And, unlike engineers in manufacturing whose deep-pocket corporations bought an exemption, Engineers in the A/E/C field are licensed. And if you screw up you can lose your ability to work in your field…forever.

You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.

I’ve yet to find a modern use for usenet as I’m not in the habit of downloading everything as it comes out, nor of looking for content within a few days of release. Often I’m looking for 2-5 year old content or back catalog, and usenet has been a uniform landscape of incompletes, even with two blocks on independent providers (or they were when I bought the data blocks).

A llama?!? He was supposed to be dead!

[Raises hand]

I don’t have time to fuck with managing a seedbox to make ratios and community participation bullshit (looking at you, abt). I don’t even have time to fight incompletes on a usenet block. Let me drop a Benjamin in your “donation” box every couple of years and I’ll cover part of the server as long as I can find what I need, when I want it, in the quality I’m looking for.

I have subscriptions to a few of the big boys through legal cross-marketing deals; it’s still better to know that my shows will be waiting for me on my server if and when I ever get around to watching them.

If I spend half an hour to find an implement a workaround (because finding ways around YT’s advertising is not my hobby) then I’d have to watch 60 unskippable 30 second ads to break even, every single time they upgrade their cat-and-mouse. I don’t watch that much youtube in a month, probably not in 3 months.

Re: reasonable levels - You can have fail safe or fail secure. Those are two mutually exclusive options. Locking people out of content, whether it be consumers or a partner organization (like a theater) is the price of security (fail secure).

There is no condition where mild DRM is valuable to anyone. For consumers it constitutes a hurdle to use of content they have purchased without hindering non-purchased copies from being reproduced and distributed. No DRM allows the latter; unbreakable DRM ensures the former will be substantially affected at some point.

Yeah, US is a real backwater when it comes to data - availability, privacy, you name it. Heck, my ISP will let me install for free, but I either have to buy my own modem or pay them $15/mo to rent one of theirs. I technically get wifi roaming with the company I use, but it’s rarely useful. I won’t torrent without a VPN; my ISP is a hardass for torrenting.

There are decent plans in some areas in the big cities in the US, but outside of that it’s pretty bleak…and there’s a lot of “outside of the cities” in the US.

Knowing who your provider is would (might) help. Xfinity has a 1TB or 1.2TB soft cap, which you can exceed once or twice a year without concern. Beyond that you fall into their top (I think it’s) 1% of users and may be asked to scale back or to pay an excess usage fee (which was non-trivial the last time I looked - something like $10/50GB).

Wait, really? I’m going to have to go check next time I log into my torrenting box.

I guess printing a correct headline of “sued for copyright infringement “ isn’t click baity enough. Because that’s all it is. Dbrand is lucky they haven’t been sued by the board manufacturers for creating an unlicensed derivative work (which is what the case art is, just as the photo of a sculpture, even stylized, has been deemed derivative - especially when the reproduction is intended to represent the original).

Oh, it definitely does. A copy does not need to be verbatim - derivative works, of which even an inaccurately memorized copy would certainly apply - to be infringing. Otherwise a re-encoded copy of a video - having been entirely changed through the encoding process - would be a new work. When I sing a song from memory, it’s effectively reproducing the equivalent recorded copy from my brain. Of course, the performance is yet a new copy - and I can be sued if I were to change the lyrics or notes outside of the specific contract under which I perform (performance) or record (mechanical). Broadway show owners do this all the time (prohibit changes of words and characters, among other alterations) - and generally they win in court if challenged, shutting down shows and cancelling performance rights

Would not the act of memorization an infringing copy? Copyright itself does not allow a provision where a non-ephemeral copy may be stored, regardless of the medium or duration. You would, of course, have the positive defense of fair use - if you were sued for your infringing copy, you could mount a defense that the storage falls under the fair use provisions, but you would still be required to defend yourself at your own expense. Would it make a difference if we, one day, developed a method of reading memories. Someone with a photographic memory could then be used to recreate the work from their copy - clearly a violation, and hence the storage is a violation (excepting backup/fairuse - which is still an infringement, but a special case of permitted infringement)

I love piracy like I love electricity - it makes my life easier, and I will extoll the virtues when asked. It doesn’t rise to a core political belief for me, though.

Huh, my page is empty.

Put one in the win column for Surfshark. (and a tip of the hat to TopCashBack, who is rebating me 80-90% of my recent 2 year renewal)

yes(?), but it appears to have open signups at the moment.

I’m on private but don’t have a seedbox, so I’m 100% pay to play. I pony up $100 every couple of years and my ratios don’t matter. On a personal pride level I make sure my old favorites say seeding, esp now that they only have a couple of seeders, but for torrents with 30-100 seeds I’m not needed and my contribution with a 10Mb cable pip against Gb seedboxes is always nil.

nice

It ticks the boxes - not Amazon, stylus, and eInk.

You’re going to need an os, even if it’s just embedded to access a file system and manage resources.

I bought one and it kinda sucked. I wanted a digital library for the tens of thousands of pages of references I use at work, and a sketch pad would be a bonus. It’s a cool device but the screen is just too slow to be useful and the application space for android and drawing is…thin.

You can get a reliable plug and play printer for as little as $500-600, though it will take 15-20 hours, if you’re technically minded, to learn to get the files to print. The material will be around $30-40 at retail prices (it’s generally only sold by the kg).

You can likely send the files to a print house and get them printed for just $100-200.

(Someone will claim that the $99 Ender and a roll of $9.99 genetic PLA will work. They are technically correct in the same way that your grandmother can edit photos for free by setting up Arch Linux on a $100 PC from Goodwill.)