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.)

Yes, that’s why I specified above that “home schooling” usually comes with lots of extra funding.

In my jurisdiction, an autistic student gets ~$30K of funding, half of which is earmarked for education specifically. In a public school, that gets maybe 45 min of EA time + being on a learning support teacher’s caseload. With “home schooling”, that $15K can pay for enrollment in a specialized small-group part-time program for academics.

The other $15K funding can pay for respite workers, if parents need more time for work, or lots of other things.

Also, parents are much better equipped to follow their children’s interests with authentic experiential learning than any public school can be. Schools can’t afford 1-to-1 attention, and parents know their children best. With academic support covered, parents can focus on following their children’s interests.

These students are also followed by a teacher (like me) and a learning support teacher to help coordinate resources, support workers, and other planning. There are layers of support.

It’s an incredibly effective educational model.

I don’t know if something similar is available in the US. I imagine it varies by state, and I would not expect Red states to support programming like this.

The nice thing is that the education system has an answer for that: home schooling! At least in my jurisdiction, the autism funding parents get is enough to send autistic students to specialized small-class tutoring services during the day (using public funds), so the burden on parents isn’t that high. Parents then get to focus on experiential learning with their kiddos outside of tutoring time, following their interests (and regulation).

Regardless, cell phones in the classroom are a problem for everyone, but especially for AuDHD/ADHD students.

This image shows it well, including where other primates fit in

Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.

Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?

And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.

Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.

I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.

And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.

What am I not understanding?

Thoroughly explained and well supported. I want to save this in case this topic ever comes up again so I can copy-pasta this.

It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.

This is probably the avenue to shut this down. If funding is contingent on making the publication freely available to download, and that comes from a major government funding source, then this whole scam could die essentially overnight.

That would need to somehow get enough political support to pass muster in the first place and pass the inevitable legal challenge that follows, too. So, really, this is just another example of regulatory capture ruining everything.

There’s probably something in the terms about it, and it would take a very expensive legal battle to settle it. And I doubt it has enough legal merit to be taken on as a class-action lawsuit.

So, really, does it matter if it’s illegal? With the asymmetrical power imbalance, they literally don’t need to care about the laws. Realistically, no EU regulator is going to fine them for cancelling “a purchase made in India”, either.

I didn’t like summers or winters where I used to live, so I moved to somewhere where I like both seasons. Then moved again to somewhere that I love all four seasons.

But I get what you’re saying; you’re describing the summers of my childhood. Hot and humid so you feel like you need a cold shower within 5 minutes of walking outside. Sticky by day, swarmed by mosquitos at night.

But you lost me at the sand bit. I love the beach and ocean when it’s like 10-30°C out. Colder and hotter are okay, too, but not as nice.

Do videogame records count? A friend of mine from uni holds dozens of works records for a reasonably well known indie game. She’s showcased it on a Games Done Quick charity Steam, too.

I can’t say the game or it’ll doxx her, though. She has most of the records.

idk. Google used to automatically highlight pages that you landed on then stopped your search, which indicates you got a good result. They basically scrapped that, though, since their advertising arm wanted people to spend more time searching, running more queries, to get more ad impressions. Google literally sabotaged their own search algorithm to increase “engagement”.

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 learned from Franklin books and Mario games that you’re wrong. A picture showing a clear cavity where a turtle could pop out won’t convince me!

I don’t know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you’re uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that “seeding” if you aren’t a “seed” with 1.00 availability? idk.

I’d still count that as “seeding” since you’re running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there’s a precise definition somewhere.

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.

I have a lot of devices, but I rarely use most of them.

1. My desktop is my main device for all my work from home. Work desktop for work at the office.
2. My work laptop only gets used for client visits.
3. My personal laptop only gets used when I need a second mobile device for work and Zooming with my family (to bring to where my kiddos are set up playing).
4. My wife’s work laptop is her main work machine and her personal laptop is our evening TV.
5. My Android phone is my ADHD dopamine machine most of the time. Some light work use.
6. My gaming is almost exclusively on my Steam Deck (but I’m working on getting a WiFi mesh network so I can stream from my desktop to my Deck). Used nightly in bed.
7. My 8 y.o. daughter’s tablet is an audiobook machine, some edutainment apps, and sleep sounds machine. Occasionally a screen for shows/art video tutorials.
8. My 6 y.o son’s tablet is mostly podcasts and sleep sounds.
9. My DSi is my wife’s Tetris machine.

TL;DR: I mostly use my desktop for work and Deck/phone for entertainment. My laptops see use a few times/month when I’m on the road for work or Zooming with family and basically never in between. But we have a lot of devices that have specific use cases for different members of my family.

When I use these services (when I’m given a gift card) I select $0 tip and tip with cash. I don’t trust the app makers to give them the tip. I hope parent poster does this, too. I thought tipping in cash was pretty common!