311–320 of 498 posts
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downloads were limited to a small number per day. if you wanted to download more there was a small fee ($1?). They tracked her Amazon account which had made $14k in purchases over the years.
Curious where you heard the detail about Amazon
> Since March 20, 2019, the 1502 Account has placed more than 110 orders totaling over $13,628.32,
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.48...
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What do you mean by 'social justice' and the implication it is a bad thing? I postulate, labor justice is social justice.
"Social Justice" is a loaded political term generally aligned with Left Authoritarianism and often devoid of actual justice
1st time I heard about it. I'll try to find the tor site.
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"Social Justice" is a loaded political term generally aligned with Left Authoritarianism and often devoid of actual justice
And who was it who loaded that term? The social justice advocates, or their opponents?
This is caused by both advocates and opponents of the various causes, positions, and world views
I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
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Yes, but it is hard to tell whether LG will stay up for long either. Their non-commercial nature makes it harder to hit them with heavy damages, arguably, but the underlying threat is the same, and there is no reason to think they are somehow protected from the same dynamic. Download anything you need and then some. And spread your own writings widely and freely.
Two questions: (1) there are torrent backups of LibGen, right? (2) If (1) is true, then I can download a book with a magnet link, and they'd have to arrest hundreds or thousands of people all over the world to prevent it. The UI for for finding and downloading a single file from a massive torrent is not very good in any torrent client I've used, but how hard of a problem is that really? Is there not tremendous value…
A small thought experiment: - Book sales in 2021 were about _9_ billion dollars. [0] - Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1] Can you imagine if the resources of the justice and labour departments would prioritize citizen wage over publishers' revenue? Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals completely outside US jurisdi…
Sleep deprivation of just 10 min per night across the entire USA adult population of 330M is 3.3Bn minutes, is over 6 thousand YEARS of sleep related fatigue, etc. PER NIGHT Can you imagine if we attacked that problem in earnest? My point, obviously, is that 50 billion is nothing on a per capita basis. This arrest is very high leverage, and very effective use of resources.
There is about 39 million americans below poverty line. That's about 1200 dollars a year. I am sure it would actually make a hell of a big difference to many people below the poverty line.
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Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice. I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks…
As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system. It NEEDS to be consolidated. I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best. Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection. I rarely go to the library for the…
It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts.
Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck.
But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.
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Use Library Genesis. It's also free and there is no download limit, and you have access to approximately the same books. https://libgen.is/
LibGen is an invaluable resource, but is there reason to expect that Library Genesis will remain accessible for long if similar sites are under attack?
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Their free model was much more than enough for a regular user to use. I mean 10 books download per day? I'm not sure if I personally would have had to ever exceed that limit.
Which is bad. They made a mirror of Libgen, closed it and charged money for access to it. You were unable to create a mirror from their mirror. Why put a limit at all? Why charge for access, just as same as publishers do? Defeats entire purpose of Libgen and SciHub.