• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle




  • 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.




  • 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.


  • But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.

    Like, the “web dev boot camp” course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it’s updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).

    I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don’t know.





  • You’ll likely also need to pay for a Debrid service. It’s basically a download caching server, so if one user downloads a file, it’s available to everyone.

    With Stremio, that means that popular media will already have a zillion options pre-cached. If you want more niche stuff, then you can do the extra step to get your Debrid service to download it for you (assuming there’s a public teacher that has it with seeders.)

    It should also work for those download/file sharing sites, but I haven’t bothered to figure it out yet.





  • Grading in red is generally avoided, nowadays. Red is closely associated with failure/danger/bad, and feedback should generally be constructive to help students learn and grow.

    I usually like to grade in a bright colour that students are unlikely to pick: purple, green, pink, orange, or maybe light blue (if most students are working in pencil). Brown is poo. Black and dark blue are too common. Yellow is illegible. Red is aggressive.

    Anyway, I’m guessing they just graded everything in green. The only time I’ve ever graded in more than one colour was when I needed to subgrade different categories of grades, like thinking/communication/knowledge/application. In that case, choosing a consistent colour for each category makes it easier to score.


  • I was going to say music, but I suppose ripping from YouTube is piracy, isn’t it? And so is X-manager for Spotify, probably? Where’s the line on ad blockers for YouTube/Free tube/NewPipe?

    I also thought to say books, since I mostly read free web serials and Kindle Unlimited… But I can’t afford $10-20 (local currency)/day for books, and at the pace I read that’s what most pay-per-chapter web serials or non-KU books would cost me. And how do we feel about using library cards we’re not entitled to?

    Then I was going to say games, but, lol, emulation.

    So… Everything is on the table for me, I suppose. I try to buy games legally, and authors get a lot of money from me from KU page reads ($2+ USD/day most days), but only if it’s not too expensive or inconvenient for me.