Microsoft uses some of these. I remember having to do something like that to setup a minecraft account and at some point I thought I would just give up and lose my money.

The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.

Indeed

I do try to be aware of my water supply. If I’m in a place where water is limited by default, like having a well, or when in a Caribbean country, I’ll be careful as I know others will depend on that source in the very near future. But I live in Canada and from my immediate point of view, the St-Lawrence and the Great Lakes are not going to be dry soon. The only scarcity here is the energy required to pump the water (also provided by water), and its treatment.

And I do understand that our little collective efforts do add up. However, the issues are systemic. Only in a single region of my province (a region!), around 18 corporations and businesses are using more than 75 000 litres a day. We know just because they have to report it past that point. It adds up to billions of litres in a year. For a single region. The provincial government here also allows corporations to just pump the ground water for about $35 CAD by million of litres.

So again, I know that I could make a difference, if we all really tried. But because of the system, and since the pandemic, I’ve lost faith in our societies. I don’t think most people care. While all hiding in our places a few years ago, while the production slowed down, people have seen the changes in nature, the air clean up… and they said fuck it we just want to go back to how it was before.

Just seeing multiple police cars running their engines 24/7 to stalk and bully some oh so dangerous anti-genocide students made me see that any effort to reduce air pollution on my part will be nullified by the system in general. It doesn’t matter if I have car or not, if I recycle plastic while it’s produced in the first place, or if I try to save a few litres of water while Nestlé… sigh.

Sorry but… yeah.

Yes I let it run. Because honestly, I don’t care. People will try make you feel guilty over using water while continuing to make excuses to drive everywhere and why they really need an electric car to “save the planet”. Oh and please recycle while the city that collects the recycling sends it to the dump because this industry is not profitable. And use less water because giant tech companies are going to need it in order to cool and power some more AI servers.

I never owned a car and have driven only once in 40 years. But I know that whatever I do individually to reduce the amount of pollution in the air, it is absolutely useless and pointless. The army or the police will annihilate a lifetime of individual efforts in one day, or even a few hours. I could get a car right now and 90% of people would probably tell me I did the right thing, as a car is sooo useful. No problem as long as it’s electric!

So uuh, I let the water run when I feel like it.

But with a dead battery you have to haul it plis your stuff, which was supposed to be there to make it easier in the first place.

And by fast charge, I mean like an electric car, that can fully cjarge in about 15 to 20 minutes instead of hours.

I pull my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer and thought about an ebike but then, I also do touring and the places I go to are beyond battery life. For example this weekend I’m cycling 90 km to my camp site and there’s no electricity. And I need to get back.

And the second issue with this is that AFAIK there’s no fast charging on most ebikes. So if I need to stop somewhere to charge it when the battery will be dead after 75 km, it will take an eternity to charge.

So in the end, for my case, as someone cycling a few thousand kilometres a year, for “longer distances”, it’s wouldn’t be very practical.

My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.

At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.

I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says “go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script”.

Yeah, the others were unremarkable but the first one made an impression on me.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Cube

Edit: Apparently there’s a remake so I should precise that it’s the movie from 1997.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

I don’t like the idea of wasting energy on inefficient things so I don’t use “AI”.

A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. runs.

As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires

Also, VGA cables have no damn HDCP integrated, so you can pass anything you want with them, contrary to HDMI and DP which both have “anti piracy” protection integrated directly into the cable, for your inconvenience.

In order to make a device that plays HDCP-enabled content, the manufacturer must obtain a license for the patent from Intel subsidiary Digital Content Protection LLC, pay an annual fee, and submit to various conditions. For example, the device cannot be designed to copy; it must “frustrate attempts to defeat the content protection requirements”; it must not transmit high definition protected video to non-HDCP receivers; and DVD-Audio works can be played only at CD-audio quality by non-HDCP digital audio outputs (analog audio outputs have no quality limits).

But I don’t need a car to go anywhere in my daily life. My bike can bring me where I need to, it doesn’t cost gas, and doesn’t require yearly fees for a license. Public transit for the rest. Groceries are hauled with a bike trailer or I make multiple trips on foot.

Seriously, I prefer to live with 3 roommates close to work, and have access to a toilet, shower kitchen… rather than pay for a car and gas to “live in it” and get to work.

If you have a car and drive, you may see it as some sort of tool, and have some value and utility over an apartment, but for people that already live without a car, they often just seem like a burden.

I don’t want to have a 1.5 ton block of metal and need to pay gas to move it. I can move by other means.

Nope. I don’t have a car and consider it a money pit in the first place. A car costs a driving license. It also costs insurance. And fuel to move it. And it will break down at some point. Plus, winters are pretty brutal where I live and heating this thing/myself would be a nightmare. To me, a car is an anchor; a heavy ball attached to your foot.

If I had a car, and it was for a few weeks in summer, I may consider it. But I prefer have a proper place instead, and save money by not having a car.

I use it to consume huge quantities of energy because I despise the human race and life on earth.

If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.

Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.

Bike touring on rail trails and quiet roads coupled with camping and visiting nature reserves and national parks.

I loved computers when I was a teenager and it became my work. I’m now working in IT.

I was fine with that for a while but because it’s now my work, I needed to find something else to escape, and be more active.

So I eventually started cycling “for fun” but now I have panniers, camping equipment, and lots of plans to go cycling and camping deep in nature.

By the way if you have rail trails and/or safe itineraries to suggest, that are somewhat long (over 80/100 km if possible), don’t hesitate to let me know.

My favourite here is 'Le p’tit train du Nord" which runs for 200 km, and I highly recommend it.

The multilingual emergency messages with the high pitched beeps on cruise ships.

I’ve never been on a cruise but I’ve seen a few videos and documentaries and always find this terrifying. You have nowhere to run to but a muster station. Like, you may drown while hearing a foreign language that you can’t understand but is somehow telling you to GFTO.