The “You get what you pay for” excuse doesn’t hold up. My 77-inch LG OLED cost over $3k USD. It’s still full of ads and spies on me unless i neuter it.

I, for one, thank the German government for introducing me to a new site.

It is. And don’t call me Shirley.

I would like to see these publishers take on OpenAI, Midjourney and others, who basically said that copyright laws should not apply to them because AI would be “impossible” without them having free access to everything.

you can be certain that these publishers don’t know that you exist

I think it’s better this way.

Not to mention fast.

Trade-in value, plus $400-500 USD. I generally change my phone once every 2-3 year, so I figure ~$150 per year amortization is fine.

They will have to rebrand Paramount+ again. Again.

Easy solution. “The Internet Archive” should rebrand itself to “Archiving the Internet” to confuse everyone who talks about how “AI” should be able to steal books.

Agreed about changing the copyright law.

Until that happens though, they must not be allowed to have it both ways - call us “pirates” when we copy their shit without paying for it, and tell us that paying for shit they copy is “impossible”.

Libraries are still a thing. You can still go there to borrow a book, read it, and return it, so that others can read it.

Public libraries are under assault from every direction.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1119752817/local-libraries-have-become-a-major-political-and-cultural-battleground

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/book-bans-librarians.html (apologies for nyt link)

https://apnews.com/article/book-bans-libraries-lawsuits-fines-prison-0914fa6cbb2a99b540cbbd28a38179b4

https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-want-to-defund-public-libraries-book-bans

Pretty soon you either won’t find the books, or even the libraries themselves. Piracy is the only way they are leaving to us.

It’s a trap!

They probably mean comic books.

Porn piracy is absolutely huge. I think you’re just doing a bad job downloading it.

Unless you have a very particular kink or fetish, porn is the one thing that you can find for free all over the internet. You don’t even have to look that hard.

Piracy of movies, TV, music, & books is alive and well with no intention of slowing down. If anything, the advent of streaming helped get media in higher quality sooner than before. It’s even easier if you’re willing to pay a little for a private tracker membership, of a Newsgroups subscription.

Gaming is the most difficult part because cracking copy protections carry a very high risk of infecting your computer with a nasty virus. Even then, if you know where to look, there are trusted groups that value their reputation and pride themselves on releasing clean repacks.

Bottom line is, there’s not going to be a “post-piracy world” OP asks about. The game simply changed to paying for a single all-in-one subscription instead of being nickel-and-dimed to death by corporations. And it’s already here.

Please. They don’t tease a new show by accident, or on the hopes alone. They also don’t increment the Enterprise letter without some solid buy-in from the network. Legacy is happening.

I’m still salty that we never got an epic Borg Vs. Jorg battle at the end of S3. They totally wasted whatever it was they were trying to set up with Jurati at the end of season 2.

Nintendon’t

Undercook, overcook - straight to jail!

Are you planning to use this only for media storage, or other tasks as well?

Many dedicated NAS boxes from the likes of Synology and QNAP come with low-powered CPUs that in addition to handling media storage can do many other useful things. For example - running various self-hosted apps like password managers, photo organizers, even office suites. Those do have many downsides as well. They use proprietary hardware and software, so you are at the mercy of the manufacturer if they suddenly decide that your NAS is too old for them to support. The CPUs in them are not as powerful as consumer-grade ones found in most desktops, and they don’t usually come with a lot of RAM. They are also quite expensive for what they offer - for example, a very basic 4-bay enclosure with 2GB RAM and Realtek 4-core CPU costs $370, and that’s without the cost of the disks. For that kind of money you can build a desktop from used server parts that will be ten times as powerful, and more versatile since it will be able to run any OS that you want. Granted, it will not be as small or power efficient.

If you just need a turn-key off-the-shelf solution, a prebuilt NAS may be the way to go. If you want to tinker with hardware and experiment with software however, self-built system with used parts may be better suited for you. Most homelabbers don’t start off with a rack full of equipment, they grow their hardware organically. You have outgrown your external enclosure, so now you have several choices. For prebuilt NAS appliances Synology and QNAP are not the only choices; there are many other lesser known in this category - Asustor, Terramaster, Buffalo, to name a few. For building a server on your own I would recommend doing some research before going on a shopping spree - https://serverbuilds.net is an excellent resource.

That said, I’d echo others’ answers. RAID is not backup. It offers some resiliency from disk failure, but that shouldn’t replace a proper backup strategy. Synology offers various RAID levels, including their own take on it that allows for different sized drives. For self-built option there’s UnRaid which handles resiliency differently, but requires an entire separate drive for parity.

In terms of hard drive choice, it all depends on how comfortable you are with possible data loss. If you back up your critical data (e.g. family photos, important documents) and don’t care about downloaded media (you can always re-download it) then go ahead and use whatever - shucked, used, etc. If you absolutely cannot handle any data loss, then new drives made specifically for NAS appliances are the way to go. Enterprise level HDDs are an option also, but those mostly use SAS interface instead of SATA, and require specialized hardware (HBA adapters).