Agreed about changing the copyright law.
Until that happens though, they must not be allowed to have it both ways - call us “pirates” when we copy their shit without paying for it, and tell us that paying for shit they copy is “impossible”.
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?
Nothing and I mean nothing will kill this faster than some leaked chats, emails, and browsing history of a few politicians.
Pichai & Co would totally have blocked videos if Hitler demanded it back during WW2. They should embrace their new motto - “Anything for a buck!”
Grow a pair, you spineless shits, and stop kowtowing to brutal dictators!
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.
“AI is nowhere near to being ready to replace you at your job. It is, however, ready enough to convince your boss that it’s ready to replace you at your job.”
Nintendon’t
You mean Cortana which was a rebrand of Clippy.
Alrighty then. If corps want to train their AI on all the content they can scrape without worrying about copyright, then they can’t complain when I torrent their shit without worrying about copyright too! Deal? Somehow I don’t see them taking that deal.
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).
I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
Also Netflix: “Let’s cancel all the popular series that we hyped up all last year because they are too expensive.”
What is your storage situation currently? Just trying to figure out why you think expanding it is expensive, because hard disks have been getting cheaper. Especially used “enterprise” SAS drives - the 12TB drives can be had for under $100. You’ll need a $40 HBA card and $10 breakout cables as well.
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.
Easy solution. “The Internet Archive” should rebrand itself to “Archiving the Internet” to confuse everyone who talks about how “AI” should be able to steal books.