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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.


  • As a Canadian, that sounds even worse to me, lol. Elected judges? That’s insanity. Judges should never be making decisions based on political expedience.

    Judges should be chosen by people who are experts in the law based on their knowledge and experience.

    In Canada, I suppose it’s loosely political, but it’s several steps removed from direct political appointment. The PM and cabinet appoint someone to be the head of the judiciary, confirmed by the Governor General, and Supreme Court judges can be held accountable by the Senate and House in cases of misconduct.

    Electing judges would make it worse, not better, imho.

    The best solution I’ve heard for the US wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, it’s to make the Supreme Court position last 18 years before becoming a Justice Emeritus (or whatever) that’s mostly ceremonial. That takes away the incentive to stuff the judiciary with young judges, and adds stability that each presidential term is 2 justice appointments on a slowly rolling basis.





  • I sincerely hope you’re right, but Biden is polling a lot lower now than he was in 2020, and it was a shockingly close race.

    Regardless, it shouldn’t be this close. Democrats need to shift to capture Gen Z and Millennial voters. Alienating young voters will be what loses them the next election, if they lose, and it’s causing increasingly bigger problems for them as Gen Z ages into voting and Millennials aren’t shifting right as they age. Democrats need to pivot to get young voters politically engaged.

    Or, at least, that’s my take as a non-American watching this trainwreck happen.


  • 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.






  • 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.