Chahk
- 3 Posts
- 113 Comments
Libraries are still a thing. You can still go there to borrow a book, read it, and return it, so that others can read it.
Public libraries are under assault from every direction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/book-bans-librarians.html (apologies for nyt link)
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-want-to-defund-public-libraries-book-bans
Pretty soon you either won’t find the books, or even the libraries themselves. Piracy is the only way they are leaving to us.
Also, at least 27 percent of bears shit in the woods.
I mean what other choice is there? The way US elections are designed (electoral college, distribution of state representatives, re-drawing local districts on whims, unlimited amount of money being able to be poured into campaigns without any oversight or even reporting requirements, etc.,) voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. So you vote for the lesser evil. Unless you are so brainwashed as to vote against your own self-interest out of fear of the other side.
Other motions proposed included a call to “abolish abortion by immediately securing the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”
Do my preborn children count towards car passengers in the HOV lanes? Can I claim every fertilized egg as a dependent on my state tax forms?
“Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto. … supporters of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which wants the Lone Star State to become an independent country, were photographed holding signs which read TEXIT NOW!”
So the Brexit disaster is their role model now?
I’m not your buddy, guy!
You don’t need AI to figure out why people go to a T-Mobile store.
Option A: your service sucks, and the hold time on the phone is over 2 hours.
Option B: the glass sandwitch that you sold me cracked because I looked at it funny, and the fucking manufacturer won’t honor the warranty because they didn’t get enough of my money.
Porn piracy is absolutely huge. I think you’re just doing a bad job downloading it.
Unless you have a very particular kink or fetish, porn is the one thing that you can find for free all over the internet. You don’t even have to look that hard.
Piracy of movies, TV, music, & books is alive and well with no intention of slowing down. If anything, the advent of streaming helped get media in higher quality sooner than before. It’s even easier if you’re willing to pay a little for a private tracker membership, of a Newsgroups subscription.
Gaming is the most difficult part because cracking copy protections carry a very high risk of infecting your computer with a nasty virus. Even then, if you know where to look, there are trusted groups that value their reputation and pride themselves on releasing clean repacks.
Bottom line is, there’s not going to be a “post-piracy world” OP asks about. The game simply changed to paying for a single all-in-one subscription instead of being nickel-and-dimed to death by corporations. And it’s already here.
Recently finished my very first play through of all 3 Mass Effect (Legendary Edition) games. Started Mass Effect: Andromeda, but for some reason it triggers horrible motion sickness after 30 minutes of playing. As in, “I need to have a barf bucket nearly, and then lie down for the rest of the day” kind of bad.
Are you planning to use this only for media storage, or other tasks as well?
Many dedicated NAS boxes from the likes of Synology and QNAP come with low-powered CPUs that in addition to handling media storage can do many other useful things. For example - running various self-hosted apps like password managers, photo organizers, even office suites. Those do have many downsides as well. They use proprietary hardware and software, so you are at the mercy of the manufacturer if they suddenly decide that your NAS is too old for them to support. The CPUs in them are not as powerful as consumer-grade ones found in most desktops, and they don’t usually come with a lot of RAM. They are also quite expensive for what they offer - for example, a very basic 4-bay enclosure with 2GB RAM and Realtek 4-core CPU costs $370, and that’s without the cost of the disks. For that kind of money you can build a desktop from used server parts that will be ten times as powerful, and more versatile since it will be able to run any OS that you want. Granted, it will not be as small or power efficient.
If you just need a turn-key off-the-shelf solution, a prebuilt NAS may be the way to go. If you want to tinker with hardware and experiment with software however, self-built system with used parts may be better suited for you. Most homelabbers don’t start off with a rack full of equipment, they grow their hardware organically. You have outgrown your external enclosure, so now you have several choices. For prebuilt NAS appliances Synology and QNAP are not the only choices; there are many other lesser known in this category - Asustor, Terramaster, Buffalo, to name a few. For building a server on your own I would recommend doing some research before going on a shopping spree - https://serverbuilds.net is an excellent resource.
That said, I’d echo others’ answers. RAID is not backup. It offers some resiliency from disk failure, but that shouldn’t replace a proper backup strategy. Synology offers various RAID levels, including their own take on it that allows for different sized drives. For self-built option there’s UnRaid which handles resiliency differently, but requires an entire separate drive for parity.
In terms of hard drive choice, it all depends on how comfortable you are with possible data loss. If you back up your critical data (e.g. family photos, important documents) and don’t care about downloaded media (you can always re-download it) then go ahead and use whatever - shucked, used, etc. If you absolutely cannot handle any data loss, then new drives made specifically for NAS appliances are the way to go. Enterprise level HDDs are an option also, but those mostly use SAS interface instead of SATA, and require specialized hardware (HBA adapters).
A bit off-topic, but I’d be fine with that. The more mind-numbingly dumb work that computers can do for us, the less time we have to spend doing it ourselves. Administrative jobs holders disagree with this, but so did every person whose job and livelihood was replaced by automation, ever. UBI (universal basic income) is the only answer that will save all of us from starvation when automation eventually replaces us too.
I agree with you on principle. However… How long do you think it will be until these very same “AI” companies copyright and patent every piece of content their algorithms spew out? Will they abide by the same carve-outs they want for themselves right now? Somehow I doubt it.
They want to ignore the laws for themselves, but enforce them onto everyone else. This “Rules for thee but not for me” bullshit can’t be allowed to pass. Let’s then abolish all copyright, and we’ll see how long these companies last when everyone can just grab their stuff “for learning”.
While digital security experts have doubted the veracity of that claim, in any case it doesn’t seem consistent with, say, HP allowing USB devices to connect to its laptops, an interface that surely offers more opportunity for viruses and malware to access critical hardware than a printer cartridge.
Stop giving them ideas!
Google has not been interested in providing value to end-users for a while now. They are at the point in the enshittification process where because of their monopoly in search, they are able to stop providing value to their paying customers as well (sites that use AdWords, etc.) and just line their own pockets.
Do musicians not buy the music that they want to listen to? Should they be allowed to torrent any MP3 they want just because they say it’s for their instrument learning?
I mean I’d be all for it, but that’s not what these very same corporations (including Microsoft when it comes to software) wanted back during Napster times. Now they want a separate set of rules just for themselves. No! They get to follow the same laws they force down our throats.
Agreed on both counts… Except Microsoft sings a different tune when their software is being “stolen” in the exact same way. They want to have it both ways - calling us pirates when we copy their software, but it’s “without merit” when they do it. Fuck’em! Let them play by the same rules they want everyone else to play.
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Rational person… 70 million people are still voting for a serial rapist even after… no, especially after he has been convicted of a felony.
“Just think of how stupid an average person is, and then realise that half of them are stupider than that.” -George Carlin