I’m more “successful” by most standard measures of success, but that might have more to do with his (undiagnosed and unsupported) autism than his IQ. (Career , house, family, etc.) In math, for example, he could get 100s without effort, until university. I could get 100s with significant but not extreme effort, or coast and get 80s-90s until university. We both got top scores on math contests at the local (academic) school level.
I don’t really think IQ is very valuable for having a “good” life. Emotional regulation, introspection, mindfulness, and other soft skills are more important, imho, and I’m actively working on trying to build more capacity in those areas, and they’re leading to more success for me than my speed at learning a narrow subset of things (what IQ measures).
I’m dealing with a lot of harm from how constantly being labeled “smart” was damaging for me, paired with my at-the-time undiagnosed ADHD. I struggle with a lot of imposter syndrome, need for external validation, and oscillating sense of self worth.
TL;DR: “Emotional intelligence” trumps IQ for life skills and general happiness, equanimity, and “success”.
Isn’t a cracked (old, I think?) Kindle the only way to pirate KU/DRM titles? At least, that’s what I recall from the last time I looked into it. There’s a book I really wanted to format shift from KU since Google TTS was fucking up all the proper nouns, but I gave up. (It was an obscure book that isn’t available anywhere pirated.)
“Sorry, mate. Work policy. We deal with confidential patient information, so IT wipes everything on a schedule and we do everything on the cloud. There’s never anything on the device.”